It takes courage to bring our trust forward and invite another person to meet us there. This sometimes sure, often shaky, surrender is an opportunity to discover something deeper than the confines of our individual experience.

We need to summon the courage to cross the bridge...

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity.

Love cannot fix everything, but it can keep us company.

When covenant / breaks, we need to come home / to trust.

Conflict resolution is in fact one of the greatest things that you can accomplish in your life and in your relationship. [W]hen I view people as not bringing conflict up, I think it’s being unfaithful to the relationship. I think it’s an abdication of your role in the relationship, and you are...

It’s important to honor the footprint others leave on our heart.

The first time I was told that I was too queer to be a congregation's minister, they asked, "What will the neighbors think?,” as if it were the most natural question in the world. It was then that I understood how grace works: it’s costly. It requires us to be uncomfortable, to get outside...

Although the German word Giftschrank sounds like a quirky holiday tradition, the term is really a combination of the words poison and cabinet....

The work of forgiveness is so challenging—the actual work of it. The naming, grieving, empathizing, releasing. It’s like a death. A death of what we wanted, what we expected, what we’d hoped for, what we deserved and didn’t receive….We don’t get to control other people or outcomes. I am...

In her 1975 theological treatise Suffering, German liberation theologian Dorothee Söelle* examines the ways that suffering can knit humans beings closer together, and can draw us more fully into the process of loving. She uses the term apatheia, “the inability to suffer,” to describe the...

Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion.

Our communities of memory and promise are founded upon covenants because we all need a defense against the impulse of immediate feelings that challenge our best intentions. It is necessary to be reminded from time to time of what you said you were going to do, and what you really want, over and...

As a child, growing up Catholic, my sense was that we should give away forgiveness like candy at Halloween: freely and readily, to anyone who comes asking. As an adult Unitarian Universalist, however, I have realized that forgiveness is a lot more complicated and challenging than that image would...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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....