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 The Rev. Dr. Barbara R. I. Isaacs
Team Leader, Program Ministries
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Empowered by my awakening to the truth of my own white privilege, and by God's charge to not blink in the face of evil, my mission is to challenge the institutional racism and white privilege within our church and to confront the alienating whiteness of political, social and economic institutions of our global community. This path of pursuing racial justice and reconciliation is both personal and public. It is an unending struggle and awakening in my life and in the life of our church. It is a journey to perfection in holy love, a journey that we must walk together.
Barbara is Team Leader, Program Ministries of the General Commission on Religion and Race. She joined our staff in July, 2006.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Barbara was ordained an Elder in 1977 and is a member of the Northern Illinois Conference. She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Theological Studies and the Graduate Certificate in Gender Studies from Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, in 2002.
In her thirty-plus years of pastoral experience, Barbara has been a pastor of rural, urban and suburban local churches; a chaplain at institutions of higher education and at a United Methodist general agency; an instructor at undergraduate and graduate institutions of higher education in Chicago; coordinator of the Women, Ministry and the City Program for the Association of Chicago Theological Schools; and a campus ministry staff executive at the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. She has led international study trips for students, faculty, and university chaplains to Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Zimbabwe, Singapore, Brazil, and Central Europe.
Barbara’s most recent publication is her essay “The Lunch Counter Struggle, 1960 to 1963: Women Re-Mapping Boundaries of Race, Gender and Vocation” in Gender, Ethnicity and Religion: Views from the Other Side, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether. In 2003 she was honored to present a paper on the role of Dr. Willa Player in the historic racial protest sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, for Sarah Lawrence College’s conference on Sisters in Struggle: Honoring Women Veterans of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.
Barbara believes each individual is called, in the words of Professor Henry Young, “to protest against whatever he or she sees as antithetical to the dignity and sacred worth of every individual in our global community.” The diverse racial and ethnic communities within the urban and suburban reach of Loyola University’s Lake Shore campus provided significant sites for community-based learning that became the foundation for her Religion in America course (1998 – 2006).
