January 14, 2018
It will be 50 years ago come this April, but the memory is vivid as ever. I was a 22 year old seminarian in Rochester, New York and was doing my field education at a large, liberally oriented American Baptist church in a Rochester suburb. Just as I was going into a meeting there on the evening of April 4, 1968 someone said they’d heard on the news that Martin Luther King had been shot.
January 7, 2018
A few weeks ago, I attended a Memorial Service for a woman named Nori. She was about 10 years my junior and had died from pancreatic cancer. Nori discovered Unitarian Universalism by way of the Nashua UU Church in the early years of my ministry there, and very quickly became involved in the life of the congregation. I felt honored to be her minister.
December 24, 2017
As for the Bible’s stories, like every story their truth depends upon their listeners.
December 10, 2017
While we do not know who Jesus really was, this does not mean he was made up out of thin air. He is not a complete invention or fabrication. What the New Testament gospels and letters give us is an interpretation of a man who will always remain hidden behind a veil of history, never to be fully revealed.
December 3, 2017
What I want to share with you this morning is the conversation I like to have with anyone who for any number of reasons is trying to make some sense out of any idea of God; as, I will admit, I’ve been doing for much of my life with greater and lesser degrees of success.
November 26, 2017
When one looks at the many and varied stories on how the many and varied religions of the world came into existence, more often than not there’s a martyr in there somewhere. And yes, we Unitarians do have our own martyr in the person of a one Michael Servetus.
November 19, 2017
Annie Dillard’s book “A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is an account of time she spent living in a rural area outside of Roanoke, Virginia in the early 1970s. Here’s how she describes her home of that time: “I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. I think of (my) house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and keeps me steadied in the current…It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about.”
November 5, 2017
Mr. Alan Weisman came out with his book “The World Without Us” some ten years ago. In it Mr. Weisman uses a very fanciful premise to play out some very factual, and scientifically based, scenarios.
October 29, 2017
The memento I brought for the service today is an old high school yearbook, published in 1927. Among the senior class pictures is one of an attractive young woman known as “Lottie.” I never even knew she had that name until I discovered the book after she’d died, and I was helping clean out the house in which she’d lived for much of her life.
October 15, 2017
Today I want to bring this matter of class closer to home. Home in this case being our Unitarian Universalist movement, and this congregation as a part of that movement—our UU Association. I’ll be drawing in part on a report that came out last summer, just prior to our UU General Assembly, by our Association’s Commission of Appraisal titled Class Action: The Struggle with Class in Unitarian Universalism. And I’ll be throwing in some of my own stuff as well.