Event Calendar
We meet at 9am and go for a few hours, please make sure you dress for the weather and we would advise AGAINST sandals or shorts/capri pants as the grass gets pretty long and dirty. Please also be advised that Alberta Transport requires volunteers for the highway cleanup to be at least 9 years of age.
Our section of the QE II is the east side of the road, just north of Highway 625.
Meeting Location:
South end of the Sparrow Drive Service Road in Nisku at the cul-de-sac just south of the Blackjacks Roadhouse. When you turn into the dirt road, Blackjacks is in front of you, turn left to the end of that road where the billboards are.
GPS: 53.338802,-113.544435 http://goo.gl/maps/Rdxuh
SEA will supply:
Safety vests (but please bring one if you have one)
Water
Garbage Bags
Volunteers should bring:
Ski pole, or stick with nail on end to pick up garbage
Sunscreen/hat/sunglasses – be prepared for the weather
Bug spray
Work gloves/thick gardening gloves (latex gloves are not suitable)
We meet at 9am and go for a few hours, please make sure you dress for the weather and we would advise AGAINST sandals or shorts/capri pants as the grass gets pretty long and dirty. Please also be advised that Alberta Transport requires volunteers for the highway cleanup to be at least 9 years of age.
Our section of the QE II is the east side of the road, just north of Highway 625.
Meeting Location:
South end of the Sparrow Drive Service Road in Nisku at the cul-de-sac just south of the Blackjacks Roadhouse. When you turn into the dirt road, Blackjacks is in front of you, turn left to the end of that road where the billboards are.
GPS: 53.338802,-113.544435 http://goo.gl/maps/Rdxuh
SEA will supply:
Safety vests (but please bring one if you have one)
Water
Garbage Bags
Volunteers should bring:
Ski pole, or stick with nail on end to pick up garbage
Sunscreen/hat/sunglasses – be prepared for the weather
Bug spray
Work gloves/thick gardening gloves (latex gloves are not suitable)
Coffee, tea and great conversation! A great event for newcomers.
TOPIC: PRIDE month, and how to be better allies towards the 2SLGBTQ+ community!
Join us to discuss why atheists should be allies, and how we can be better ones, particularly in the political climate of today. Pleased be prepared to discuss issues of intersectionality and bring ideas for future speakers to help us understand the issues better.
**Strathcona Library has confirmed there is an elevator to the program room upstairs, so access is available for wheelchair users.
We meet afterwards for drinks and continued conversation, starting around 9pm. Location to be announced shortly
**NOT HOSTED BY THE SEA**
Reviewing chapters from the book GETTING RIGHTS RIGHT by Robert MacQuarrie.
Discuss how we are ethical people outside of organized religion, all respectful voices are welcome.
6:30- 8:00pm
**THIS EVENT IS HOSTED BY WESTWOOD UNITARIAN CHURCH**
Please join us at the Church on Friday at 7:00 PM
TREASURE HUNTERS
They live on our waste, on what we leave behind. Once called guenillous (beggars), they’re now known as scrappeurs—or, more nobly, recycleurs. Denis is one of them, prospecting by bicycle around his neighbourhood, sifting through garbage looking for things to sell: used furniture, crippled toys, trinkets, scrap metal and a myriad other cast-off items that, for him, are the gold he survives on. He’s surrounded by a network of colleagues, customers and friends: a woman who collects old dolls; Roger, who makes bracelets; Jean-Claude, who makes a decent living by picking up scrap metal in his truck; and two youngsters, Yannick and Sébastien. As we follow Denis in his efforts to buy a truck, we enter a parallel universe of hardworking folk who consider freedom the most important wage they earn.
Discussion after the movie.
Dinner and drinks, great conversation. Come join us!
Sherlock Holmes runs a trivia night on Tuesdays, join our team ”The Heathens”!
There is no book club in May, which should give us plenty of time to read Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari for June. We will be discussing the entire book at this meeting
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow examines what might happen to the world when old myths are coupled with new godlike technologies, such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.
Humans conquered the world thanks to their unique ability to believe in collective myths about gods, money, equality and freedom – as described in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In Homo Deus, Prof. Harari looks to the future and explores how global power might shift, as the principal force of evolution – natural selection – is replaced by intelligent design.
What will happen to democracy when Google and Facebook come to know our likes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves? What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class”? How might Islam handle genetic engineering? Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions, rather than just novel gadgets?
As Homo sapiens becomes Homo deus, what new destinies will we set for ourselves? As the self-made gods of planet earth, which projects should we undertake, and how will we protect this fragile planet and humankind itself from our own destructive powers? The book Homo Deus gives us a glimpse of the dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century.
Coffee, tea and great conversation! A great event for newcomers.
Dinner and drinks, great conversation. Come join us!
Philomena by Martin Sixsmith, we will be discussing the entire book at this meeting.
When she fell pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent at Roscrea in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him from her and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. Coerced into signing a document promising never to attempt to see her child again, she nonetheless spent the next fifty years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching for her from across the Atlantic.
Philomena’s son, renamed Michael Hess, grew up to be a top Washington lawyer and a leading Republican official in the Reagan and Bush administrations. But he was a gay man in a homophobic party where he had to conceal not only his sexuality but, eventually, the fact that he had AIDs. With little time left, he returned to Ireland and the convent where he was born: his desperate quest to find his mother before he died left a legacy that was to unfold with unexpected consequences for all involved.
Philomena is the tale of a mother and a son whose lives were scarred by the forces of hypocrisy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the secrets they were forced to keep. With a foreword by Judi Dench, Martin Sixsmith’s book is a
compelling and deeply moving narrative of human love and loss, both heartbreaking yet ultimately redemptive.
