A consensus of contemporaries who choose to ignore their own historical traditions is not a creative evolution over time but a rejection of time.
Categories
Category: Unitarian Universalism
Categories
Revelation.
For religions that don’t claim revealed status, one still must identify the ultimate source of authority.
Categories
Making it up.
What I don’t hear UUs doing, when they try to define the new religion of Unitarian Universalism, is to speak revelationally, or to offer the sort of charismatic insight that has in the past launched what we now recognize as religions.
Categories
Atheism is easy.
“Even now it is busy creating a world fit for humanism’s happy heroes: the plucky, self-reliant, cheerful, libidinous, and uninhibited fun-lovers of the future.”
To the extent that we UUs think of ourselves as a “new religion,” we consign our movement to irrelevancy, intellectual confusion, and spiritual shallowness.
Sallie McFague urges us to behave as if the world is God’s body. But doesn’t faith seek some anchor more secure than “as if”?
The early history of American interest in Hinduism is closely tied, surprisingly, to the early intellectual history of a small, liberal sect of American Christians known as Unitarians.
A leading 19th-century Unitarian says that “God talks in creation, in history, [and] in revelation,” and that the church is a community of ongoing interpretation.
A doctrine of the church, refined by theological and historical analysis, helps us identify the purpose and significance of Unitarian Universalist congregations.