Lecture by Dr. Allan Boesak

South African activist Dr. Allan Boesak will present a lecture entitled “The Belhar Confession and the Pursuit of Justice and Peace” on Monday, April 11, at 7 p.m. at San Francisco Theological Seminary’s Alexander Hall (40 Kensington Road across from the Playhouse).

In the 1980s, Boesak was an outspoken critic and opponent of South Africa’s governing party and played a major anti-apartheid activist role as a patron of the United Democratic Front, one of the most important anti-apartheid organizations of its time. He is one of the originators of black liberation theology in South Africa and a scholar on Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2008 while serving as the Moderator of the Cape Synod of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, he announced he would resign all of his positions within the church because of the church's discriminatory position on homosexuality and gay and lesbian persons, invoking the anti-apartheid Belhar Confession that lambasts all forms of discrimination. Boesak originally spoke out in favor of same-sex in 2004, a year before South Africa's Constitutional Court ruled that the denial of marriage rights to gay people was discriminatory and violated the country's constitution.

This lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call 415-451-2823.