Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A teacher once recommended a spiritual practice to a student. She said, “When you wake up, before doing anything else, write down on separate pieces of paper these sentences: (1) I am but dust and ashes, and (2) I am a Child of God. For these truths are both true, and together they spell out…
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There aren’t many people about whom it can be said that they transformed the very nature of their profession. That, before they arrived on the scene, it was one way, but when they left, it was something else entirely. But you can say it about Muhammad Ali. This was a man who, besides being the…
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Theology Outside the Box
Summers when I was a teenager, I used to teach Vacation Bible School at the Church of Christ in Palestine, Texas. We used popsicle sticks to create little Noah’s Arks. We played Pin-the-Animal-to-the-Ark. We ate a snack of animal crackers. It was a blast. It might not have looked like it, but we were doing…
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One of the longest-running science fiction series in network television history is The X-Files. It originally aired in the 1990s up till 2002 and saw revivals in 2016 and a further season in 2018. In the show, “X-Files” are unsolved cases involving mystical and paranormal phenomena collected by the FBI, but no one really takes…
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Someone asks, “What is Unitarian Universalism?” “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” What do you do? People are going to ask. It’s inevitable, in this world in which folks are generally not familiar with what those two very long words strung together, “Unitarian Universalism,” mean. I think elevator speeches (brief statements between 30 seconds and 2…
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When I was eight years old, I saw a movie called Escape to Witch Mountain. People called me Tony back then, and it just so happened that one of the movie’s main characters was a boy also named Tony, about my age, together with his sister, named Tia. Tony and Tia were brother and sister…
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What Does It Really Mean to Love Yourself? (All About Love, Part 3)
Here is bell hooks, author of All About Love, the book we are exploring in this year’s year-long sermon series. Love is our focus all year long. Different aspects of love. Today, we look at the aspect known as self-love. And as bell hooks, says, “When I talked with friends and acquaintances about self-love, I…
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When one imagines a religion, something human-made may immediately come to mind: perhaps religious architecture like Angkor Wat, the vast ancient Hindu temple complex in Cambodia; or Islam’s Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; or Chartres Cathedral in Paris. Something spacious and sizable in stone and glass, shaped by human hands. Yet I am struck…
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If you are here for the first time, it might not be unreasonable for me to assume that you were expecting to hear about a certain Christian doctrine that many (not all!) but many strands of Christianity affirm: the bodily resurrection of Jesus. For many folks, Easter and Jesus’ physical resurrection go together like peanut…
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Part 1 Some time ago I posted on Facebook one of my all-time favorite Unitarian Universalist jokes: How many UUs (that’s how we shorten our VERY LONG NAME) does it take to change a lightbulb? Here’s the answer: We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a…
Spiritflow 