Arthur Powell Davies did not start out as a Unitarian minister. He came to the United States in 1928 from England, as a minister in search of a “freer” strain of Methodism. Once he found his home in the Unitarian movement, he became one of the leading figures in the American Unitarian Association…

Brook Farm is probably the best known of the three utopian communities started by Unitarians or Universalists in the mid 19th century….

Slavery has often been called America’s original sin. Yet, white American Unitarians, like most white Americans, were slow to speak out against slavery as an immoral institution. The Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was no exception. Channing was a major voice for American…

Clara Barton was born on Christmas Day, 1821, in Oxford, MA, into a Universalist family. She was living in Washington, D.C. when the U.S. Civil War landed at her doorstep. She began nursing wounded soldiers in her sister’s home, visiting the army camps, and was soon orchestrating the delivery of…

Meetings of the Caucus are open to all women and their friends. Mothers and daughters come. Women from other UU churches drop in and have come back. Women with no church affiliation have joined the group. The Caucus usually meets in private homes in a geographical location that is accessible by…

Margaret Fuller was born in 1810, at a time when women could not attend institutions of higher learning. Although brilliant, she was denied the educational opportunities enjoyed by her father and her male peers. She persevered in her education, on her own terms. She refused to accept the limited…

In 1951, the congregation of First Unitarian Church of Cleveland decided to move from its building at the corner of 82nd and Euclid in downtown Cleveland to suburban Shaker Heights. This move was motivated by the economic decline of the Hough (pronounced “how”) neighborhood where the church was…

Unitarian roots in North America stretch back to Puritan New England. Many of the original Puritan congregations, the oldest Protestant churches in the United States, are now Unitarian Universalist communities….

Sermon delivered on October 22, 1967 at Arlington Street Church, Boston. Abridged version; used with permission. A hue and cry has arisen over the sixty young men who burned their draft cards in the chancel of Arlington Street Church. No matter that 280 young men took the more solemn and perilous…

A retelling of Christian scripture (Luke 10: 25- 37). A lawyer asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered, “What is in the law? What do you read there?” The lawyer answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your…

Medieval Jewish story, A Chosen Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). A rabbi spoke with God about heaven and hell. “I will show you hell,” God said, and they went into a room which had a large pot of stew in the middle. The smell was delicious, but around the pot sat people who were famished and…

Excerpted from a March 3, 1998 New Orleans Times-Picayune article by Mark Schliefstein as reprinted on the website of the annual D’Orlando Lecture on Social Justice…. The Rev. (Albert) D’Orlando fought racism and segregation for many years and later opposed the Vietnam War. His house and church…

The United States entered World War I in April 1917. Shortly afterward, Congress passed the 1917 Espionage Act. The act made it a crime for people to speak out against the country’s involvement in the war or to encourage draft resistance or conscientious objection. As a result of the act, several…

These letters are excerpted from correspondence between the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). They detail a public controversy between the two organizations over the BSA’s policies toward the LGBT community and atheists. For information about the 2016…