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What makes a fire burn? Mark Hicks, Angus MacLean Professor of Religious Education at Meadville Lombard Theological School, reminds us that it is the spaces between the logs. If you pile the wood too densely, it will not burn. For most religious educators, autumn is a dense time….

I am not anxious to be the loudest voice or the most popular. But I would like to think that at a crucial moment, I was an effective voice of the voiceless, an effective hope of the hopeless. —Whitney Young by Kathleen Carpenter During the summer, I was one of the almost one thousand people who…

by Sally Patton See me beautiful each and every day. Could you take a chance? Could you find a way to see me shining through In every thing I do, And see me beautiful. —lyrics by Red Grammer, from the “Teaching Peace” CD When I started the Involve Project over 14 years ago, I was hoping to…

That is what my big brother said to me more than a decade ago. The occasion? I was hired as the Director of Religious Education at my local UU church. My brother knows something about ministry. He is a minister and bishop in the Missionary Baptist Church, married to a preacher’s kid, with whom he…

September 11 cannot pass without notice. Perhaps it never will. Even though our personal memories may lose sharpness, each year the story of U.S. vulnerability to terrorist attack returns like a haunt in our media and sometimes inside of us….

In her 2013 Minns lecture, Sticking with Stories: Unitarianism and the Creation of Children’s Literature, Rev. Andrea Greenwood described the emergence of books for children as a genre separate from mainstream literature. One unintended consequence of this separation, which I find intriguing, is…

It was an August night at Ferry Beach, a UU camp in Maine, and many had already gone to bed. Those of us on the youth crew lingered on the beach enjoying the rhythmic sound of the ocean, the feel of the sand, and the gentle night breeze….

His name was John. He was a Nigerian immigrant about my parents’ age. I was a suburban 18-year-old, living in Boston with college friends the summer after my freshman year. John and I rode the MBTA together after our shifts as dishwashers in a fancy Harvard Square restaurant. I don’t know how…

William Ellery Channing described principles of Sunday schools including what and how they should teach.