We come to a time when we realize that the faith we have inherited is inadequate for what we are facing...at such moments we have three choices: We can hold to our religious beliefs and deny our experience, we can hold to our experience and walk away from our religious tradition, or we can become...

The program presents the problems of the invisible minority as they face a society where the majority view homosexuality with confusion, fear and hostility. The emphasis throughout is on understanding and accepting all people as human beings of worth and dignity....

The sexuality education program is about wholeness and healing. It is about justice and equity. It is about responsibility to self and to others, and it's about enhancing the meaning and value of life itself, and those are all religious pursuits. — Judith A. Frediani, quoted in the 1999 UU World...

Something changed during that program at the church; we added our music to the women's movement. Singing together as women created something very special. We went into the service thinking of ourselves as a political activist group and came out of it singing! — Audrey Drummond, "Honor Thy...

"Black Empowerment," "walkout," "racist"...the words we use, the language we have to describe the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s are loaded. Why, for example, do we use the term "Black Empowerment Controversy"? It seems to make the anguish of that period the fault of the relatively small...

I am more sorry than I can say that your fellowship is again being caught in the grinders of the advance of history in the south. I hope desperately that the group will not suffer unduly as the result of the events in which our people are participating in Jackson and Mississippi....

Our religious teachers, ministers and lay-men alike—from Thomas Jefferson to William Ellery Channing to Adlai Stevenson—have urged us to honor always the primacy of conscience over any external authority which we believe to be immoral... Thus it is natural that some of our young men must regard...

We consider the House Committee's inquiry into speakers, meetings and activities of the church an attack upon our institution and on all organized religion and our nation's tradition of the free conscience and the open mind....

Those who find the more conventional communities unsatisfactory sometimes band together to form a new kind of community—an experiment. The kibbutz, Brook Farm, Amana, and Summerhill are diverse examples of such communities. On a limited basis, LRY is also an experimental community. Sharing...

Those of us who are alive in these times have a clear and evident mission. We have a compelling moral purpose that can direct our lives and our energies: We are about saving the world. So what is our part? The place is to begin at home—that is, with ourselves. Notice what is life-denying and...

...though we are forced to dissent from them in matters of church discipline, yet our dissent is not taken up out of arrogance of spirit in ourselves, whom they see willingly condescend to learn of them, neither is it carrier with uncharitable censoriousness towards them, both which are the prope...

...the citizen, before fighting, is bound to inquire into the justice of the cause which he is called to maintain with blood, and bound to withhold his hand if his conscience condemn the cause. — William Ellery Channing This week, when reading, watching, or listening to the news, pay attention to...

Oppression and war will be heard of no more Nor the blood of a slave leave his print on our shore, Conventions will then be a useless expense, For we'll all go free suffrage, a hundred years hence. — Frances Dana Barker Gage, in her 1875 hymn "A Hundred Years Hence" Few of the early women's...

As the Unitarian denomination should be ashamed of its antislavery conduct as a religious body, so it should be justly proud of the men and women who as individuals chose love of freedom over thoughts of expediency. — Douglas Stange, in "Patterns of Antislavery among American Unitarians,...

We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty....

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one... And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. — Theodore Parker, 19th-century Unitarian minister and abolitionist Reflect on your reasons for participating in this workshop series. What do you hope to learn or...