PRAYING WITH OUR FEET
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Hero narratives make great movies but incomplete blueprints for change. Join us on this trip to Alabama where we will explore how change happens.
4-Day Travel Seminar

This program is on hiatus for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Travel seminar to Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham during the Presidents' Day weekend

​This is a 4-day ecumenical program in justice-seeking theological education. Our goal is to help you explore theological questions and perspectives in a supportive, mentoring community where your views, talents, and insights are respected and encouraged.
We depart from the Emory University campus by chartered bus to explore iconic civil rights sites in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham. Our hope is that the rich experience of these places bring a depth and energy to the process of learning about the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Imagine reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” near the site of the historical Birmingham jail or following a viewing of the film, Selma, by stepping off the bus to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In the midst of our historical exploration, we dig into the theological tools civil rights leaders used to make sense of their struggle. 

We each have the opportunity to reflect on the usefulness of these and other theological tools for our own time and struggles. We grapple with the context and challenges of our own time, hoping that each of us end our trip with new courage and insight.
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As with all our programs, a key component of your learning process involves each other. Because we bring together youth from diverse racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, national, denominational and religious backgrounds, you learn about other people, and learn how to engage honestly and respectfully with people  whose experiences, commitments, and perspectives are different from yours. The ways you grow from this aspect of your experience will serve you in countless ways throughout your life. 
How do we figure out
when we're being
​faithful to God today?
Questions We Explore:
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  • How do we create the change we want to see in the world?
  • How do we know when we're being faithful to God?
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Many lessons about the Civil Rights Movement focus on a few key figures and the words they said and the events they shaped. The history of the Civil Rights Movement was far more complex than these "hero narratives" suggest. These stories set us up to wait for our own heroes who will bring about the world we want.
 
If we want to create change in our world today, we need to understand everything that went into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. During our trip, we will look at some lesser known figures and the work they did.

We sometimes hear why working for social change during the Civil Rights Movement was tied to faithfulness to God, but what about folks who supported segregation and the denial of voting rights on the basis of their faith? How did they explain that?

If it's possible to be so far off base in our faithfulness, how do we figure out when we're being faithful to God today? 
When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying. —Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel