To Lead a More Simple Life Curbing our impulse to buy too much as well as decluttering our homes is a path towards greater personal satisfaction. Let’s talk about living a life more congruent with our spiritual values. Dave Gerlach is a member of the Fox Valley UU Fellowship in...

Rethinking Prayer As Unitarians we are often uncomfortable with prayer. Who are we praying to?  What are these prayers really for? To avoid any discomfort with these questions we turn to silent prayer or meditation.  For me, this has always felt like a gaping hole in our services, instead of joining...

Random Acts of Kindness for Mother Earth and All Our Relations On Mother’s Day, let us consider the actions that cultivate abundant life for Mother Earth and all our relations. What are the paths that energetically transform our relationships in ways that build understanding and life-giving community among earth’s diverse...

Belief: Our Dangerous Dilemma “Belief” seems to be at the root of many of the ills of our society today as people use their “beliefs” to justify all sorts of damaging and unproductive behavior.  This talk will look at the nature of belief and explore some of the distortions which...

Voices from the Earth If you look in your Thesaurus, you will find dozens of words related to “earth”, “earthling”, “earthly”, and “earthy.” They are wonderful words that range from the soil to the biosphere, men and women to the goddess Gaea, the corporeal to the global, the folksy to the...

Three Physical Requirements for Life on Earth: Clean Air, Clean Water, and _____ _____ History tells us that war, politics, disease, deforestation, and drought have all contributed to societal collapses that punctuate human history. But there is another factor of at least equal importance.  In fact, Wes Jackson of the Land...

How to Make a Resurrection: Easy, Medium, and Hard When a person with a great mind, heart, or message passes away, we find the fact of their death hard to process. This is particularly the case if their end was unexpected, violent, or at the hands of the enemies of...

Escalating Inequality “Upward mobility—the American Dream—has become a myth. Concentration of wealth and power has skyrocketed. Dr. King’s dream of justice and equality has fractured. Half of all Americans are impoverished or struggling, as the middle class shrinks and billionaires take the profits. Where’s our commitment to the Common Good?...

Understanding Ebola: Fear and Heroism Now that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is diminishing, it is a good time to reflect on the meaning of this global health crisis. On the one hand, an immediate response to the spread of the disease was fear, a reaction increased by the...

Deep Listening as Spiritual Practice We are surrounded by sounds every day from our morning alarm clock to the drone of late night TV. At times it may seem sound permeates nearly every aspect of our busy days. Our ears are always “on.” We have no ear-lids after all, so...