American Teilhard Association
Annual Meeting
Saturday, June 6, 2020
This meeting is free of charge.
Morning Board Meeting
10:30 AM to 12:00 PM ET
Afternoon Presentations
1:00 PM to 3:15 PM ET
Recordings of the Annual Meeting:
Part 1: Presentations by educators Jennifer Morgan and Kathleen Deignan; and artists Imogene Drummond, Angela Manno, and Mary Coelho.
Part 2: Presentations by musician Sam Guarnaccia, religious leaders Nancy Wright and Kevin Cawley; play producer Sant Aranda; and filmmakers Frank and Mary Frost.
Bios of Presenters:
Jennifer Morgan is an award-winning author, storyteller, and educator inspired by the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Brian Swimme. Her Universe Story Trilogy — Born With a Bang, From Lava to Live, and Mammals Who Morph are used in classrooms around the world, particularly in Montessori schools as part of the Cosmic Education Curriculum, and have received the Teachers Choice Award, Nautilus Semi Finalist, highest ratings from AAAS and endorsements from Jane Goodall, Neil de Grasse Tyson, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and others. She’s founder and president of the Deeptime Network (dtnetwork.org), a global educational network that offers professional development, courses and study groups in the New Cosmology. Members can blog and add resources and events, and promote their work through DTNetwork social media.
Kathleen Noone Deignan, PhD is a Sister of the Congregation of Notre Dame and a teaching theologian recently retired from Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, where she now directs the Deignan Institute for Earth and Spirit, an enterprise deeply imbued with Teilhard’s spirit. A life-long student of his corpus, Sister Kathleen has taught courses and offered a variety of programs on his legacy. The deepest transmission of his vision came through her mentor Thomas Berry, and also Ewert Cousins, with whom she studied at Fordham University. She now sits on the Board of the American Teilhard Association.
Angela Manno is an internationally exhibited artist and iconographer whose work has been deeply influenced by Teilhard, Thomas Berry and her years long practice in Byzantine-Russian iconography under Master iconographer, Vladislav Andreyev. Her award-winning art resides private collections around the world and in the NASA and Smithsonian fine art collections. She studied Earth Literacy at Genesis Farm in its three month long Earth Literacy program and holds a Bachelor’s degree in French from Bard College. Her most recent project, “Sacred Icons of Endangered Species,” depicts non-human species in a traditionally religious form – the icon, originating in the monasteries of 14th-16th century Russia, in order to awaken a sense of the Sacred for all living beings and ecosystems. Each time she sells one of her icons, she donates 50% to the Center for Biological Diversity, a highly successful organization protecting critical habitat for all creatures great and small on the brink of extinction. www.angelamanno.com
Mary Conrow Coelho brings her theological studies, her background in science as a biology teacher and her excitement about our transformed worldview to her work as a watercolor painter. In addition to realistic watercolors, some of her paintings have images evoking the new cosmology. Her accordion books are reflections on the insights of voices that speak to the new cosmology in a series of small paintings. A few of her paintings and some accordion books are on her website: http://newuniversestory.com. Mrs. Coelho is a signature member of the Northeast Watercolor Society, exhibiting her paintings in the northeast. Mary is author of the book Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood. (Wyndham Hall Press, 2002) and a number of articles. She has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Friends Committee on Unity with Nature, is on the board of The American Teilhard Association and founder with others of the New Story Group at Friends Meeting at Cambridge and a similar group in New York City. She has led a number of workshops on the integration of the epic of evolution and the Western contemplative/mystical tradition.
Sam Guarnaccia is a composer, performer, scholar, and founder/director of Sam Guarnaccia Music (SGM) www.samguarnaccia.com. A classical guitarist, he studied privately, at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, the North Carolina School of the Arts, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. He created, and for ten years taught and directed the guitar program of the University of Denver’s renowned Lamont School of Music. He has also taught and instituted programs at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont, as Spanish scholar, performer, and composer. His cycle of nine peace songs has been incorporated into a children’s peace education curriculum. His work, A Celtic Mass for Peace, Songs for the Earth, a collaboration with Celtic Spirituality scholar, writer, and teacher, John Philip Newell, has been performed all over the United States, Iona and Edinburgh, Scotland, and was featured in a major Peace celebration on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2011, in New York and in Vermont. His most recent major work, the Emergent Universe Oratorio, first performed in Shelburne, Vermont in 2013, had its world premiere with new libretto and full orchestra in Cleveland in June 2017. It was also performed by the Mainline Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at Villanova University in July 2018 at the International Big History Association World Conference. With creative partner/producer Paula Guarnaccia, a performance is now being planned with the Albany Pro Musica, at RPI Experimental Media Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York for March, 2022.
The Rev. Dr. Nancy Wright, board member of the American Teilhard Association, is the Pastor of Ascension Lutheran Church, S. Burlington, VT and the Environmental Liaison for the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Dr. Wright coauthored (with Fr. Donald Kill) Ecological Healing: A Christian Vision (Orbis, 1993); “Christianity and Environmental Justice” (Crosscurrents, June 2011); and the chapter “Living Water,” in Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to Journey of the Universe (Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, eds., Orbis 2016). Previous ministries included Congregational Coordinator at Earth Ministry, Settle, and staff member at CODEL (Coordination in Development, Inc.), which funded international small-scale development projects. In addition to two advanced theological degrees, she holds an M.A. in Environmental Conservation Education. She and her congregation created the Congregational Watershed Discipleship Manual (Christian and interreligious versions) available for free PDF download or bound copy. Order here.
Santiago Aranda has been a member of the Board of the American Teilhard Association since 2008. He has a BS in Environmental Sciences and a BA in Philosophy from the Loyola University Chicago. Sant has postgraduate studies in Sustainable Design of Human Settlements, Sustainable Construction and in Conflict Resolution including courses on The Earth Story. Hs professional career revolves around sustainability and shaping our future in the spirit of Teilhard by designing and building several sustainable human settlements as well as energy projects. He has advised new businesses and companies to make their production processes more efficient and incorporate elements of sustainability in them. Between 2006 and 2007, Santiago guided eco-spirituality programs which focused on caring for the environment and environmental education. He has taught classes and conferences on sustainability, infrastructure design and construction. In 2016 he helped produced El Corazon de la Materia, a play about the life of Teilhard intertwined with current-day events.