Stories for liberal religious kids, drawn from a wide variety of religious and spiritual traditions.
The stories on these pages were originally written for a variety of purposes — worship services, classes, or just for fun. You should adapt them to whatever situation you want to use them in.
Copyright: Please respect copyright. For just one example, if you use one of my copyright-protected stories in a webcast or recording, I ask that you give me credit for the story (e.g., “This story is copyright by Dan Harper”). You do not have to give me credit in educational settings or at home.
Cultural appropriateness: When I wrote these stories, I worked from the most culturally appropriate sources I could find, and I attempted to retain the distinctive flavor of the original religion/culture of each story. You will have to decide how you want to present other religious traditions where they conflict with Unitarian Universalist sensibilities, whether you will cover over religious differences or not. Some examples of what I mean: Will you ignore that Buddhists affirm that Buddha had 500+ previous lives? Will you adhere to Western understandings of gender, or acknowledge diverse understandings of gender? Will you acknowledge that most Christians believe Jesus is divine? Again, you will have to judge for yourself, based on the needs of your local congregation. Also note that some of these stories were written 25 or more years ago. You may want to revise older stories to match your current understandings of gender, race, cultural diversity, etc.
Table of Contents
- Daoist, Confucian, and East Asian Tales
- Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Tales
- Tales from Africa and the African Diaspora
- Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain Tales
- American Indigenous Tales
- Unitarian Universalist tales
- Ancient Greek and Roman Tales
The links above will take you to collections of stories.
(Originally, all the stories were on this one webpage, but as I added more stories and illustrations, eventually some web browsers were slow in rendering the page. For this reason, I split the stories up into several different webpages.)