{"id":736,"date":"2007-01-04T22:41:05","date_gmt":"2007-01-05T03:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=736"},"modified":"2008-02-10T18:45:01","modified_gmt":"2008-02-10T23:45:01","slug":"736","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=736","title":{"rendered":"Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our congregation’s CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapter asked me to meet with them this evening and talk with them about Unitarian Universalism. Which forced me to a quick overview of the current state of Unitarian Universalism. Here’s my short list of what we stand for these days:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. We’re non-creedal. We explicitly state that we don’t tell you what to believe.<\/li>\n
  2. But we have boundaries, too. One of our boundaries: you shouldn’t come into a Unitarian Universalist congregation and tell other people what to believe.<\/li>\n
  3. We’re pro-science. For example, we do not find evolutionary biology to be threatening to our religion.<\/li>\n
  4. We’re disorganized. Like the rest of the religious liberals (or spiritual progressives, if you like that name better), we can’t seem to get our act together organizationally speaking.<\/li>\n
  5. We’re “post-Christian.” To my friend the rabbi we look like Christians, but more conservative Christians are quite sure that we are not Christians. So I’d say we’re post-Christian and proud of it.<\/li>\n
  6. We’re relatively open. No human community is perfect, and we have our moments of intolerance, but as religious organizations go we’re pretty open.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As one example of a definition of Unitarian Universalism, I passed out printed copies of Time Berners-Lee’s online essay WWW, UU, and I<\/a> — which I still think is one of the best expositions of what it means to be a Unitarian Unviersalist in our time.<\/p>\n

    Then I talked a little bit about where Unitarian Universalism seems to be heading. Acknowledging that we’re too anarchic to really agree on a direction in which to head, here’s my short list of preferred destinations:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. We should be moving towards a new way of organizing. The organizational structure of most Unitarian Universalist congregations keeps us at 50 to 100 members. We should adopt a scalable organizational architecture. I like the idea of small groups linked in larger web formations (see Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics<\/em> for a good discussion of this, or the Small Group Ministry Network<\/a> for another approach).<\/li>\n
    2. We should be interpreting the Western religious traditions (Western Christian, Jewish, and European pagan traditions) to support the healing of Nature and the earth.<\/li>\n
    3. We should be working on building dialogue between secular non-religious folk and religious liberals, helping both groups to find common causes on which they can work together.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Towards the end, we also talked about how various religious liberal groups — pagans, Unitarian Universalists, liberal Christians, liberal Jews — could work together on the same sex marriage issue. We all pretty much agreed that this is the big issue facing religious liberals in Massachusetts today. (So I told the CUUPS group about the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry<\/a> and Mass Equality<\/a> — send them money, and sign up to receive email updates from them!)<\/p>\n

      That’s my quick overview of Unitarian Universalism. Your results may vary. No guarantees that I will agree with myself tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Our congregation’s CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapter asked me to meet with them this evening and talk with them about Unitarian Universalism. Which forced me to a quick overview of the current state of Unitarian Universalism. Here’s my short list of what we stand for these days: We’re non-creedal. We explicitly state that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[342],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-religion","tag-tim-berners-lee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}