Spiritual Pride Dinner
The 10th annual Spiritual Pride dinner, hosted by the Friends of St. Aelred, will be at 6 pm Saturday, June 15, in Harvard Hall. June is Pride Month, and we hope you will come and enjoy a catered banquet, flowers, decorations, an inspiring program, and a chance to meet with other welcoming and affirming people from faith communities throughout the Tampa Bay area.
All are welcome! Spiritual Pride lifts up the importance of a supportive faith community for LGBTQI+ Episcopalians. That support is more important than ever now, when equality issues are under fire. Perhaps this year you’ll consider inviting someone you haven’t seen at the banquet before — and maybe even buying their ticket. Can you imagine what that might mean to a young adult: to see a room full of supporters and to know that you are one of them.
Our speaker will be our own Stephen Willis, moderator of the Friends of St. Aelred. Stephen is a real estate agent and manages the Court Administration-Polk County Juvenile Court Division, and was formerly a Pentecostal minister. At the Cathedral he is an usher and lector. His partner, Rodney Kayton, managing partner of a market research firm, serves on the Flower Guild and as a verger and is coordinating several aspects of the Spiritual Pride banquet.
Tickets ($40) will be sold at the Cathedral on Sundays: May 19 in the Narthex after the 8 am service; and May 19 and 26 and June 2 in Harvard Hall after the 10:15 am service. Visit spcathedral.org/pride to purchase tickets online.
Please buy your tickets early! We are space-limited to 118 attendees, and the dinner is often a sellout. Because beer and wine will be served, this event is open only to those age 21 and older.
Confessions of St. Augustine
And any reader — Christian or not, philosopher or not — will find much in Augustine that is captivating, inspiring, and challenging. For the story of Augustine’s life as he presents it in the Confessions is at once startlingly intimate and dizzyingly cosmic.
“ ‘How can I make sense of this action?’ turns effortlessly into ‘How can anyone make sense of any action?’ ‘Why did I keep stepping on my own feet?’ leads to ‘Why do we all make such a mess of things?’— and, inevitably, to reflection on what exactly it means for a life, any life, to be a mess, and what it might look like for the mess to get cleaned up, for what is broken and fragmented and dispersed to get put back together.”
The class will meet at 9:00 am on Sundays through May 12 in Harvard Hall, and yes, there will be coffee. Short excerpts from the Confessions will be available for participants to read before each session. Visit spcathedral.org/augustine for more information, a link to the book, and the reading schedule.