Sunday, November 14, 10 am
Sanctuary
As part of our occasional Life Meets Art series, we will host Oakland author, Stanford professor, and multidisciplinary artist Jenny Odell in church on Sun., Nov. 14! Rev. Molly will interview Jenny during the 10 am worship service and, for those who want a deeper dive, Jenny will also lead us in a forum after the service from 11:45 am to 1 pm.
Jenny is the author of the profound hit How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Though she describes herself as “the quintessential California atheist,” she is an active birder with an exquisite sense of attention to beauty, truth, the shedding of ego and anxiety, and commitment to what really matters in life.
If you are ontologically tired, discerning a new direction for your life, renegotiating your relationship with social media, or just love new paradigms to awaken your mind, come to church on Nov. 14! Purchase a copy of Jenny’s book on Sunday morning from Mrs. Dalloway’s (they’ll be staffing a special table in the Hall of Entrance before and after worship).
Read more about Jenny on her website, where she says: “My work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In one of my favorite projects, I created The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a searchable online archive of 200 objects salvaged from the San Francisco dump, each with photographs and painstaking research into its material, corporate, and manufacturing histories. I am compelled by the ways in which attention (or lack thereof) leads to consequential shifts in perception at the level of the everyday.”
And here’s a quote from her book: “I’m suggesting that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human–including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore or disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the bodies of the landscape that we inhabit.”
Sounds just like good church! For more info, email Rev. Molly.