monday briefing header
Trace Informal Welcome to Monday Briefing, a weekly digest from ACPE Executive Director Trace Haythorn! 

Each week, you will receive related articles, updates on ACPE transitions, and helpful links to keep you connected, better informed, and well-resourced for the week ahead.
Tulsa. Charlotte. Burlington. 
We live in a time of madness. Maybe we hold one another close, and dare to be agents of transformative justice. 
Regional Meetings Begin: 
I look forward to seeing many of you at the regional meetings that began last week with East Central. While I will enjoy seeing folks and catching up, my primary role will be to facilitate conversations about the revised model for the association and questions about the bylaws . We've asked members of the Organizational Design Work Group to share their thoughts about the new model. First up, our board representative, Amanda Jones.
Congrats to Mt. Sinai:
"Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" ran a segment on the spiritual care offered at Mt. Sinai. In case you missed it, here's the link. Please note that the clip starts at 5:35 in the show.
Some Thoughts from Class: 
As many of you know, I serve as an adjunct professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. This semester, I'm teaching the introductory religious education course. One of our readings this week was from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the most important education texts in the last fifty years. I love Freire's critique of the "banking model" of education, and I've always been drawn to CPE because of the way it takes the learner and the learning so seriously. Context, experience, and emotion of the teachers and students - of all learners - matter according to Freire. As I reread this quote, I thought about not only your work as educators but also the work in which our association is engaged: 

"In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation."
  Freire, 1993

 A reality in process, a transformation: seems to be what we're all about.
A Poem for Reflection: 
Uvavnuk was an early-20th-century Iglulik Inuit shaman. The story goes that she was struck by a small meteor, the experience of which made her clairvoyant and began her life as a shaman. After seeing such a beautiful harvest moon last week, her words came to mind (translation by Stephen Mitchell):
The great sea has set me in motion,
set me adrift,
moving me like a weed in a river.
 
The sky and the strong wind
have moved the spirit inside me
till I am carried away with trembling joy.
 
May we all be carried away with trembling joy by the winds of autumn and the promises of the future.
A Fun Resource/Distraction: 
A couple of folks asked about where/how I learned about Kid President from last week's Monday Briefing. All of his videos and so much more can be found at Soul Pancake, a wonderful whimsical, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes silly collection of videos which was originally curated by Rainn Wilson (from TV's "The Office").
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