McCormick Days 2020

Rewatch McCormick Days 2020 Here.

Thursday October 15 – Friday October 16, 2020.

McCormick Days 2020 theme is: Legacies and Realities of the Penal System: Investigating Power, Justice and Liberation. So, while we won't be gathering in person, we remain excited about new creative programming, worship and conversation, along with celebrating the class of 1970 (50th Anniversary), and the class of 1995 (25th Anniversary)! We are truly excited. Can you feel the energy?

On Thursday, October 15, we'll open with a conversation "Legacies & Realities: Dr. Jenny McBride and Jia Johnson"

On Friday, October 16, we'll open with our keynote address by Kaia Stern, Elegy for Justice: Do we know justice well enough? This will offer a kind of sermon for justice itself. Beginning with grief, it will focus on how we imprison the most vulnerable among us in the name of justice. It will then praise the idealized part of justice as dead in terms of kinship, suggesting the good news that we are kin, despite relational amnesia. Finally, it will consider solace and the urgency for an ethic that moves beyond the logic of punishment and shifts from coercion to recognition.

Kaia Stern, Co-Founder and Director of the Prison Studies Project

Our keynote speaker is Kaia Stern, co-founder and director of the Prison Studies Project, the first practitioner in residence at the Radcliffe Institute, executive director of Concord Prison Outreach, and visiting faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From Sing Sing prison to The White House, Stern’s work has been grounded in reimagining justice. She has taught extensively on topics such as liberation theology, ethics, punishment, race, eye contact and transformative justice. Author of Voices from American Prisons: Faith, Education, and Healing (Routledge, 2014), she is currently working on a book about memory and justice.

Recognized as a national resource, her contribution to the Greenhaven Prison Program at Vassar College, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, Vera Institute of Justice, Kings County District Attorney's Office, Interfaith Justice Project at The Riverside Church, Open Society Institute's After Prison Initiative, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, Boston University's Prison Education Program, Department of Justice's Norval Morris Project, and Truth Commission on Conscience in War has facilitated work with numerous schools and prisons in various states.

Stern holds a doctorate in religion from Emory University and an M.A. of theological studies from the Harvard Divinity School. She is ordained as an interfaith minister and has been learning/teaching in and about U.S. prisons for 25 years.

Congratulations to our Distinguished Alumni for 2020! We are pleased to honor both Rev. Dr. Nayoung Ha and Rev. Dr. Jorge L. Morales. Their ministry to Asian and Latino communities has been their life's work.