Read the Order of Service. These three questions were inscribed by the artist Paul Gauguin on a painting in 1897, and they form the basis of one of our hymns.  (Where do we come from?  What are we?  Where are we going?)  They also suggest an intellectual approach to forming identity — our identity (individual or […]

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Read the Order of Service. After coming home from General Assembly this past summer, our Director of Faith Development, Leia Durland-Jones, told me that I should watch the Sunday morning service and, particularly, to listen to the sermon that had been given by the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd.  Not that much after, our Director of Administration […]

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January 22, 2017: The Prophetic Role

“After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history.”  This description of a then still upcoming television program was published in a Scottish newspaper last week.  It continues, “Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is […]

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December 24, 2016: Christmas Eve Services

4:30:   Christmas Pageant Read the Order of Service. Our annual highly participatory Christmas Pageant is a fully family-friendly event. 7:00:  UU Christian Community Our Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship offers communion in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. 8:00:  A Service of Stories and Carols Read the Order of Service. Hear the meaning of Christmas through different lenses, sing some […]

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Read the Order of Service. During this “holiday season” there are celebrations to mark the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, Winter Solstice, Yule, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Eve (not to mention Festivus).  What are Unitarian Universalists to make of this, and what might this season tell us about being a people of presence?  Rev. […]

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December 4, 2016: Be Here Now

Read the Order of service. When I was a kid, two of my favorite possessions were a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and Baba Ram Dass’s book Be Here Now, admittedly a pretty trippy book that has been called a “countercultural bible,” and a “seminal” text for the 1970s hippie culture.  And while it’s three-word title is now quite common […]

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November 27, 2016: Sharing Our Stories

Read the Order of service. This month we have said that we are “a community of story.”  On this Sunday after Thanksgiving, many of us no doubt have stories to tell – stories from this year, and stories of years gone by; stories that evoke laughter, and those that bring out tears.  Today we will have […]

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Read the Order of Service. The image of “the welcome table” has been fully embraced in religious metaphor, but if its fruits can be seen nearly everywhere, it is important to remember that its roots are in slavery.  Enslaved African Americans sung about a “welcome table” at which they would one day be free to […]

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October 30, 2016: Healing Our Past

Mainstream American culture acts as if everything important happened today, or will happen in the near future, like a car driving down the highway with no rearview mirror.  Yet the majority of other world cultures know that our past is intimately intertwined with the present.  Día de los Muertos, and festivals like it, are a […]

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October 16, 2016: Help Heal the World

Read the Order of service. In 2007 the Unitarian Universalist Association began a national marketing campaign which had as its tagline:  “Nurture your spirit; help heal the world.”  This might sound like a grandiose objective, were it not for that first word, “help …”  When we set our goal as helping to heal the world we […]

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