Excerpted from Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of Dr. George de Benneville, translated by Rev. Elhanan Winchester (Germantown, PA: Converse Cleaves, Publisher, 1890), with material to explain the context for each.George de Benneville was raised by his godmother, Queen Anne of England....

By Rev. Elizabeth Buffington Nguyen, Leadership Development Associate for Youth and Young Adults of Color. When I was 24, my father gave me a new name. I was learning Vietnamese in graduate school....

Young Phebe Coffin stood on a box in the barn, playing preacher to the group of friends she had gathered. Of course, in the 1830s, when Phebe was a child, women ministers were unusual, if there were any at all. Women couldn't vote, didn't have the right to own property, and couldn't attend most...

Imagine that you are in a glider, soaring over the Grand Canyon. You see layers of rock, red and yellow, brown and black. You see a deep gorge, as if someone has cut a trench a mile deep out of the layers of rock....

Raύl Cardenas came to the United States from Mexico, looking for work that would support him and his parents. He found a job driving heavy machinery, and even better, he found the love of his life, Judy. What he didn't find was a way to become a legal American citizen, even after he and Judy were...

What's the biggest protest you've ever heard of? Maybe you've seen pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in front of a sea of faces on the National Mall in Washington, D.C....

Sometimes a big idea starts with noticing small things. One day 14-year-old Hannah Salwen was in the car with her father, stopped at a stoplight under a bridge. Hannah noticed that just off the road on her right was a homeless person carrying a cardboard sign asking for help, and to the left of...

Scott was nervous on his first day of junior high school. Junior high started with the fifth grade in his town. He was going to be among the youngest kids in school, and everything was new to him....

On a moss-covered log, in the middle of the Hoh Rain Forest, in Olympic National Park in Washington State, there's reddish, square-ish stone. This stone may be the smallest, least noticeable marker ever for a really big idea. This stone marks one square inch of silence....

It was a shock to the whole nation when a gunman opened fire on a group of people who had gathered at a supermarket to meet with their U.S. Representative, Gabrielle Giffords. In mere moments, six people, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, were killed, and many more, including...

For 24 years, Reverend Don Robinson worked as a teacher. He taught in the Washington, D.C. public schools, in a juvenile jail, and later as a community youth counselor who helped families in their neighborhoods....

Henry sat in front of his little cabin on one of his three chairs, listening to the evening. If you were there you might have thought there was nothing to listen to. Certainly no television or iPod. Those wouldn't be around for 100 years or more....

We do not need to think the same thoughts as someone else, in order to love them. So wrote Francis David, a long-ago faith ancestor of today's Unitarian Universalist movement. He wrote these words in Transylvania, where he lived and was persecuted for his unpopular beliefs....

In early 2008, Mark Covington was out of a job—a very common problem in his native city of Detroit, where unemployment rates are some of the highest in the country. Large sections of many neighborhoods have been abandoned as people have fled Detroit, looking for jobs and a better life somewhere...

Adapted from an Aboriginal creation story from Australia.When the earth was new-born, it was plain and without any features or life. There were no rivers or mountains, no trees, no grasses, only flat red earth as far as the eye could see—except that there were no eyes for seeing. Waking time and...

From "UU Convicted of Littering While Supplying Humanitarian Aid" , UU World, June 15, 2009. Used with permission. The subject of the story is a White Unitarian Universalist who currently uses the name "Emrys Staton." Next fall, Walt Staton will be starting divinity school to become a Unitarian...

"Honey, those girls were being chased for at least half a mile once school got out," Ms. Myra recalled. I shook my head knowingly. We had just walked out of the subway station across the street from Boys and Girls High School and were listening to the owner of Cafe 258, one of our original safe...

The Highlander Research and Education Center is an 80-year-old popular education center in the mountains of East Tennessee, which serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement-building in Appalachia and the South....

By Ellen Zemlin, a White Unitarian Universalist.For me, there's never really been a question about whether my Unitarian Universalism and my commitment to antiracism, anti-oppression, and multiculturalism are related. My introduction to justice work came sitting in a circle on the floor at youth...

Russell was an amateur geologist, paleontologist, and professional teacher. He took his young charges on an overnight field trip. While sitting around the campfire, he brought out a bag, took out five rocks, and held up a round, grapefruit-size rock....