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Wednesday, 17 June 2009 21:30 |
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July 5, GNOUU Poetry Sunday. Poets from our GNOUU churches will share their work at a special joint service during this summer holiday. Anne Saunders will be our service leader.
July 12, Celebrating Our Heterogeneous Cerebra. This is not just a title for head scratching. Our minister will reflect on our appreciation for our mental aptitude, and enjoying the variances we find here, and continuing to build a bridge to greater empathy and understanding; i.e., we will look once again at our diversity.
July 19, The Forty Years of Thomas Starr King. We will be welcoming Mr. Charlie Dieterich, a student at Starr King School for Ministry, as our ministerial intern this fall. Rev. VanderWeele will revisit the impact of the Rev. Thomas Starr King, the preacher for whom this school was named and his significant impact in California during the forty years of his life.
July 26th Sunday Service “City on a Hill: How Ideas Shape American History.”
Alexis De Tocqueville said that Americans had no philosophy. Richard Hofstadter said American culture was largely anti-intellectual. Nevertheless, when the puritans settled New England they brought with them an idea of America as a new Jerusalem, and Americans as a chosen people with a destiny. For better and worse this idea has shaped American History — Americans have been capable of extraordinary idealism and yet there is also a fear of loss of control. The talk goes from the 17th century through the Reagan era.
by Howard Hunter, Metairie Park Country Day School; President of the Louisiana Historical Society |
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Tuesday, 26 May 2009 22:23 |
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Our eleventh session of Ethical Living in NOLA featured a visit by Colin and Carrick McCullough on the 14th of May. Colin and Carrick are a father and son from a central Massachusetts family who are travelling cross-country to work on an eco-video project for kids about renewable energy and sustainable living.
The McCulloughs (all four of them) are crossing the U.S. in a vegetable-oil powered Beetle, stopping in at UU congregations to show the videos they have already produced and also to learn (and videotape) the steps being taken at a host of local renewable energy and sustainable living projects. (They visited the BuildSmart Learning Center designed by the Alliance for Affordable Energy while in New Orleans.)
Together, Colin and Carrick shared several of the eco-friendly videos they have already produced, videos that are powerful for young people because Carrick is the featured performer in each program. As they say, “Kids need to see what a sustainable future can look like, and they need to hear it from someone their own age!”
They also shared that they plan to visit projects that are earth friendly around our country and produce a free video for schools. Their hope is to remind young people of the importance of being friendly to our earth as well as to encourage them to formulate and design their own eco-friendly projects, systems, or pieces of equipment.
We thoroughly enjoyed their visit and wish them the best as they are powering their vegetable-oil powered Beetle across the country.
You can learn more about their exciting tour at www.OurRenewableNation.org.
Jim VanderWeele
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What Is Unitarian Universalism? |
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Wednesday, 23 April 2008 19:10 |
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Unitarian Universalism began within the Christian Church as two separate heresies: belief in the oneness of God (Unitarianism) and belief in universal salvation (Universalism). These ideas, though preceding it, gained followers after the Protestant Reformation in the 1500's and were widely taught in the United States in the 1700's at Harvard College and within the congregationalism of the Pilgrim church.
In 1785 King's Chapel in Boston was the first American church to declare its Unitarianism. Through the years as they were affected by transcendentalism and the rationalist humanists, Unitarianism and Universalism grew further from traditional Christianity and closer to one another and officially merged in 1961.
From their founding both Unitarianism and Universalism were non-creedal, claiming freedom of belief as a basic value. The authority for our individual beliefs is the evidence of our local experience refined through reason and spirit and tested in community. Although those beliefs may range from liberal Christianity to naturalistic humanism, it is probably true that nearly all of us can agree to these four statements:
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Each of us has the right and the responsibility to seek his or her own truth.
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Our faith, although it may transcend reason may not be contrary to it.
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We respect all people for their individual worth without regard to color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation.
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We must focus on the needs and purposes of this life rather than an afterlife in which some of us may believe, but for which we have no evidence.
This only scratches the surface, there is a wealth of information about Unitarian Universalism available on the web site of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
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We believe that we are all family and we all have value.