An interview with UU minister Rev. Erik Martínez Resly “an interfaith child who grew up to become an inspired community leader” and Lead Organizer of The Sanctuaries, a racially and religiously diverse arts community in Washington, DC.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-katz-miller/when-interfaith-kids-grow_b_8959626.html

Composed by Keith Mesecher for the “Cosmos” celebrations at First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego. The Cosmic All Stars performed all 5 songs live at the world’s first “Evolutionary Revival” February 2008

1) All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

2) Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

3) Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

4) Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

5) In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

From a post from British Unitarian minister Andrew Brown

http://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2016/02/following-in-footsteps-of-hypatiasome.html

For those of you who couldn’t be with us today, or those who were and would like the ten irrational ideas or to hear the music, chants, or guided meditation again, today’s sermon has been added to our website.

Pax,
Lisa

It was wonderful to see those who made it today, and we were thinking of those who couldn’t.  I’m putting together a page of our songs. It has our opening and closing songs, the one we sang today, one we might want to learn, and will have a few more we sing frequently.

From a UU Church of the Larger Fellowship service:

Pax, Lisa

There has been an ongoing discussion on the UU-Leaders email list called “Let’s Get Out of the Box and Do Something Meaningful”. This poem, imagining an abandoned church building, was quoted.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Church Going – Philip Larkin

Another excellent sermon from James Ishmael Ford.

Transcendentalism called us to examine our own hearts and the world through that faculty that can be called either “reason” or “intuition.” I find it really important how for them there was no particular difference between the two, reason from this angle, intuition from that. This is a much richer understanding of how we actually come to know things than many of us tend to notice. So, itself a great gift.

And when applied to life, it brings a new way of living in the world. Parker himself, in that sermon sorting the transient from the permanent, proclaimed, “Christianity is not a system of doctrines, but rather a method of attaining oneness with God. It demands, therefore, a good life of piety within, of purity without, and gives the promise that whoso does God’s will, shall know of God’s doctrine.” And with this Parker articulated a radical doctrine, declaring we are our true selves when we have nothing between God and us, between the ultimate and me, between the world writ large and you.

A Meditation on Theodore Parker and the Call of Liberal Religion as a Compass in Hard Times