The Ten Commandments were the strategic plan of a desert people with ancestral memories of having been enslaved. They were written to ensure that slavery and the culture of slavery would never again return to the community. And they were meant to protect the human rights and thriving of all. This lecture will explore how the seemingly mundane obligations enshrined in each of the Commandments are really fierce practices of liberation - practices that, if truly applied, would be radical even in our day.

The Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons is a writer, activist, and senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregational Society in Brooklyn. She brings to her ministry a passion for social and environmental justice and a belief in the power of liberal religion to transform our world. She has won numerous awards for her sermons including the Borden Sermon Award, the Jerry Davidoff Sermon Award, and the Dana Greeley Sermon Award. She is the author of the book, No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments (2018), which a prominent rabbi praised as providing "spiritual grounding for engagement with political realities we face today." Her work has appeared in UU World, Yes! Magazine, Truthout, and Tikkun magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Rev. Levy-Lyons holds a Master of Divinity degree (MDiv) from the University of Chicago and a BA in Music from Brown University. She is currently a rabbinical student at ALEPH Ordination Program.

The Zoom link will be emailed to all registered attendees who cannot join the event in person, 24 hours prior to the event.

St. Francis College's Human Rights Lecture Series features leading experts and activists from the corporate, non-governmental, non-profit, academic, or governmental sectors to share their perspectives on advancing human rights, broadly defined in all its aspects, with internal and external communities.