Opening Words: The German wildlife photographer Norbert Rosing has a particular affinity for polar bears. His work has been featured in National Geographic, and in 2006 he published, The World of the Polar Bear, which follows a family of bears over the course of a year in words and pictures. You may have heard...
Opening Words: The abbot of a provincial monastery was in something of a tizzy, because the abbot of his school’s main temple was coming for a visit, and he wanted everything to be just perfect. He had set his students to polishing every bit of wood, and brass, and gold, and...
Congregational Meeting, June 3rd, 2018 During our Congregational Meeting I made reference to the written report I’d submitted, and I heard from some folks that they hadn’t found it easily accessible. Following up on publishing Adam’s President’s Report yesterday, I thought it’d make sense to post mine here as well....
Once there was a man, walking along in the countryside, when he chanced upon a woman hard at work doing something which seemed kind of strange. By the time the man got there, she had already stretched out two long ropes in parallel, staking the ends on either side. Now she was...
I want to tell you something absolutely amazing this morning. Or, to be more precise, I want to tell you aboutsomething absolutely amazing. You might think that I’m going to tell you about the youth who will be bridging in a moment – and you’re right, I could, they are amazing, and the journey that...
Anyone who has lived in Charlottesville for over a year has likely spent some time explaining where and who we are. No, we’re not in North Carolina. Home of University of Virginia. A little blue dot in a sea of red. That changed suddenly after the events of August 12,...
In April of 1865, at the end of the Civil War, Union troops entered the city of Charleston, S.C. A great many of the white residents of Charleston had left the city in advance of the soldiers, but the Black citizens remained, welcoming the troops to the city where it had...
This service was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the formal founding of the congregation. Looking Back; Looking Forward It was the early 1940s, and a woman named Carrie Baker moved to Charlottesville from Montclair, NJ. In a letter to a friend she said that she liked her new home...
We have sung the hymn Morning Has Broken, with its references to the sensation of fresh defall in the wet garden, the sound of blackbird singing, and the sight of sunlight. The hymn writer praises for them, and names their origin in the Word, meaning the sacred text of the Bible,...
Kate Fraleigh, who until recently was Chair of the Racial Justice Committee, shares some of her evolving thinking about what’s been happening here since Christian Rivera found an anonymous racist note in her mailbox on Monday, February 26, as well as about our work in ending white supremacy. [Here is...
