I don’t get it about the natural world. Like, greenery, without people in it, is supposed to do what? ~Charles Smith How to do religious community in a post-religious world . . . . As a senior minister in an urban congregation, it’s something I think about every day. For most urban North Americans, the choice of (non)religious community is as profuse as the choice of breakfast cereals, frozen pizzas, or any other consumer good. We can even find... Read more
My colleagues in Unitarian Universalist ministry are blogging this month under the hashtag #SexUUality. Sex is a good topic for us liberal ministers. We have something important to say: that sex is fine, that pleasure is good, that consenting adults should be free to make their own decisions about what they do in private. We affirm relationships in which sex is simply not going to be for procreation, whether it be same-sex couples, older folks, people who can’t bear children... Read more
I bet I’m not the only one whose Facebook page is lighting up right now with people arguing about vacccines, President Obama’s comments about Christian extremism, and other current events. Though there’s always something, and my Minnesota location could bias me—I think it’s partly just February. Our media comes out of the East Coast, where the weather has been bad enough this year to make Minnesotans smile in gratitude about our own, which is saying something. I have to wonder... Read more
I always enjoy reading columns by New York Times Op-Ed writer David Brooks. His opinions are not of the usual “conservatives say the darnedest things” variety, and his 3 February 2015 column “Building Better Secularists” is no exception. (See the link below) First off, Brooks admits some inconvenient truths that most apologists for religion won’t, such as the fact that evidence says secular people are more—not less—“moral” and law-abiding than religious people. (Go figure!) Brooks also faces the fact that... Read more
Late in his life the philosopher Richard Rorty—well known to be an atheist—was asked by an interviewer if he could define “holy.” I suppose the interlocutor thought Rorty would be stumped by the question, or even perhaps show some sympathy for one religion or another. Rorty was not stumped by the question. He responded, “Holy: the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” For... Read more
OK, I admit it—I love it when postmodernism calls it right. And the screeches and whines that have emanated over media since the film appeared are the sound of metanarratives dying. It was the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard who postulated that the essence of postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives.” A metanarrative is a big overarching myth (lie) that justifies the ways of power to man (and woman). One metanarrative is that the Europeans who journeyed to the Western Hemisphere were up... Read more
Today we welcome the Reverend Paul Beedle, parish minister for First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans, as a guest blogger on the UU Collective! Reflections: Selma by the Reverend Paul Beedle: Sometimes folks speak of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s as if it only belonged to that period of a little over ten years of activism in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, was prominent. I think it’s important to remember that the progress of... Read more
Truth is power. I don’t think many people disagree with that statement. Truth is power. Yet we often miss that little “is,” functioning as an equal sign: Power is truth. That’s an equally “true” statement. As the old proverb goes, “Until lions have historians, tales of the hunt will glorify the hunter.” I pondered this recently as I spent a pleasant afternoon at a cafe on the piazza of Santa Maria de Trastevere in Rome. Santa Maria is a... Read more
I learned in school that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. What I did not learn in school was that he had a vision and a clear sense of what it would take to get there. I was taught about how he worked to end racism, but not taught that he had named the “Giant Triplets” of interrelated evil to be Racism, Militarism, and Poverty. It wasn’t long after his transformational work expanded from civil rights to... Read more
Captain, We’re Out of Beer! When those adventurers we now call the Pilgrims realized they weren’t going to make it to Virginia on their beer supply, they did what most idealists do, they jumped ship. But first they wrote up a little agreement for themselves that nowadays we call the Mayflower Covenant. This was 1620. A covenant is not a contract. Imbued as they were in their scriptures, the Pilgrims chose instead the sort of agreement that God made with... Read more
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