Her fighting trim was as much a giveaway as her detailed Pilates knowledge. Dixon is a practitioner of this discipline, which uses breathing control and other techniques to strengthen muscles that govern posture and balance, from the abdominals to the lower back.

It is a mind-body technique, Dixon said, requiring “attention and intention” to what the body is doing, a marriage of breathing, movement and thought, all working in harmony.

Dixon suggested that spiritual fitness, defined by service to others and love, requires similar discipline.

Pilates owes part of its inspiration to yoga, which also combines movement and thought, teaching “a purposeful attention to what we do [to achieve] spiritual progression.” Yoga’s principles, she said, launch from a springboard of virtues that should govern our relationships: truthfulness and refraining from stealing, for example. Violence - whether in thought, word, or deed - results from violating these principles, she explained.

By turns philosophical and poetic (”The breath connects us. It is the tie that binds us to all spiritual things.”), her talk might have seemed abstract to some.

But when she gave examples, Dixon tossed up a concrete and controversial one. She said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose criticisms of US policies led Barack Obama to repudiate some of his former pastor’s views, had been maligned by “slipshod journalism” that took stray comments out of context.

Having insisted that do-not-steal and truthfulness are anchors of spiritual fitness, Dixon declared that reporters had violated these virtues in covering the Wright brouhaha. “We allowed the media to have stolen this brother’s good name,” she declared.

In the interest of disclosure, Dixon said she once attended a church led by Wright’s father, befriended his mother, and has heard him preach occasionally for 20 years. Wright comes out of a black prophetic preaching tradition, dating back to American slavery, that critiqued oppressive power structures, she argued.

The ensuing discussion session turned into an avalanche of questions and comments about Wright, with many in the audience seconding Dixon.

“The shock of white people at the prophetic preaching of Rev. Wright is a real critique of the prophetic preaching of the white church,” said Elizabeth Dodson Gray, coordinator of the Theological Opportunities Program. The prophetic message “is not preached, or white people would not have been surprised to hear it.”

Carolyn Cummings-Saxton broke the chorus of agreement. The Nahant woman recalled being unwelcome a generation ago, because of her white skin, in black neighborhoods of Chicago, where she lived, as well as at Operation PUSH, Jesse Jackson’s social justice organization.

“Some people - and I must include Rev. Wright Jr. - to me, they betray their gift,” she said. “I don’t care it’s 3 percent of their verbiage, 1 percent of a single sermon. People that are bitter, it leaks out of you.

“We need to move on,” she added. “We’re tolerating, in some people, separatism.”

“My sister here is right” about the existence of black separatists in the African American community, Dixon replied. “You are right that at a certain point in our history, we need to get over separatism. . . . You are right that every word out of Jeremiah Wright’s mouth is not golden.”

But black separatism was “a necessary moment” in black history, not its conclusion, she said, suggesting that Wright’s church today would offer a white such as Cummings-Saxton the welcome denied her many years ago.

“I apologize to you . . . for that separatism,” she said. “And I’m sorry for it, because I know [as an African-American] what it feels like to be rejected.”

No one mentioned Obama’s take, which was to embrace the man who brought him to faith while repudiating his words as a distorted view of America. But if the senator’s stance grew from honestly examining his own views, Carol Staszewski of Jamaica Plain urged her liberal friends in the Theological Opportunities Program to do the same. “You talk about separatism,” she said. “We sit here and talk about Republicans week after week,” and not in glowing terms.

Staszewski repeated a principle that Dixon had urged them to remember: “I am everyone who I hate, as much as everyone who I love.”