TOP is a charitable organization (as described in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code) with the purpose of providing educational programming of women's issues in religion and society, including, but not limited to, lectures and discussion groups.

TOP's Mission Statement:   TOP provides lecture series within a feminist learning community for women, to connect with the sacred dimensions of their experience and to support and encourage each other in the world community.

TOP is a Learning Community of feminist women and men seeking clarity around issues encountered in their daily lives.

Thursday Schedule

10.00 am	A favorite piece of women's music, possibly a Carolyn McDade song
10.05 am	Announcements
10.15 am	An Advisory Committee member speaks about how the day's topic comes from her life
10.45 am	Guest speaker
12 noon	For those who can stay, discussion continues through further questions and comments from the audience
12.30 pm	Lunch break*
1.15 pm	Advisory Committee** reconvenes to plan the series a year ahead
3.00 pm	Day ends

* At lunchtime some of the participants meet downstairs for a support group over their lunch, while others find something to eat in Harvard Square, enjoy informal conversation or leave for the day.

** The Advisory Committee is an open group of women which meets with the Coordinator to plan TOP's fall and spring conferences a year ahead. All participants are welcome to join in this stage of the process. Not everyone comes every time. But over the afternoons of the planning process 30 to 40 women participate in giving shape to each new series.

Conference topics and series themes emerge from those who participate, using a feminist process of sharing our lives and issues, and looking there for concerns from which to design future TOP conference series. This unique method of designing the series is what makes TOP so special.

See Kim Romano's minute long montage of a day at TOP with speaker Callie Crossley on YouTube.

Since 1973 more than 4,300 have participated. We mail to 1,400 more-recent attenders.

Each series is a "course" on a single theme, with various topics each week.

You can come to one conference, several, or to all. You can come to the whole day or to a part of it. Take two hours in the morning to re-invigorate your mind, or spend an extra half hour to join the participatory discussion. Bring a bagged lunch from home or buy lunch at one of the numerous shops on JFK Street or around Harvard Square. You are welcome to contribute to the planning of future series in the afternoon, or to just observe.

We do not gossip about each other but accept each other as we present ourselves in the present moment with our own challenges and our own potential.

We honor the fact that each woman has been oppressed by the fact of living in a patriarchal system.

We come together to realize how important it is to have a feminist analysis of our culture, our education and our society and the other patriarchal structures in which we live.

We empower one another to shape our own lives in authenticity.

We practice mutual respect in speech, in attention to the speaker and in sharing talking time.

"We hear each other into speech." Nell Morton

We nurture our connections to one another with open social events.

"Whoever shows up can play." Elizabeth Dodson Gray

Theology, by its Greek derivation, is "thinking about God" (theos [God] and logos [word]).

But in actual use the word theology has been extended to cover thinking about humans, and then extended still more to cover thinking about our human place in the cosmos.

Theology, thus, is about naming, and that naming has power - the power to shape the way people perceive their lives and their world.

Throughout many centuries male theologians have been unapologetic about making theological statements about human life based only upon their male life experience. And male theologians through the centuries have been unapologetic about projecting their own theological speculations upon females and female life ("Women as like Eve, evil," etc.).

Let us as women then not be reticent about our doing our own theological reflection about our own lives and women's life experience, and our women's search for purpose, spirituality and moral meaning.

Theology in the past, though it presumed to speak for the entire human experience, has been based upon only the life experience of one half - the male half - of the human species. It is our challenge and opportunity as women to explore the theological reflections of the other - silent or unrepresented - half of the human species.

We invite you to this theological opportunity!

TOP began in the fall of 1973 as a Thursday morning fall and spring lecture series by Divinity School faculty for the general public, a public which turned out to be predominantly women.

Over the first decade the women doing the planning - and also those attending - became increasingly feminist, and so did the topics for the lectures. In the late 1970s and the 1980s the series gradually increased in length to ten Thursdays in each series, and in the mid-1980s the sessions became half-day conferences with two or more speakers and now run from 10:00 am to 12:30 pm.

In the early 1980s faculty from other Harvard Schools began to be invited to speak, as well as lawyers, legislators, authors, journalists, environmentalists, psychologists and psychotherapists from the Greater Boston area. In 2007 TOP began to be archived at the Smith College's Sophia Smith Collection, one of the preeminent archives of women's history.

Previous speakers include philosopher and author Sissella Bok, anthropologist and author Mary Catherine Bateson, former Smith College president and author Jill Conway, Federal 1st District judge Nancy Gertner, psychoanalyst and author Jean Baker Miller MD, psychologist and author Irene Stiver, politician and philanthropist Ambassador Swanee Hunt (now at the Kennedy School), elder activist Elsie Frank (Barney's mother), arts activist Elma Lewis, theologians Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox and Harvey Cox, Globe columnists Linda Weltner, Patricia Smith and Derrick Jackson, CBS TV 4 newscaster Liz Walker, and innumerable faculty members from the Divinity School and other schools at Harvard and from other colleges and universities in greater Boston, Worcester and the Connecticut Valley Five Colleges.

Between 50 and 70 people, mostly women, usually attend TOP. Our chronological ages range from the 30s to the 80s. In our past and present religious orientations we are Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, Quaker, Buddhist, post-Christian, Goddess and non-religious. We are single, married, divorced, widowed, remarried, heterosexual, bisexual and lesbian. We are daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, aunts, great-aunts and grandmothers. Most, not all, of us are white; most, not all, of us are middle-class. We are teachers, clergy, housewives, psychotherapists, physicists, business women, lawyers, architects, authors, composers, singers, gardeners, caregivers, artists, and craftswomen. Our participants are a very intelligent, sensitive and responsive group to speak to.

We regret we are not able to offer our speakers any honorarium. Even though we nowadays invite outside speakers as well as Divinity School faculty, our budget is shaped by our origins as a faculty lecture series. The $15 admission fee we charge goes to printing, postage, computer services (for the mailing list), and a one-day-a-week stipend for a coordinator, Elizabeth Dodson Gray. In response to a change in university policy, Harvard Divinity School (HDS) and TOP separated in 2004 so TOP is now an independent non-profit organization - which continued to meet, as it did in the previous thirty years, Thursdays fall and spring at HDS. Now, since Rockefeller Hall at HDS was renovated, TOP has been meeting at University Lutheran Church.

Participants drive up to two-and-a-half hours to come to our Thursday half-days. We mail to about 1400 alumni in Greater Boston, Eastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Rhode Island, a few in Hartford CT and the Amherst MA area, a few in Vermont, a considerable number in southern New Hampshire, and a few in Maine. We also mail to 600 churches and synagogues. We typically get some new attenders each Thursday. Most come because a friend brings them. In our first thirty years more than 4,300 different individuals have attended our program.