This March Putney Friends Meeting celebrated the retirement of our mortgage for the new Meeting House addition and renovations. Below is a slide show by Roger Vincent Jasaitis showing the love and attention that went into building our new Meeting House.



Putney Friends Meeting is a member of Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting. Our meeting has gone on record that it supports the overall work of FUM internationally, but opposes FUM’s personnel policy that discriminates against gay men and lesbians, including married ones. Below is a recent personal letter to FUM leaders from a member of Putney Friends Meeting who participated in this Fall’s international 40 Days of Prayer sponsored by FUM. It raises important issues about both faithfulness and justice.

Dear Colin Saxton, Friends United Meeting Staff and General Board,

Thank for creating a global prayer effort through the 40 Days of Prayer this fall. More than a dozen of us participated from Putney Meeting in Vermont. I heard comments that for many of us it opened our eyes to the important work FUM does with women and children. Others were grateful for the daily practice of prayer that they have continued in their own way. I noticed differences as a Quaker from Putney Vermont, an unprogrammed meeting, in our language and concepts regarding our faith and practices in the world. The themes of “stepping into deeper spiritual waters,” “radical inclusion,” and “healing fractured relationships,” constantly lead me to our testimony of equality.

I find the FUM personnel policy as it defines marriage to be incongruent with the Quaker testimony of equality. In the reader you point out that Jesus uses the words, ”follow me.” We are reminded that Jesus was a,” fisher of people.” We read about “abiding “ in Christ. One writer shares how, “other people carry within them the breath of God.” I believe that the FUM personnel policy denies a certain class of Friends to follow, join, and abide even though they too “carry within them the breath of God.” The personnel policy hurts Friends. The policy points Friends in a different direction. If one is called to follow and abide it is unacceptable for Quakers to reject another Friend’s calling.

The personnel policy is causing suffering. The children you teach do not all identify with the heterosexual model you share in the Belize school. Equality does not mean a select few are acceptable in God’s sight. One of the highest suicide and homeless rates is among gay and lesbian youth. Throughout my hours of prayer, I have felt confusion and deep grief. I am not patient with a policy that causes suffering. Please write an inclusive policy this year. Please do not use slavery as an example. Who today would agree to taking 100 yrs. to abolish slavery?

My suggestion for your strategic priorities around leadership development is that you broaden your acceptance of all who feel called to serve. Go through the routine discernment of course. Seize the opportunity for ministry. Remember, Jesus was a “fisher of people.” There were no exceptions.

In regard to FUM’s Global Partnership; I ask you to consider creating a safe haven, a place of refuge for the very people the personnel policy has hurt. I imagine that our gay and lesbian Friends feel unwanted and unsafe among many people and places in the world. Do we dare to embrace the outcasts like Jesus did? Do we have the “faith, courage and compassion” frequently written about in the reader to stop our part of oppression? Do we Friends in Putney Vermont, Indiana, Kenya, Belize, Ramallah have the courage to open our hearts and minds to the “others who carry within them the breath of God?”

Day 39 reminds the reader that, “ you are FUM.” Therefore, as one who is FUM, I urge heartfelt equality among all Friends, in all places, at all times to do what God is calling us to do in all ways now, before more Friends suffer.

Please choose love.

How can I help?

Holding us all in the light,

Frances E. Herbert-Poma

Here is a letter to the editor that I just submitted to the Keene Sentinel. It counters a claim made by another letter writer that Ayn Rand is a strong defender of “traditional Christian values.” Given that Ayn Rand has become a major intellectual influence within the US Tea Party movement and the favorite philosopher of a recent US vice-presidential candidate, I thought it was particularly important to challenge the inaccurate notion that Rand’s philosophy is consistent with the ministry of Jesus and the values of those who are faithful to his gospel of peacemaking, compassion, and justice.

Ayn Rand and Christianity

To the Sentinel:

Whatever else one can say about Roger Brooks’s letter to the editor on Sunday, January 6, 2013, he is certainly wrong in his claim that Ayn Rand is a defender of “traditional Christian values.” She was, in fact, a militant atheist who said belief in the faith and practice of Jesus was evidence of “a psychological weakness.” Elsewhere she called his altruistic teachings “monstrous.”

Mike Wallace once interviewed Ms. Rand about her view that selfishness is the most important virtue. Their exchange is revealing. Wallace said, “You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?” Rand simply replied, “Yes.”

Later Wallace said, “You say you don’t like the kind of altruism by which we live.” Rand replied, “‘Don’t like’ is too weak a word, I consider it evil.”

In her private journals, Rand also praised William Hickman, a convicted murderer who raped and dismembered a 12-year old girl. Why? Because of his exemplary selfishness and his ability to have “no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred.” Rand’s philosophy is the philosophy of an oppressor and a sociopath.

I am sad for Roger Brooks that he views Ayn Rand as a moral philosopher that Americans should take to heart, especially those of us who are trying to be faithful friends and followers of Jesus. Unlike Rand, and perhaps Mr. Brooks, I don’t think Jesus’ prophetic call for us to embody an ethic of compassion, sharing, simple living, and social justice is evil or monstrous. I think it is the way of personal and national salvation.

Steve Chase
380 Water Street
Keene

Below is the announcement of the upcoming Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting scheduled for February 3. The program is to be about the growth dilemma and an ecologically integrated economy. Ed Dreby and Margaret Mansfield will be leading the discussion.

Bill Upholt

Hartford Monthly Meeting is happy to be hosting
Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting

First Day, February 3rd, 2013

The program for the day will be presented by Ed Dreby and Margaret Mansfield and is entitled,

“It’s the Economy Friends, Toward a Quaker Witness”

We’ll begin by sharing initial impressions of a short video featuring Charles Eisenstein. He views our current economic system as the product of a culture of separation run amok. We’ll then consider together the basic thesis of two new Quaker Institute pamphlets about the growth dilemma and the concept of an ecologically integrated economy, which is akin to what Eisenstein calls “sacred economics.” How might a witness on ecology and the economy become a distinctive Quaker contribution to what Thomas Berry called “the great work” of our time?

Ed Dreby and his wife Margaret Mansfield are both former social studies teachers in Quaker schools and have worked together for many years as authors, editors, and workshop facilitators on Friends testimonies, and economics from an ecological perspective. They are members of Mount Holly, New Jersey Monthly Meeting, and are also active with Friends Committee on National Legislation. Ed is also a leader of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Growth Dilemma Project, and has collaborated with Quaker Institute for the Future on several publications.

Schedule for the Day

10:00 am Meeting for Worship with Hartford Friends

11:00 am Introductions and Announcements

11:15 am Refreshments

11:30 am Program

1:00 pm Luncheon

2:00 pm Quarterly Meeting for business

Hartford Friends Meetinghouse is located at 144 South Quaker Lane, West Hartford, CT 06119. We have a lift for mobility impaired persons, who are also invited to park in the meeting driveway.

For directions, see our website: www.hartfordquakers.org

If you need childcare, or you have food allergies or need other special assistance, please contact Chris Robinson: kranknsweet@sbcglobal.net or 860-675-5670.

I stumbled on to this poem by Howard Thurman on Christmas eve. Thurman was a mystical, prophetic preacher active in the civil rights movement who studied with Rufus Jones and joined the Wider Quaker Fellowship in the 1960s. I found this Christmas poem of his in the book Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights and thought it worth sharing. Many of his books have been published by Friends United Press.

The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Click here for a 28 minute audio of AFSC’s Friends Liaison Lucy Duncan explaining some of the opportunities for local Quaker faith-based activism in cooperation with the American Friends Service Committee.

On October 18, 2012 Lucy Duncan, AFSC’s Friends Liaison, and Madeline Schaefer, Friends Relations Fellow, discussed a new and developing program at AFSC—the Quaker Meeting/Church Liaison Program.

The liaison program supports Quaker congregations’ work for peace and justice, while at the same time working to broaden the impact of AFSC’s programs.

On this call, Lucy and Madeline discussed how the program was developed, the components of the program, and how your meeting/church can get involved.

Dear Members, Attenders, and Supporters of Putney Friends Meeting,

I’m thrilled to invite you all to a very low-cost nonviolent direct action training workshop this Saturday, on December 1, from 9 am to 5 pm in the main Community Room at Antioch University New England, 40 Avon Street, Keene, NH. If you are interested, please send an RSVP email to me in the next few days, bring a bag lunch for yourself on Saturday, and, if at all possible, be prepared to make a $5 donation when you arrive in order to cover training materials and the travel expense of our two trainers. However, please know that no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

The two trainers leading this Saturday’s workshop are experienced members of the nonviolent action training committee of the SAGE Alliance, the year-old campaign of concerned citizens from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts working to support the State of Vermont in its efforts to decommission the aging and leaking Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor as soon as possible. The SAGE Alliance has recently focused on educational events and also trained people to participate at the two recent public hearings of Vermont’s Public Service Board.

But more citizen action is needed between now and next Fall when the Public Service Board will likely make its final decision about whether Vermont Yankee’s owners will receive a “Certificate of Public Good” to keep operating the reactor for another 20 years, or whether the corporation will have to shut the reactor down as planned and clean up the hazardous site in Vernon, Vermont, as long advocated by Vermont’s Senator, Governor, Attorney General, State Senate, Department of Public Service, and the many citizen’s groups in the tri-state area that make up the SAGE Alliance campaign.

Between now and the PSB’s decision in the Fall, the SAGE Alliance wants to train as many area people as possible to engage in creative, disciplined, and effective nonviolent public demonstrations–including well-organized acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Many of us already have some experience with this as sixty New England Quakers held a meeting for worship at the gates of the reactor on September 23 and ten people at the action committed civil disobedience, including four people from Putney Friends Meeting. The goal in all this work is to keep this important regional issue in the public eye and influence the decisions of both the Louisiana-based Entergy Corporation, which owns Vermont Yankee, and the three-member Public Service Board, which currently has the legal power to close Vermont Yankee if it determines that Entergy does not deserve a Certificate of Public Good.

Have you ever wanted to know more about how to effectively participate in a nonviolent citizen action campaign and deepen your skills to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience actions either as a participant or as a support person? Are you concerned about the proposed 20-year extension of Vermont Yankee’s operation beyond its original expiration date of March 21, 2012? Have you wanted to do more to act in unity with Putney Friends Meeting’s minute on supporting the citizens movement to close Vermont Yankee? If any of these three things are true for you, I would love to have you join us this Saturday, from 9 to 5, in Antioch University New England’s Community Room for this important civic engagement skill-building workshop.

This Saturday’s nonviolent direct action skills training workshop is co-sponsored by Nuke Free Antioch, Nuke Free Monadnock, and the Environmental Studies master’s concentration that I direct at Antioch in Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability. The training workshop is open to the public, as well as any interested Antioch students, faculty, staff, and alumni, so please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone in the area that you think might be interested.

Also, please let me know if you have any further questions about this nonviolent direct action training opportunity, and please RSVP to me ASAP if you would like to reserve a slot at this Saturday’s training workshop.

All my best,

Steve Chase
Director of the Master’s Program Concentration in
Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability
Department of Environmental Studies
Antioch University New England
40 Avon Street, Keene, NH 03431
schase@antioch.edu; 603-283-2336 (office); 603-357-0718 (fax)

Here are some upcoming events sponsored by Putney Friends Meeting:

Nov. 24: 4:30 – 6:00 40 Day of Prayer Discernment Discussion, followed by a potluck

Nov. 25: Worship 8:30 & 10:30
9:30 Adult Study:
12:15 Healing Circle

Dec. 2: Worship 8:30 & 10:30
9:30 Steve Chase talking about his book: Letters to a Fellow Seeker
10:30 First Day School

Dec. 6: 7 pm. “Tipping Point –Age of the Oil Sands” Movie and discussion sponsored by Putney Friends Social Justice & Peace Committee. Free Will offering to cover expenses.

Dec. 8: Worship 8:30 & 10:30
9:30 – Adult Study

Dec. 12: PFM provides supper for the Overflow Shelter at the Baptist Church in Brattleboro – contact Sora Friedman to help.

Dec. 13: 7 pm “ Silent Voices” a movie regarding migrant workers. At the Brooks Memorial Library.

Dec. 15 10:30: Gingerbread house making at the Meetinghouse

Dec. 16: Worship 8:30 & 10:30
First Day School 10:30
Cookie Exchange at 11:30
Business Meeting at 12:15

On Thursday evening, December 6, at 7pm, Putney Friends Meeting’s Social Justice and Peace Committee will be sponsoring a showing of Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands, an hour and a half visual tour de force, taking viewers inside the David and Goliath struggle playing out within one of the most compelling environmental issues of our time.

In an oil-scarce world, we know there are sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of energy. What no one expected was that a tiny Native community downriver from Canada’s oil sands would reach out to the world, and be heard.

Directed by Edmonton filmmakers Tom Radford and Niobe Thompson of Clearwater Media, and hosted by Dr. David Suzuki, this special presentation of The Nature of Things goes behind the headlines to reveal how a groundbreaking new research project triggered a tipping point for the Alberta oil sands.

For years, residents of the northern Alberta community of Fort Chipewyan, down the Athabasca River from the oil sands, have been plagued by rare forms of cancer. They were concerned that toxins from oil sands production might be to blame. Industry and government, meanwhile, claimed production in the oil sands contributed zero pollution to the Athabasca River.

But in 2010, new and independent research measured pollution in waters flowing through the oil sands and discovered higher-than-expected levels of toxins, including arsenic, lead and mercury, coming from industrial plants. Leading the research was renowned freshwater scientist Dr. David Schindler. At the same time, the leaders of tiny Fort Chipewyan took their battle to the boardrooms of global oil companies, demanding change.

Leading the campaign was Dene Elder Francois Paulette, whose battles with Ottawa a generation ago launched the era of modern land claims. From New York, to Copenhagen, to Oslo, to the oil sands themselves, our camera followed Paulette on his relentless search for allies. When he finally enlisted the support of Avatar director James Cameron, Paulette created a storm of controversy for the Alberta’s oil sands industry.

By the end of 2010, Schindler’s alarming discovery of toxic pollution and the media attention Cameron’s visit had raised was putting federal and provincial environmental policy under serious pressure. Separate reports by Canada’s Auditor General, the Royal Society of Canada, and a panel of experts appointed by then Environment Minister Jim Prentice revealed a decade of incompetent pollution monitoring, paid for by industry, in Alberta’s oil sands.

The documentary’s climax shows how Professor Schindler’s research findings, and the determination of Fort Chipewyan residents, led to change. In December 2010, the special scientific review by the high-level federal panel declared environmental monitoring standards in the oil sands seriously flawed. In a dramatic reversal of their previous position, both the Federal and Alberta governments announced steps to improve their pollution monitoring. The age of innocence for the oil sands is over.

Tipping Point was directed by Niobe Thompson and Tom Radford for Clearwater Media in association with CBC-TV. A theatrical version of the documentary, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, is now playing in film festivals around the world.

On the evening of Wednesday, November 7, over 250 members of the public from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts packed the elementary school gym in Vernon, Vermont, for the first of two public hearings held by Vermont’s three-member Public Service Board. The topic at hand was whether the Public Service Board should grant the Entergy Corporation a “Certificate of Public Good” that would legally authorize the company to run the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor in Vernon for twenty more years past the original 40-year license period, which ended on March 21, 2012. Given Putney Friends Meeting’s continuing witness against the ongoing operation of this aging reactor, I went to see if I could speak at the hearing.

What happened next is in some dispute. According to the Brattleboro Reformer, “Supporters of the continued operation of Vermont Yankee outnumbered opponents by a margin of three-to-one at Wednesday night’s Public Service Board hearing in Vernon.” This same story was reprinted in the Rutland Herald, picked by the Associated Press, and quoted on NHPR later Thursday night. Yet, this was not my experience.

The actual tally of speakers was that 39 members of the public, most of them employees at Vermont Yankee, spoke in favor of granting the 40-year old reactor a twenty-year extension. In opposition, 34 members of the public, none of whom worked for the company, spoke against granting the extension on the reactor’s operational life. This hardly seems like a three-to-one ratio to me. Five other people also signed up to give testimony at the hearing, but were not able to speak because time ran out. Thankfully, these people will have another chance to be heard-—as will other concerned citizens, including interested members of our Meeting–at the Public Service Board’s second public hearing on November 19th. (For more information, go to the Vermont Public Service Board’s website at
http://psb.vermont.gov/calendar/7862/public2
.)

As it was, I was one of the 73 citizens who got to speak at the hearing. While I spoke in opposition to the continued operation of the reactor, I was also deeply moved by the testimony offered by many of the plant’s workers and their family members. These are good, dedicated, and hardworking people who understandably want to protect their jobs. I was particularly impressed with one young man, a Keene High student whose dad works at the reactor. This teenager was thoughtful, prepared, and eloquent. I laughed when his mom walked up to the microphone next to give her testimony and started by saying, “That’s my boy.” She had every right to be proud of her son, who stood up for his dad’s job and their family’s livelihood in clear, personal, and moving terms. The loss of over 600 jobs, especially in this economy, has to be factored into the Public Service Board’s decision.

During my two minutes at the podium, I also acknowledged that NASA climate scientist James Hansen might well be right that we will need some modern, fourth generation nuclear energy plants to help transition us away from our dangerous, fossil fuel economy in the next decade or two. Yet, I pointed out that this does not mean that it makes good public policy sense to keep an aging, leaking, and frequently malfunctioning nuclear reactor operating for the next twenty years. Even the pro-industry Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits that Vermont Yankee has the “least robust” design in the entire fleet of US nuclear reactors. It has a second generation design at best.

An even bigger problem, and one not addressed by any of the VY supporters at the hearing, is that the Louisiana-based Entergy Corporation has simply not established itself as a good corporate neighbor that deserves the public trust, reliably serves the public interest, or respects the people and government of Vermont. The ten years that Entergy has owned the Vermont Yankee reactor have been ten years of corporate lies, misinformation, cover-ups, deferred maintenance, broken agreements, underpaid taxes, state law violations, and expensive lawsuits that harass the state of Vermont for trying to represent its people and decide Vermont’s energy future democratically.

It is for this reason that giving the Entergy Corporation a Certificate of Public Good is opposed by Vermont’s Governor, its Attorney General, its Department of Public Service, and its State Senate, which expressed its opinion in a 26 to 4 vote as far back as 2010. Even the Republican candidate for Governor who just lost his election bid against Peter Shumlin—and who supports nuclear power in principle—joined the twenty-five other Vermont Senators in 2010 to oppose giving Entergy a Certificate of Public Good. As Randy Brock put it before the vote, “The dissembling, the prevarication, the lack of candor have been striking, and there’s not enough time to be able to correct that through management changes or through the kinds of things we had hoped with time, we could resolve.”

I couldn’t have said it any better. Entergy is not a reliable corporation that deserves a Certificate of Public Good. For more information on how to demonstrate against the continued operation of VY in Montpelior on November 17 or offer short testimony at the next interactive TV public hearing at many towns around Vermont on November 19, please contact me at schase@antioch.edu.

Steve Chase is a member of Putney Friends Meeting and a professor of environmental studies at Antioch University New England in Keene, New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife Katy.