Please join us at 10:30 am., this Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Hot Springs, 100 Norwalk St., as we welcome Charles “Orson” Cook as our guest speaker. He will share stories of Angelina and Sara Grimke, the daughters of a prominent white South Carolina slave owning family, who were probably the most effective advocates of antislavery and women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Less well known, but no less important, were their black nephews who were among the leaders of the early civil rights movement a generation later. This relationship between reform and race raises some fascinating and intriguing questions that remain alive and well in our own time.

Dr. Cook is a Visiting Professor in the University of Houston ’s Honors College . He has a special interest in American race relations and nineteenth century popular culture. He is the editor of Gender and Success in the Gilded Age: Two Novels by Horatio Alger. His other publications have appeared in Houston: The Urban Frontier, the Houston Review, the East Texas Historical Journal, Louisiana History, and the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Nineteen of his entries are in the new Oxford Encyclopedia of African American History, and he has an essay on William Jennings Bryan in Major Documents of American Leaders. Dr. Cook is one of several collaborators on a new book, African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House. In the summer of 2010, two of his essays—one on James Weldon Johnson and another on Colin Powell– were featured in an anthology entitled Major Documents of African Americans.

The Religious Exploration group will continue the discussion of “Situation Ethics” which is referred to as a Christian ethical theory explored in Joseph Fletcher’s controversial 1966 book. How do the ideas presented hold up almost 50 years later? Join us at 9:00 am. for an interesting hour and share your input. You do not have to have read the book to join in and all are welcome.