Civility and Health Care

What has become of civility in our society?  Civility is inherent in civilization.  To civilize is to instruct on the arts of life, to enlighten and refine them, to bring our society out of a state of barbarism.  However, a wave of incivility has us headed back to barbarism, diverting us from any sensible dialog or progress, especially as we consider health care reform.  My concern here is not just for health care.   Our health care system is exemplified by Paul Goodman’s comment about…

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Citizens Speak to Would-be Presidents (in 2000)

Welcome to this church service where "Citizens Speak to Would-be Presidents." I thank you for your attention and invite you to add to what I will say. As you can see, I have arranged for some video cameras and a microphone to be present. Not only will we partake of this exercise, others will be able to see and hear what we did. I hope and trust the cameras will not detract from our service. It's just a way to include more people in our…

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All Hallowed

Happy New Year!  I know the new year started recently during the Jewish high holy days, and earlier than that at the end of February when the Chinese started theirs, and earlier than that on January 1st.  It turns out the year can start almost any time and I don’t mind it starting over and over.  As harvest season ends for us in the Northern Hemisphere, Halloween makes as good of a time to end and start the years as any other.   Halloween turns…

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A Recession, Depression, Obsession Confession

I confess I’m obsessed with this depressing recession.  It results from, and brings out, some of the worst aspects of our people and society.  And yet, it is an opportunity to see and actualize some of the best. When I was born in 1945 a single man could support his whole family on his average income of $2,400 while living in a house that cost about twice that.  Mom, like most moms then, stayed home as homemaker.  I was the first of five children born…

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A Person among Persons

Speaking to the young graduates of Harvard’s Divinity School in 1838, Emerson said this of Jesus: “One man was true to what is in you and me.”  However, he also lamented that because Jesus was seen as the Christ, one of the three persons of the Trinity, his portrait grew to be as “the vulgar draw it.”  He wanted the young graduates to themselves come alive fully as persons.  “Always the seer is a sayer,” he said, and that, “only he [or she] can give…

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A Liberal Appreciation of Conservatives

My usual rant against conservatives needs corrective balance. I do for them here what I wish they would do for us – understand. Why? Our country has grown dangerously divisive, though we are and must be a single society. In our society and in our liberal congregations, conservatives deserve support both as persons and for their useful perspectives. Finally, we are more whole by knowing both ways in our being. Over two decades ago, when I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Conservative,” his appreciation…

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Why Unitarian Universalism serves God and Humanity better than Christianity Does

Many religions have one thing in common: each believes it has the best truth.   It is bold or predictable for me to preach on why our religion has the best truth?  I suspect many UUs would resist such an attempt.  Everyone has the right to their own way, we believe.  What works for some wouldn’t work for us, yet we’re glad that others have their ways.  We’re not evangelical.  We don’t proselytize.  We’re a “live and let live” religion.   Meanwhile other religions insist…

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Theology Still Pertinent

“It doesn’t make an iota of difference,” goes the phrase meaning it couldn’t matter less.  That phrase comes from an old theological fight over the letter “i”.  The homousians and the homoiusians had it out over whether the iota should be there.  One side claimed Jesus was of the same nature as God.   The other claimed he was of the same substance.  For this iota of theological difference, hundreds were killed.   More important than an “i” in a word is the “I” in you. …

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The Da Vinci Code: A Review

Having not read The Da Vinci Code, as has some sixty million readers worldwide, I felt professionally obliged to see the movie.  It did not shock me, but I’m used to these ideas.  (I favor the more radical possibility that Jesus not only loved Mary Magdeline and fathered a child with her, but survived his crucifixion (with her and his mother’s help) and lived on to be a father of children in northern India, where he is buried.)  In the Da Vinci Code, she left…

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Deeper than Roots

Deeper than any scriptural roots are the cosmic substances that make life possible.  Our western religious roots reach deep via old scriptures, but other roots were cut off, defined out, declared heretical, just as our ways have been treated.  Along side the New Testament books are the adjacent but banned Gnostic texts of that early Christian era.  In them, we find our liberal religious ways align with the ways of Jesus and his early followers better than Christianity’s orthodox approach has, especially in terms of…

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