Philip K Dick was born on the 16th of December in 1928. So, he would have been eighty-seven today. He was brilliant and mad as a hatter. I suspect his ability to see things sidewise was connected to these two things. Among his most salient observations, one that I keep in mind a lot, is “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Although I have to admit his advice “Don’t try to solve serious... Read more

Jesus has been on my mind of late. In part I’m sure because of the holiday season. At the Unitarian Universalist church I served in Providence we had a tradition of a pick up Christmas pageant, boisterous, and with unitarian flourishes here and there, but basically following the conventional pattern. Makes sense as in New England Christmas is pretty much a Unitarian invention, the Puritan founders knew it was really a pagan holiday and had banned it. And it was... Read more

(A small warning. There is lots and lots of bad language in the film, and because of that a little here, too…) Yesterday afternoon after church and a nap, Jan and I saw Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. I was really curious at how Mr Lee would use Aristophanes’ twenty-five hundred year old play, Lysistrata as the scaffolding for a contemporary tale of war and violence, and women stopping it by withholding sex from their combatant men. In the film “No peace,... Read more

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU Star Wars, Joseph Campbell, and the Rise of our Contemporary Unitarian Universalism A Homily 13 December 2015 James Ishmael Ford Pacific Unitarian Church Rancho Palos Verdes, California As you may have heard, the first film in the third Star Wars trilogy will be opening around the country this coming Friday. You may have also noticed how this is a big deal. It threads my own generation, who were the first to be captured by... Read more

On this day when the good and the great have gathered in Paris to hammer out a climate accord that might, just might save our planet from some of the worst effects of our ravaging, it might be a good moment to remember today is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. According to the legends of the Catholic church there were a series of visitation of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego. Actually... Read more

Frank Sinatra was born on this day in 1915. The essence of cool for a generation. Actually, thanks to a long life with several reinventions, as well as modern recording technologies to catch it all, the essence of cool for several generations. In some ways I prefer the older Sinatra. But for this, let’s go to the beginnings… Read more

11 December 2015 An Open Letter From the Unitarian Universalist Clergy Of Orange County, Long Beach, & Rancho Palos Verdes Dear ones, We are writing to call your attention to a grave injustice, and to ask your help in addressing it. Not that many years ago Catholics were seen as some “other” who could not be good Americans. More recently Jews suffered many insults and abuses because they did not belong to the dominant faith, again they were seen as... Read more

It was on this day in 361 that Julian, later to be called the Apostate, entered Constantinople as the Roman Empire’s sole emperor. A golden child of the Constantinian dynasty, he had previously served as Caesar of the western provinces. His army proclaimed him Augustus 360, and with the death of his rival Constantius he was acknowledged universally. He would rule for two years. Most notably Julian was the last non-Christian emperor. The Christian tide had already probably ebbed past... Read more

It was on this day in 1968 that the American Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who had been attending an interfaith monastic conference in Bankok, Thailand, stepped out of his bath and apparently reached and touched an electric fan, was shocked and suffered a fatal heart attack. By coincidence it was the twenty-seventh anniversary of his entrance into Gethsemane Abbey not far outside of Louisville, Kentucky. The author of the best selling spiritual memoir Seven Storey Mountain, followed by many other... Read more

The great John Milton was born on this day in 1608. Milton was a disputant, a man of letters, at one point a bureaucrat, a theological and political speculator, but most of all a poet. Considered one of the greatest produced within the bounds of Great Britain, one or two consider him their greatest. Me, I like Milton’s theological speculations. He rejected the trinity and was a principal in publishing an English edition of the Racovian Catechism. He appears to... Read more