Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

of the Religious Society of Friends

Peace and Social Action

Carrie Newcomer Online Concert: ‘Remembering Radiance, Acknowledging Grief, Claiming Love’

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Barnegat Monthly Meeting is pleased to partner with Carrie Newcomer to present her online concert at the Mandolin site. Buy tickets here:

https://boxoffice.mandolin.com/products/carrie-newcomer-online-concert-remembering-radiance-acknowledging-grief-claiming-love-2-27?oid=41&affid=277

Carrie Newcomer is a performer, recording artist, and educator, described as a “prairie mystic” by the Boston Globe and one who “asks all the right questions” by Rolling Stone. Her song “I Should’ve Known Better” appeared on Nickel Creek’s Grammy award-winning gold-certified album “This Side”, and she earned a regional Emmy for the PBS special “An Evening with Carrie Newcomer.” Carrie is the 2019 recipient of the Shalem Institute Contemplative Voices Award. Recent media appearances include PBS’s Religion and Ethics and Krista Tippett’s On Being. In the fall of 2009 and 2011 Newcomer was a cultural ambassador to India, invited by the American Embassy of India, resulting in her interfaith collaborative benefit album Everything is Everywhere with world master of the Indian Sarod, Amjad Ali Khan and his sons Ayan and Amaan. In 2012 and 2013 Carrie traveled to Kenya and the Middle East performing in schools, spiritual communities and AIDS hospitals. Carrie has 17 nationally released albums on Available Light and Rounder Records, including The Point of Arrival, The Beautiful Not Yet, A Permeable Life, and Everything is Everywhere. Newcomer has also released two companion books of poetry and essays, A Permeable Life: Poems and Essays and The Beautiful Not Yet: Poems, Essays, & Lyrics. Newcomer’s first theatrical production, Betty’s Diner: The Musical, was performed at a sold out run at Purdue University in 2015 and is now available to interested theaters, universities, and spiritual communities.

In 2016 Carrie presented the Goshen College commencement address and was awarded an honorary degree in Music for Social Change. She regularly works with Parker J. Palmer in live programs, including Healing the Heart of Democracy: A Gathering of Spirits for the Common Good and What We Need is Here: Hope, Hard Times, and Human Possibility. Newcomer and Palmer also are actively collaborating on The Growing Edge, a website, podcast, and retreat. Spirituality and Health Magazine named The Growing Edge collaboration as one of the top ten spiritual leaders and programs for the next 20 years. Three of Newcomer’s songs are included in Palmer’s newest book. Other special collaborations include presentations with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, author Rabbi Sandy Sasso, and environmental author Scott Russell Sanders.

Carrie lives in the woods of southern Indiana with her husband and two shaggy dogs.

Book Discussion: “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson

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Join us for a discussion about “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent” by Isabel Wilkerson, a New York Times Bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club Pick.  Hosted by Haddonfield Monthly Meeting, the discussion will be facilitated by Karriem Lateef Salaam, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at Friends Hospital, Philadelphia, and Clinical Assistant Professor, Drexel College of Medicine.   This event will be held on Tuesday, February 16, 2021, from 7-8:30 PM.

This is an online event. A link to Zoom will be emailed on the day prior to this event to all who have pre-registered.  Please use this link to pre-register:   https://www.southjerseyquakers.org/caste-registration/

Let’s Talk About Inauguration 2020

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The Anti-Racism Committee of Moorestown Friends Meeting invites you to a conversation about America’s journey toward equality as reflected in various events of inauguration day 2020. Click here to join us. Some useful resources you may like to review include:

President Biden’s inaugural address; transcript is here

National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman reads ‘The Hill We Climb’; transcript here

Many media outlets have reflected on the many ‘firsts’ related to this inauguration day; there’s a brief overview from Forbes magazine here.

Many of the proclamations and orders President Biden issued on his first day relate to racial justice.

Video of seven hours of the day’s events is here.

FCNL Changemaker Event: Strengthening Quaker Community

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Join us for our lively January Quaker Changemaker conversation about how advocacy and other forms of collective action can bring and hold us together. We’ll focus particularly on what we’ve learned about ways that virtual gathering and action can strengthen community bonds and spiritual experiences.

Our panelists will be Carolyn Levering and Jen Higgins-Newman. Carolyn will discuss how participating in FCNL’s Advocacy Teams can help bring new life to meeting communities. Jen will share perspectives from her work to facilitate community-building and community action as the program manager at Beacon Hill Friends House, a center for Quaker learning and action and a residential intentional community grounded in Quaker principles.

Let’s Talk with Moore Unity

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Moorestown Friends Meeting’s Anti-Racism Committee sponsors Let’s Talk with Karen Reiner and Meredith Butts, President and Vice President of Moorestown’s MooreUnity, about the group’s efforts “to raise awareness of divisive forces in our community and promote inclusion by building bridges across those divides.” Reiner and Butts formed MooreUnity after KKK materials were distributed in Cinnaminson and a Jewish community center in Cherry Hill received a bomb threat. Their efforts and experience are relevant far beyond Moorestown. To join the conversation, click here, or phone 646-558-8656 and enter meeting ID 815 8781 6369.

Broadcast of Must See Documentary Dawnland 11-5-18 @ 10 PBS

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Greetings from the Indian Committee

We want you to be aware of on MONDAY NOVEMBER 5th 10PM PBS will broadcast DAWNLAND

Our friends Wayne Newell and Denise Altvater (AFSC WABANAKI) are among those featured. See link below.
Thanks to Elizabeth Koopman

About the Film

They were forced to assimilate into white society: children ripped away from their families, depriving them of their culture and erasing their identities. Can reconciliation help heal the scars from childhoods lost? Dawnland is the untold story of Indigenous child removal in the US through the nation’s first-ever government-endorsed truth and reconciliation commission, which investigated the devastating impact of Maine’s child welfare practices on the Wabanaki people.

https://upstanderproject.org/dawnland/

PS Learn the Lenape Language online! http://talk-lenape.org/getting-started

 

Green Street Meeting provides school supplies to children at EMIR Healing Center

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Green Street Meeting’s EMIR Ministry Support Group says a heartfelt “Thank you!” to everyone at Green Street, the meetings in Philadelphia Quarter, and beyond who supported our school supplies drive in summer 2018.

The drive benefited 103 children whose families had lost a loved one to homicide, and who received services and support from the EMIR Healing Center. The center was founded by our member Victoria Greene, and named in memory of her son Emir, who was murdered. The name also makes the statement “Every Murder Is Real.” No matter who the victim was, or how much or little attention the crime received, that person’s loved ones are mourning their loss for years afterwards.

Still going strong in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, after 19 years, the EMIR Healing Center continues to help families survive and eventually heal from the pain of losing a loved one to homicide.

Friends from Green Street Meeting formed the EMIR Ministry Support Group in early 2018. We use the Quaker Social Change Ministry model, developed by American Friends Service Committee (especially Green Street member Lucy Duncan). In this model, a group of Quakers partner with a local organization led by people most impacted by a particular issue. The Quaker group follows their lead in deciding what to work on. The model also makes time for spiritual sharing, connection, and reflection, leading to deeper relationship, followership, and grounding of action.

Victoria asked our group at Green Street to organize a drive to provide backpacks with school supplies to the children EMIR serves. When a parent is mourning a murdered family member, whether it be a brother, sister, parent, or child, it can be very hard for them to keep things together for the rest of the family. They may be depressed and overwhelmed, and not as able to track things like school start dates and supply lists. They may lose income or even their job.

Our ministry support group got organized in the spring, asked the Meeting to take us under their care, and then spent the summer campaigning and publicizing the drive. An online buying service was set up so supporters could buy things and have them shipped directly to EMIR. (See this PYM news story from May 2018.)

With a couple of weeks to go before our deadline, we had 51 backpacks, toward our goal of 85. And then we found out there were 103 kids served by EMIR! With God’s abundance, people came through. We had enough to serve every child. We raised about $1,750 in donations, which enabled us to fill gaps in what was bought online or contributed in person.

The week before school started, we gave away 103 backpacks with school supplies in them at the EMIR office. The little children in particular were overjoyed. There were even a few backpacks left over, in case other children have a need.

Victoria said it was a great success and thanked our support group for doing the project and everyone who contributed supplies, funds, or time.

To everyone who purchased supplies online, dropped off supplies directly at the Meetinghouse or at the EMIR office, or made a donation, THANK YOU!

– Chris Mohr, support group convenor

Photo: Victoria Greene, member of Green Street Meeting and founder of EMIR Healing Center, with a box used to collect school supplies. Learn more about EMIR at emirphilly.org.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Friends support arrestees at Demand the Ban action outside Senator Toomey’s office in Philadelphia

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On May 16, 2018, Fran Sheldon (Providence Meeting) and Paul Sheldon (Lansdowne Meeting) participated in a Demand the Ban action in Philadelphia to demand that Senator Toomey co-sponsor Senate Bill 2095 that bans the sale of assault weapons. [Read more…] about Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Friends support arrestees at Demand the Ban action outside Senator Toomey’s office in Philadelphia