Events & Retreats – 02.03.2021

Mound Offers Dan Schutte Virtual Lenten Retreat

SINSINAWA, WI – Sinsinawa Mound Center is sponsoring a Virtual Lenten Retreat with Dan Schutte. The retreat will be available to participants beginning Feb. 17, Ash Wednesday, through April 1 at the beginning of the Triduum on Holy Thursday. Schutte is providing 18 musical reflection videos that are accessible online anytime during the retreat. Plus, participants will join Schutte in a Zoom conversation at 7 p.m. CST Thursday, March 25. Schutte said, “I offer you these days of prayer and hope. We all need to hear Jesus speak to our hearts.” Reflection themes include What God Can Do with Dust, Lured by Love, When Night Is Long, Our Same Old Sins, Wounded by Grace, We’re in This Together, and the Journey to Jerusalem. The fee is $75 per person, and registration will remain open through March 10. A downloadable workbook/prayer journal is included. Please register by contacting Guest Services at 608-748-4411 or visiting our website at www.sinsinawa.org/moundcenter.

Author Boss Leads Lenten Retreat Based on her Writing

SINSINAWA, WI – Gayle Boss, author of “Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing,” will share insights from her book at an online event by the same name from 7 to 8 p.m. CST Wednesday, Feb. 17. It is sponsored by Sinsinawa Mound Center. Boss notes that humans share this beautiful blue-green globe with creatures magnificent, delicate, intricate—and now vanishing at a faster rate than at any other time in Earth’s history. Begin Lent with her as she shares their stories—stories of the suffering of God’s beauty. These stories of wonder and loss can thaw stiff hearts to a greater compassion and wake a wild hope that from all this death and ruin, something new could rise. In fact, their stories also bear witness to the promise of Lent: that this hope is already loose in the world. Boss also authored “All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings.” In both books, her lifelong love of animals and her immersion in spiritual texts and practices have melded to explore how relationships with animals, specifically, and an attentive presence in the natural world, generally, restore people to our deepest selves. The fee is $10 per person, and the registration deadline is Feb. 16 at 4 p.m. Please register by contacting Guest Services at 608-748-4411 or visiting our website at www.sinsinawa.org/moundcenter.

Pause: A Season to Breathe

SINSINAWA, WI – Sinsinawa Mound Center is sponsoring a series of virtual micro-retreats that invite participants to be attentive and compassionate, pause, and appreciate each faith-based season as it mirrors the natural changing cycle of seasons. Sister Stella DeVenuta, OSF, will lead the series Pause: A Season to Breathe. Like the seasons of Earth that shift and change in nature, our lives of faith are also cyclical. From the ordinary time of now through the anticipated promise of hope, these sessions will be both reflective and engaging, with an invitation to carry the session focus into further reflection as personal practice. The third micro-retreat, Season of Release, is scheduled from 10 a.m. to noon CST Saturday, Feb. 27. The final session is at the same time April 10 (Season of Hope). The fee is $25 per person and the registration deadline is Feb. 25 at 4 p.m. To register contact Guest Services at 608-748-4411 or visit our website at www.sinsinawa.org/moundcenter.

Preaching with their Lives

The McGreal Center will host a series of new book events about Preaching with their Lives.  Registration will begin mid-February.

Workshop Explores U.S. Prison System Through Eyes of Christian Mercy and Ethics

Kathryn Getek-Soltis, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Villanova University and former Catholic chaplain at Suffolk County House of Corrections in Boston, explores the U.S. prison system through the eyes of Christian mercy and ethics. Her workshop, Christian Mercy and our American Prison System, is offered virtually from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. EST Thursday, February 18, 2021, through Weber Retreat and Conference Center.

Kathryn, Director of the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University, earned her doctorate in Theological Ethics at Boston College, focusing her dissertation on a virtue ethics approach to justice, with an application to the reform of the U.S. prison system. 

The program is free and open to all; donations are appreciated. Registration is available at www.webercenter.org; click on “programs.” Registration is also available by contacting Weber Center at 517-266-4000 or webercenter@adriandominicans.org

Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative Explained

SINSINAWA, WI – Join Shelley Buffalo, coordinator of the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative (MFSI), as she shares a brief history of the Meskwaki tribe and information about the MFSI. The event, sponsored by Sinsinawa Mound Center, will be held online from 7 to 8 p.m. CST Tuesday, Feb. 23. The group’s mission statement reads, “MFSI emphasizes the impact of local foods, indigenous foods, and medicines in supporting the health and well-being of our community, while strengthening the economy, healing relationships with the land, and celebrating cultural identity.” Buffalo will discuss the primary program strategies that were developed to meet the objectives of their mission, outlining the priorities for this year. She will incorporate her own background as it pertains to health and food. Raised in rural central Iowa and on her tribal lands, the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County, Iowa, Buffalo has straddled two very different cultures: Meskwaki and the settler-colonizer. She has spent a lifetime seeking a deeper understanding and sense of belonging within the social complexities of being indigenous in the heartland. The fee is $10 per person, and the registration deadline is Feb. 22 at 4 p.m. Please register by contacting Guest Services at 608-748-4411 or visiting our website at www.sinsinawa.org/moundcenter.

Tree Rings Tell History of Driftless Area’s Climate, Environment, People

SINSINAWA, WI – Sinsinawa Mound Center is sponsoring The Driftless Oaks: A History of Climate, Environment, and People from the Rings of Trees online from 7 to 8 p.m. CST Wednesday, March 3. Evan Larson and Chris Underwood will share stories, photographs and scientific results from a decade of tree-ring research conducted in collaboration with their geography students at UW-Platteville and at sites across the Driftless Area. The primary focus of this presentation will be the Driftless Oaks project, a seven-year effort that recently culminated in the publication of a 303-year reconstruction of drought for southwest Wisconsin, with additional highlights from recent work developing multiple eastern red cedar tree-ring records that span the past seven centuries of climate and land use. Larson has 18 years of experience using tree rings to investigate past climate, disturbance, forest development, and invasive species impacts. Underwood is a biogeographer and paleoecologist with interests in the distribution of forest communities, fire ecology, and global environmental change. The fee is $10 per person, and the registration deadline is March 2 at 4 p.m. CST. Please register by contacting Guest Services at 608-748-4411 or visiting our website at www.sinsinawa.org/moundcenter.