The Religious Impulse We are alive and we are going to die. Religion is our response to these two realities. We are, in fact, the religious animal. Death casts a mantle over everything we do. The answers we seek have to find meaning beyond our mortality. A major conundrum of our...

Why Don’t We Recognize Our True Selves? From a Buddhist perspective, this is the great conundrum of our lives:  we are simultaneously one vast living organism and a distinct living person.  And we are vastly more comfortable with those whom we perceive to be like ourselves, at least on the surface. There are...

Breaking our “mind forged manacles” in an age of global violence The violence and disorder that rages around the world today is a sign that we are in a period where the global system is breaking down. Our participation in finding a path forward can’t be limited by “mind forged...

Miracle Fair Roger Bertschausen’s favorite poet is Wislawa Szymborska, the late Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet. Some of Roger’s all-time favorite services at the Fellowship have been collaborative sermons with the accomplished mezzo-soprano, Cynthia Stiehl. So you can imagine Roger’s excitement that his last collaboration with Cyndy at the Fellowship will...

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...

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...

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...

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 together we...

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...

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?...