Thought for Contemplation: The very first Memorial Day, the story goes, was originated by newly freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, who gathered May 5, 1865, to express their gratitude to the Union soldiers who had perished in an open-air Confederate prison. - Michelle Richards, UU World 5/30/2011 Adin Ballou, author of the hymn “Years Are Coming,” was minister in both of our ancestral faiths, first as a Universalist and later as a Unitarian. He dedicated his li

Have you ever done one of those exercises where you try to get to the bottom of something that is working away at you; the big assumption that underlies the question at hand? I have done this on more than one occasion in groups exploring root causes, personal and professional and have even led a cohort of colleagues through the process while in seminary studying leadership and change. You begin with an ideal or commitment or value that begs for exploration, primarily becaus

When I first entered the Unitarian Universalist ministry back in the mid-1960s, some 55 plus years ago, one of the things I noted at the time was that there were very few women ministers engaged in the practice of ministry. UU ministerial gatherings were, sorry to say, still pretty much a boys club, with a few token exceptions here and there. I remember a ministers study group I belonged to, the Greenfield Group, taking up the topic of feminist theology, but there were no fem