RevCyn

Tomorrow we vote on what Study/Action issue to adopt for 2012-2016, and I haven't made up my mind yet which one I'm voting for.  I talked with a proponent of "CSAI 1 - Climate Action and Adaptation Plans: Why Greenhouse Gases and their Effects Matter to Us" today, who points out that if we don't save the earth, none of these other issues will matter.  Well, yeah.  That's a point.  And he also points out that some of the other issues are related to this one, particularly "CSAI 2 - Families, Population, and the Environment."  I've also seen that a lot of people I know are walking around wearing anti-slavery buttons and that there seems to be a lot of support for "CSAI 5 - Ending Slavery."  The advocate for CSAI 1 asked me, "Well, what is your congregation engaged in?"  We're engaged in all these issues to some extent.  Our JXN Community Forum series has often engaged in environmental issues.  Our members are individually in...

Christina McNight wrote over at her blog , following the Tucson shootings: While I am beyond horrified at the killing of a nine year old girl – BEYOND HORRIFIED – I am equally as horrified at the people who seem to think that she was the only innocent person who was injured or killed that day. ALL of the people in the parking lot on Saturday were innocent.  NONE of them had “done anything”. Her words got me thinking.  This has always been my reaction to other events involving the death of  young children--that it was tragic, yes, and that they were innocent, yes, but that there are a lot of tragic deaths and everyone is innocent. Yet with Christina Taylor Greene, I've responded tragically.  Christina is right that nobody in that parking lot had done anything that made them deserve to get shot, and all of the deaths were tragic.  But I've responded to Christina Taylor Greene's death in a way I've never responded to any other similarly publicized tragedy....

As many of my readers know, I'm on sabbatical.  But I had volunteered to preach this past weekend at a colleague's church on her Sunday off.  I had volunteered a new sermon topic, rather than a "canned" one, but one I knew I would use again in my own congregation later.  I was most of the way done with my sermon, a sermon on the future of Unitarian Universalism, and had two parts left to go -- one was on the work our denomination has done on immigration reform, particularly in Arizona, and then the conclusion. That's where I had left things on Friday night.  When I got back on the computer late Saturday afternoon, I checked into Facebook, and was hit by the news of the tragic shootings in Tucson, Arizona.  I knew I couldn't complete my sermon as I had planned, and was going to have to change it.  Because I wasn't preaching in my own church, I didn't completely scrap the sermon, but as you'll see below it was greatly changed. My first instinct wa...

God of our silent tears, God of the weary and oppressed, We offer up our prayers of comfort and care for all those in shock and sorrow, pain and fear, with the hopes that the goodwill of the many reaching out across the earth will be a balm for those affected by the ill-will of the fear. We pray for the families of the dead, for the wounded and their families, and for the hearts grown cold and bitter against their neighbors, that they may all feel the earth's nurture, humanity's overwhelming respect for life, and the loving arms of that which is most high and most deep. While we cannot change what has been wrought, we can protest when life is treated callously and we can pray and love and care for those whose lives are cut too short, for those whose world is filled with violence and hate, and for the rising sun of a world filled with renewed conviction to stand true to our God of Love, true to our native land, home of those yearning to breathe free, true to ou...

When a bunch of UUs recently got arrested while protesting in Arizona (see Standing on the Side of Love or the UUA for more details), I immediately posted on the Facebook pages of those I know, "I'm proud of you."  Meanwhile, over at The Chaliceblog , "Chalicechick" was asking, "I get that people get arrested protesting with differing levels of justification for it. What I don't get is why we're all so proud of ourselves about it. It seems meaningless at best." It's a good question.  Pride is a mixed bag.  We have pride in things that we feel good about in ourselves or others, things that were hard to achieve, obstacles that were overcome.  And yet we also hear that pride is deadly sin, and pride goeth before a fall.    I've wondered about other people's misplaced "pride" in different things, and I've seen others wondering at pride I or friends of mine have had over different issues.  For example:  I'm no...