God’s Goods: Human and Natural I’m so glad you’ve invited me here today and that you’ve come. This brief sermon has been forty years in the making. They say preachers really only have one sermon that they then elaborate on. This is that one. It says what I most care about and intend to serve the rest of my life. I’ll be using some religious terms here. I hope and trust that doesn’t dissuade the more humanistic of you from listening past them to the…
Friends know I’ve been spending lots of time learning about and addressing Global Warming. What is it? What to do? Here are my favorite sites for easy-to-picture, comprehensive, and reliable information. Click around on the many links in each for a fast and fun view of the slow and problematic predicament we’re in. You might want to visit and bookmark each now for easy reference later. From NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): http://www.climate.gov/ From NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration); http://climate.nasa.gov/ The World Bank:…
I was interviewed by my dear friend, Aletha Nowitzky, on her Saturday morning (10 - 11AM) radio show "Tasty Topics and Tantalizing Tunes" on KSKQ in Ashland, Oregon. (A low-power local station, but you can listen live on line.) She posted the show on their archive. Take a listen; it does a good job of exploring fatherhood, especially from my dad and for my three sons: http://www.kskq.org/index.php/145-tasty-topics-and-tantalizing-tunes/2048-tasty-topics-and-tantalizing-tunes-hosted-by-aletha-nowitzky-6-15-2013-an-innerview-with-ashland-dad-brad-carrier-in-honor-of-father-s-day
Better than Guns "Speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important. . . Violence is a big problem. Too many children are dying. Too many children. We must do something. It will be hard, but the time is now. You must act. Be bold, be courageous, Americans are counting on you. Thank you." Gabby Gifford I do not mock Gabby here; I join her in desperate vulnerability. We’re all vulnerable. We’re vulnerable to a whole host of problems before and beyond guns –…
Thinking I spend too much time reading essays, opinions, and information, I dove into a big, fat novel, Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor. 766 pages later, I wondered why. If I cared about radar technology, war-game theory, economic analysis, etc. I might have a debt of gratitude to Mr. Clancy. He did a fine job of bringing me the inside scoop on how these things work and how various forces and personalities might use them to launch and end a war. But even in the…
Why add another religion to the world’s crowded supply? What would be different about God’s Goods? How would it help? Why participate and contribute? Background I don’t expect that you have to believe in God or the Bible to benefit from reconsidering what the Bible’s opening pages say. Or you can believe in both, in which case, what those opening pages say is even more pertinent. How they’re seen and what is said about them is vitally important to our entire world. Even bible-resenting atheists…
I’m from Michigan, in what is still called the Midwest – located in the mid east section of our country. Odd. Once, it was in the far west, for few had ventured past the east coast. A similar misnomer applies to the so-called northern California, by which they mean central California, where San Francisco is. Redding and Shasta are in the real northern California. But old words have a way of sticking, be they about geography or religion. Our religion may have been defined in…
Are Unitarian Universalists Christian? Some are. Some aren’t. The question is as old as the religions themselves, going back to their forming and founding. The answer depends on who gets to answer. If orthodox (that is, “conforming to approved doctrine”) Christians get to determine, then no, we’re not. We’re heretics, which word comes from “those who choose,” because we choose to see and say our truth, our Christianity, as our religion. That’s older than the Protestant Reformation, for the early Christians differed too, some claiming…
These letters are acronyms for four kinds of drugs that I would like to explore in this sermon. Basically, I will recommend them as possibly problematic but potentially beneficial for persons and society. On the whole, and especially compared with the Counter Culture, I have not found a lot of interest in entheogens or other drugs in our UU culture. UU’s have concern for civil liberties, curtailing a needless and excessive police/prison state, the right for people to live their own lives as long as…
(I believe in human wholeness – not fragmentation, not partiality, not alienation. Does this include sex? Yes! What the Creator built in we should not shame and alienate. The topic is vast, the approaches to it are many, and the feelings about it can be prone to upheaval. What I offer here is limited, provocative, reasonable, and sincere. I appreciate my liberal congregation, which took this in thoughtful stride. The version they heard was about half as long as what here follows.) “Oh, God!”…