Turn on the Love with Dr. Lourdes Rodriguez: “Works are in the eye of the beholder.”

First UU has made the theme for the fall Faith + Works series Turn on the Love to keep our spirits high as we continue to navigate the complexities of this pandemic. Join us as we Turn on the Love with Dr. Lourdes Rodriguez: 

“My mother always says: ‘El que no vive para servir, no sirve para vivir’ which loosely translates into ‘a life that is not lived in service (say, through works), is not worth living’. Join us as we explore the meaning of works from multiple perspectives: life circumstances, cultural backgrounds, and our elders‘ wisdom. Using scripture, contemporary literature, reflections by spiritual leaders and our lived experience we will come to see ‘Works’ in unexpected places, through the eye of the beholder.”  Register on Eventbrite to join us!

Born in Puerto Rico, Dr. Rodríguez serves as Senior Program Officer for Women’s Health at the Saint David’s Foundation and holds an appointment as an Adjunct Faculty with the UTHealth School of Public Health Austin Regional Campus. As a public health practitioner, and in both academic and philanthropic roles, she collaborates, develops and evaluates initiatives to improve health with people most impacted by health inequities.

Dr. Rodríguez’ background is interdisciplinary and combines multiple areas of social sciences –sociology, history, political sciences, psychology, and anthropology– and engineering to inform her work in public health. Her work examines the complex pathways that lead individuals, networks, and communities to health, or not. She rounded her education with a fellowship experience with an architect and urbanist at the National Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris, France, with whom she learned to think about cities and their neighborhoods as units of intervention. Her dissertation work focused on promoting and documenting collective recovery from trauma post the 9/11 disaster in NYC. Since, she has applied lessons from that work to mobilize communities in response to other natural, man-made, chronic and acute disasters. Lourdes is also a chicken and duck steward, can hem her own pants, and is very proud of her ability to put cranky babies to sleep.

Faith + Works: Turn on the Love
is a 4-part fall series. Our next speakers will be Sarah Townley on November 22nd, and Lesley Rennis on December 20th.