Feb 27: Discussion and LGBT Week in Student Union

So, no one is prepared to carry out a workshop on the meeting of 27th of February. I have another spare one from the Buddhist tradition (but that is only in case no one else wants to share anything from their faith).

As for the Scripture study, I propose to look at the topics that Kevin was thinking about for Abraham's Table. They are:

Love, sexuality, loving relationships

Peace - a moral government - how can religion teach us to improve society?

Pilgrimage - important to most faiths
-travel, life is a spiritual journey, etc

Meditation - value of spiritual exercises

As for me, I would love to talk about meditation (obviously). If people agree on one particular topic before the meeting and can prepare some reading from their Scripture, that would be grnad. If not, we will just talk about one of them on the day.

As some of you might have noticed, there is an Amnesty International exhbition about Sudan set up in the Chaplaincy. There is an opportunity to sign letters as well. Please, do so. Letters and envelopes are provided.

On the 4th of March, Sunday, everyone is invited to Fo Guan Shan Chinese Buddhist Temple in Stretford Road. We are meeting at the steps to the Chaplaincy at 10:30 am. At the Temple, we are looking around, watching the light offering ceremony, enjoying a free lunch, and then games and activties in the afternoon.

We discussed about getting the multifaith/interfaith society recognised by Student Union formally, and Kevin got a list of signatures that Hana and Natalie collected earlier, many thanks to both of them for doing this. So hopefully we should become formal in few weeks time, then we can have access to more publicity hopefully. We have also since collected a few more signatures thanks to our friends at the Bahai soc and the student christian movement, and thanks to Nicholas and Kevin for organising this part.

We then discussed about the interfaith conference (along with Abraham's table) being organised by the chaplaincy, Oxana kindly agreed to MC for the conference, there will be a few student helpers etc. The Abraham's table will be on topic of "Science Vs religion" and we will have people from different religions (preferably people studying a core science degree such as Physics or Chemistry or Biology etc etc) and also an athiest who will give their prespective on the issue.

Finally in view of the LGBT week in the union we discussed about the religions approach to issues concerning homosexuality, a rather controversial topic that one! Many participants stressed on kindness towards all people without discrimination (although some religions are opposed to the practice of homosexuality in itself). Kevin stressed that the gay lifestyle which is considered promiscuous was one reason why gay people had a bad image especially among religious people. Oxana invited us to the religion debate during the LGBT week that was the following day from 1:30-2:30 and myself, Kevin and Oxana attended as part of interfaith society, there too we listened to a very interesting discussion on perspectives on religion and sexuality from many different viewpoints.