First Gathering of the Friends of St Thomas

This is the note I sent announcing the first gathering of the Friends of St. Thomas, February, 2006


A monthly gathering for conversation about spiritual life for people who question.

At each gathering, we will have an assigned reading to provide a focus for our conversation. This reading will typically be "article length" not "book length."

There are three "rules" for our time together:

1. Anonymity. What you hear and who you see are not to be mentioned elsewhere.

2. Respect. All speech must evince respect for questioners and believers, intellectuals and fundamentalists, friends and enemies, Democrats and Republicans, iconoclasts and church bureaucrats, etc. We expect vigorous debate and keen questioning, but we will honor those with whom we disagree (whether they are present or not).

3. Our questioning will work toward faith. We presume that faith is both desirable and problematic. Most of our questions have ancient antecedents, that is, others have asked them before us. In spite of their long history, most of our questions have no coherent, satisfying answers. So we do our questioning in hopes of finding working hypotheses, tentative solutions or possible explanations not with the expectation of articulating a "grand theory of everything."

Our first session will focus on issues raised in the short story by Honore Balzac, "The Atheist's Mass."

Feel free to invite others to join us, however, please mention to them our "rules," especially the first one.


Our first session is 7:00 p.m. this coming Friday night, February 3, 2006
At the regular meeting place of North Hill Christian Fellowship
(Sunrise United Methodist Church)
150 S. 356th Street,
Federal Way, WA 98003