Public

RantWoman is meditating about the phrase "attend Meeting for Worship just like everyone else." RantWoman COMPLETELY supports that.

RantWoman is also finding herself grateful that Meeting for Business has interacted with big circumstances in the life of the Friend with the Remarkable Story. RantWoman heard summaries of extensive and very positive evaluations before the Friend with the Remarkable Story was released from prison. RantWoman learned that the Friend with the Remarkable Story is being notably open with his neighbors, even some who post hateful and alarming things on neighborhood blogs. RantWoman heard much that is positive and not a single negative thing about the Friend with a Remarkable Story.

RantWoman heard one Friend grumble "Why does this even need to come to Business Meeting? It's apples and oranges in important respects from the Safest Sex Offender on the Planet." RantWoman and everyone else who spoke said it's an important story and it's important to speak Truth and to be strong in the story.

RantWoman is collecting some items off the internet. RantWoman is clear that a number of people in her Meeting currently have both the capacity to look things up on the internet and enough information to know why one would look things up. RantWoman learned today that some in her Meeting did not have to look things up. Elders may think the blogosphere is a big echo chamber full of middle class people and their computers, but younger families plugged into neighborhood email lists have decidedly other views.

RantWoman is glad that information and inquiries have now come to Meeting for Business. RantWoman is still feeling surprisingly fierce about some points she is seasoning what to do with, but RantWoman would feel fierce about these points with or without the Friend with the Remarkable Story.

RantWoman is clear that many more conversations are probably going to need to happen. RantWoman is clear about her own views, and RantWoman is praying for centeredness as conversations unfold and Light about where to go next.

RantWoman wrote the rest of this earlier including the blog as file cabinet listings. RantWoman does not feel called to edit out the anachronistic elements.

If Quakers ever write an etiquette book RantWoman would be glad to help about a chapter on whether or not it is a social gaffe, if one is not feelng centered enough for where a conversation might go, to "forget" to introduce two people who need to meet, the Safest sex Offender on the Planet and the friend with the Remarkable Story. RantWoman has to be VERY frank: despite being in a unique position about the matter, RantWoman herself is easing in very slowly. RantWoman is clear in her own discernment that immediate reaction is NOT needed about some issues. Rantwoman is also clear that others may not share her view or may need thoughtful discernment to get there.

The Friend with the Remarkable Story introduced himself again during announcements after worship last week. That happens to be one of the weeks each month when the safest sex Offender on the Planet worships at 11:00. The Friend with the Remarkable Story is quite forthright about having just gotten out of prison and about being part of the Monroe Worship Group. At this point in our Meeting's life, there exactly two people attending regularly besides the Friend with the Remarkable Story and his wife who participated in the Monroe Worship Group, RantWoman and.... and only RantWoman was present.

So,when the Friend with the Remarkable Story introduced himself during announcements, RantWoman felt called to rise also. Despite pleas from parents of squirming children for brevity in announcements, RantWoman spoke of the Monroe Worship Group, of how LOTS of Quakers are involved with Alternatives to violence in prisons, but the Monroe Worship Group is unique in terms of inmates getting out and continuing to worship among friends. RantWoman also specifically said she is glad to have the Friend with the Remarkable Story and Mrs. ... Remarkable Story worshipping among us. Neither the Friend with the remarkable Story nor RantWoman have so far felt called to say more of what RantWoman knows there is to say. Thinking more about that problem a day or two later, RantWoman was led to ...the search engine of her choice, and to some links to follow from what turned up!

Understand, in the world of RantWoman and e-torrents, if it's all over the internet, sooner or later either someone else in Meeting is going to notice or someone is going to turn up and ask. Either way, let's hope it's God, not just RantWoman trying to mix PR and centered community discernment.

The nub of the matter, if a set of topics which evoke a whole range of thoughts in RantWoman and about which many in RantWoman's Meeting have so far had no or very little occasion even to think about can be called a nub:

RantWoman never has trouble holding couples living through great challenges in the light!

Sex Offender Registration with various informational links.
http://www.icrimewatch.net/offenderdetails.php?OfndrID=1425116&AgencyID=54473

A bit from the local Fox news affiliate. Rantwoman cannot locate any content except the picture but thinks there musht be some.
http://www.q13fox.com/news/kcpq-daniel-pens-level-3-sex-offender-living-in-ballard-20111020,0,3373116.photo

A blog entry with a range of comments ranging from, to RantWoman's ear, vehement ranting to sensible thought.
http://www.myballard.com/forum/topic.php?id=11650

An important appellate case about treatment programs that encourage offenders to acknowledge offenses they cannot be prosecuted for and whether or not those admissions can be cited as aggravating factors in sentencing.
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/902/1464/164758/

An OLD Letter to the Editor of The Stranger, a local newswekly whose stylebook most assuredly does not eschew the F word and which regularly curls the hair of many readers:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/letters-to-the-editor/Content?oid=6497

The original article about Tamara Menteer and the Whitestone Foundation:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-rape-revisionist/Content?oid=6343

A book review:

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/99_displayNews.aspx

and as previously mentioned:
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/Default.aspx

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Eid el-Adha / Kurban Bairam 2011

The headine "80,000 Muslims pray on the streets of Moscow" caught RantWoman's eye. The visuals and the text about need for more mosques also caught RantWoman's eye. Without further comment:

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/80-000-Muslims-pray-on-the-street-in-Moscow-2254975.php

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Quakers and Sex Offenders

RantWoman's Meeting has a lovely library. As previously posted, RantWoman is unclear whether material there about sex offenders is useful and current. That is a whole conversation in its own right. In the interest of RANTWOMAN being in a position to speak from topical Light, more items for the blog as file cabinet, with the proviso that one should also check the search engine of one's choice for newer material

RantWoman would like to have more of a separate info stream, beyond the items RantWoman has been collecting, about matters specifically to do with survivors. Stay tuned.

In the meantime:

Nice 2003 item from Quaker Life, FUM
http://www.fum.org/QL/issues/0306/responses_abuse.htm

Sex offenders are people too from Friends Journal
http://www.friendsjournal.org/sex-offenders-are-people-too

FGC library about Rochester MN MM
http://www.fgcquaker.org/library/fosteringmeetings/0305.htm l

http://www.quaker.org/sexuality/Readings.htm

http://thefriend.co.uk/articledisplay.asp?articleid=1540

Tim Newell on Circles of Support and Accountability, also a PDF to download from a Swarthmore Lecture.
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/88

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Search Engines, Sex Offenders, Congregations

RantWoman has truly ODD taste in after hours reading. Tonight RantWoman has been led to see what the internet is serving up about religious congregations and sex offenders.

"But RantWoman," someone will say, "Quakers are DIFFERENT." RantWoman really does not care. The point is that LOTS of congregations deal with sex offenders. Does our Meeting have anything to learn from others' experience? Who knows, but RantWoman is not ashamed to consider the question.

The Unitarian Universalists: a couple different situations and articulation of some general points about each situation being unique. Also, lots of links.
http://www.uua.org/safe/children/23531.shtml

Another great checklist:
http://www.churchstuff.com/sexuality/pcmso.aspx

Really interesting Christianity Today article about practices at different churches, also Circles of Support and Accountability
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/21.49.html


last page of article above with multiple links
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/21.49.html?start=7

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/21.49.html?start=7

A 2007 item from Good Morning America about a UCC congregation. The audio starts automatically which I found annoying. The reporter is kind of gushy. The pastor talks about Safe Church practices.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3144748&page=1

The United Methodists:
http://umsexualethics.org/LocalChurches/SexOffenders.aspx

Faith Trust Institute:
http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/news/sex-offenders-in-congregations

Really frank about sex offenders already among congregations and about congregations as part of accountability system.
http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/blog/marie-fortune/8

Part 2 of the above: don't forgive us so quickly
http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/blog/marie-fortune/9

ELCA page with multiple PDF's
http://www.elca.org/Who-We-Are/Our-Three-Expressions/Churchwide-Organization/Office-of-the-Secretary/Congregation-Administration/Legal-Issues-for-Congregations/Questions-About-Protecting-Children-and-Adults-from-Abuse/How-should-our-congregation-respond-to-the-sex-offender.aspx

The ELCA page:
http://www.elca.org/Who-We-Are/Our-Three-Expressions/Churchwide-Organization/Office-of-the-Secretary/Congregation-Administration/Legal-Issues-for-Congregations/Questions-About-Protecting-Children-and-Adults-from-Abuse/Sexual-Misconduct-Policy-and-Resource.aspx

Something from Agape Resources
http://www.agaperesourceministry.org/Is%20Your%20Congregation%20Ready%20for%20a%20Sex%20Offender.pdf

http://www.stopbaptistpredators.org/article07/sex_abuse_in_churches_preventable.html

The google search string:
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=crnk_totw&cp=25&gs_id=2d&xhr=t&q=sex+offender+congregation&tok=JhayOqBVLoh00mSCGds4cg&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=sex+offender+congregation&aq=0v&aqi=g-v1&aql=f&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=bdf357a7f2cc5c4d&biw=1680&bih=786

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Who is Steve Jobs to You

RantWoman is meditating about her call to post this in her blog both in terms of how much the blogosphere needs more reflections about Steve Jobs and the circumstances behind this item coming to RantWoman.

This item arrived via email from Sentimental Classmate. Sentimental Classmate was one of the handful of classmates who appeared in photos on every section divider in the high school annual. RantWoman thinks she and Sentimental Classmate were in Calculus together but seating was alphabetical and our last names are far enough apart we interacted little, or more correctly barely talked in high school. This classmate, like RantWoman moved far away from high school. Unlike RantWoman, Sentimental Classmate has not been back at all; Sentimental Classmate also has a life path pretty different from RantWoman's. However, in connection with a major year reunion neither of us attended, Sentimental classmate asssembled an email list and most of the time RantWoman is finding herself surprisingly grateful for what arrives via the list.


A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve JobsBy MONA SIMPSON

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif. We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco. Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.
That’s incredibly simple, but true. He was the opposite of absent-minded. He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited. He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church. He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood. Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing. His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.
Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans. When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there. And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him. Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us. What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us. His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it. He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude. He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

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Way of the Spirit Discernment

RantWoman has no idea whether she has readers who might be interested and are not already on a mailing list to receive this. RantWoman is also mostly self-taught about many points of using HTML that comes out of email. RantWoman does actually know how to make links that look like text humans would want to read instead of raggedy url's but RantWoman is not always patient enough to do this.

The main point: RantWoman HIGHLY recommends the following item and RantWoman is looking for way to open to participate herself!



Way of the Spirit, Module One: Discernment, January 12-15, 2012
[1]View this email online instead
[2]Way of the Spirit: Module One Discernment
Links:
1. http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=1af0ef3a0d956f5082f3005c1&id=4d9fd9cb7d&e=dc9e7201e0
2. http://goodnewsassoc.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=1af0ef3a0d956f5082f3005c1&id=ba5306546f&e=dc9e7201e0

_Way of the Spirit_ begins

For people in leadership or service roles within and beyond faith
communities — clerks, pastors, elders, counselors, educators, social
activists, and others following their leadings—_Way of the Spirit_ builds
practical tools for faithfulness.
* Distinguish God’s inward guidance
* Strengthen understanding of discernment in scripture, and in Christian
and Quaker heritage
* Integrate content with contemplation, prayerful dialog & shared worship
* Face challenges in discernment
* Follow up the retreat with an online reflection group

The January module begins a year-long _Way of the Spirit_retreat series
continuing in April and September. Register for the January module as a
trial, or sign up for the entire series. More information: curriculum
overview, articles and "Is this for you?" _[3]Online Here_.
Links:
3. http://goodnewsassoc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1af0ef3a0d956f5082f3005c1&id=e83917a31b&e=dc9e7201e0

January staff:

_Christine Betz Hall, _Way of the Spirit Coordinator and Facilitator, Good
News Associate
_Margery Post Abbott_, Speaker, Author of _To be Broken and Tender: a Quaker
Theology for Today_ Other guest speakers to be announced

Details

* Thursday 1/12, dinner at 5:30, through Sunday 1/15 lunch
* At Seabeck Retreat Center on Hood Canal, 1.5 hours from Seattle
* Small cohort of 8-12 people aligned with the Way of the Spirit vision:
Unprogrammed and Evangelical Quakers, members of diverse faith
communities and unaffiliated seekers
* Approximately 10 hours of readings before the retreat

Fees

* January module includes three nights lodging, meals & tuition
* 10% registration discount through December 11th
* $350 for Module One trial, $2,250 for year-long program
* + 10% after 12/11 ($385/$2475)
* [4]More fee information
Links:
4. http://goodnewsassoc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1af0ef3a0d956f5082f3005c1&id=f080412836&e=dc9e7201e0

_Christine Hall, Way of the Spirit_
You received this message because you expressed interest in a program like School of the Spirit Ministry.
_Our mailing address is:_
Christine Hall, Way of the Spirit
7351 Barred Owl Way
Clinton, WA 98236

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University Friends Meeting Fall Retreat November 5 9-4:30

Hi Friends.

RantWoman is back to speaking of herself in the third person. Cope. RantWoman has a sense of many things seasoning. In the meantime, join us for this great retreat!

University Friends Meeting Retreat
November 5, 2011

9 am - 4:30 pm.

Please bring: Potluck dishes to share
Optional reading: “The Spirit Level” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket

Schedule
Time Activity

8:30-9:00am Coffee (Social Hall)

9:00-9:30am Introductions (Meeting Room)

9:30-9:50am Opening meeting for worship (Meeting Room)

9:50-10:40am “10 Chairs” (Meeting Room)

10:45-11:00am Visualizing Equality (Social Hall)

11:00-11:20 am Break-out sessions (Social Hall)

11:20-11:45 am Pre-lunch closing (Social Hall)

12:00-1:00 pm Lunch

1:00-3:30 pm Work party

4:00-4:30 pm Closing meeting for worship (Meeting Room)


Queries:
What kind of society would be consistent with the Quaker belief in equality? In simplicity?

Can you dream of a world of the beloved community where all can thrive?

How am I advantaged/disadvantaged by local, national and global inequality?

How does UFM participate in maintaining or overcoming inequality?

How can we as Quakers practice more sharing instead of materialism and individualism?

How do we genuinely reach out to others in order to foster inclusiveness?

==========
This would not of course be a RantWoman blog entry without RantWoman rants and rambles.

RantWoman is terribly excited to have the tidings here in advance electronically.

RantWoman is terribly grateful to have the schedule. RantWoman will need to leave early. RantWoman does not get much choice about helping the RantFamily celebrate Brother-in-Law's birthday and that is important, unfortunately for RantWoman's sincere wish to uphold Meeting maintenance tasks more important than the work party.

RantWoman even has a beloved electronic gizmo to help her tote around topical materials including this text and the book mentioned. In fact, RantWoman is so happy to have this particular electronic device that RantWoman is going to have to speak to the simplicity inherent in enough materialism to have exactly the right material things for one's purposes even if , for instance, the forces of global marketing probably wish RantWoman would darn well spend more, more, more or, even worse, RantWoman herself might feel called endlessly to whine and moan about inconveniences and frustrations that come with this particular mode of information access. RantWoman perfectly well knows she gets to be grateful to have such problems. So?

RantWoman confesses, the book has tons of citations on the topic and tons of data all pointing the same way. In fact the book has SO many citations all pointing the same way that RantWoman might want either to click on some hyperlinks and read additional bites of the studies cited OR to test some of the items against others' views. RantWoman thinks it darn well is going to be a great retreat regardless of cavils RantWoman might not even get time to deal with anyway!

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