In December, we had our first service in the new Reason Center and it was also a wonderful experience. January 8th will be our second Sunday Assembly service since 2020 to be held in our new Reason Center at 1300 Ethan Way, Suite 675 on January 8th, 2023. As always, families are welcome, and Becky Mark will entertain the children during the service. The doors open at 10:30 am and the program will begin at 11:00 am.
We welcome old and new members to Sunday Assembly. We will have live music by Sunday Reason and a presentation on Worldviews by Mynga Futrell, PhD. All this will be followed by a potluck lunch! Please bring your favorite dish to share with the group.
Worldviews: Bridging the Faith/No-Faith Divide and Educating for Inclusion
Mynga Futrell, our speaker, will show us the usefulness of the “worldview” concept as a tool for putting everyone (believers and nonbelievers alike) on a level playing field. She will be drawing on her experiences working with social studies teachers who were being challenged by a new California mandate to include religion as subject matter in their social studies curriculum. (How will they deal equitably with this touchy subject? Will religious and nonreligious diversity be considered?)
Mynga holds a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction and an M.S. in natural science, and in her professional career she worked primarily as an instructional and staff developer. Locally, though, her having participated in the co-founding of AOF (1993), CFD (2002), the Brights (2003), and Reason Center (2014) means that she is probably better known for freethought activism than for her professional activity.
As regards religion, Mynga’s secular activism clearly did feed into several years’ of professional contributions to the California 3Rs Project (e.g., “The Secular Side of the Coin”) and to her crafting a website for public school educators (“Teaching about Religion in Support of Civic Pluralism”) She also authored a chapter for the National Council for the Social Studies’ manual for teachers, Teaching about Religion in the Social Studies Classroom. Hers is the 21-chapter manual’s one and only chapter even acknowledging non-religion (Chapter 19: “Conscience and the Challenge of Civic Inclusion”).
