Last spring, I got a message from the universe. Now I don’t get too many messages from the universe; sometimes I don’t even get my phone messages. But this message was very loud, and it came at four in the morning in the form of a tremendous thud from my closet. This particular message was one...

It has been a not-so-quiet week in Lake Wobegon! On Monday, I found that, apparently over a long period of time, a large sum of money was taken from me. What I thought I had safely saved toward some of my future dreams was gone! Have any of you ever been robbed? Do you remember how it felt to be...

Readings 1: The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 14, verses 3-91 While he was at Bethany, in the house of Simon the Leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came in with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head....

The question for us today is: what does it mean for us to stand with our faith, for us to stand with this church?

It was in Alaska, right before the first Gulf War, that I first realized how music can “teach us how to hear the world differently,” as jazz critic Jed Rasula once said. I was in the Air Force “Gateway to the West” jazz band and my unit was temporarily deployed to Alaska, waiting anxiously...

The first step is to notice the mountain. It is there. And it belongs to a range of mountains. There’s no going around it. The next step is to reach the kind of acceptance that has us praying in our hearts: "Lord, I don’t ask you to move the mountain, just give me the strength to climb." The...

Fantasies sometimes reveal undisclosed information about ourselves: our hidden phobias, unspoken desires and unexamined motives. And group fantasies say much about our culture—our society's real values as opposed to the ideals that receive mainly lip service.

Introduction One year for the November Service Auction, [a member] asked and I agreed to have a sermon topic listed among the many items available for bidding....

Readings An excerpt from “The Sonnets To Orpheus” by Rainer Maria Rilke Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21 Lyrics to Tracy Chapman’s song “Be And Be Not Afraid” Sermon The character of God said it to the reluctant Hebrew prophets who were always charged with speaking truth to power. “Be not...

In a Barnes & Noble just before Easter, I watched a woman glance at a table of books and make a face like she'd just tasted something awful. Then she hurried on by as if she were afraid the books would bite. Curious, I looked to see what she had grimaced at: All the books on the table were about...

SERMON DELIVERED BY REV. ROBERT WEST at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York on September 8, 1963. This was Rev. Robert West's first sermon at First Unitarian in Rochester. Late on a Sunday afternoon, five weeks ago, my family and I drove into Rochester to begin our life here with...

The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Stewardship and Development staff is pleased to announce that The Reverend James C....

If you have been paying attention lately, you have been exposed to a mountain of information about the status of immigrants and aliens in the United States. You have heard some of the heart-wrenching stories about separated families and exploited workers, about thousands of deaths as a result of...

Step One:​ Invoke an external and internal threat. Pose it as a threat to civilization itself. Create a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solution. Insist that the leader’s superior instinct and access to privileged knowledge are more reliable than universal...

"Few of their children in the country learn English Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our Language, and even our Government will become precarious." Does this sound familiar? This...

As part of my seminary training I spent a summer working as a hospital chaplain, assigned to the psychiatric floor. I found it to be deeply gratifying work, and I was able to build relationships with many of the patients. Some were long-term and others had a quick turnaround. Some were what we...

Today is the second of our three-part sermon series dedicated to Rev. Forrest Church. As I noted last week, Church spent nearly 30 years as the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City....

How clearly I remember it. My husband, Dan, and our daughter, Sarah, had spent the night in Taos, New Mexico. The next morning we set out for the pueblo, an ancient village inhabited by indigenous people known as the Pueblo. Clearly tourists, easily identified as European Americans, we were...

One day I was sitting in a coffee shop downtown when I noticed a couple of street corner evangelists setting up shop across the street—an older and a younger man (possibly his son?), wearing dark suits and ties and wielding King James Version bibles. They commenced taking turns preaching the...