Just as I was in the midst of moving a couple months ago, my dear friend Neylan McBaine invited me to be part of a new group she was helping to form. Neylan runs the fabulous website, The Mormon Women Project plus she heads up the profiles of women at Mormon.org. After helping with a symposium on Mormon Women at BYU a while back, she and some of the other women who'd been invited to be part of a panel there decided to form an ongoing discussion/podcast group to address Mormon womanhood.
The women she was inviting to participate sounded wonderful and I'm always up for a great discussion with intelligent, interesting women. So even though I felt totally overwhelmed at the time, I just had to say yes.
With lots of emailing back and forth, we arrived at this title for our new group: The Round Table: Insight and Inquiry into Mormon Womanhood, decided to present our discussions via monthly podcasts, and came up with this purpose statement: to build unity and honor diversity as we further the vital work of strengthening and celebrating Mormon womanhood.
I love this artwork that one of our group members found to help illustrate what we're doing - celebrating the many different types of women our faith brings together.
We had our "inaugural" meeting last month and recorded several podcasts addressing the purposes of our group and some of the many facets of being a Mormon woman. It was truly a beautiful afternoon as we shared our hopes and challenges and thoughts in a spirit of faith and love.
The podcasts and discussion are being hosted by a wonderful site called Patheos that offers objective information and thought-provoking, respectful discussion on all the major religions of the world. Now that this first set of podcasts is up and running, I thought you might want to check it out. Please let me know what you think! You can post comments on our Patheos page after listening to the podcasts.
http://www.patheos.com/community/theroundtable/
This week we're getting together to talk about church culture vs. church doctrine for our second set of podcasts. Should be really interesting!
2 comments:
Saren - this sounds awesome. I'm so glad they'll have a voice like yours in their midst. Fascinating artwork. Who is the artist?
This is a spectacular idea! Love the purpose statement! Perfect forum for some very remarkable women! Can't wait to hear the discussion this week!
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