HUH?? A Collection of Sermons, Homilies, and Calls to Action
By Rev. John Eric Gibbons
“HUH??” covers the best of 31 years of John Gibbons’s preaching, counseling, prodding, surprising, clowning, inspiring, and confetti-bombing people through his ministry at the First Parish in Bedford, Unitarian Universalist.
John’s preaching and this book highlight the countless and varied religious, social, and political topics that reflect the issues from 1990 to the present as well as his own beliefs and the charges to action for his parishioners seeking a better world. While John’s sermons benefit from his presence and delivery, reading them can be almost as satisfying spiritually. John’s humor and common sense are evident as is his commitment to social justice and the Unitarian Universalist denomination.
Words are not meaningful in and of themselves; rather they are made meaningful when—by asking “HUH??”—people create meaning. People are curious, we strive to understand; we are the “huh?” asking species.
A Meetinghouse & Its People – The Story of The First Parish in Bedford
By Sharon Lawrence McDonald
As its Town Historian, Sharon McDonald has an impressive amount of knowledge about the town of Bedford. … Sharon is a wonderful storyteller, and in her special way she has woven all of this into a narrative that is both informative and entertaining. Highly recommended!
—Don Corey, President, Bedford Historical Society
These accounts of First Parish history enable all of us to have been here forever, or at least since 1729. Of the personages we may never have heard, and we may share no blood lineage, but these are our ancestors now!
In their accomplishment and anxiety, their oddity and aspiration, their frustration and foible, their plodding and marching and day after day walking together, may we see a resemblance to ourselves. Amidst the ordinary and the momentous, may they teach us perseverance and the long view.
—John E. Gibbons
Journey in North America / Utazás Észak-Amerikában
Honoring “the transformative power of pilgrimage,” Rev.John Gibbons arranged a re-publication of Journey in North America, a facsimile copy of the 1834 first edition in Hungarian, and an English translation with an introductory essay.
Sándor Bölöni Farkas or Alexander Farkas (1795–1842) was the first Hungarian Unitarian to visit America. Traveling in 1831, he described the United States as a wonderland, and highly praised American democracy. Like deToqueville (whom he met in Boston), Bölöni’s writings furthered democratic agitations in Europe and the Revolutions of 1848. More radical than the Catholic deToqueville, Bölöni’s book was banned by the Roman Catholic Church in 1834.
