Our ministry theme for January is practicing resistance . I’m not surprised our friends at Soul Matters (the independent UU resource hub that provides materials for our monthly themes) landed on this theme at this time. As we have named many times over the past year, the administration in Washington, DC has engaged in many authoritarian actions, e.g., abducting and deporting people without due process, deploying federal troops to US cities, cutting the social safety net to pa

I want to share the words the choir just sang. The piece is “Where the Light Begins” by the choral composer Susan Labarr. The words are a slightly adapted excerpt from a longer poem titled “Where the Light Begins,” [1]  by the Rev. Jan Richardson, an artist, writer and Methodist minister. The poem is from Rev. Richardson’s 2015 collection, Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. [2] About the light she says:   Perhaps it does not begin. Perhaps it is always. Pe

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die / And where you invest your love, you invest your life / Awake my soul / Awake my soul / Awake my soul – w ords from the British folk-rock band Mumford and Sons. [1]  I’m not deeply familiar with their music. My colleague, the Rev. Carolyn Patierno, mentioned back in October she was using the song in a worship service. I liked it, so I asked Jenn (Richards) if she could play it for us this morning. She already knew the

Photo of King's Chapel from a recent UUSE Affirmation class trip to Boston I’m about to take you on a whirlwind tour of 1,840 years of Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist history. (I’ll be covering, on average, about 92 years every minute of this sermon). Please know everything I say is a generalization, and I am leaving out many important people, events, and trends. I’m offering primarily a theological history—Unitarian and Universalist are, after all, theol