ADORE Team Plans Trip to Levine Museum of the New South for Members

Join members on an interesting field trip to Levine Museum if the New South on Sunday afternoon, June 22! The newly formed ADORE team is sponsoring this excursion to the Levine Museum as the beginning of a year long effort to increase awareness and appreciation of diversity, especially in our own congregation.

We will leave after the 10 a.m. service on Sunday, June 22. (Only one service starting that Sunday) We will have a light lunch at church that will be provided and then car pool to the museum, leaving about 11:45 a.m. We will probably return between 3 and 4 p.m.

To those unfamiliar with the Levine Museum, the museum is a storehouse of fascinating history of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area and has much information about Charlotte’s civil rights history, including the integration of public schools after the 1954 Brown Supreme Court case and the 1969 case to integrate the school through planned busing.

A current exhibit through August is Faces of Freedom Summer, 104 photographs taken in 1964 in Mississippi.

The Levine is located downtown on East 7^th Street. We will be in a group at the museum

with a tour guide and have an opportunity to meet afterwards to discuss our reactions. The cost of admission is $5 for members of a group and there is no charge for parking on Sundays in the adjoining garage.

Members of the ADORE team include Christine Robinson and Lauren Neal (co-chairs) and David Parker, Eva Danner, Arvind Patil, Alan Perkinson, Elaine Slaton, Anne Laukaitis and Rev. Robin Tanner. This event is the first of many interesting activities the ADORE team will sponsor in the 2014-2015 church year.

Please let Anne Laukaitis (Laukaitis@windstream.net) know if you plan to attend so that we can have a number for lunch on June 22.

Visit the website of the Levine Museum of the New South at www.museumofthenewsouth.org

Summer Reading with ADORE

The ADORE (A Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity) team is PUUC’s multiculturally diverse team aspiring to bring awareness and cultural competency to our congregation through dialogue, human story, worship, education and relationship. One of our summer activities will be a three session book discussion. We’ll have a short meeting on June 8th, following the first service, to decide which one of the following books we’ll read and discuss. Contact Eva Dew Danner or David Parker for additional information.

The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry (poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, cultural critic, and descendent of slave holders). Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is rooted in the hope that someday the historical wound will begin to heal.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (science writer, editor, media correspondent, biographer). Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer, but scientists know her as HeLa. Her cells - taken without her knowledge in 1951 - were vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown. Skloot tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine.

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride (journalist, musician and author). McBride’s mother was a self-declared light-skinned woman who would not admit she was white and Jewish, yet was steadfast in her love for her 12 black children. McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and recreates her remarkable story: daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi in Poland, whose family emigrated to America and settled in a small Virginia town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high; marriage to a black minister and co-founder of an all-black Baptist church in NYC.