One of the proposed Congregational Study/Action Issues that will be discussed at General Assembly later this month is “Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice.” In the official proposal is a section that describes the issue’s significance to UUism. Here is what it says:
“Unitarian Universalists have a vision of environmental justice. One of our principles acknowledges [...]
This blog is on informal hiatus while summer research is being conducted. A significant part of that is ethnographic fieldwork at a number of American Buddhist groups. In sitting in on these meetings, it is hard not to notice the aspects of liberal religion that they embody. While each of the five groups currently under [...]
Most Unitarian-Universalists are white; on average they are not poor; the denomination’s roots are Protestant Christian, as are many of their institutional structures, forms of service, and fundamental thought processes about religion. A great many of them were actually raised in at least nominally Christian households and are fluent in North American Christian language, bodily [...]
A study in the new issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion—the top sociology of religion journal—sets out to determine whether religious liberals are limited or universal in their compassion.
There’s a bit of background to the new study. The journal published a study in 2002 that suggested religious liberals displayed a limited [...]
Language is always up for reinterpretation; language matters. Two axioms to start this discussion. The specific question here is whether religious liberals, such as UUs but including other groups as well, can authentically talk about the Kingdom of God, especially the desire to see the Kingdom of God here on earth.
What sort of metaphor is [...]
Writing at The Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship’s site, Rev. Thomas Wintle offers an interesting typology of UU Christians. Essentially, it breaks down UU Christian identity into three primary categories, linking them to the Trinitarian Christian conception of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The descriptions are brief so it isn’t always exactly clear [...]
Conrad Wright’s 1970 collection of essays The Liberal Christians is a classic of American church history, especially for those of us who work on the more liberal streams of the tradition. Wright is a major historian of Unitarianism in particular, and it is with the Unitarians that The Liberal Christians is concerned. Perhaps [...]
From James Pike it’s now time to take a look at Thomas Merton, a convert to Roman Catholicism who, strangely enough, ended up creating a sort of liberal Catholicism from inside a monastic cell in Kentucky. Perhaps it is significant that his journey to Catholicism took him through many other religious bodies, including liberal [...]
Yesterday’s brief discussion of You and the New Morality pointed out some ways in which Bishop James Pike’s concerns and approach to religion differ from those of Leary and his fellows, who were explored in previous posts. The contrast between these two camps continues with Pike’s book If This Be Heresy. Unlike the [...]
James Pike was a famous religious liberal of the mid-20th century and the Bishop of California for the Episcopal Church in the 1960s. With Pike we have entered a different realm of religion than that we explored with Leary, Dass, and Ginsberg. While each of them had views and experiences particular to themselves [...]
