Simplicity

Jennifer Kavanagh was caught up by a life-transforming Spirit, right at an age where many other people are just shifting into a lower gear, ready to coast the last stretch. After years of the normal study-family-professional life path, she was found by faith, which has included diverse tasks, like running a center for the poor and homeless, setting up micro-credit funding programs, and educating folks about simplicity & spiritual activism.

Tara Button is the founder of BuyMeOnce.com which helps connect people to durable, dependable, well-designed & built products, to live sustainably. Her new book is A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life, and it provides a wealth of info & exercises to help people find the optimal material life for themselves.

Past/current religious/spiritual influences:
Catholic, Sunday Assembly

In the land of "he who dies with the most toys wins" and where we're taught that more-and-more possessions will make us happy, it's hardly a surprise that hoarding is of epidemic proportions.

Hayley Hathaway is passionate about the relationships between ecology, economy, and faith. She is publications director for Quaker Earthcare Witness and lives as part of the South of Monadnock Community, after having spent 6 years with Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City.

Iris Graville is an author, book artist, and a former nurse. Her memoir, Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman's Search for Balance shares her quest for meaningful & life-balancing work. The journey took Iris & her family far off the grid, radically exploring simplified living, freeing her to find her own answers to the big questions, less controlled by society's prompting.

Pamela Haines calls us to a right relationship with finance. With a BA in Social Ecology, MA in Labor & Women's History, and as a self-taught economist, she looks to the future & seeks to foster integrity. She was lead author of Toward a Right Relationship with Finance.

Robert Wolf, author of Building the Agricultural City: A Handbook for Rural Renewal advocates a move away from globalization and toward regionalism. Robert is co-host today, completely in charge of the 2nd half of this program. Robert is also author of American Mosaic, and has a vision of government small enough to be responsive, but large enough to accommodate the diverse needs of a community.

What led Prairie Cutting (now Sister Confianza del Señor) & Beth Blodgett (now Sister Alegria del Señor) to leave the USA & create the Methodist-Quaker Amigas del Señor Monastery in Honduras? One key motivation was a calling to lead a life of poverty, explained in an article in Western Friend called Overcoming Need.

While there are many sources of info on urgent environmental threats and of technological methods of dealing with those threats, few books tackle the major underlying question of how can we make a sustainable life actually be sustainable for the individual. In A Sustainable Life, Douglas Gwyn examines the essential inner work and the myriad complexities of initiating and supporting the choices of living sustainably, mostly using Quaker experience & insights as guideposts to the process.

How much is enough - and how much is too much?

May we look upon our treasures and the furniture of our houses and the garments in which we array ourselves and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions, or not. 18th Century Quaker John Woolman

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. - Matthew 19:24

And one more quote: More is better!!! - Spoken daily by the Great American Dream