Toni McNaron Lecture in Arts & Culture 2009

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Steven J. Schochet Endowment Presents:
10th Annual McNaron Lecture in Arts & Culture

Rabbi Stacy Offner:
"How Spiritual Outcasts Nourish the Soul"
Wed, Oct 14, 7:30 PM
Humphrey Institute, Cowles Auditorium
301 19th Ave S, Mpls

The Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies & Campus Life is pleased to present the 10th McNaron Lecture in Arts & Culture featuring Rabbi Stacy Offner, Vice President of the Union for Reform Judaism. This event is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow in the Humphrey Atrium.

Rabbi Offner's lecture, How Spiritual Outcasts Nourish the Soul, will explore the parallels between outcast communities: Jews, women, and the LGBT community. Religious communities have always made heros out of outcasts while rejecting the outcast in their midst. Ever since Abraham was marginalized and shunned for being different from his polytheistic family, it has been the outcast who has given birth to new spiritual practice. Rabbi Offner will examine the ways in which Jews, women, and LGBT peoples have enriched the dominant culture, even as each community has the potential to exclude others in their own efforts to become normative.



Rabbi Stacy Offner is the first career congregational rabbi and the first woman to hold the position of vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism. She arrived at a pivotal moment in the Union’s history and quickly assumed the mantle of leading the transition team that is overseeing a complete restructuring of the 136-year-old organization. The new Congregational Support Center and the Congregational Consulting Group are in her purview. She is also responsible for overseeing the Union’s North American board of trustees and promoting leadership and development among its members. Prior to joining the Union in 2008, Rabbi Offner spent nearly 25 years as a congregational rabbi in Minneapolis, MN. She was the first woman rabbi in the North Star State and is the founding rabbi emeritus of Shir Tikvah Congregation in Minneapolis.

Rabbi Offner has served as adjunct professor of Jewish ethics at Hamline University, on the Ethics Committee of Minneapolis Children's Hospital and as chair of the Socially Responsible Investing Committee of the Reform Pension Board. She is a past president of the Midwest Association of Reform Rabbis, and was the first rabbi to serve as the officially elected chaplain of the Minnesota State Senate.

A magna cum laude graduate of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, Rabbi Offner received her master's degree in Hebrew literature in 1982 and her rabbinic ordination in 1984, both from Hebrew Union College in New York.

For more information, please contact Beng Chang at schochet@umn.edu or 612-626-2562.

 

Toni McNaron

Toni McNaron, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is a multiple award winning teacher and scholar who worked joyfully with graduate and undergraduate students for over 35 years at the University of Minnesota.

Her passion as a writer led her to explore topics ranging from diversity in the academy, gender and genre, the works of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, to the contours of her own life as a white Southern lesbian.

In recognition of her accomplishments, the Steven J. Schochet Center for GLBT Studies was pleased to inaugurate its Distinguished Lecture Series in April 2000, by introducing the Toni McNaron Lecture in Arts and Culture.