Three Days of Justice, Love & Art with John Dominic Crossan
February 3-5, 2012 • Winter Park, Florida
Thank you to the 175 participants who made the 2012 Symposium a gratifying expression of agapē love for community.
Hear an audio podcast of John Dominic Crossan’s February 4, 2012 lecture, God and the Community of Resurrection, from the GladdeningLight Symposium, courtesy of the Carroll McKenney Foundation for Public Media, producer of media content featuring local voices that matter to Central Florida.
Feed the soul, savor the beauty and experience the communion love of agapē in the gladdening light of God.
- GladdeningLight’s signature event celebrated the artist’s role within the second commandment expressing love for one’s neighbor as oneself.
- John Dominic Crossan, the symposium’s featured speaker, is a foremost authority on the historical Jesus and the matrix of first century Roman imperialism (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography and The Birth of Christianity).
- Four practicing artists – Cherokee carver & storyteller Freeman Owle, photo essayist Brendan Bannon, iconic painter Trent Tomengo and community choreographer Barrie Barton – supported Crossan’s vision of God’s longing for a just and loving community, representative of all. The artists exhibited and spoke about their own creative aspirations struggling for transformation beyond societies that marginalize the disenfranchised.
View the 2012 Artist Profiles (pdf).
Video from the Event
Meditation of the Hands, Randall B. Robertson, GladdeningLight Symposium, February 4, 2012 (Symposium 2012)
Sponsoring Churches
First Congregational Church of Winter Park
St. Peter the Fisherman Episcopal Church, New Smyrna Beach
Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, Longwood
St. Richards Episcopal Church, Winter Park
Jubilee! Community, Asheville, NC
GladdeningLight is for the spiritual seeker yearning for radical justice and a loving community in an unjust world.
Inspiration & Exploration
GladdeningLight’s 2012 Symposium featured several practicing artists, including Brendan Bannon, who supported Crossan’s vision of God’s longing for a just and loving community, representative of all. Bannon, along with the other artists, exhibited and spoke about his own creative aspirations struggling for transformation beyond societies that marginalize the disenfranchised.
Photo by Brendan Bannon
From his home base in Africa since 2005, Brendan Bannon, www.brendanbannon.com, has expressed fervent devotion to the humanitarian plight of his subjects through the art of photojournalism, a talent inspired in him by his father Anthony, and by his mother who processed film at home in a makeshift darkroom. During his twenties, Brendan cared for his mother who became afflicted with multiple sclerosis, an experience he credits with informing his approach to photography.
“I don’t shy away from difficult stories. The experience of taking care of my mother showed me clearly that behind every moment of perceived suffering there is profound victory over circumstances. I look at people’s lives as being full of meaningful relationships, striving against the odds, achieving small victories.”
Brendan’s work in Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tanzania, Congo and India has appeared in The New York Times, leading magazines and newspapers in Britain and the Christian Science Monitor. To occasionally catch his breath, he maintains a home stateside in upstate New York.
Photos from the Event
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Elaine Johnson
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