Feminism

Deborah Silverstein is a gem and a beacon. She started out musically in the heady early days of women's music, in the 1970s, as part of the Red Basement Singers, and the New Harmony Sisterhood Band.

The Thread Collectors. is a co-authored book, all the more compelling because of the family connections of the authors to the events of this story, set during the Civil War, much of it in Louisiana, and centering around two couples, one couple enslaved, and the other couple White & Jewish. Shaunna J.

In These Walls Between Us – A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class Wendy Sanford helps us all travel with her a path away from white supremacy, white privilege, and micro-aggressions, to true interracial friendship, by witnessing Wendy's journey of growth & self-examination.

Kristin Lems is insightful, determined, compassionate, and talented, and sees our world with eyes honed by the experience of living in Iran, Algeria, & Mongolia, the last 2 as a Fulbright scholar. She's founder of the National Women’s Music Festival in Champaign-Urbana (this year in Middleton, WI), and got Dr Demento's attention with her music, including the very clever Mammary Glands. Kristin is a professor of ESL/Bilingual Education at National Louis University with their flagship campus in Chicago.

Betsy Raasch-Gilman has a lifetime of experience as an activist, feminist, anarchist, Quaker, and change-maker, so she has seen the ups-and-downs of organizing and burn-out. Hearing of the exhaustion of activists in the current political turmoil, she gathered her resources and shared a presentation on Reasons for Hope.

Susan Urban is half of February Sky, along with Phil Cooper, a duo originally from the Chicago area now well-installed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They play a wide range of traditional, modern, and original folk and Celtic tunes, on guitars, banjos, citterns, dulcimers, and other instruments. Susan's songs are full of reality-based fictional story-telling, conveying important meaning and values at the heart of our lives.

Launa Schweizer is lead voice & writer for New Yeller, based in Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY, dazzling musically through indie pop, prog rock, folk-rock, bluesy and jamband sounds. Previously with Bliss Point, Launa's gift with words & people is exercised in her day-job teaching English/humanities to middle schoolers at Brooklyn Heights Montessori School. Find New Yeller on Bandcamp, Reverbnation, Facebook, CDBaby, and more. Contact Bill Lienhard.

A different type of Spirit In Action show, where we do our learning about dead-end and promising directions for men's growth in a kind of musical called Ebenezer's Make Over. Peter Alsop master-minded the project and contributed a lot of the songs, along with many of his friends in the feminist men's and women's movements. Whole lot of eye-opening in a reconceptualization of Ebenezer Scrooge facing dysfunctional manhood presented by the 3 ghosts.

Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ helped to found the study of women & religion, starting in Yale University.

For decades there has been a political war about abortion where the only acceptable answers were pro-choice or pro-life. Aspen Baker, founder of Exhale & author of Pro-Voice: How to Keep Listening When The World Wants a Fight, has been advocating for empathic listening to women who've had abortions as a new path to peace in the abortion wars.