The following is based on content presented as part of the “Staying the Course” workshop at the New Day Rising Conference in February 2021. The full workshop is available to conference registrants through Whova and to new participants who enroll in the UULI course. To stay the course in our...

We have to assume that if we are engaged in dismantling white supremacy, then we will have to encounter it along the way.

The following is based on content presented as part of the “Staying the Course” workshop at the New Day Rising Conference in February 2021. The full workshop is available to conference registrants through Whova and to new participants who enroll in the UULI course.

Wisely, many faith leaders, writers, and activists have offered a more reflective third dimension between the tensions of before-times nostalgia and new world futures. They invite us to seek and reflect on insights and lessons wrought from a year of altered time.

Friends, move toward your purpose. Remember what is most essential. Let the rest go. We are here if you need help. 

Today, I sing praise for the gift of Black Lives. For precious, irreplaceable lives: Emmett, Trayvon, Eric, Tamir, Freddie, Treasure, Sandra, Breonna, George, Skylar, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and.... whose names I recall at all because Alicia, Opal and Patrisse and all the...

I imagine you, too, saw the unique holiday cards from the incomparable year just completed with messages like “Just say no to 2020,” “OH OH OH,” and “Merry Christmas from a distance.” Just some of the G-rated messages. We might as well laugh. Humor can be one of our more benign coping...

As we go about our work at this time, the NER staff team keeps learning about the faithful ways UU congregations are meeting the challenges of being and doing church during a pandemic.

“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism,” writes Walidah Imarisha, “we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another...

It’s been a hard fall. We made it through a virtual summer after our very first all-virtual General Assembly last June  - and here we are already anticipating another all-virtual GA in June of 2021. The election season was both astonishing and surreal. As I write this, many of us are preparing for..

Earlier this year, just as the reality of the pandemic was unfolding, the New England Region was planning to host a workshop on “Faithful Risking,” one of our Practices of Spiritual Leadership. Ultimately we ended up cancelling the workshop. While we could have adapted to an online format,...

I return to the Spiritual Leadership practice of doing my inner work. It may be the hardest practice of all. I want so many things to be different than they are — including myself. Yet the only path forward is to be right here in this real place, right now at this real time.

We understand covenants as being an attempt to make promises together that are grounded in a shared understanding of something unenforceable but to which we want, collectively, to be faithful or obedient. However, lots of other stuff can tend to creep into our covenants, too...

We can’t really teach Spiritual Leadership. Each person needs to find theirs, claim theirs and exercise theirs in their way. The best we can do is identify practices, offer suggestions, give reminders and tell stories.

Faithful congregations take faithful risks. In this post, we lift up examples of the faithful risks New England Region congregations have taken recently. The UU Meeting House of Pittsfield, ME When they lost their longtime minister and realized they could not afford to hire another professional...

So, friends, let’s practice together. I invite you to engage in some reflection about whether and how you are bringing that individualism into your practice of covenant and what a deeper practice of covenant can make possible for us. 

While the New England Region staff team’s introduction of the concept and practices of Spiritual Leadership has been enthusiastically received, there’s been some pushback about the one we call “binding to tradition.” Most Unitarian Universalists don’t like the idea of being bound to...

Come, practice with us, and let’s see what’s possible! We are launching a new blog called Tending to Spiritual Leadership, which will share offerings on how we can engage the practices of spiritual leadership to make more things possible.