Dear friends and members of the Fellowship,
Next UFT
Meeting, Sunday July 10th, 2022 1:30 Informal Lunch RSVP please
Announcements
· We will take our usual summer’s
break from our Second Sunday meetings with speakers. We plan to resume again September 11.
3:00 (JST).
The speaker and whether we
will have a zoom meeting, hybrid meeting or in-person has not been decided.
· The July UFT gathering will be a small lunch in Tokyo at International House on
Sunday 10th from 1:00. RSVP
Please let us know if
you plan to come so we can
confirm the reservation.
-- Next TUG (Tuesday
Unitarian Gathering) on ZOOM from 2:30 July 26
All are welcome to join
this informal discussion but contact us at this email for the ZOOM link which
is sent out the day before. Check Berg link for possible reading
material.
Topic: Further discussion
about politics and climate change/ our interconnected web of
existence.
UFT June
Meeting Summary
Thank you to Glen Edmonds for
chairing today’s gathering and asking our speaker to handle the Chalice
lighting..
Our speaker, Joshua Louis
Berg talked to us about Nature’s Music: An Eco-Theology of Spirit
Having been
in Japan during high school, he had experienced the Shinkansen when it used to make a booming
sound exiting tunnels. He
explained to us how railroad engineers learned from nature to solve this problem, adopting
the characteristics of owl feathers, the Adele Penguin and the shape
of the Kingfisher’s beak.
Learning from
nature and to live with nature is “a darn good justification for our
(Unitarian Universalism) seventh principle; respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a
part. He quoted Albert Schweitzer on this, who wrote “by ethical conduct
toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.”
And Joshua showed us how our relationship with nature can be with inanimate as well
as animate beings.
Along the way
he also introduced us to the thoughts of
Janine Benyus, “Biomimicry”; Robert Cialdini “reciprocation”, and
Ursula Goodenough.
Goodenough and Joshua both received degrees from Meadville Lombard
where our dear friend and member Gene Reeves was Dean and CEO from 1979-1988, and I think Gene’s connections lead Joshua to us.
We wish
Joshua good
luck at his new job working as pastor in a children’s hospital in LA.
You can find some of his writings
here. Joshua Lewis Berg - TheHumanist.com
-- Also June 28 TUG facilitated by Naoko Fukai. Observations about the
current situation in the USA.
From your moderator with much help, please take care in the heat.
