Image Credit: Lorraine Day (NAUA Membership Co-Chair)

Greetings, !

We hope all our fellow NAUA members and friends enjoyed a warm and festive holiday season. NAUA programs are now back in full swing! Learn about upcoming events by reading through this newsletter. Joining your NAUA friends in worship, learning and discussion is a great way to beat those winter blues.

Grey skies hold the world in thrall,

Days are short, the light is thin,

Post-holiday, the spirits fall,

A quiet, chilly, muted din.

Cold wind whispers, snow drifts deep,

Promises the year can keep,

But for now, we just must sleep,

Through the January blues we creep. 

~ Author Unknown

Former board trustee Mike Long suggested we could use a little more humor in the Compass, so he submitted the following:

Why did the Unitarian cross the road?

To support the chicken in its search for its own path.

Note: Members and readers are invited to share a jpoem, short letter or artistic rendition of their hopes for NAUA and the wider world in the coming year. Please email your contribution to jmkrettek@gmail.com for inclusion in this newsletter or posting to our social media accounts. 

The SatChat CIRCLE is accepting new participants. They meet the 2nd and 4th Saturday each month at 1:00 PM PT / 4 PM ET. If you are interested in joining this CIRCLE, please email circles@naunitarians.org

Below is an excerpt from one member's "report" about their participation in the group:

"Our SatChat group practices shared leadership. Choosing topics for conversation has often been *the* topic, and our themes have been wide-ranging, from our own “faith-journey” stories, to discussions of individual histories and interests.

I’m truly grateful for my SatChat friends—I think that we are a great example of almost any randomly pulled together group of Unitarian Universalists, with many more viewpoints than people, and genuine interest, intellect, respect and good-humored affection for each other!"  

Thank you, Margaret Stewart, for giving us a window into how your CIRCLE operates and the benefits for participants.

The Thursday Connection CIRCLE is accepting new participants. We meet the 1st and 3rd Thursday each month from 9:00 - 10:00 am Pacific Time. If you’d be interested in joining this CIRCLE, please email circles@naunitarians.org

What’s it all about?
Each session will be a chance to dive into a new spiritual topic, guided by facilitator Allan Lindrup. At the first meeting, we’ll brainstorm a list of potential topics, then vote on which ones we want to explore over the next 7 sessions.

How it works:

• First session: We'll suggest ideas, then vote on the top 7 topics.

• Next 7 sessions: We dive deep into those chosen themes, with opportunities to shape the conversation as a group.

• Want more? After 8 sessions, we can decide to extend the circle if there’s interest.

Ready to join?

If you’d like to be part of this thoughtful, spiritual exploration, email us at circles@naunitarians.org  Registration is required and open until Friday, February 20th. 

Don't miss this chance to engage in meaningful conversations about spirituality—come, share, and grow with us! 

We'd like to invite anyone who is interested in helping to plan this year's Summit to consider joining the team. There are many, many ways to contribute:

• Helping to select a Summit theme and keynote speaker
• Planning workshop topics and recruiting workshop leaders
• Deciding on an all-online or hybrid (in-person and online) format
• Creating an event schedule and event program with workshop and presenter descriptions
• Determining and maintaining a budget (in cooperation with the board)
• Marketing the event both internally and externally
• Recruiting technical hosts for online sessions
• Setting prices and reviewing scholarship applications
• Establishing and managing a registration process
• Welcoming participants to the Summit, answering questions, and troubleshooting technical or other issues
• Designing workshop evaluations and compiling feedback from participants
• Reporting progress on a monthly basis to the board

Materials from prior annual Summits will be provided to planning team members so there is no need to start from scratch. If you would like to contribute in any of these areas and serve on the planning team, please email info@naunitarians.org.

We are pleased to announce that we are now officially identified as a tax-exempt organization and will be added to the IRS' searchable database as such. As stated in the determination letter: "We’re pleased to tell you we determined you’re exempt from federal income tax under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 501(c)(3). Donors can deduct contributions they make to you under IRC Section 170. You’re also qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers or gifts under Section 2055, 2106, or 2522." 

More information on how you can maximize your contributions to NAUA by donating directly from your IRA's Required Minimum Distribution or your estate will be shared over the coming months. We are always grateful for any and all contributions that allow us to continue to provide monthly worship services, workshops, CIRCLES and other services to members.  

Consider joining NAUA's New Principles Research Group!

Since NAUA's inception, and most recently at our fall Summit, members have consistently requested that NAUA consider adopting a set of principles or guideposts that better outline how religious liberals can fulfill our mission and live according to our values on a daily basis. 

In response, NAUA is establishing a working group tasked with gathering ideas and aspirations from members and distilling them into a set of principles to be voted on at our next annual Summit. Member input can be gathered in any number of ways, including surveys, focus groups, listening sessions and more, as determined by the group. If you are interested in serving as a member of this group and hosting a series of conversations with members, please email your interest to info@naunitarians.org. By doing so, you will play a key role in defining who we are as religious liberals and the ideals we choose to live by.

Participation by Reservation Only

To register for the Forum Circle and obtain the meeting link, email circles@naunitarians.org

From the book cover: "For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike―either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. In their major New York Times bestseller, The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow fundamentally challenge these assumptions and recast our understanding of human history. We will never again see the past in the same way.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, Graeber and Wengrow reveal how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

Destined to be a classic, The Dawn of Everything signals a paradigm shift, profoundly transforming our understanding of the human past and making space to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual and political range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and hopefulness..."

If you are interested in attending, please email Ed Hudak at bookclub@naunitarians.org.

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We will seek to understand how science confirms or contradicts religious or philosophical conceptions, think about how the disagreements might be resolved, and also identify religious or philosophical issues that have been neglected by science, which might lead to fruitful growth on both sides.

• Session 1: February 7

• Session 2: March 7

• Session 3: April 4

• Session 4: May 2

Register with IARF.net and then register for the course at https://iarf.net/network/courses/30/. The time is always 8:30 AM ET. The course has a discussion board for announcements, asking questions and general conversation related to the subject.

If you can't attend the upcoming course on "Human Consciousness," be sure to register with the IARF anyway. Free attendance at IARF workshops is a wonderful perk of being a member of NAUA. Here is the latest update from Lukasz (Luke) Liniewicz of IARF:

"Our new e-learning platform is complete – please visit it at https://iarf.net/network/courses! At the moment, we have two upcoming courses (there will be more soon), and have migrated our past courses and webinars, so that everything is now in one place. 

One of the courses is a wonderfully interesting series on consciousness – Prof. Mark Reimers, a renowned neuroscientist, mathematician and a religious humanist, will discuss consciousness from the scientific and spiritual, as well as the Western and the Eastern point of view.

Please register (“enroll”) for it if you want to participate. The schedule is to start on the first Saturday of February and continue with one session per month until May. The sessions will begin at 8:30am ES(D)T. You will see the time in your own timezone on the e-learning platform.

The other course is a continuation of Rev. Maruta’s great series on Buddhism and Free-Religion. You can already view the past 10 sessions and two more are upcoming.

Join NOW and select NAUA as your member organization: IARF.net

The NAUA Academy takes place on the second Tuesday of the month from 4:30 to 6:00 PM PT.

Each session features an educational presentation by a guest speaker, a question and answer period and then group discussion.  

This month's session (“Can GMO crops feed the world and spare the planet?”) will be led by Dr Felicia Wu, Michigan State University.

If you are interested in joining or observing a board meeting, please read the board meeting participation policy on our website before emailing our board secretary for the Zoom link: secretary@naunitarians.org.

Note: Past board meeting minutes can be found on our website.