Summer Break and July Lunch

 

Dear friends and members of the Fellowship,

Next UFT Meeting, Sunday July 10^th, 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.