Münster, Mennonite Innocence, & the Siege of Palestine

The Chicana theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa tells us that to create the basis for solidarity across difference, we must learn our own and each other's histories. 

We must do so in all the complicated realness of those histories, without flinching. In the presentation, "Münster, Mennonite Innocence, & the Siege of Palestine," Cass Diaz will discuss a complex episode in Mennonite history--the militant Anabaptist takeover of the city of Münster--in relation to the current violence in Gaza. In these two disparate events, we will ask what it means to reach a hand out to our estranged ancestors and how doing so can help us see more clearly in our present moment. 

Presenter Cass Diaz (they/any) writes in the subjects/genres of poetry, media criticism, history, and philosophy. They ground their work in community and action at Seattle Mennonite Church and other groups in Seattle. Cass was raised in the Reformed Church and has attended SMC for just over a year, where they have developed an interest in the Anabaptist tradition's engagements with questions of justice, peace, and social transformation.