The most excellent Peggy Senger Parsons of Oregon’s Freedom Friends Church emailed me today saying she and the equally excellent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a workshop at the Philadelphia area Pendle Hill Retreat Center from 3/27 – 29. These two were crossing theological boundaries and pioneering the Convergent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twitter & Facebook. The workshop is called “Are we still a dangerous people?” and as rocking as that sounds, I’d be willing to listen to these two read the Salem, Oregon phone book for a weekend. If you have a pillow stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for commuters) then you should definitely try to make it (unfortunately I don’t have a lumpy pillowcase and can’t afford to take another three days off).
Peggy wrote that she wants to make herself “available for the Saturday afternoon free time for a conversation with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the party.” That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some childcare schedules, I’ll try to make that. That would be Saturday the 28th from 1:00 – 3:30pm.
Oh how I wish I was not on the opposite side of this vast country.
Oh, but that’s not the attitude, Wess! We need to have lots of cool events all over the place, dozens of cool workshops and gatherings every weekend that we wish we were at.
Hey, we’re going to need to need to have some “freely available time” when we’re at Pendle Hill this November for our New Monastics and Convergent Friends workshop. It seems like there should be some way to piggy-back these pricier events that pay for airplane tickets with free events for those who can’t afford it. We’d have to make sure it didn’t compete with the paying gig, of course, as that wouldn’t be fair and wouldn’t get us invited back. Let’s think about it as the time gets closer.
I love the idea. I’m sure we can think of some stuff.
I saw this listing and I surely wish I could attend. Sadly, the money is not there.
@QuakerDave: come for the 1pm free time. If there’s a lot of great conversation still happening at 3:30 all of us visitors can just reconvene somewhere else nearby. We don’t need Peggy and Marge to be dangerous, grin!
Wow, this sounds really cool, for anyone who’s not a member of Phildelphia Yearly Meeting, which is having their Annual Sessions at Arch Street Meetinghouse duirng the exact same time! http://www.pym.org/annualsessions.
Please check out the program – this is not your grandfather’s Yearly Meeting anymore.