Organizing authority Marie Kondo has been a sensation in the US since the launch of a Netflix show in 2019. The greatest wisdom Kondo offers concerns not organizing, but life. Join us as we consider how a different way of thinking about objects can be life-transforming.
In many traditions and across languages and cultures, the belly has been a source of wisdom and an interior space of great protection. To bear our bellies involves risk and vulnerability, both which feel particularly precarious during this era of threat from democratic breakdown and a global pandemic. How do we continue assessing risk and opening up in ways that generate meaning, connection, and community to lean into creating the type of religious community we dream about? The belly may be one place to begin.
Nothing enriches life like caring relationships. Dr. George Wolfe, interfaith minister and Professor Emeritus of music at Ball State university explores how we can take relationships that grew out of the need for personal social and financial gain and transform them into caring relationships. George also applies this to developing a caring relationship with our planet and its non-human inhabitants.
The bird is an intriguing metaphor appearing in many religious traditions, stories, songs and legends. We have long been fascinated by (or sometimes afraid of) the winged creatures. What lessons can we learn through the lives of birds?
Pastor Katie Culbert is a graduate from Meadville Lombard Theological School, where she received two graduation awards: Leadership in Religious Education and Excellence in Preaching. She graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Religious Studies. She served as Intern Minister for two years in Sarasota, Florida, where she was ordained in 2016. She was the Director of Religious Education at the UU church of Tampa for seven years and has worked as a Chaplain at Tampa General Hospital for seven years. Katie has been involved in many social justice campaigns including working to increase the minimum wage and creating common sense gun legislation. Katie lives in Tampa with her two children Desi, 14 and Casey, 13 and their rescued pit bull, Mickey. Her interests are music, nature and praying for the pandemic to end because people need hugs.
On Sunday, UUCM will conclude its summer series on “The Six Sources of Our Living Traditions by discussing the Fifth source, which asks UUs to heed the results of science and warns against the idolatry of mind and spirit. Music will be provided by Jim Helton, the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and Jon Baptiste and Stay Human. Tom Lowe will review the Ten Commandments and Mike Sullivan will address the Ten Commitments of Humanist Ethics. This service is dedicated to the memory of Steve Robert, a big man with a big heart.
Religion deals with questions of life’s meaning and purpose, and death and how we relate to it—especially to our death or the death of loved ones—is certainly one of those “big questions” that all of humankind’s religions, spiritualities and philosophical systems have addressed, as has science.
The COVID-19 pandemic that is currently ravaging the world and particularly now the U.S. with no clear end in sight has led many people—and I expect some of us—to revisit the question of our own mortality and that of our loved ones. Even if we ourselves have escaped, and even if no one close to us has been stricken, just the magnitude of the death toll around the world is emotionally shattering. We are, psychologists tell us, experiencing a period of collective grieving, along with everything else.
One way of interpreting religious and spiritual beliefs about death and what comes after is to look at them as attempts to demonstrate that the significance of human life is such that it simply does not—cannot—end with the death of the body. In other words, views about life after death are in essence views about life before death and its meaning. Join me as we explore this idea.
Source One - Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces which create and uphold life. Join us this Sunday Jay and Karen Moorman will share personal reflections on the message of hope in finding the connected and shared meaning between all of us. Connections are often formed through like-minded people sharing similar interests and compassion for each other. But connection sometimes is found despite differences in our backgrounds and beliefs. What ties us together as human beings despite differing beliefs? Hope can be found when we look for what we have in common rather than focus on our differences. It takes work and care but it is to this purpose that we must strive.
It's become glaringly clear that the nation cannot look to the Oval Office for emotional and spiritual support through the COVID-19 crisis. That means it needs to become a DIY operation. So how do we do it ourselves?
The process of forgiveness is complex; it is normal to experience a multitude of feelings when searching for forgiveness. It behooves us to practice forgiveness because all of us hurt other people sometimes, and we all need to give and receive forgiveness.
Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne served UU in churches in Illinois, Utah and Ohio, as a Chaplain at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and is now retired. He and his wife Cece are sheltering in place in Carmel, Indiana. They are members of All Souls Unitarian Church, Indianapolis. He is working on All Souls application' to become a Green Sanctuary Congregation and a project to get All Souls to Net Zero Carbon.
Sunday’s sermon weaves together a few of the stories uncovered in decades of research into how events in our local and regional history reflect issues from our national past. These include the Shawnee Prophet’s murderous purging of purported Delaware ‘witches’; the near lynching of Frederick Douglass by pro-slavery ‘ruffians’ at Pendleton; and the notorious KKK terrorism of the 1920s culminating in the last lynching in the North, which took place at Marion in Aug. 1930. Regrettably, most of these incidents are absent from our schools’ history and social studies curricula and remain largely unknown to the populace at large. When it comes to bigotry, hatred, and mass violence justified by religious belief, ignorance is not bliss! The act of remembering these past traumas in situ is the first step toward reconciliation. While we are not responsible for the malign actions of our forebears, we are morally obligated to be accountable for the ways that unacknowledged collective trauma can redound imperceptibly across generations.
