Please be advised:
This event has been canceled

Tuesday, May 21  |  9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Wednesday, May 22  |  9:00 am – 3:00 pm
Instructor: Donna Schaper

Sustaining creation often causes us to tremble.  We don’t know where to start or how to hope that we might start.  We know changing lightbulbs is nearly trivial compared to all that must be done to avoid more catastrophes, like the many we experienced in the last decade already.  Irma and Sandy come to mind as examples.

In this course we will change the light in our heads and hearts and find a place to start.  Hope will be both the driver and the destination of this work.  We will start where we are and end with some directed hope about where we want to be.  You will leave with a theology of care for the environment and a practical agenda, custom designed for you and your circle of influence.

Donna Schaper is Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church since 2006.  She is active in th New York City Sanctuary Movement, Bricks and Mortals (sacred sites and real estate) and with a community ministry program at Judson which trains seminarians in how to do public ministry from a parish base.

Deeply involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, she entered the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1969, earning a Master’s Degree in 1971. She was one of the first women ministers in the United Church of Christ in the early 1970s, and was a key figure in the feminist movement within the Church and within campus ministry during the 1970s, when she was first Assistant Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Tucson, AZ, and then Associate Pastor of Tabernacle Church in Philadelphia (also a chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania). She was a key player in Campus Ministry Women, as well as women’s groups within the United Church of Christ.  She helped bring the Open and Affirming Movement to the United Church of Christ and the “God is Still Speaking” Movement as well.

For 25 years in ministry she has been one of the best known feminist civil rights and peace advocates in the church. She is one of the most sought-after preachers and speakers in the United Church of Christ. Donna is also one of the most widely published women ministers in the country, especially within the mainline church. Since the late 1980s, she has had 35 books published on everything from becoming 40, to understanding Sabbath, to spiritual rock gardening, to the differences between male and female ministerial styles, to devotional guides to different Christian seasons (Advent, Lenten, and the like), and most recently, from Nation Books, GRASSROOTS GARDENING: RITUALS TO SUSTAIN ACTIVISTS.   She writes weekly for the Poughkeepsie Journal (City Mouse, Country Mouse) and for the National Catholic Reporter.