At one point in her novel Fly Away Home, American writer Marge Piercy has a mother say of her daughters: “The girls had been raised Unitarian (Universalist), which seemed a nice, sensible compromise between having no religion at all and having to lie about what we believed. Enough religion to be...

"It was still dark that morning in 1942 when the Gestapo rousted from bed the Jews of Bobawa, a Polish village. In the confusion, twelve-year-old Samuel Oliner slipped away and hid on a roof, still in his pajamas. The next afternoon, when he dared to look around, the ghetto was silent....

Take a moment right now to visualize in your mind’s eye the first American Thanksgiving feast which our Pilgrim forebears shared with their Native American neighbors on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the Fall of 1621. If you’re like me, you imagined a pretty pleasant and peaceable scene—a...

This morning, I want us to grapple with one of the most universal and troubling facts of human existence. Though every last one of us would have it otherwise, it is an unavoidable reality that during our lifetimes people close to us will become sick, suffer great pain, and, in some cases, die. It...

Elie Wiesel was just a wide-eyed and innocent adolescent when he and all the other Jews of the Transylvanian village of Sighet were jammed into cattle cars one April night in 1944 by SS troops, and shipped to Auschwitz....

An Austrian millionaire was in the news this month for giving away all of his fortune. Why? "For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said....

Since the time human beings became conscious of their existence, of the reality that they will die, and of the awareness that birth creates new life, they have wondered where they came from, why they were there and what happened to them when they died. They regarded these happenings with awe and...

Thursday marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Different though they and their influences were, both contributed to a tectonic shift in ideas. Neither arrived at his culminating treatise: Darwin’s 1859 The Origin of Species and Lincoln’s 1865 Emancipation...

The journey was a long one. We started on an airplane, a 16-hour trip crossing the international date line. A van for an hour, then another hour’s plane ride. A pedi-cab trip, and a four hour van ride. Then another hour’s drive up a windy mountain road, turning off the road onto a rocky, bumpy,...

Every June, representatives of the congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association gather for the annual General Assembly. Each year as we do so, we try to shed some light on a local issue of justice, and we invite people of all faiths to join us in working to make our world a better place.

We are five days away from what is has come to be traditionally celebrated as the birth of Jesus of Nazareth....

Many of us have stories about God. A college student once told me how he asked questions about God in his childhood church and the leaders did not know how to answer. He decided that God must not be real....

Gadgets: The downfall of a free society, electric litter paving an inexorable path to our culture’s moral, intellectual, spiritual, and inevitable destruction. If you are an American living in the 21st century, you likely have fretted over this topic, or some variation on it. You might even have...

For if they are evil and we are not, if that's how we see things, then we are committing the same kind of error which led to this tragedy. That's the problem of evil. Not so much that it exists — in that it's really just a fact of life, or a force of nature. The problem of evil, as I see it, is...

A child I know, when asked this week whether she would answer the call of her elementary school principal to wear red, white and blue clothes on Thursday, was in a quandary. She put down the crayon with which she was painstakingly trying to squeeze the words Peace is Possible onto the white bars...

“I wondered about what I espoused as a pacifist and as a lover of life. As a Unitarian Universalist I dug for answers. But I had no answers. I still felt scared, horrified, hurt, angry, and shocked.”— Tom Capo How has this attack on our safe and secure country affected us? When a catastrophe...

Once or twice a generation comes a tragedy so immense that our whole nation comes to a stop and some new day of infamy becomes ingrained upon our memory and calendars. Such a date now becomes September 11th. We fixate on the horror; and then fear, anger, and a kind of helpless despair follow, but...

I invite you to reach out and make contact with the person next to you, a hand on shoulder, hand in hand, arm in arm, arm around, that we might feel our human connection at this dreadful time of mourning. And I ask you to be silent with me in remembrance of those who died on Tuesday, Sept. 11, in...

...Our spiritual connection to the food we eat has...been harmed by a modern culture in which over-processed foods are so ubiquitous that we have ceased to think about foods in their whole forms any more. ...Michael Pollan writes, “Try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother...

It’s really complicated honey. I’m only now understanding it myself. We weren’t really thinking about it like you and your friends do. It’s not that we didn’t care about how it would impact you; we weren’t really thinking about you at all. Oh that’s sounds terrible, I’ll say. I...