As someone who’s spent the last 38 years imploring, cajoling and badgering the flock to ‘COME JOIN US IN CHURCH EVERY SUNDAY!’, I was happy to read a post from UU minister, Victoria Weinstein: Last Sunday morning I picked up the phone in the office. After I said, “Good morning,...
Let’s listen and reflect on five Door County stories. In each story, landscape and memory are intertwined and often historical events drive the plots. We’ll lift up the voices of fisherman Anton Amundson, Ephraimite Emma Trueblood, Horseshoe Island’s Alma Folda, the talented and testy Bill Beckstrom, and two women who sold “London...
If you ask most people if crime has increased and if the world is a scarier place most will answer “Yes!” But statistically crime is down across the country. This feels out of sync with what our news feeds tell us. What is driving this sense of fear and how might we...
The trickster is a beloved figure of mine, disruptive, breaking the rules, violating the norms, challenging authority, pricking our pomposity. He is mythological in nature, corresponding to inner psychic experience. There is another side to God then the one we were taught, darker, fiercer, not at all related to our...
Poststructuralism and Its Influence on Unitarianism Poststructuralism is a philosophical, literary and social movement that says everything is culturally based, and thus culturally biased. The claim is that there is no objective truth, just truth filtered by cultural bias, and that bias is controlled by authorizing and validating power structures....
Do any of us deliberately structure our lives, our behavior, by any rules or guidelines? I would guess many of us go through life reflecting some combination of parental lessons we received in childhood and the life lessons we have experienced as adults. Those of us with a deep Christian...
Throughout our lives people come to us in distress, saying they need someone to talk to about a difficult issue. We want to be helpful, but few of us know how to listen in a way that truly helps. We struggle for the right thing to say. But the truth is that...
What does “woke” really mean? How does it relate to UU’s first principle involving respect for all human beings? How did it come to be a four-letter-word? Estella will talk about the history of this “dirty word” and about how we might respond to its use to control our speech....
I have had some recent interactions where it has been a challenge to feel fully present. This experience has led me to wonder what opportunities, to listen with an open heart, have I missed? What attempts at gaining my attention have I missed because of my desire to keep things...
When a monarch caterpillar pupates into a chrysalis, its entire body breaks down during metamorphosis. Since leaving her position at the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Marie has been experiencing a similar feeling, and has learned a lot about “living in the goo”. Life transitions, planned or unplanned, can be...