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Displaying 101 - 150 of 340

  • Diverse. Multicultural. Inclusive. Welcoming. If I made a list of every single Unitarian Universalist congregation I have served, visited or worshipped at, they would have a few things in common—including the use of these words. Perhaps on the front of the Order of Service?...
    Reading | By Carol Thomas Cissel | October 15, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Anti-Oppression, Direct Experience, Health, Listening, Multiculturalism, Pain, Personal Stories, Race/Ethnicity, Reconciliation, Unitarian Universalism
  • Joy Unspeakable is not silent, it moans, hums, and bends to the rhythm of a dancing universe…. For our free African ancestors, joy unspeakable is drum talk… For enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage, joy unspeakable is the surprise of living one more day… For Africans in bondage in the...
    Reading | By Kimberly Quinn Johnson  | October 15, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Anti-Oppression, Arts & Music, Community, Direct Experience, Joy, Living Our Faith, Multiculturalism, Personal Stories, Race/Ethnicity, Spiritual Practice, Unitarian Universalism
  • When I started attending a UU church, I was excited by the promise of worship that would draw from the arts, science, nature, literature and a multitude of voices. Indeed, some of the voices that Unitarian Universalists hear in worship each week belong to Thoreau, Emerson, Ballou, and others....
    Reading | By Connie Simon | October 15, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Community, Direct Experience, Identity, Inclusion, Listening, Multiculturalism, Pain, Personal Stories, Race/Ethnicity, Reconciliation, Unitarian Universalism
  • Religion is as much about faith in humanity as it is about faith in deity. And many of us will find that, over and over, our faith in humanity gets tested. We are immersed in a culture that's deeply corrupted by selfishness, greed, and oppression-borne privilege and fear....
    Reading | By Sarah Gibb Millspaugh | September 12, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), Acceptance, Compassion, Faith, Healing, Humanism, Integrity, Living Our Faith, Unitarian Universalism, Wholeness
  • Yesterday, a new employee—a white guy—walked into the bakery where I work. “Hi,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve met you yet.” He told me his name. “I’m Jabari,” I replied. “Are you American?,” he asked. I hesitated. “Yeaaaaaaaaaah.” “Well, it’s just that your name is...
    Reading | By Jabari S. Jones | July 31, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), America, Anti-Oppression, Black History / Whitney Young / James Reeb, Direct Experience, Humanism, Identity, Multiculturalism, Race/Ethnicity, Secular
  • Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should or because...
    Reading | By Leslie Jamison | July 19, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Commitment, Compassion, Connections, Direct Experience, Empathy, Humanism, Interdependence, Living Our Faith, Love, Relationships, Secular
  • The 7 Jobs Capitalism Asks of All of Us: 1. Measure Self Worth by Work: Don’t believe in the inherent goodness of people. Instead decide that everyone’s worth is only as much as they achieve. 2. Accept that Oppression is the Norm: This starts with adultism the moment we are born and conditions...
    Reading | By Talia Cooper | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Activism, Arts & Music, Character, Direct Experience, Healing, Integrity, Relationships, Secular, Self-Respect
  • For a long time now, I haven’t believed in a god with a will, intentionality, or consciousness. I don’t put all my eggs in the basket of a god who will save and transform me. Rather, I look to humans, to my relationships with people. Transcendence with life, with the holy, comes through my human...
    Reading | By Kaaren Solveig Anderson | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), Humanism, Relationships, Transcendence, Transformation
  • Those of us who call ourselves religious Humanists have a strong reverence for life. Many of us experience a deep sense of awe before the mystery of life and death, those powers greater than ourselves. We share a respect for science and reason, and we are willing to live with ambiguity to live...
    Reading | By Carol Hepokoski | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Awe, Earth, Earth-Centered, Environment, Humanism, Nature, Reverence, Wonder, Climate Justice
  • Reason is an important tool, sure — an essential arbiter of truth claims about the world. But religion is grounded someplace deeper, where we experience the joy of living and are connected intimately with all that is....
    Reading | By Mark Ward | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Humanism, Purpose, Reason, Religion, Reverence
  • Humanism… is primarily about who we are connected to, what we think about each other, and how we work for justice in the world. No matter what else they believe, Humanists insist on the inherent worth of every person....
    Reading | By Amanda Poppei | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), Acceptance, Belief, Humanism, Unitarian Universalism, Unitarianism, Unity
  • For all the talk about reason and science, Humanism is really about a passionate love affair. It is a love affair with life, not a mythical hereafter. Humanism is a love affair with a progressive vision of civilization in which each of us can add to our growing library of wisdom, our evolving...
    Reading | By Michael Werner | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Humanism, Meaning, Progress, Reason
  • Late in his life, the philosopher Richard Rorty — a well-known atheist — was asked by an interviewer if he could define holy. Perhaps the interlocutor thought the aging and dying Rorty would be stumped by the question or would fall into some traditional language of reverence. But Rorty was not...
    Reading | By David Breeden | April 20, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 6th Principle (World Community), 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Dignity, Hope, Humanism, Sacred, Unitarian Universalism
  • Each of us has gifts and wounds from those who fathered us. This is inevitable; even the best fathers in the world disappoint their children sometimes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grow up. But I know that some wounds are deeper than others. Some people’s hearts have been broken by their...
    Reading | By Myke Johnson | April 13, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Acceptance, Children, Family, Father's Day, Fathers, Generations, Growth, Healing, Humanism, Pain, Parents, Secular
  • Every mother has a different story, though we tend to group them together. We like to think that partnered moms have it good and single moms have it rough, but the truth is that we're a diverse bunch....
    Reading | By Cheryl Strayed | March 15, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Children, Direct Experience, Family, Fathers, Humanism, Identity, Love, Money, Mother's Day, Mothers, Parents, Relationships, Sacrifice, Secular
  • Whiteness has been used throughout the histories of America and Europe to praise desirable groups of people and exclude undesirable groups. But “whiteness” is not a ethnic group, a cultural group, or a nationality. In the United States, the Supreme Court legally defined what it meant to be...
    Reading | By Sarah C Stewart | March 14, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: America, Anti-Oppression, History, Oppression, Race/Ethnicity, Secular
  • Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is a novel that takes the form of a letter or journal that a dying, elderly Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa, writes to his 7-year old son in 1956 – written so that one day the boy will know something about his father’s life and character. In this passage...
    Reading | By Marilynne Robinson | March 10, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), Animal Blessing, Animals, Awe, Calling, Christianity, Faith, Leadership, Ministry, Ordinations, Power, Sacred, Unitarian Universalism, Wonder
  • No matter what tactics and methods racial justice activists use, the general response of society will be a collective head-shaking and tsk-tsk-ing — because what people are actually complaining about are not the specific tactics that are being used in the struggle for racial justice, but that the...
    Reading | By Aisha Ansano | February 27, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 6th Principle (World Community), Activism, Anger, Anti-Oppression, Direct Experience, Equity, Humanism, Justice, Multiculturalism, Oppression, Race/Ethnicity, Secular, Solidarity
  • The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a radical. He was called “the most dangerous man in America” by the FBI and had a 17,000 page FBI file at the time of his death. It wasn’t just KKK members or those in positions of power who disagreed with him or hated him. As Cornel West explains in...
    Reading | By Aisha Ansano | February 27, 2017 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 6th Principle (World Community), Activism, America, Anti-Oppression, Black History / Whitney Young / James Reeb, Direct Experience, History, Humanism, Justice, Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, Multiculturalism, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Race/Ethnicity
  • We gather at Thanksgiving, in some sense, to retell the creation myth of our country. In this myth is our very best and our very worst: a boldness; a care for the common good; a wish to say we before I. Yet from even before the first Thanksgiving feast, it’s a story of theft and violence, and a...
    Reading | By David Schwartz | November 15, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 6th Principle (World Community), America, Anti-Oppression, Freedom, Generations, History, Humanism, Indigenous American, Race/Ethnicity, Secular, Thanksgiving
  • Our first breath is followed by our first song Lusty, loud and primal A solo that announces to the world, “I have arrived!” We are the music. As toddlers hearing our first reggae beat We let our spines and hips bend and sway in response As natural as the beat of our hearts We are the music. The...
    Reading | By Renee Ruchotzke | November 12, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), Arts & Music, Direct Experience, Humanism, Music Sunday, Secular, Unity
  • People have always known that fire was special. Long, long ago, before people made matches or candles or even made houses, people knew that fire was special. There was the great fire in the sky, the sun, which made the earth warm and made night into day....
    Reading | By Elizabeth Harding | October 27, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Direct Experience, Fire Communion, Generations, Imagination, Nature, Secular, Spiritual Practice, Tradition, Unitarian Universalism
  • This reading is an excerpt of the sermon delivered by Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd on Sunday morning at General Assembly 2016. For as long as two or more have gathered in the name of the spirit, those two or more have fought some fake fights. You remember, perhaps, the classic wedding reading from...
    Reading | By Nancy McDonald Ladd | October 19, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Anger, Christianity, Community, Compromise, Conflict, Conscience, Purpose, Relationships, Secular, Self-Respect, Seven Principles, Unitarian Universalism, Unity, Wholeness
  • I have a voice. It is a small voice, perhaps, but it will not be silenced. When you call for black people to be beaten, and excluded, and even removed—I will say no. When you attempt to silence Latinx voices—I will say no. When you mock the disabled and threaten the oppressed—I will say no.
    Reading | By Amy Petrie Shaw | September 29, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Activism, Anger, Anti-Oppression, Character, Commitment, Democracy, Direct Experience, Justice, Limitations, Nonviolence, Oppression, Secular
  • In the first episode of "Call the Midwife"—a British show about post-WWII midwives—the main character Jenny Worth is just starting as a midwife in the East End of London. She experiences a moment of disgust and overwhelm at witnessing the awful experience of one of her expectant mothers. She...
    Reading | By Forrest Gilmore | July 28, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 6th Principle (World Community), Activism, Compassion, Humanism, Integrity, Justice, Poverty, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Purpose, Service, Spiritual Practice
  • He's not where he is supposed to be. He should be practicing sprints in the desert sun with all the other aspiring Marines, but instead he is here, retreating into the quiet shade of the chaplain's office, the one person who won’t yell at him. Since he was seven years old, he wanted to be a...
    Reading | By Susan Maginn | July 10, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Calling, Choice, Direct Experience, Humility, Military, Psychology, Sacrifice, Secular, Service, Work, Young Adults, Youth/Teens
  • I understand participation in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a spiritual practice or discipline. While the word discipline may want to make us run and hide, a spiritual practice or discipline is meant to help us find our center. Approaching my participation in the CSA as a spiritual...
    Reading | By Nicole Janelle | July 10, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Community, Contemplation, Direct Experience, Earth, Earth Day, Earth-Centered, Family, Food, Food Justice, Gratitude, Nature, Spiritual Practice, Summer Solstice, Table Grace, Wonder
  • When I was a kid I liked to skip stones on lakes. If I threw a flat stone at the correct angle and with enough speed and energy it would kiss the surface and leap into the air again and again. If we have too much stuff in our lives, our attention skips from one object to another without really...
    Reading | By Doug Kraft | June 1, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Balance, Buddhism, Compromise, Direct Experience, Mindfulness, Patience, Playfulness, Self-Care, Simplicity
  • Don’t speak to me of “healing” racism, or “wounded souls” or the “painful hurt” until you are willing to feel the scars on my great-great-grandmother Laury’s back. Don’t speak to me of “values” or “justice” or “righting wrongs” until you are able to feel the heartache...
    Reading | By Adam Lawrence Dyer | May 17, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, America, Anti-Oppression, Brokenness, Direct Experience, Healing, Identity, Justice, Personal Stories, Race/Ethnicity, Responsibility, Secular, Shame
  • You’ve seen it. Two black men pass each other on the street. They nod. Subtle, sometimes imperceptible, but there is acknowledgement. “Do you know him?” “No . . . (yes) . . . no.” I learned this from my father and my grandfather and my other grandfather and my uncles and my great uncle and...
    Reading | By Adam Lawrence Dyer | May 17, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), America, Anti-Oppression, Connections, Direct Experience, Identity, Race/Ethnicity, Secular, Solidarity, Unity
  • To become an anti-racist faith community, the key question for a white/white majority community is not “How do we get people of color to join our faith community?” It is, instead, “How can we make a prolonged, spiritually-rooted, engaged commitment to uprooting white supremacy within our...
    Reading | By Chris Crass | May 9, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, Anti-Oppression, Black History / Whitney Young / James Reeb, Direct Experience, Freedom, Justice, Living Our Faith, Purpose, Race/Ethnicity, Secular, Seven Principles, Solidarity, Unity
  • Fertility in social movements and among people is not something we control. We cannot make new life like we make plans or money. It's hard to be fertile when we are not grounded. Fertility is about making new life that becomes self-determining: that does not belong to us. If we drain ourselves as...
    Reading | By Caitlin Breedlove | May 3, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Abundance, Community, Creativity, Direct Experience, Leadership, Unitarian Universalism, Unity
  • For decades prior to my mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, we had suffered a strained relationship born from her alcoholism. When I learned she had Alzheimer’s, my hope for forgiveness and reconciliation drained away, along with her cognitive abilities. But the world of Alzheimer’s teems...
    Reading | By Jade C. Angelica | April 18, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), Aging, Caring, Children, Direct Experience, Family, Forgiveness, Mother's Day, Mothers, Transformation
  • The word desire comes from the Latin desiderare: “to long for,” but the Latin desiderare comes from de sidere: “from the stars.” From the stars. I find this extraordinary: to think that somehow our desire, our longing, is connected to the very stars in the sky. The stars, which share their...
    Reading | By Laura Horton-Ludwig | April 8, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Connections, Intimacy, Love, Mystery, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Sexuality, Wonder
  • The religious mystics of every tradition tell us union is what we are here for — union is what we are: we are connected to each other, to the earth, to everything that exists, and to the force that lies beyond it all—only most of the time we don’t realize it. Union is not a myth or a pipe...
    Reading | By Laura Horton-Ludwig | April 8, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Body, Connections, God, Intimacy, Love, Mystery, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Sexuality, Unity
  • One of the potential spiritual lessons of sports comes in its ability to connect people—to each other as well as to a team of strangers. Not too long ago, I was in a workshop in which we were discussing “peak experiences,” those mystical, transcendent experiences of what Abraham Maslow would...
    Reading | By Michael J. Tino | April 5, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Awe, Connections, Direct Experience, Personal Stories, Playfulness, Secular, Teamwork, Unity, Wonder
  • Dear Liberal Allies, You and I learned very different things in very different ways. If you didn’t live an experience, then step aside. We students of color, gay students, trans* students, children of immigrants and refugees knew this stuff before our professors told us what to call it....
    Reading | By Trungles | March 30, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Anti-Oppression, Direct Experience, Growth, Identity, Justice, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer, Multiculturalism, Personal Stories, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Race/Ethnicity, Solidarity, Suffering
  • Desire and sexuality are not held in high regard by many of the world’s religious traditions today. And sex? Don’t even go there! As extremism rises, desires are seen as objects of suppression while bodies become things to control. The Greeks first articulated this idea of separation of the...
    Reading | By Robin Tanner | March 2, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Body, Christianity, Direct Experience, Intimacy, Islam, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer, Sacred, Secular, Sexuality
  • One day, your church was born. Maybe it was a gathering of saints, called together for the common worship of a wrathful god, ceaselessly praying between bouts of decrying the evil of Christmas or dancing. Or maybe a few brave souls answered a notice in the newspaper, curiosity piqued by the...
    Reading | By Sean Neil-Barron | February 26, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 5th Principle (Conscience & Democracy), Building/Space Dedication, Business Meetings, Change, Child Dedication, Community, Creativity, Direct Experience, Generations, Installations, Leadership, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Purpose, Religion, Sacred, Unitarian Universalism, WorshipWeb
  • Bruises are a part of roller derby — a celebrated part. It’s not uncommon for players to take pictures of their biggest, most colorful shaped bruises: bruises that go deep into your tissue, and come out in amazing blues, purples, and blacks that eventually fade to greens, browns and yellows. A...
    Reading | By Dawn Skjei Cooley | February 23, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: #BlackLivesMatter, 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 2nd Principle (Justice, Equity, & Compassion), 6th Principle (World Community), Anti-Oppression, Black History / Whitney Young / James Reeb, Body, Commitment, Direct Experience, Healing, Justice, Multiculturalism, Privilege, Race/Ethnicity, Secular
  • When we talk about a liberal theology and ethic of sexuality, we need to start in our vulnerable, needy bodies, in real life, in the struggle to navigate our embodied neediness with others in an embrace of the still-possible mutual wholeness and transformation. Any theology of sex that doesn’t...
    Reading | By Gretchen Haley | February 22, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), Body, Coming Out, Gender / Sex Change, Healing, Intimacy, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer, Multiculturalism, Sexuality, Wholeness
  • Today, you join in membership. This is a moment of excitement and possibility. And although I don’t wish to pull you out of this moment, I need to talk to you for a bit about a moment in your future....
    Reading | By Liz James | February 11, 2016 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), Commitment, Community, Covenant, Inclusion, Living Our Faith, New Member Ceremony, Reconciliation, Relationships, Strength, Teamwork, Transformation, Unitarian Universalism, WorshipWeb
  • I am always in a bit of a shock when December 1st arrives on the calendar. I always feel like there should be at least another week beyond Thanksgiving before I can even contemplate the next holiday....
    Reading | By Cynthia Frado | December 21, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 4th Principle (Truth & Meaning), Advent, Birth, Christianity, Christmas Eve / Christmas, Compassion, Hope, Mindfulness, Unitarian Universalism, Winter Solstice / Yule, Wonder, WorshipWeb
  • I want to say to all those who would close the door, who would be guided by fear instead of hope, who would clutch in scarcity rather than live in generosity, who would say “No, you can’t come here”— I want to say: How dare you. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, . .
    Reading | By Matthew Johnson | December 7, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Acceptance, America, Anti-Oppression, Christianity, Direct Experience, Immigration, Inclusion, Justice, Secular
  • In eighth grade, we were assigned a project: to make a poster about some part of our ancestry. I made mine about the story of the 1930 migration, from Germany to the United States, of my great-grandmother, her husband, and their three children. My great-grandmother, Emma Johanna Jacoba Kranenburg...
    Reading | By Matthew Johnson | December 7, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Acceptance, America, Anti-Oppression, Direct Experience, Family, Generations, Immigration, Inclusion, Multiculturalism, Prophetic Words & Deeds
  • Note: this reflection was written at the end of Rev. Janis-Dillon's week in Samos, Greece working in a Syrian refugee center. The people of Samos, Greece have done something that sounds ordinary, only it's not: they have treated the Syrian refugees like human beings. Past the terror of the rubber...
    Reading | By Bob Janis-Dillon | December 6, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 6th Principle (World Community), 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Anti-Oppression, Compassion, Dignity, Human Rights, Immigration
  • We hear it said we are witnessing a “clash of civilizations.” We hear it from presidential candidates, from right-wing talk radio pundits, from white supremacist, nationalist and terrorist organizations. They say we live in the midst of a “clash of civilizations.” This is the first great lie...
    Reading | By Joshua Mason Pawelek | December 6, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), America, Direct Experience, Immigration, Inclusion, International, Justice
  • For many reasons, people depart. They leave home—or the places given to them, in place of home that might’ve been lost to war—and seek refuge from a thousand dangers and uncertainties. For many reasons—many of them inconceivable to us, who live in relative peace and prosperity—people...
    Reading | By Erika Hewitt | December 3, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Acceptance, America, Anti-Oppression, Compassion, Immigration, Journey
  • I heard the Second Brandenburg Concerto played in honor of Bach’s 300th birthday, and I was swept away. I remembered a story about the people who send messages into outer space. Someone suggested sending a piece by Bach. The reply was “But that would be bragging.” Some say we get what we...
    Reading | By Robert Walsh | November 18, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: Arts & Music, Awe, Beauty, Direct Experience, Gratitude, Humility, Thanksgiving, Wonder, Worth
  • We gather together this morning, Because others came before us. Some have left examples for us to follow, Others lessons for us to learn from, and the paradox is that many have left both pain and joy. We honor our ancestors this morning, not because they are perfect, But because, without them, we...
    Reading | By Chris Rothbauer | November 11, 2015 | From WorshipWeb
    Tagged as: 1st Principle (Worth & Dignity), 3rd Principle (Acceptance & Spiritual Growth), 7th Principle (Interconnected Web), Community, Generations, History, Limitations, Meaning, Pain, Prophetic Words & Deeds, Vulnerability