We want to be good and treat others as having inherent worth and dignity. But sometimes we screw up and cause harm. When this happens, what should we do? This important ethical question has a lot of bad answers and a few good ones. I will talk about both, drawing on Danya Ruttenberg’s insightful and … Continue reading How to be Good … Even When You’re Bad

As Unitarian-Universalists, we affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth. Consequently, we ought to be concerned about lies: they rather obviously interfere with the search for truth. In this service, I want to look at the phenomenon of lying: its origins, its pervasiveness, its types, and, in particular, the most common and … Continue reading This is Your Brain on Lies

When our children light the chalice, they say, “This is the church of the open mind.” But what do we mean by the open mind, why is it so important, and what are its enemies? In this service we investigate these and other questions, a journey that takes us to a UFO cult in 1954 … Continue reading The Open Mind and Its Enemies

Link for Sunday Worship:   https://tinyurl.com/WUSworship American political discourse has become intensely polarized. On even apparently neutral issues, there is a Republican side and a Democratic side. As Unitarian-Universalists we value the free and responsible search for truth, but our politics seems to embody the exact opposite. How did this happen? How did we get this way? … Continue reading The Perils of Polarization