We hear many despairing voices around us today. So many problems look huge and unyielding: climate change, global economic disruption, economic and racial inequality, violence both far away and close by. People are doubting their ability to make positive change happen. How do we doubt this doubt? Where do we find hope when hope is hard to find?
If the 10 commandments aren’t a passionate guide for our lives and those of other faiths seem obscure or less applicable, what source might suggest a contemporary and rigorous basis for personal decision-making?
July 3: In my nearly 70 years as a dedicated music student, performer and teacher, I find that I have experienced many life lessons, serious, ridiculous, profoundly mysterious, funny, exasperating. Some of my stories might be parables. Others are just unexpected. A life in the arts can be interesting to examine because it has essentially different goals than most vocations. Gary … Continue reading Stories From A Life in Music
What is faith and why is it important? Where most people tend to equate faith and belief, they are in fact two very different things. Beliefs are but ideas that have chosen to accept as truth, often in spite of evidence to the contrary. Faith, on the other hand, is the willingness to let go of even our most cherished beliefs in pursuit of truth and meaning.
Ours is an age in which opinions rule while “truth” is at best an elusive commodity: a suspect ideal to postmodern liberals, or (to the other side) the strict word of a stricter God. But only by appealing to truth can we call out what is nonsense. So, bypassing philosophers, I find in Bob Dylan’s 45-year body of art an elemental truth. Dylan’s is a truth steeped in tradition yet devoted to creativity, defiantly challenging everything “phony,” to the very UU refrain: “for every hung up person in the whole wide universe.”
The 19th century art movement known as Impressionism was a radical departure from traditional art forms and from the realism offered by the then emerging technology of photography. Impressionism changed the very nature of the way we think about art. It also offers intriguing possibilities to change the way we think about life, aging, and death.
Transitions never cease in the life of a congregation. Ministers come and go; finances rise and fall; neighborhoods thrive and fail. This morning we explore how to manage the excitement, anxieties and frustrations of shifting times, drawing from the teachings of the Tao te Ching.
May 29th About our Speaker: Billy has a BA degree from Stetson University, an MA from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and post graduate hours in counseling from the University of North Florida. He is an Academic Counselor at Florida State College at Jacksonville and the Director of the Karma Kagyu Study Group. Worship Leader: … Continue reading Billy Thomas – “The Ten Virtuous Actions”
Join BBUUC’s Beacon youth group as we explore transitions, love, and life and how to find the beacon that leads to who we are and who we will become.
May 15th TBD About our Speaker: Rabbi Merrill Shapiro grew up in Bloomfield, northern New Jersey, and studied electrical engineering at both Cornell University and Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology). He became a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and was identified as an educational leader by the … Continue reading Rabbi Merrill Shapiro
