April Announcements

Gretchen Schafft is a Friend from the Bethesda Friends Meeting in Washington, DC., an anthropologist at American University, and a graduate of Ottawa Hills High School. On May 3, she will be speaking at Schuler's Books and Music on 28th Street about her new book, "Commemorating Hell, published by Illinois University Press. This book, written with Gerhard Zeidler, is about the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Germany and the way it was later remembered under a communist and then a unified German government. From this camp of 60,000 inmates, of whom 20,000 perished in a year and a half, the US received Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, two of our pioneering space engineers. Little has been said of this camp, and new information based on 20 years of interviews, observations, and archival research brings to light many aspects of war and peace that are as relavent today as they were then. She hopes some of her Quaker Friends will come to hear the talk at 7 PM on May 3 in the 28th street store and bring interested friends.

By the way, her family went to Camp Innisfree for seven years with Grand Rapids Quakers!
Email Address: * gschafft@verizon.net
Name: * Gretchen Schafft

April Query

Query:

• Do we center our lives in the awareness of the presence of God so that all things take their rightful place?
• Do we keep our lives uncluttered with things and activities and avoid comments beyond our strength and light?
• Is the life of the Meeting so ordered that it helps us simplify our personal lives?
• Do we order our individual lives so as to nourish our spiritual growth?