You have probably caught a glimpse of Fannie Farmer’s picture in our UUGP kitchen on your way to the dishwasher or sink. Maybe you even read the bio. Why has our kitchen been dedicated to Ms. Farmer? UUGP member Camille Korsmo will tell us more about this remarkable woman, and why you might want to thank her the next time you follow a recipe. Our Congregational Meeting will follow the service.
The Voters Service Chair for the League of Women Voters of the Rogue Valley, Kathleen Donham will present a brief history of Voting Rights in the United States and Oregon, followed by concerns about the future of enfranchisement. Who gets to vote in a democracy? What are the outcomes of universal suffrage?
Can your son or daughter deliver your mail-in ballot for you if you are in a wheelchair?
UUGP is honored to welcome members of the local chapter of Veterans For Peace to present our Memorial Day service. The collective experience of Veterans For Peace has shown that wars are easy to start and hard to stop, and that those hurt are often the innocent. As veterans, they will draw on their personal experiences and perspectives to raise public awareness of the true costs and consequences of militarism and war – and to seek peaceful, effective alternatives.
Rev. Stephen Landale joins us to share a surprisingly humorous story from the Hebrew Scriptures, the story of the healing of Na’aman, in 2 Kings 5: 1-15 (the humor will be more evident in a modern retelling of the story). We’ll reflect on how we want healing or change to happen, and how it typically needs to happen. Rev. Landale has been a hospice chaplain for over nine years, served as a full-time UU parish minister for 11 years, and has been a guest UU preacher and consulting minister for most of the last decade.
For millennia mystics and prophets have told us “All is one” and yet we feel ourselves surrounded by separation, antagonism, and isolation, plenty of reasons to conclude instead that “All is horribly splintered.” Recent advances from mainstream science reveal an underlying integrity, connectedness, and wholism in everything from human bodies to ecosystems to the fabric of space-time. Science agrees: “All is one.” New findings from science offer an interfaith, non-dual spirituality, grounded in Reality itself.
What can we learn from the natural world – from our one and only Mother Earth? And are we willing to listen and pay attention? Members of the UUGP book club reflect on two of the books they recently read together, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. Both women are writers, scientists, teachers, and of course, mothers.
Domestic violence is not just an individual or even a family issue, but a problem that has the capacity to have negative consequences on communities and society as a whole. Ray Dinkins will share motivational stories and meaningful ways to engage individually and communally in ending intimate partner violence in our community.
In honor of Earth Day, SOU student and local small-business owner Bashira Muhammad will talk to us about the big picture of sustainability, including social, environmental, economic,and institutional aspects. We will learn about the history of her agricultural company Zoom Out Mycology with connections to our seven principles of Unitarian Universalism.
After what seems like an especially long winter and two years of being shadowed by Covid, this spring dawns, filled, with as yet unmet, potential. In the face of global conflict and dissension close to home, we need a season of resurrection and renewal of love and hope. Let us gather together to wish and dream and to begin anew.
The surprise revelations of the puzzle-like Matrioshka dolls and the multi-layered symbolic designs of Ukrainian pysanky (decorated Easter eggs) set the stage for understanding the complexity and significance of feminism in contemporary Ukraine. It is the story of women whose culture, with its roots in ancient matrifocal civilizations, have been continuously negated by the dominant culture of Russia. Like the Matrioshka dolls who recall older images of the Great Goddess bringing forth life from within her body, Ukrainian women continue to bring forth from within themselves individually and as a diverse community new expressions of the life-giving and world-shaping power of the values and beliefs of their submerged culture.
