Hi: some news I need to share with you.

Last Sunday, on April 2, I experienced a pretty bad stroke, and I was in the hospital until Friday evening. I am now at home, and I am expected to fully recover.

Unfortunately, I now have Aphasia which is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to a specific region of the brain. To be diagnosed with Aphasia, a person's speech or language might be significantly impaired in the certain aspects of communication following the acquired brain injury.

You might think as my difficulty as being jumbled words, and difficulties with Aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words, and the difficulty to speak.

However, intelligence is totally unaffected (well, to the extent I have no more nor less intelligence than I have ever had).

So, obviously I will need speech therapy, and as a certain extent I will need to “re-learn” how to re-speaking.

The most important I am boring with you my diagnose is to clarify that I will am expected to recover, hopefully within about 6-8 weeks. And in the interim, I will be participating in our Compassion Consortium activities as much as possible. And obviously the Compassion Consortium will not miss a beat, and our Spiritual Team will continue to lead us all together in my interim period as always.

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SWAG! SWAG! GET YOUR SWAG WHILE IT'S HOT!

Be the envy of all your friends!

Strut down the street proudly announcing to the world that you are a Compassion Consortium Compassionist!

Yes, you too can now purchase official Compassion Consortium merchandise with our new logol

Lastly, you may have received a couple of emails from Compassion Consortium "Forum" which seem to be advertisements. I was not aware that we even have a CC "Forum", and do not know how unknown persons were able to access this Forum and send out advertisements unrelated to the CC. We think have fixed this, and we apologize if you received these.

Rev. William

Introducing Adriana DiFazio and New Essay

We are very pleased to introduce to you Adrian DiFazio, a third-year MDiv student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City studying Buddhism and Interreligious Engagement and completing her Field Education placement with the Compassion Consortium.

Adriana DiFazio (she/her) is a third-year MDiv student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City studying Buddhism and Interreligious Engagement. She is completing her Field Education for her MDiv degree with the Compassion Consortium and is a student in the Ordained Animal Chaplaincy Training.

Adriana was drawn to the Compassion Consortium for her field education experience to bridge and supplement her human-centered chaplaincy training to include the more-than-human world. She is most excited about developing her theological thinking in company and collaboration with other eco-animal centered spiritually oriented humans.

You can follow along with Adriana's MDiv thesis research on Instagram @vegantheologian.

In this month's essay, Adriana explores a profound question: "How can pro-animal rights movements and scholars play on affective congruences for the benefit of non-human animals? How can pro-animal movements create a feeling, embodied karmic ripening in favor of non-human animals on a cultural scale?"

Click here to read Adriana's Essay

Rev. William