In the Bible, there’s a pretty well-known story about David and Goliath. Goliath, a huge warrior from the side of the Philistines, challenged someone from the side of the Israelites to battle. David was chosen and he knew that even with all of the armor in the world, he would not be able to win...

Call to Gather “The struggle of today is not altogether for today; it is for a vast future also.” -- Abraham Lincoln’s annual message to Congress, December 3, 1861[1] Reading: “The Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this...

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...

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...

In his 1947 biography of Theodore Parker, the American historian Henry Steele Commager wrote about Parker's first trip to Europe: There was everything to be seen and much to be remembered, and Parker invaded Europe with the ruthless thoroughness that ever characterized him: he carried the towns b...

[This sermon is third in a three-part series: "The Humanist in Me," "The Theist in Me," and "The Christian in Me."] In this series of sermons, there is much more we could do....

I am a third generation Unitarian Universalist. This is by no means a record. Even in this congregation there are families whose Unitarian Universalist history goes much further back, and in New England, where I grew up, there were people who were fifth, sixth, even seventh generation....

As must be obvious to every one of you, these are times of great tension and conflict in America. Much of this turmoil in our nation is focused on what many observers have called The Culture Wars...the very vocal and visible battles that are occurring on many fronts to determine whose values,...

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...