Our Annual Solstice Party and Fund-raising Auction is always a great event. We celebrated the Humanist holiday of HumanLight. We inaugurated our new board members and gave out the annual Helen Goldsmith Awards to our most deserving volunteers!

The HSGP Book Club meets at the Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner.)

From Publishers Weekly:

Hamilton's captivating third novel (after 2004's The Distance Between Us) follows Fiona Sweeney, a 36-year-old librarian, from New York to Garissa, Kenya, on her sincere but naïve quest to make a difference in the world. Fi enlists to run the titular mobile library overseen by Mr. Abasi, and in her travels through the bush, the small village of Mididima becomes her favorite stop. There, Matani, the village teacher; Kanika, an independent, vivacious young woman; and Kanika's grandmother Neema are the most avid proponents of the library and the knowledge it brings to the community. Not everyone shares such esteem for the project, however. Taban, known as Scar Boy; Jwahir, Matani's wife; and most of the town elders think these books threaten the tradition and security of Mididima. When two books go missing, tensions arise between those who welcome all that the books represent and those who prefer the time-honored oral traditions of the tribe. Kanika, Taban and Matani become more vibrant than Fi, who never outgrows the cookie-cutter mold of a woman needing excitement and fulfillment, but Hamilton weaves memorable characters and elemental emotions in artful prose with the lofty theme of Western-imposed "education" versus a village's perceived perils of exposure to the developed world.

Many of you are aware of the billboard recently seen in Gilbert that reads "PostMormon.org -- You are not alone." Our speakers, Paul Hahn and Tom Donofrio, were local men who are part of the PostMormon movement (headquartered in Logan, Utah).

Paul Hahn grew up in Arizona and served a mission for the Mormon church in Rapid City South Dakota. After returning to Arizona, he spent 10 more years in the church before leaving it in 2007. Paul has been a software engineer for the past eight years, currently employed with Shamrock Foods. A 2004 graduate of DeVry University Phoenix, he currently resides in Queen Creek.

Tom Donofrio was a Mormon until 2002, when he formally resigned his membership. He came to Arizona from Pittsburgh as a Mormon missionary, from 1979 to 1981. After his two-year service, he settled in Arizona. He met his future wife during his mission and married six months after his service terminated. (She remains a faithful member of the LDS church.) Tom currently works for Industrial Refrigeration and Boiler Company as an ammonia technician. Their clients include some of the large food warehouses in the valley.

Tom and Paul gave us information about the Post Mormon organization and what effect it is having on the Mormon community. Visit their website at: http://www.postmormon.org.

John Carlson joined the religious studies faculty at ASU in 2005 after completing his Ph.D. in ethics from The University of Chicago Divinity School. He was also a founding member of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, serving as the project coordinator for the University of Chicago office (2000-2003). He has received graduate fellowships from Pew Charitable Trusts (2001), the Bradley Foundation (2003-04), and the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2004-05). Professor Carlson is coeditor of, and contributor to, two books: The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics and Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. He is also series editor (with Jean Bethke Elshtain) of the Eerdmans Religion, Ethics, and Public Life Series. Since arriving at ASU, he has published (or has forthcoming) articles from several journals including "Religion and Human Rights," "Journal of Religious Ethics," and "Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics." Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled "Human Nature, Limited Justice, and the Ordering of Relations in Political Ethics," a political-theological examination of how views of human nature and the divine shape our political understandings of justice. He is also co-editing a volume on religion, violence, and America. Professor Carlson serves as co-principal investigator of two research projects funded by the Ford Foundation: Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy and Teaching and Talking about Religion in Public for which he is also project coordinator.

We also held our annual election of officers/board members at this meeting!

The HSGP Book Club meets at the Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From "Booklist":

Death is the narrator of this lengthy, powerful story of a town in Nazi Germany. He is a kindly, caring Death, overwhelmed by the souls he has to collect from people in the gas chambers, from soldiers on the battlefields, and from civilians killed in bombings. Death focuses on a young orphan, Liesl; her loving foster parents; the Jewish fugitive they are hiding; and a wild but gentle teen neighbor, Rudy, who defies the Hitler Youth and convinces Liesl to steal for fun. After Liesl learns to read, she steals books from everywhere. When she reads a book in the bomb shelter, even a Nazi woman is enthralled. Then the book thief writes her own story. There's too much commentary at the outset, and too much switching from past to present time, but as in Zusak's enthralling I Am the Messenger (2004), the astonishing characters, drawn without sentimentality, will grab readers. More than the overt message about the power of words, it's Liesl's confrontation with horrifying cruelty and her discovery of kindness in unexpected places that tell the heartbreaking truth.

Dr. Bruce Merrill is Research Director for Walter Cronkite Media Research Center at Arizona State University. His undergraduate major was mathematics and his master’s is in political science. His doctorate in political behavior is from the University of Michigan, where he trained at the Institute for Social Research.

When the journalism-telecommunication faculty was expanded in 1988, Dr. Merrill -- an ASU faculty member since 1971 -- was sought out because of his reputation as a researcher in the areas of political behavior and political media communications .

Professor Merrill’s first major assignment in fall 1988 was to establish a Media Research Program in the Cronkite School. Under his direction the School launched the Cactus State Poll in conjunction with KAET-TV in 1990. The Media Research Program is used to conduct public opinion polls and to train students in the design and interpretation of the polls.

Dr. Merrill has overseen more than 500 surveys during the past decade and has served as a consultant to scores of newspapers, television stations and corporations. The surveys have focused on a variety of issues as well as marketing and advertising strategies. Results have been disseminated widely by major national and international newspapers and electronic media outlets.

Dr. Merrill teaches courses in public opinion, political communication and quantitative research methodology with an emphasis on survey research. He also has interests in marketing and advertising strategy.

David William Foster is Regents Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. He holds a BA in Spanish, as well as an MA in Spanish and Romance Linguistics and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literature, all from the Univ. of Washington.

Dr. Foster's research interests focus on urban culture in Latin America, with emphasis on issues of gender construction and sexual identity. He specializes in Argentina and has written extensively on Argentine narrative and theater. His most recent publications include: Culture and Customs of Argentina (1998), A Funny Dirty Little War/no habrás más penas ni olvido (1998), Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (1998) and Contemporary Argentina Cinema (1992).

The HSGP Book Club meets at the Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner).

From Amazon.com:

An all-time science fiction classic, Rendezvous with Rama is also one of Clarke's best novels--it won the Campbell, Hugo, Jupiter, and Nebula Awards. A huge, mysterious, cylindrical object appears in space, swooping in toward the sun. The citizens of the solar system send a ship to investigate before the enigmatic craft, called Rama, disappears. The astronauts given the task of exploring the hollow cylindrical ship are able to decipher some, but definitely not all, of the extraterrestrial vehicle's puzzles. From the ubiquitous trilateral symmetry of its structures to its cylindrical sea and machine-island, Rama's secrets are strange evidence of an advanced civilization. But who, and where, are the Ramans, and what do they want with humans? Perhaps the answer lies with the busily working biots, or the sealed-off buildings, or the inaccessible "southern" half of the enormous cylinder. Rama's unsolved mysteries are tantalizing indeed. Rendezvous with Rama is fast moving, fascinating, and a must-read for science fiction fans. Clarke collaborated with Gentry Lee in writing several Rama sequels, beginning with Rama II.