Before we start today’s episode, on behalf of the Antioch Podcast team, I want to thank all of our listeners. The annual Stand Against Racism episode “White Work” has been downloaded and listened to hundreds of times more than any of our previous episodes. We have heard in comments from many of you that you want to hear more episodes like this, and so stay tuned. There will be another live event, White Work 2.0, coming in June, details coming soon.

To all of our new listeners, welcome to the Antioch Podcast, where every week you will get the opportunity to listen in on our multiethnic group of Christian antiracism educators and friends as we have a conversation about Biblical antiracism. When all of us are here, we have two team members who identify as white, two team members who identify as black, and two team members who identify as “middle voices” to capture a limited spectrum of the voices who make up the American racial caste system we all inhabit. No other podcast that we know of talks about faith and race with such a diverse team, and we welcome you to listen in.

Now to our long-time listeners, thank you. Thank you for listening when we were starting out and were small. Thank you for listening when we were finding our voice as we started out, for some of you going back to 2016 when Barack Obama was the president. We didn’t see what was coming, what turned out to be the racial re-awakening that continues to blossom across the United States and in post-colonial spaces all across the globe. As this re-awakening sparked conversations, dialogue and intense emotions in our churches and religious institutions, you listened. As the years continued, we saw that you listened – often more intently – following racial incidents that punctuated the new cycles of the past five years. Thank you for trusting us to be a place that you went to hear honest, thoughtful Christian conversations during these impassioned moments in our nation.

So today, we are going to bring you an Antioch encore, an episode from our archives. For a bit of context, this is an episode from this past fall. We were entering into the winter holidays during the pandemic. The events of the summer of 2020 were still very much on our minds, and we took a moment, in this episode we called “Antiracist Inspiration” to recall the people who inspired us to strive for racial justice during this trying time.