Over on the Resources page, I have assembled a bunch of links to web sites that might be interesting to people reading this archive. It’s obviously not an exhaustive list, so I need your help.

I’d like to keep the links somewhat general in nature - you’ll notice that I haven’t linked to any specific blogs, for example, but rather to places people can find blogs they might enjoy reading.

What is missing? Should I have a Religious Education section? Any suggestions on what to put there?

Please do contribute your thoughts to this process if you can.

From the Reverend Adam Tierney-Eliot:

We need to come together to be what we dream.

. . .

We come here to make sense of the world. This is where we come when we are in grief or in shock, when we are confused and lost. It is where we share our victories and recover from our defeats. It is an avenue for reaching out to the world and looking within ourselves. Ultimately, that is what church is. It is a place that challenges and heals and should do so with all the fullness and grace that its component souls can provide.

An abundant church should think in terms of abundance and of possibility. We should try to embody our goals of inclusion and our dreams. We dream for ourselves, for our children and for those people in the near and distant future who will be proud to say that “This is my Church.”

from “The Abundant Church,” sermon given April 29, 2007 at the Eliot Church in Natick, MA

The Good News of Unitarian Universalism is too often unshared. This archive seeks to highlight the very best of this religious faith, by collecting inspiring, challenging writings of the Good News of Unitarian Universalism from ministers and lay people of all walks of life.

To start, I will post materials three times a week, with the first on Friday, June 1, 2007.

Submissions and suggestions for resources are highly encouraged! Please use the contact form or the comments to respond to what you read here, and to add to it. I’m only one person and can’t read the whole internet by myself.

And so it begins.

From Rev. Lawrence McGinty come these opening words:

To this house we come bringing our boldest dreams — seeking here the inspiration and strength to make them be! To this house we come hoping to bury broken dreams, to be sustained through their pain and to discover new ones amidst their tears. We come here lonely, isolated from meaningful human contact, searching for warmth and closeness and care. Needing to grow beyond plateaus of the commonplace, we seek here challenges and commitments productive of greater wholeness and deeper meanings.

We come intense and constructed, hoping for encouragement to shed our pretenses and to be ourselves. Filled with despair and self-doubt, we seek affirmations prodding us to say “yes” to ourselves and to life. Somehow, always putting happiness ahead of ourselves, we enter this place trusting that what happens here will enable us to make and to accept a little bit of it now — today!

Strange place, this house — here we cry, sing, laugh, hurt, dance, touch, survive, celebrate, grow, search, doubt, hope, rejoice, pray, trust, care, learn, think, wonder, be, become! Yes, this morning, to this house we come.

Source: UUA.org “WorshipWeb,” by Rev. Lawrence McGinty, most recently of All Souls Unitarian Church of Indianapolis, IN, before his death in 1996.