A minor pet peeve of mine is how many Unitarian Universalists when recounting the history of our liberal faith make Hungarian speaking Unitarianism the ancestor of English speaking Unitarianism. This can happen because the continental Unitarians come first. But in fact they’re parallel movements, two separate streams that had almost nothing to do with each other until the last couple of decades when American Unitarian Universalists “discovered” our oppressed cousins as the iron curtain rusted and shattered… There is no... Read more

Over at UU World Online, Doug Muder has contributed another of his thoughtful essays, this one Unfinished with Christianity. Within a context of how he finds it hard to have an “elevator speech,” a succinct statement of liberal religious faith, Doug argues much more expansively (and I’m sure, persuasively) than I write here how we need to struggle with our faiths of origin and as Unitarian Universalists, whatever else may also be true, our faith of origin is Christianity. I,... Read more

(Thank you Dan, for this jewel! And a tip of the Hatlo hat to Will for pointing it out…) Read more

You can spend a few minutes in the funny pages… Read more

Hakuin’s Song of ZazenTranslated by Norman Waddell All beings by nature are Buddha,As ice by nature is water.Apart from water there is no ice;Apart from beings, no Buddha.How sad that people ignore the nearAnd search for truth afar:Like someone in the midst of waterCrying out in thirst,Like a child of a wealthy homeWandering among the poor.Lost on dark paths of ignorance,We wander through the Six Worlds,From dark path to dark path–When shall we be freed from birth and death?Oh, the... Read more

Anyone who pokes through my blog knows I’m very, very fond of the Desert Fathers, (here’s another more sectarian, but frankly better brief take.) those Christian monks and really, nuns as well, who fled to the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries of our common era, seeking deepest wisdom. What remains for us are fragments of conversation and briefest homilies. For someone of my spiritual tastebuds among the intriguing things about them is how often they sound like... Read more

the coolest thing since sliced bread! Well, almost… If you want the cutting edge of UU outreach, check out UU Planet! Read more

On this day in 1841 educator Dorothea Dix visited the East Cambridge Jail to teach a Sunday school class. She found mentally ill women incarcerated with violent criminals. All were living in horrific conditions without heat or furniture. When asked how these conditions could be tolerated she was told the “insane do not feel heat or cold.” She began to visit perhaps every jail in the Commonwealth carefully documenting what she witnessed. Armed with this information she began to lobby... Read more

Don’t worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music. The strumming and the flute notes rise ito the atmosphere, and even if the whole world’s harp should burnup, there will still be hidden instruments playing. So the candle flickers and goes out. We have a piece of flint, an a spark. This singing art is sea foam. The graceful movements come from a... Read more

the moment is near a hawk hangs high in the air winter dreams the green james ishmael ford Read more