Our male children are in crisis and have been for decades now. Research shows that boys are more vulnerable than girls, even in terms of live birth rate, but also in finding their way in the world, trying to balance cultural “norms” of toughness with emotional expressiveness. The result of this collision, combined with institutions that […]

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Having It Out With Death

No one can be mature until they have arrived at the very high spiritual achievement of looking at death and accepting it, perhaps it is the last and highest of all achievements. It casts a mantle of significance over everything we do. Carlos Castenada says: Death is our eternal companion, always to our left, at […]

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Blues Traveler: The Good in Sad

It’s easy to get mired in sadness. But it’s also possible to let sorrow move through you and open you to the light within your heart. Just as anger can be a doorway into strength, and desire the force behind creativity, so sorrow can trigger soft-heartedness, humility, and other profound spiritual emotions. It’s a station […]

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Who’s in Charge?

We live in a paradigm of domination and control. Our political, economic, social, and cultural systems all have an expectation that someone will be in charge. Where does this expectation come from? Is it inherent in our binary brain or our binary sexuality? Is it an appropriate paradigm for the future? We’ll explore some ideas […]

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What do You Think the Bible Is?

Our UU faith tradition was grounded in Christianity. As such, the Bible and its many interpretations have largely shaped UU history.  Yet, for many of us the Bible is a strange, largely unknown book that we rarely, if ever, open. Yet, English authors over the centuries have presumed that their readers were Biblically literate. In […]

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She/He/They/We

With the unfolding conversations and awareness around gender identity and diversity, how do we understand what it means to be “us” in ways that welcome and open the fullness of all our gender identities and possibilities? Rev. Karen Hering is consulting literary minister, rooted at Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, and author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening […]

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“They were not social thinkers, but their friends were. Their summer friends, in particular, harvested facts row on row from newspapers like mice on corncobs. The Maytrees were not always up -to-the-minute. Their city friends envied their peace.” — The Maytrees by Annie Dillard From this hour, freedom! “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d […]

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The Best Possible Day

Most of us have brushes with death when we’re young but in those years it is usually never more than a rare visitor, to be forgotten as quickly as possible. After 50 it becomes an acquaintance, sometimes a frequent one. Too soon, for all of us, it will be a companion and, finally, move in […]

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