August 11 to 18, 2012

The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul

Exploring the rich, living heritage of American UUism 
Current as of 1/25/12

This years co-Chairs are Marion  Halberg and Michael Hardiman. Photo shows Michael Hardiman, Bridget Hardiman (Pelican), and Marion Halberg as they wait for the Uncle Oscar to Star last summer. (Camera shy: Katie Hardiman)

The Theme Speaker for LOAS I, 2012 will be Megan Marshall. Megan, scholar and award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism, will draw connections between Unitarianism’s founding era of reform-minded spirituality and our own. She will speak as well about her new biography, The Passion of Margaret Fuller, forthcoming in 2013.

Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a biography praised by William Grimes in the New York Times as "the intellectual equivalent of a triple axel." The culmination of twenty years of research and writing, during which Marshall sought out manuscript letters and diaries in archives across the country, the book was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for the best-written book of American history, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2006.

In The Peabody Sisters, Marshall "manages to create vivid portraits of three distinct, and distinctly engaging, personalities," writes Grimes, "placing them at the center of the seismic disturbances associated with writers like Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau. After reading Ms. Marshall, it is impossible to imagine this gallery of American greats without seeing the Peabody sisters in their midst." Writing in The New Republic, historian Christine Stansell called the book "a fascinating, sprawling story [of] the emotional complexities that thrived among people living at the edge of cultural possibility."

At Star Island, Marshall, who grew up attending the UU Fellowship at Neighborhood Church in Pasadena, California, and has spoken at numerous UU Fellowships and at General Assembly, will draw connections between Unitarianism’s founding era of reform-minded spirituality and our own. The three Peabody sisters and their brilliant circle cherished opportunities for collective inspiration–"a feast of reason and a flow of soul," they called it, quoting Samuel Johnson–out of which was born a liberal religious tradition of self-exploration and social activism. She will speak as well about her new biography The Passion of Margaret Fuller, forthcoming in 2013.

Marshall’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her talk on Margaret Fuller at GA 2010 was reprinted in the Journal of UU History. Her work has been supported by grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She teaches narrative nonfiction writing and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College.

Minister of the Week:
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino has been the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Westchester in Mount Kisco, NY, since 2007.  Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Michael came to the Unitarian Universalist ministry through the intentional community found at another UU summer conference, SUUSI, held each year in Virginia, which he still attends every summer.  Michael’s first career was in science, and he holds a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Duke University in addition to a Master’s in Divinity from Meadville/Lombard Theological School.  Michael currently also serves as President of UU Allies for Racial Equity and as a member of the UUA Board of Trustees.  He is the co-author of Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Young Adults, and spent six years on the UUA Staff as Director of Young Adult and Campus Ministry.  He lives in Peekskill, New York, with his partner (now fiancé) Eric.

Youth Leaders:

Workshops and Starbursts:

Website created by and maintained by Staris Consulting. © 2012   |  Contact the LOAS Webster pertaining to the website
Special Thanks to Matt of svaha.com for Hosting this website