Faith in Place!

For the last several months I have been doing more of two things that make me feel stronger and happier. I’m eating more crisp fresh organic veggies and I’m tooling around the city on my bicycle whenever errands and meetings allow it. Today, I packed a fresh lunch and rode a couple of miles, literally right down my street, to have lunch with Clare Butterfield and talk about our work.

Clare is connecting food (growing and buying) with household energy consumption (electricity and oil), and faith practice (churches and congregations). She shared with me what she’s calling our “duty of inquiry” — our responsibility to look into and understand where our food and energy come from, and where our habits and rituals are leading us. I love Clare’s work for it’s clarity and caring and groundedness — and the way she lets those dimensions inform each other. I also appreciate that her approach does much to inform my own next steps. On top of it all, she handed me a check for The Giving Conference and I’m thrilled that she will be with us for that in July.

Also, save September 10th for the Faith and Food Conference and visit FaithInPlace for details, as they become available. We came up with some very interesting variations on the OpenSpaceTech approach to support broad and deep participant engagement to leverage the wisdom of several major speakers — and set up lots of ongoing congregational conversation. More on all of that as the designs emerge.