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Signs of Life’s Christmas Festival 2006 - 12 events for 12 days before Christmas - features kids’ story time. Our talented readers will bring to life Christmas stories from the pages of classics and new tales to delight the younger set. Mom and Dad can shop the bookstore or art gallery, knowing that the kids are well occupied. From 1-4 pm.

What could be better than the sound of a french horn playing Christmas music?  How about four french horns, or maybe more?  Tonight, the Signs of Life’s Christmas Festival 2006 - 12 events for 12 days before Christmas brings you Carol Ney and friends all tooting their horns for a delightful evening of music.

Signs of Life’s Christmas Festival 2006 - 12 events for 12 days before Christmas - features a reader’s theater version of A Christmas Carol, described by Charles Dickens as his favorite work. If you’ve never participated in reader’s theater, you are in for a treat. OK, you’re in for a treat even if you have done reader’s theater before. We’ll ask for volunteers from the audience to read each part. No rehearsal, no props, whatever happens, happens - God bless us every one!

Signs of Life’s Christmas Festival 2006 - 12 events for 12 days before Christmas - features a time for making your own Christmas cards tonight at 7:30. Kids and adults can join gallery director James Schaefer in making beautiful creations to send Christmas wishes to friends and family. Bring something to cut with and something to color with.

To get a preview of what will happen tonight, you can watch interviews channel 49 in Topeka did with our gallery director James Schaefer and book manager Seth Toebben.

Signs of Life’s Christmas Festival 2006 - 12 events for 12 days before Christmas - features members of the KU Women’s Glee Club tonight at 7:30, presenting songs of the season.

And you can continue to bring in your non-perishable food items for the Christmas Community Can Collection to benefit the Leo Center.

Christmas Festival 2006! During the Christmas season, Signs of Life will present 12 events during 12 days before Christmas. There will be carol singing, Christmas-card making, music of all sorts, even a readers theater of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. For details, view the flyer, or check out our calendar. Also, look for the flyer as an insert in today’s Lawrence Journal-World newspaper.

Author and historian Darryl Hart will speak at 7:30 pm tonight at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The title of his talk is “The Last Dance: Why the Romance between the Religious Right and American Conservatism May be Over.” Dr. Hart’s most recently published book, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation between Church and State (September 2006) provides the backdrop for Hart’s analysis of evangelicals’ rise to power during the last 25 years.

This weekend Dr. Hart will be speaking locally at a conference on Christianity and Culture sponsored by the Aletheia Forum. His talk at the conference will also draw from another of his recent books, Deconstructing Evangelicalism. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hart will be Signs of Life friend Caleb Stegall as well as World Magazine managing editor Timothy Lamer.

Have you joined the growing club of coffee connoisseurs? Joe Farthing, local owner and roaster of J&S Coffee, discussed “The New Connoisseurship: Specialty Coffee and Tea Industries in the 21st Century” in our Public House lecture series recently (what is it?). You can watch a video of his talk here.

Caleb Stegall, editor of The New Pantagruel, gave a talk in our Culinary Culture series on “Culinary Politics: Prairie Uprisings and Agricultural Revolts in Kansas History”. This fascinating presentation centered around the farm economy of the 1890s in Kansas and might challenge us to rethink our modern political labels of “conservative” and “liberal”. The talk was videotaped and is available now to view online.

The African Children’s Choir performs at special events and concerts throughout the world, raising the profile of the African child as ambassadors for all children in Africa who have become orphans because of the AIDS pandemic.

The group will give a concert at Lawrence’s Free Methodist Church on Sunday, Nov. 5th at 6:00 pm. Many of the children in the Choir have lost one or both parents to poverty or disease, yet their message is one of hope and joy as they spotlight the plight of children in Africa.

You can catch all the exuberance of their music on their CD Windows on the World. Funds raised from this CD build and staff schools that provide food, shelter and education for orphans in various parts of Africa.