An evening offering hope and healing with Maxine Hanks, Ronda Callister, Natasha Helfer Parker, Chelsea Shields Strayer, and Dan Wotherspoon as moderator
It’s been a rough few weeks with Kate Kelly of Ordain Women being excommunicated and John Dehlin’s status up in the air. Many of us have been pained and dismayed. What will the future hold for us and our church that we yearn to become more transparent, inclusive, and equal in its treatment of all? Despite current events, we have hope. Come join us for some perspective and processing in the company of good faithful souls and sound minds.
Brinn Bagley of Matteo will set our spirits in a good place with music. A prayer will be offered and then we’ll take about a half an hour for those who wish to share BRIEFLY how they’ve felt about these recent events. Then each panelist will take 10 minutes or so to express their thoughts with Dan Wotherspoon facilitating. This will be followed with a Q&A from the audience. Paper and pens will be passed around for questions to be submitted as well as an open forum for questions from the audience.
Time:
Tuesday, July 1, 2014, 7:00 pm
We encourage you to come a 15 minutes early. The evening will be more productive and helpful with minimal interruptions.
Location:
(NOTICE DIFFERENT ADDRESS)
Home of Ed and Kristen Iversen
3582 Oak Rim Way Salt Lake City, UT 84109
We encourage all who can walk a block to leave their cars in the “park & ride” lot nearby. See Google map pict below. And car pool if you can. It’s good for God’s green earth.
BYOW&C: Bring your own water and chair. Since this gathering has been thrown together quickly we want to keep it simple. We’ll have some chairs but we expect a boatload of people so we want to be prepared. No Lazy-Boy’s though, the smaller the chair the more that can fit in.
Maxine Hanks
One of the “September Six” who were excommunicated in 1993, she returned to LDS Church membership in 2012. In those years of “non-membership” Maxine studied Christian liturgy and clergy formation, also serving in interfaith ministry and chaplaincy.
Maxine lectures and writes on Mormon studies and women’s studies in religion. Her work focuses on gender in Mormonism and in Christianity, and explores other themes in Mormon studies and religious studies. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and a research fellow with the Utah Humanities Council. She has lectured at the University of Utah, and guest lectured at Utah Valley U., Salt Lake Community College, Weber State U., Harvard Divinity School, and Claremont Grad. U. Her first book, Women and Authority, excavated Mormon feminist history, theology, discourse, and women’s authority. Subsequent books include Mormon Faith in America, and Getting Together With Yesterday. Her essays appear in anthologies such as Religion in America (2005), Secrets of Mary Magdalene (2006), and Latter-day Dissent (2011), among others.
In 2012 she shared her journey at Sunstone
Ronda Callister
Ronda Callister studies and publishes in top academic journals on conflict and anger expressions in organizations, dispute resolution in other cultures, and the impact of gender on careers. Ronda led a major campus change effort as the Principal Investigator on a $3 million NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant. She leads workshops and teaches courses on negotiation and third party dispute resolution.
Professor Callister is the recipient of multiple awards for her research and teaching. She has held the Vernon Maughan Buehler and Maree C. Buehler Endowed Professorship since 2006. In 2009 she was selected as the Utah State University Women and Gender Research Institute’s Distinguished Professor in 2009. She was selected as the College of Business Researcher of the Year in 2007 and the College of Business Teacher of the Year in 2001. In 2012 Ronda presented a TED talk about reducing the barriers to the contributions of women.
Ronda is active in several professional organizations and has held administrative positions within the Academy of Management in the Conflict Management Division and in the International Association of Conflict Management. She previously served on the editorial board of Academy of Management Learning and Education and Negotiation and Conflict Management Research and as an ad hoc reviewer for the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Organizational Behavior and a number of others.
Ronda has a Ph. D., in Management from the University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996 Emphasis: Social Psychology and Research Methods, MBA, University of Utah, 1980. BS, Business Management, Brigham Young University, 1977
Natasha Helfer Parker
Natasha has been married for 16 years and has four children. She received her undergraduate at BYU in psychology and her masters in Marriage & Family Therapy from Friends University in Wichita, Kansas where she currently has a private practice working with couples, individuals and families. Natasha specializes in sex therapy and faith transitions within a systems framework.
Currently an active member of the church, Natasha considers herself comfortable in both traditional and nontraditional settings within LDS practice and membership.
Natasha podcasts through Mormon Mental Health, part of the Open Stories Foundation that John Dehlin founded. She has been a regular guest on Dan Wotherspoon’s Mormon Matters podcasts and often posts on Patheos. Natasha’s hope is to help members of the LDS church develop healthy relationships with their spirituality, their religious culture, their interpersonal relationships and their individual selves. As in most religious communities, there can be extreme pain and anxiety when things don’t go as traditionally planned – specifically when members find themselves outside of orthodox belief or practice.
On June 16 she posted this statement on The Mormon Therapist within Patheos: Room For All In This Church
Chelsea Shields Strayer
Chelsea is a biological and cultural anthropologist who specializes in research on the health effects of social belonging, specifically the beneficial and adverse consequences of religion and ritual. She just completed her dissertation on The Social Life of Placebos based on over a decade of fieldwork in the Asante region of Ghana, West Africa
Chelsea is the mother of an adorable 4 year old daughter and currently working as an adjunct professor, freelance consultant and TED fellow. Her research and personal religious beliefs recently collided in a feature on the TED blog about “Why Belonging Matters.”
The impact of religious social belonging is not a foreign concept to Chelsea. She comes from a long line of pioneer ancestors and religious educators and was raised in a very traditional LDS home where her father was a CES Institute Director and her mother a SAHM of 8 children.
Chelsea has been grappling with intellectual, historical and gender issues in the church for about fifteen years and she chronicled some of those experiences as the blogger Whoa-man at Exponent, in podcasts on ritual and temples, motherhood, LDS salvation theology, the problem of evil, effecting change, and spiritual adventures at Mormon Matters, Why I Stay at Mormon Stories, and monthly discussions at The Mormon Women’s Round table at Patheos and in interviews at Feminist Mormon Housewives and The Mormon Women Project. Chelsea is a prominent feminist activist for religious gender equality. She is president of Mormons for ERA, and on the executive board for Ordain Women and LDS WAVE: Women Advocating for Voice and Equality, executive producer of an upcoming film on Mormon feminism and global religious inequality and contributes regularly to blogs, conferences, articles and podcasts. Her biggest contribution to Mormon feminism so far might be explicating some of the very distinct and clear gender inequalities that currently exist in the church in her two widely shared articles and lists: “I Feel Unequal When” from Ask a Feminist on LDS WAVE and “Mormon Male Privilege and How to Make Apparent Gender Disparity in the Church” from the Exponent blog.
Dan Wotherspoon
Dan Wotherspoon is a free-lance writer, editor, and podcaster—now in his fourth year of hosting the popular MormonMatters podcast. From 2001 to 2008, he served as editor of Sunstone magazine and director of the Sunstone Education Foundation. Since its inception, he has also been an active participant in the work and development of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, currently serving as a secretary on its executive committee. In 2013, Dan edited and wrote the introduction to The Challenge of Honesty: Essays for Latter-Day Saints by Frances Lee Menlove. He is currently at work with co-author Boyd Jay Petersen on a biography of prominent Mormon teacher, writer, and organizer Eugene England.
He has a Ph.D. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, where he wrote his dissertation on theological resources within Mormonism for affirming a robust environmental sensibility. He also has an M.A. in religious studies from Arizona State University, where he focused on world religions and ritual studies, ultimately writing his thesis on theories of ritual empowerment. He also has a B.A. in philosophy with a minor in classical civilizations from Brigham Young University.
He has been married to Lorri Hubbard Wotherspoon for 28 years, and they have two grown children. They live in Bountiful, Utah.
