Ohio-Meadville District Unitarian Universalist Association |
 |
Kenyon College, Gambier, OhioBrochure Index ~ SI Basics ~ Theme Speaker ~ Music ~ Children's Program ~ Youth Program ~ Young Adult Program ~ Adult Morning Workshops ~ Afternoon Activities ~ Evening Activities ~ Workshifts ~ Registration ~ Kenyon |
|
Monday. The Spiritual Power of Our Faith. A Breath Meditation. Through story, historical adventuring, and personal practice, Thandeka introduces the spiritual foundation of our liberal faith. Lecture, workshop, and discussion. Tuesday. Seeing Beyond Belief. Thandeka will use film clips from the 2002 feature film “About Schmidt,”* starring Jack Nicholson, to help us see more clearly what we already know about the wellsprings of our own spiritual lives in our multi-cultural world. Lecture, workshop, and discussion. Wednesday. Feeling Beyond Belief. Thandeka will take us through a series of mental exercises that reveal and affirm for us the spiritual foundation of our faith as a felt sense of life abounding within us and around us. Lecture, workshop, and discussion. Thursday. Thinking Beyond Belief. Building on work from the preceding three days, Thandeka will show us how personal experience – which according to the May 2005 Commission on Appraisal Unitarian Universalist Association Report is “Almost universally [considered] among UUs . . . the most important source of religious convictions” –speaks in multi-cultural voices in our one faith. Drawing on her work in racial identity formation and Unitarian Universalist systematic theology, she will show us how to think outside the thoughts that box us in and lock us out of the spiritual wellsprings of our own faith. Lecture, workshop, and discussion. |
Friday. Celebrating the Spiritual Power of Our Faith. Thandeka will introduce us to three simple practices we can do at any time and in any place to remind us that we are a religious people who see, feel, and think beyond doctrinal belief. We are, after all, known by our deeds not or creeds. These three practices give us a way to live boldly from the center of our faith tradition as one people in a multi-cultural world. Lecture, workshop and discussion.
Thandeka is Visiting Scholar at the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology for the 2008-2009 academic year. She is the founder of Affect Theology, which investigates the links between religion and emotions using insights from affective neuroscience. The author of The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to Kant’s Problem of the Empirical Self, and Learning to be White: Money, Race and God in America, and contributor to books including The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher and The Oxford Handbook on Feminist Theology and Globalization (forthcoming), Thandeka’s current book project is Affect Theology: Returning Rational Theology to its Senses. Thandeka’s numerous publications in journals include essays in American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, The International Journal of Practical Theology, Harvard Theological Review, Process Studies, and Tikkun.
Thandeka has taught at San Francisco State University, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Williams College, Harvard Divinity School, and Brandeis University, and has been a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University and a Visiting Scholar at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Before receiving her doctorate in philosophy of religion and theology from the Claremont Graduate University, Thandeka was an Emmy award-winning television producer for sixteen years. An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian, she was given the !Xhosa name Thandeka, which means “beloved,” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984.
photo by