Category Archives: Church

February 17, 2015 · 3:58 pm

Giving Voice to Kings: Richard III, and the Bible

The St. Andrew’s Shakespeare group read The Tragedy of King Richard III last Saturday night, with John Watson-Williams and me splitting the title role by acts. Laura Biche was kind enough to host our dinner and reading in Redwood City. The next morning in church, I was the Old Testament Lector at St. Andrew’s in Saratoga, reading the lesson from Second Kings 2:1-12. Even though these two texts are extremely different, I enjoy using my voice to bring a story to life – whether the charmingly evil Richard or the story of a great prophet.

The St. Andrew’s Shakespeare group meets every two months, taking turns hosting. (John and I are hosting Comedy of Errors in April.) Sometimes we become the St. Andrew’s Players to act out a lesson for the church congregation.

Richard III, Act I, scene ii

Richard III vies among Shakespeare’s characters with Iago as being the greatest villain who is most satisfied by his evil deeds. Here is Richard (still the Duke of Gloucester) gloating over his seduction of the Lady Anne Neville:

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill’d her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars
against me,
And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
Ha!
…

2 Kings 2:1-12

Kings presents the biblical view of the history of ancient Israel and Judah after the death of King David, for a period of about 400 years, including cycles of stories about various prophets (c. 960 BCE – c. 560 BCE). Elijah was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of Ahab (9th century BCE). Elisha was a disciple of Elijah and lead the prophets after Elijah was taken up into the whirlwind.

… they both were standing by the Jordan. Then Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up, and struck the water; the water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry ground.

When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.” Elisha said, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” He responded, “You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.” As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and crying out, “Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church Shakespeare group 2014

Mutual Invitation with Positive Review

I was excited to meet Rev. Eric Law (Founder and Executive Director of the Kaleidoscope Institute) today at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real in Salinas, California. Rev. Law is the developer of Mutual Invitation, a popular and effective method for inclusive communication between a variety of people. He was interested to see the “Mutual Invitation with Positive Review” diagram I created for reference by the Everwise Women’s Group this week. So, I am posting it here.

Mutual Invitation was designed for multi-cultural settings where it is important for all voices to be considered. It encourages sharing of power and careful listening to both the reserved and the talkative members of a group. Mutual Invitation works best for groups of 12 to 15 people and only when there is time available to listen to all views.

In this diagram, I combined Rev. Law’s Mutual Invitation method with something I am calling Positive Review. This is a way to consider a proposal (or a job candidate, or idea – something complex) in a balanced way. I did not create either method but have used both, and find that they also work well together. In my earlier blog post Why Ideas are Killed, I quoted Charles Kettering:

Man is so constituted as to see what is wrong with a new thing – not what is right. To verify this, you have but to submit a new idea to a committee. They will obliterate ninety per cent of rightness for the sake of ten per cent of wrongness. The possibilities a new idea opens up are not visualized because not one man in a thousand has imagination.

I find that the Positive Review method keeps a group from savaging something new – because it is easier to be negative. That is, Positive Review allows people time to understand benefits well before turning to disadvantages. Using Mutual Invitation and Positive Review together takes time to process but is a effective combined method of giving a balanced, inclusive, review to a complex subject.

Update: Thanks to Rev. Eric Law for re-publishing this blog entry!

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Filed under Church, News & Reviews

Tagged as Episcopal church, technical women

August 17, 2014 · 9:48 pm

Embrace an Oak

Kristoffer is a 7th grader at St. Andrew’s School (Saratoga, California). He presented his Heritage Oak Initiative today to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Kristoffer collected 1,000 acorns from the immense oak tree that dominates the church-school campus. These acorns were grown into 250 starts that are being sold to collect donations for Embrace.

The award-winning Embrace Warmer is designed for hypothermic infants in developing countries. It costs a fraction of the price of a standard incubator, doesn’t require constant electricity, and is portable, hygienic, and reusable.

Embrace now works in 11 countries and has helped over 87,000 low birth weight and premature infants. Kristoffer wrote on the Heritage Oak Initative website:

The Heritage Oak Initiative was founded with two objectives: First and primarily, I wanted to help people who are less fortunate than me, and second, I wanted to give the church and school community a living memory of Saint Andrew’s. The Oak provided a perfect opportunity to do both through its annual production of acorns, which means that the program can live in perpetuity benefiting a separate charity each year.

In addition to being an impressive and generous project by a very young man, today’s presentation was of particular interest to me because Everwise CEO Mike Bergelson and I and used Embrace as our example for quick and successful product development when we presented at the FutureNow event last month. I just bought two of Kristoffer’s oaks today for my own garden!

Tartan and Pipes for Baptism

Last year, my friend Laura and I bought tartan sashes at the Scottish Games. I discovered then that my Dickinson family may be historically associated with the Paisley district tartan. Laura’s family has connections to the Boyd tartan.

Today, in honor of the baptism of our Rector’s daughter Olivia, Laura and I wore our tartans to service. Rev. Channing Smith and his wife Mary were delighted to be baptizing their baby, so the Stewart Tartan Pipes and Drums marching bagpipe band were on hand to lead us out of church. Two of the drummers in the band were women!

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Filed under Church, Home & Family

Tagged as Episcopal church, John, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

June 8, 2014 · 5:28 pm

New Job: Everwise Vice President – Mentoring

Last week, I started as the new Vice President – Mentoring at Everwise in San Francisco. I am delighted to join a team helping progressive, successful corporations and non-profits to create world-class mentoring programs. My first big project will be with InovAtiva and entrepreneurs in Brazil!

Here is some of what drew me to Everwise:

Everwise connects professionals with the people and insights that can help them succeed at every stage of their career.
Everwise has re-engineered workplace mentoring using best practices culled from industry’s most effective mentoring programs and real-world experience guiding more than 60,000 successful mentoring partnerships over the course of 20 years.
The Everwise platform is built on the unified view that data, technology and workforce science can dramatically improve the way organizations develop their people.
Everwise has offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Minneapolis.

My new position at Everwise coordinates well with my ongoing activities. I will continue as the Chief Operating Officer for People to People (pro bono), as a volunteer for the TechWomen mentoring program of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, as an accredited EfM Mentor, and as a member of the Anita Borg Institute Advisory Board.

My husband John and I will be commuting to work together from San Jose to SF, where he is the Principle Architect, Open Storage at EVault (Seagate). Since our son Paul is graduating this month from Foothill College and transferring to San Jose State University in September, he can get to class more easily on public transit.

Ethiopian Icons

My Episcopal home church in Saratoga, California, is spare in design – with most of the color coming from huge stained glass windows by Mark Adams. Visiting Ethiopian Orthodox churches and the Ethiopian Ethnological Museum last month presented me with the new world of brightly colored Ethiopian icons. Some were new and others were ancient but the color palette, style, and topics were similar regardless of age.

The icon topic that was very surprising to me was the Trinity (as seen in the last photo below). In my Protestant Christian faith tradition, Jesus is commonly represented in art but only rarely are God and the Holy Spirit shown, except symbolically (such as when the Holy Spirit is shown as a dove). Ethiopian icons showing the Trinity as three mature, identical, kingly men with haloes sitting in a row were disturbing.

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Filed under Church, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, Episcopal church, Ethiopia, John, Theology

May 28, 2014 · 4:53 pm

Ethiopian Art, Crafts, and Icons

I was going to write a “Crafts in Ethiopia” blog entry like my Crafts in Rwanda entry from February. Then I realized that in Ethiopia there is heavy overlap between art, craft, and religious icons. Some of the works I brought home are between these categories. For example, if the two paintings on goat skin above were not religious in content, I would consider them crafts; however, because one is depicts Saint George and the other represents the Holy Trinity, and both are heavily inspired in design by ancient icons still in active church use, I am not sure into what category they fall.

The image below of coffee drinkers is clearly craft – even though its media, design, and execution are very similar to the paintings above. The baskets, woven scarves, and jewelry items pictured below are also crafts. The silver cross ear rings and bracelet are something else – maybe religious crafts? The great variety, symbolism, and social importance of Ethiopian Orthodox crosses puts them in another category.