Quest for meaning
Courage comes in many forms and it wears many faces. We often think of those who put themselves in harms’ way for the sake of others as being courageous. The firefighter who rushes into a burning building. The soldier who risks life and limb to save a buddy who’s been wounded. The mother who shields [...]
A few years ago, a member of my congregation with a background in science asked me why, in his words, “so many people insist that there’s some kind of life after death?” I don’t think he was prepared for my response, which was to say that it’s because there is. I believe that that death [...]
I recently participated in a church board of trustees’ retreat in which a congregant, Travis Ploeger, lead us in some improv exercises in the style of his work with the Washington Improv Theater. It was challenging and fun to be a part of a group stepping a little out of its collective comfort zone (no [...]
The aspect of my personal faith that seems to bring about the most confusion in friends and colleagues is that I believe I have a deep and abiding personal relationship with a God that is incapable of knowing that I even exist. I find that the confusion about this theological point rests not only with [...]
A growing number of people in the United States define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Study after demographic study shows that this segment of our population is rising steadily, as people growing up in a pluralistic society reject the rigid dogma that they associate with “religion.” Maybe you’re someone who has claimed this title [...]
This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of what is known today as the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians. Its first minister, the Rev. Dr. Norbert Fabián Čapek, created a ritual that is celebrated by Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists all over the world, Flower Communion. Čapek described the ceremony in a 1923 letter [...]
Last week a Baptist pastor by the name of Worley got a fair bit of internet attention for declaring that gay people should all be stuck behind an electric fence – lesbians in one area and “queers and homosexuals” in another, where food could be dropped to them from an airplane until they all eventually [...]
For Sunday, May 27th, I titled the worship service at the Church of the Restoration, “Sex and War: Love and Hope.” My title mostly came from a 2008 book by Malcolm Potts and Tom Hayden, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. It’s a very [...]
Women’s studies classes in college introduced me to the idea of feminine images of God/goddess. Frankly, I hadn’t really much thought about it up to that point. God was simply not an idea that I much related to, since God seemed to be distant, vague, and to alternate unpredictably between benevolent and judgmental. But [...]
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