The Canterbury Forum is a gathering of mainstream and progressive religious communities on the Central Coast to hear lectures and engage in conversation about religious issues relevant to the relationship between religion and the broader society and culture—including science, history, and the arts.

The Forum invites all who regard faith and reason as partners, rather than antagonists, to join in this collective and collaborative effort to educate and to promote an informed, welcoming and compassionate approach to religion and social engagement.

2020 Calendar

All the meetings are held at the Waldport Community Center from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm.

Put the dates on your calendar and come prepared to be enlightened, challenged and provoked to thought and conversation!

Tom Kerns, Ph.D.

On February 22nd, Tom Kerns, Ph.D., will address the forum on the topic "Youth Climate Courts, Human Rights and the Courage to Be."

Tom will offer the Forum an overview of human rights, their implications for the climate crisis, and some new tools — such as Youth Climate Courts, with a youth judge, youth prosecutor and youth jury — that become available to regular people when human rights standards are foregrounded. He will conclude with brief reflections on “How shall we then live?” and open the floor for discussion.

Tom Kerns is the Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory, Philosophy Professor emeritus at Seattle Community College, and author of Environmentally Induced Illnesses: Ethics, Risk Assessment and Human Rights (McFarland, 2001). He has lectured at WHO Headquarters in Geneva on human rights issues in HIV vaccine research and served as commissioner on the New Zealand People’s Inquiry into Aerial Pesticide Sprays Over Auckland (2006). Tom helped shepherd into being the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights Fracking and Climate Change and is a member of the Drafting Group for the Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change.

Franki Trujillo-Dalbey, Ph.D., and Barbara Turrill

CANCELLED - will be rescheduled at a later date
On March 21st, Franki Trujillo-Dalbey, Ph.D., and Barbara Turrill will give a presentation on the topic "Critical Questions About Power, Privilege, and Other Difficult Dialogues."

We are living in very difficult times as expressions of hatred, racism, and homophobia are all too common today. Some of the actions and beliefs we read about and experience appear to be simply misguided ignorance while others are intentionally designed to marginalize and actively harm and silence anyone different from oneself. In this interactive session Franki and Barbara will explore personal biases as well as structural and institutional privileges in an effort to describe and demystify how racism is expressed, power used, and privilege maintained by us all unconsciously and unwittingly to perpetuate inequality in our daily lives and the institutions to which we belong.

Franki Trujillo-Dalbey, Ph.D., holds degrees in intercultural communication and a doctorate in urban studies & community development. She is semi-retired and is currently teaching Intercultural Communication at Oregon Coast Community College. In addition to teaching at Portland State University, Franki was a senior civil rights investigator, and co-principal of Communication Works, an intercultural training and mediation business and was the managing editor of The Sage Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence. Franki is KYAQ 91.7 FM’s board president and director and spends her free time playing electric bass with The Dalbey Gang.

Barbara L. Turrill recently retired as Behavioral Health Division Director with Lincoln County. She has over 30 years experience working in Behavioral Healthcare, including as a therapist, trainer and administrator. Her academic training was completed at Antioch New England (MA, Counseling Psychology and Dance/Movement Therapy) and at the University of Oregon (MA, Culture, Curriculum, and Communication). She has been a folksinger, songwriter and musician throughout her life, releasing a CD in 2018 called “Southbound Door.” She performs regularly in Oregon and California.

Kempton Hewitt, Ph.D.

On April 25th, Kempton Hewitt, Ph.D. will present a talk entitled "Red-Letter Jesus."

In the early 1980’s a group of scholars took up the task of revisiting the practice of printing the New Testament words of Jesus in red. They applied historical-critical tools to establish a database of assured “Jesus speak” and produced an edition of the Gospels that distinguishes degrees of historical certainty in identifying Jesus’ actual words. Their published edition used the colors black, gray, pink and red to indicate the committee’s consensus about the genuineness of Jesus’ various sayings in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Thomas. This group of scholars, known as “The Jesus Seminar”—with the help of national media attention—set in motion the so-called “third quest” for the historical Jesus. Of course, many conservative voices condemned the enterprise as heretical and some of the participants were pressured to quit the seminar or even fired from their academic positions. Dr. Hewitt's presentation will briefly sketch the kind of tools and principles used by the Jesus Seminar, then offer three examples from "The Five Gospels,” and conclude by suggesting the difference this makes in current cultural divisions—divisions often based on or bolstered by competing understandings of Jesus of Nazareth.

C.M. Kempton Hewitt, S.T.M. (Yale), Ph.D. (Durham) was a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar for seventeen years and is listed as such in The Five Gospels. Further background is available on the Westar Institute website.

For more information: