Whether we’re thinking about our current national political and cultural realities, the mood of our Association, recent events in our city, or even the state of things within our own congregation, many of us are decrying what seems to be a deepening sense of division, of separation. The classic question,...
I carry a collection of photographs on this iPad. Some are of my kids. (141, actually … pictures, not kids!) Just edging them out – at 156 pictures – is a collection I call “icons.” These are images of people – real and imaginary – who in one way or...
Summer of 2017: This is the official statement of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, outlining the response(s) planned by many of the faith communities in C’ville. (The list of signatories is at the end.) Over the next several days I will post more information, both practical and theological. The Charlottesville Clergy Collective is...
In perhaps one of her most well-known poems, Emily Dickenson wrote of hope: Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all … My mother had a friend named Pauli Murray. I’ve mentioned her before, and...
Yesterday morning I joined with a group of people in a park in downtown Charlottesville. The park has been getting a lot of attention lately, both locally and in the national media, because of an effort to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee which stands so prominently in its...
Yesterday I promised that I would return to one of the most frequent responses people who identify as white have to the use of the term “White Supremacy” as the way to describe the dominant culture in which we, to borrow a phrase, “live, and move, and have our being.’...
During the years I served the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, Maine, I regularly had lunch with a colleague from the United Church of Christ congregation across the street. I don’t remember what prompted this particular exchange, but Peter once made the observation that Unitarian Universalists, as a whole, were...
This month’s theme is “transformation,” and as I sat to write I found myself curious about the difference between change and transformation. The word change means, “to make or become different,” and it comes from the Old French changier, which means essentially the same thing. Transformation is defined as, “a...
This is the text of a Letter to the Editor that I’ve submitted to the Daily Progress: Donald Trump’s recent executive order banning entry into the United States of “immigrants and nonimmigrants” from seven majority-Muslim countries is nothing more than he had promised he would do, and nothing less than...
During the Presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the country. To be “fair,” he has defended his ban as simply being a precautionary measure of banning for 90 days entry into the United States travelers from seven specific countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya,...