Welcome to THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE, beginning Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and culminating with Valentine’s Day! THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE is a collective visioning process about making sense of the present moment, and what we are called to do. We aim to accomplish this through self-reflection, active listening, sharing personal and community stories, and celebrating our lives and our heroes for their courageous love.
THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE offers daily, direct actions for love, and the calendar is a template to guide you through a meaningful THIRTY DAYS. But your participation is envisioned as a process, not an event.
While there is great power in collective action, the beauty of Standing on the Side of Love is its “open source” spirit, so bring your own ideas, actions, and traditions with you for this journey.
(via National Standing on the Side of Love Month: The Story of Us, The Story of Now « Standing On The Side Of Love)
Stand for the “Beloved Community.”
Speaking of love, I love being a UU.
Along with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (the first woman president in Africa), and journalist Tawakkul Karman, she is this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I met her in a luncheon reception just before her address which you can see in this link.
Leymah Roberta Gbowee UMass Lowell Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies “Days Without Violence” featured speaker
Gbowee helped bring an end to Liberia’s bloody civil war. I wrote about her last year.
Dr. King, whose life was spent preaching unconditional love and nonviolent redemptive good, continues to inspire people the world over who are helping to shape his vision of an “arc of the moral universe” that is long but bends toward justice. Gandhi, King, Mandela—there are precious few whose legacies resonate with those who are risking their lives today, in a nonviolent fashion, to eliminate the evils of racism, poverty, militarism and environmental destruction. King’s tribute to global peacemakers should have reached out to them as the legitimate heirs of the King legacy, not the monied interests who helped pay for the piece of carved granite that bears his image.
Video of Talk by Leymah Gbowee, 2011 UMass Lowell Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies, 4/4/11
2011
Leymah Roberta Gbowee, Peace Activist
UMass Lowell Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies
“Days Without Violence” - Featured Speaker
April 4, 2011
Leymah Roberta Gbowee is an African peace activist who organized a peace movement that helped end the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Gbowee organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, bringing together Christian and Muslim women to pray and sing for peace, and eventually forcing national leaders to create a peace process. Gbowee is now the executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network Africa in Ghana. In 2007, the Women’s Leadership Board at Harvard University’s JFK School of Government honored her with the Blue Ribbon Peace Award, and in 2009, she and the women of Liberia were awarded the Profiles in Courage Award by the Kennedy Library Foundation. She is the central character of the award winning documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.”
http://library.uml.edu/media/campusvoices/gbowee.html
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Speaking on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the very church where Dr. King once pastored, new Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley gave a speech in which he said that those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior are not his “brothers.
