I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Christmas is coming. I know, you may not have noticed … if you’ve spent the last month living in a fall-out shelter and you’ve never gone shopping or turned on the radio or the TV.
I’m not complaining. Well, maybe a little, but only about the chintzier [...]
Ever since the election, there has been a heightened interest in the role of religion in America’s public life, including claims by some members of the so-called religious right that in some essential way, the United States is a Christian country - not just demographically, but ontologically, in some innate, immutable way that should be [...]
(Just not so much as before!)
There is a complicated relationship between Unitarian Universalism and Humanism, one that has changed over time and goes on changing, a fact that does not go unnoticed or unremarked upon by UU humanists and non-humanists alike. In particular these days, Humanism seems to be a less predominating outlook in [...]
Ah, Halloween tomorrow, and a chance for me to preach about it today. I do that every now and then - every fifteen years or so (a sentence a minister gets to use if he or she stays in one place long enough).
Why would I do it ever? Well, it was originally a [...]
We are so alike, you and I.
And we are so different.
We are so alike, we human beings all over the globe.
We are so different from each other.
Is it a good thing, being different?
We all are. The religion we belong to is, too.
In fact, just being human makes us different.
Of course, in a lot [...]
We are in the midst of the Jewish high holy days. Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, is behind us, and the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, lies just ahead.
These are not holidays I was brought up in. And while I have preached about both, hoping to share some of the wisdom and hope they have [...]
[I plan to give the opening story extemporaneously. But it goes something like this: I was at a ministers' meeting recently. (I know I now have your rapt attention. Ooo - a story about a ministers' meeting - those are always wild!)
At some point mid-morning we broke up into groups of nine or ten to [...]
The director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently said
of one of the Museum’s supporters, David Rockefeller, no less, the former,
long-time president of the museum’s Board, “He’s the lifeblood of the
institution. Of course, his benefactions range from the hundred million he
just pledged us to the great Cezanne ‘Boy on a Red Vest,’ [...]
Every Memorial Day weekend, when the country is commemorating those who have served in our military endeavors, for many years I have taken the chance to recognize many of the people who have died in the previous twelve months who contributed in a variety of ways to our times, not all of them positive, but [...]
Last week was Question and Answer Sunday, a long-standing if dubious tradition in which parishioners write questions on 3×5 cards and your professional staff - Erin, Polly and I — try to answer them off the top of our heads. This has been going on for almost thirty years.
By now, the congregation for that Sunday [...]
The church year nears its end - here it is May. Thank you all for your
continuing presence at our communal worship, which is the very heart of the
congregation’s existence. (True, without the blood of life generated in the
canvass, we wouldn’t be here at all; but the heart of it all, why we exist, is
the corporate [...]
“All life comes from the sea.” [words from the Prelude] This is true. There is
another chant that says, “We come from the ocean.” And we do. Well, actually, I came
from my mother, or (if you prefer) from Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. That
is where I was born. Just so, my grandparents came from Templeton [...]