July 24, 2022
by Linda Dove

Good morning, my dear UU community and friends. Are you in love? Have you ever been in love? It’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it? But today I share with you, my feelings of intense grief and loss. Love and loss, of course, are yin and yang and so grief stares at me in the mirror these days. Lately, grief, even horror, have worn down my resilience and sense of connectedness. So today connectedness is my theme.

I grieve about the contemporary absence of global connectedness, connecting with one another as humans and with all the natural world of which we’re a part. I love summer and I usually perk up once winter is over. But this year, grief interferes. I grieve at the harm humankind is doing to itself in conflict and war and our harm to all other life in our neglect of climate change. I also grieve for our precious HUU community and our own struggle for survival.

Living amidst a lot of house construction at Preston Lake, the destruction of life is on my doorstep. Daily, I witness the building industry’s lack of concern for nature in the materials it uses, its construction methods, and its polluting trash, waste, and noise.

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July 10, 2022
by Mwizenge Tembo, Ph. D
Emeritus Professor of Sociology

In my message this morning, I will discuss the relationship between Critical Race Theory (CRT), Power, Humility, and Happiness in Our Lives. I will first define and describe these terms and conclude with how they may be related to our happiness.

We may not appreciate the significance of CRT unless we understand its brief history. This may help dispel some of the myths and controversy that surrounds the term today.

In the early 1700s Europeans began the search for race as Europeans increased sea exploration of the world in Africa, Asia, North and South America. They encountered many peoples that looked different from Europeans in terms of skin color, facial and other body features.

Swedish biologist Carolus Linneus in 1758 was the founder of the modern system of biological taxonomy that categorized all living things. Linneus created 4 groups of all humans: 1. Homo sapiens Americanus (reddish, choleric, erect) 2. Homo Sapien Europeans (white, ruddy, muscular) 3. Homo Sapiens Asiaticus (yellow, melancholic, inflexible) 4. Homo Sapiens Afer (black, phlegmatic, indulgent).

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HUU – July 3, 2022
By Robin McNallie

I recall Forrest Church once asserting that Unitarian Universalism is the denomination that, in its principles, is the most representative of American democracy, and we can look retrospectively to find earlier evidence of this freedom tendency in our denomination, specifically at the era of Transcendentalism, extending roughly from the 1830s to 1850. The great guru of that avant garde Unitarian movement was, of course Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in a reminiscence published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883, the year after his death, comments on the generation just coming of age in the 1830s decade. He characterizes that cohort in a memorably pungent sentence: “The young men were born with knives in their brains.” Pungent as it is, the sentence leaves out the young women of the time, predominantly Unitarian, who were also carrying inside their brains concealed cutlery – women all known in their own time if not ours: Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Sturgis, Sophia Ripley, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydian M. Emerson (Waldo’s wife), and Margaret Fuller.

In her rather short lifetime, Fuller was a much talked-about figure whose 1845 book, Woman in the 19^th Century, was a pioneering tract in describing women’s subordination to men and the benefits to both sexes of ending it. Here, she was reiterating what the English writer, Mary Woolstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, was saying in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). After her death in 1850, Fuller’s reputation faded. In a college course survey of American literature that I took as an undergraduate in the 1950s, she didn’t warrant the standard biographical sketch and sampling of her writings in the assigned text, nor was she better represented in the survey text I taught at JMU in the mid-‘60s. Only with the rising tide of the women’s movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s did she begin to acquire more standing. Finally, in 1994, the Viking Portable Margaret Fuller was published with the entire text of Woman included. It was, incidentally, the Viking Portable edition of William Faulkner in 1946 which brought him his late recognition and the Nobel Prize in 1949, and indeed, in 1995, the year after the Viking publication, Fuller was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame. Now, with Fuller’s place in the canon secure, we can see her forward-looking accomplishments more clearly.

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By Les Grady
May 22, 2022

At the request of the author, please DO NOT COPY OR REUSE SLIDES.

Climate Change 2022 file is in pdf format.

by Linda Dove
May 1, 2022

Our Conscious Living Adults group has heard this before. A soldier before the battle of Waterloo is reported to have prayed, “Dear God, if there is a god, save my soul, if I have a soul.”

I’ve decided I’m no longer going to tiptoe around the “God” word. As UUs we’re often reluctant to refer to God with a capital “G”  for fear of offending our Humanist or Atheist members and friends. And many of us migrated from religions discomforted by their rituals, absolutist creeds and dogmas, or literal acceptance of scriptures. Or we felt distanced by religion’s imperial, patriarchal set-ups and power-grasping—God distanced at the church altar with the priests, or Gods idolized in statues or icons in the temple, or God literally being born human in an implausible way.

UUs have never tolerated discomfort well and have been rebels and innovators. In the third century AD proto, as you know, the Unitarians broke away from the mainstream Catholic creed because they rejected the anthromorphic image of God as literally three in one, father, son and holy ghost: hence unitarianism. We heard last week how Thomas Jefferson rejected the Son as God but accepted him as a great moral teacher.  The Universalists broke away from mainstream Protestantism discomforted by the portrayal of an angry, jealous father-figure with a dominating ego. They couldn’t reconcile a judgmental God consigning people to heaven or hell with a kindly, forgiving God, a God who cares personally for individuals. There’s a familiar story about the personal God. A rabbi was a poor man and kept praying God would win him the lottery. Eventually, he whined, “God, why won’t you grant my prayer?” God replied, “Rabbi, just meet me halfway. Go buy a ticket!” But, of course, the idea of such a God also makes UUs uncomfortable. We can’t get our heads round the contradiction of a God that intervenes with our free will and personal responsibility for democratic and social justice activism, all ideas dear to our UU principles. And, finally, there’s the big either/or question of God’s part in evil, as well as good.

More positively, many folk, of course, associate God with the beauty of religious worship—music, art, sculpture, architecture—that all religions inspire. For Christianity, one commentator said something like: “Without Bach’s music, God would be a completely 2nd.-rate figure.”  And it’s a common experience for religious practices and artefacts to inspire ecstasy. Ordinary people as well as mystics are sure there’s a God after such transcendental experience. I’ve had three such experiences in nature but they confirmed for me, not faith in God, but an inner knowing that there’s a field beyond what my limited human faculties can grasp. Those ineffable moments enhanced my awe of nature, the cosmos, and the unnecessary fact of my tiny life; and this firm unknowing continues for me to this day—call it spiritual unknowing, if you will. Meanwhile, some atheists and agnostics say the idea of God is merely a place-holder until our minds and technology solve the mysteries of life and death and the cosmic creation.

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by Linda Dove
January 23, 2022

Good morning. I’m going to talk common sense today! But I’ll disappoint you if you think I’m preaching revolution against the Brits as did Tom Paine in his 1776 pamphlet entitled Common Sense.

No, my focus this morning is on everyday sense-making, one of our three HUU tenets, as you know. [#1 Know Thyself-Temple at Delphi] I’ve always been interested in how we humans make sense of ourselves, each other, our world, and the cosmos, and how we come to our truths, questions pondered, of course, by philosophers and spiritual teachers all through the ages.

First, let me confess I’m in love with the proposition that Consciousness is the Cosmos becoming aware of itself and I’m trying to live my life inside the poetry of those words. But I’m not talking directly about all-pervading consciousness as Dave Pruett did so elegantly last Sunday. I do, though, build on a similar perspective.

As Dave mentioned, extreme materialists assert that matter is the stuff of the universe and they dismiss non-material consciousness. That’s a big issue in itself for another time. But others do offer insights on the biology and physiology of our awareness, recently much helped by functional MRI imaging. Antonio Damasio, an influential neurobiologist, says our sense-making is entirely embodied.

Briefly, my nervous system and my five senses send signals to my brain. My brain translates them into feelings of pain or pleasure and alerts me to what I need to avoid or go for. In this way, my feelings help maintain my body in homeostasis, healthy balance. [2. Shakespeare] My brain converts the basic pleasure or pain to feelings of well-being or suffering and to refined emotions—joy, love, grief, say, or anger, envy, hatred. My brain translates all these feelings into what these biologists call mental images, visual, auditory and so on. And my feeling of being aware is also, they say, composed of mental images; basically abstractions of experiences, re-presentations. My sad feeling in my body becomes a mental image.

I’m not a natural scientist like some of you, but as a lay student I find this approach convincing—up to a point. It leaves some big questions hanging, though. I have time to mention one or two.

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by Dave Pruett
January 16, 2022

The Dilemma

The late cultural historian and Catholic priest, Thomas Berry wrote: “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are between stories.”

The “we” to which Berry refers is the human race, certainly the Western world. No one with eyes to see can deny that humanity is facing simultaneous existential crises: pandemics, climate instability, aging nuclear weapons on hair triggers, extreme disparities in wealth and power, failed states, and the rise of authoritarianism.

On the other hand, it seems a tad naïve to suggest that these difficulties all stem from a broken story.

When Berry speaks of our “story,” he means  our “mythology.” Mythology gets short shrift in Western culture. It shouldn’t. Mythology is what anchors the human soul to the cosmos. It’s the metanarrative that patterns through parables how we ought to relate to our fellow human beings, our fellow creatures, our planetary home, and the cosmos at large, including the Creator.  It’s no surprise that things fall apart when we get this story wrong.

When Berry says “we are between stories,” he refers to the tension between established religious mythology and the newer and emerging scientific story.

For centuries, Western humans took comfort from a religious story that went something like this: Humans were created by divine fiat, in the image of God. Thus, we are superior to the other creatures.  We occupy the central point—Earth—of a cozy universe consisting of a few planets and a few thousand stars. And Earth is our resource, over which we have “dominion.”

The scientific story burst on the scene in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which upended Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology.  In the five centuries since, we’ve learned that the universe is anything but cozy. Vast beyond measure, it consists of some 100B galaxies each populated by 100B stars. Nor do we occupy the center of the cosmos. Rather, we exist in an ordinary solar system on one arm of a spiral galaxy, the whole shebang having originated 13.7B years ago in a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang.

Thanks to Darwin, it gets worse.  We’re the product not of divine decree but of random mutations operating over eons. And we differ not in kind from the other creatures, only in degree.

Which story are we to believe? It’s like having two parents, one of whom tells us how special we are and the other how ordinary. “Do we really have to make the tragic choice,” asks Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, “between an antiscientific philosophy and an alienating science?”

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