[Touch hands to your own forehead, if it feels natural] May you be blessed with wisdom, knowledge and understanding. May your intellect take you far on your journey. You have been blessed with reason and free will, it is your call every day to use these gifts. [Throat] May you be blessed with voice.

A UU-founded family practice in rural New York offers transgender patients the services they need.

Bowie, Prince, and Cohen slashed through repression, urging us to be rapturously unshackled and alive.

Being a Unitarian Universalist (UU), I was lucky to grow up with the Our Whole Lives (OWL) program. I started taking OWL classes when I was 5 years old, and continued to participate through high school....

Jaime Jarrett’s musical Normativity shows that LGBTQ characters deserve happy endings, too.

A Dixieland chorus of separate lines / Just lucky to be in the same key, in the same room.

The word desire comes from the Latin desiderare: “to long for,” but the Latin desiderare comes from de sidere: “from the stars.” From the stars. I find this extraordinary: to think that somehow our desire, our longing, is connected to the very stars in the sky. The stars, which share their...

The religious mystics of every tradition tell us union is what we are here for — union is what we are: we are connected to each other, to the earth, to everything that exists, and to the force that lies beyond it all—only most of the time we don’t realize it. Union is not a myth or a pipe...

I wonder Did God’s heart (I mean the love-mushy, endearing part of God) That part The heart that I don’t really believe in as a thing, With pulses... ANYWAY Did that heart Did it Break just a little; When God realized "Oh no— They have made leaves into underpants!" If God says things like...

Desire and sexuality are not held in high regard by many of the world’s religious traditions today. And sex? Don’t even go there! As extremism rises, desires are seen as objects of suppression while bodies become things to control. The Greeks first articulated this idea of separation of the...

When we talk about a liberal theology and ethic of sexuality, we need to start in our vulnerable, needy bodies, in real life, in the struggle to navigate our embodied neediness with others in an embrace of the still-possible mutual wholeness and transformation. Any theology of sex that doesn’t...

In school I was taught abstinence only; in church I learned about Our Whole Lives.

Spirit of life and love, may we find appreciation today, and in our lives, for our embodiment. We are physical creatures: mind, spirit and soul housed within our bodies. Our bodies, our physical form, allow us to experience the world: Taste—chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven. Touch—the...

I want not dainty bone china-cupped, oh-so-polite, pinky-extended sips, but guzzle-by-the-gallon, drink-from-the-fire-hose- two-hundred-eighty-psi- Niagara-Falls volumes, and inch-thick slices of hearty multi-grain-hard-crusted- with-stick-in-your-teeth-seeds-bread (none of that bland supermarket...

They will march, walk, wheel, dance, shimmy and shake Block upon block of undulating color, flesh, banners, signs, clothing or lack thereof Hands raised, hands linked, apart, together Singing, shouting, chanting, silent, Joyous, tearful, nervous, afraid, proud, defiant, angry, happy, delirious,...

We give thanks for love, Agape and Eros, Chocolates and pillow talk, And all of cupid’s arrows. For unrequited yearning And the grand passion burning, For quiet appreciation And platonic contemplation. For lovers, too, we offer thanks: Those gay and straight, near and dear, Gender metamorphic or...