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Sunday, April 27 at 10:00 AM
"Some Assembly Required"
A Lay Service by Doug Muder
"Don't come to a Unitarian Universalist
church to be given a religion," UU minister
George Marshall wrote. "Come to develop
your own religion." Statements like
that can puzzle newcomers, and they often
respond with questions that we have a
hard time answering to their satisfaction:
What good is a church that doesn’t give
you a religion? Can UUs believe anything
they want? Where are the limits?
Newcomer questions are hardest when
they are embedded in an unexamined
background (unspoken assumptions and
unconscious metaphors) that serves
UUism badly. To answer these questions
well, we need to make the background
metaphors explicit and challenge them:
What if church is more like an art class or
a shop class than like a class teaching answers
for a final exam? What if we picture
a religious community as a caravan
rather than a fortress?
Doug is a member of First Parish, an
online columnist for UU World magazine,
and is working on a book presenting
UUism to newcomers.
Sunday, May 4 at 10:00 AM Music Sunday coordinated by Brad Conner,
First Parish Music & Choir Director
Music Sunday will be especially significant
event this year. The adult choir, joined by
the Senior & Junior Youth Choirs and
KidSing will be singing Spirituals in celebration
of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
As a tribute to the 40th anniversary of Dr.
King's passing, Harvard Law School Professor
and famed author, Randall Kennedy,
will be reading King's famous "I Have a
Dream" speech as the homily. Kennedy is a
member of the bars of the District of Columbia
and the US Supreme Court, a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and a member of the American Philosophical
Assoc. His 1997 book Race,
Crime, and the Law won the Robert F. Kennedy
Book Award. He is the author of Sellout:
The Politics of Racial Betrayal; Interracial
Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity
and Adoption; and Nigger: The Strange Career
of a Troublesome Word.
Sunday, May 11 at 10:00 AM Rev. Laurie Auffant, guest preacher
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