Bishop Michael Curry, who is nationally known for his published sermons, spoke about the impact of race relations on religious communities as a part of Race Relations Week.
Jermaine Reeves, co-chairman of Students for the Advancement of Race Relations and head coordinator of Race Relations Week, said Curry was an excellent choice as the week's speaker.
"He can talk about how race, religion and identity correlate," Reeves said.
The theme of this year's Race Relations Week is "reflections," and the week's goal is to discover the true defining aspects of identity and to find out how race fits into that definition.
Curry, dressed in maroon and black under his official collar, began his speech with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that was to be the central theme of the evening.
"`We shall either learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we shall perish as fools,'" Curry quoted. "`The choice is ours - chaos or community.'"
He cited his work in his previous Baltimore, Md., congregation as a source of inspiration. He talked of hosting a Jewish Holocaust survivor in his Episcopalian congregation and mediating conflicts between the black and Korean populations.
"I saw that whenever a human being was defined as less than human, the impossible becomes possible," Curry said. "You have less value than a cockroach."
He also stressed the importance of individual introspection to the issue of race relations. "To affirm who we are, we must accept who we are, on all levels," Curry said. He discussed coming to terms with the past and personally making peace with America's history of slave-holding and discrimination.
