Thomas Wolfe wrote: “It is not all bad, but it is not all good, it is not all ugly, but it is not all beautiful, it is life, life, life — the only thing that matters.” We are living in an extraordinary time full of vitality, discovery and transformative movements, but we also live in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Americans of all generations are familiar, whether they know it or not, with Cuba and its history. Words such as “Che” Guevara, embargo, Fidel, Elián González, Mariel, resonate with the American history of the last half century. These terms are also intimately related to Cuba and its peoples. I invite you to join me at this special moment […]
A conversation from ancient China opens up for us a question about the relationship between the world in our mind that grapples with global issues and the world of our hands that do small useful tasks. Do we ignore the small when thinking big and ignore the big when doing small?’ Can we find a […]
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 […]
“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 […]