Living in Chicago, working at the U of C while my husband attended seminary, I often felt that we were in the middle of a great dialogue. Students around us were in the midst of formulating ideas central to their lives as scholars, ministers, theologians, thinkers. People we knew were sent forth into the world to then practice those ideas. And then it was our turn.

And now, two thirds of the way through the first year of his first settled ministry, I’m coming to feel that we are isolated from that process, just in the practicalities of the busy-ness of life, of living focused on one community rather than on a veritable hub of many.

I turn to the internet as a source of more ideas, more discussions, intellectual and spiritual discourse, but I find often that many sites are places that people go to vent their frustrations and scream at each other without consequence, and not really have any meaningful discourse. It doesn’t help that it’s an election year.

Rev. Matt Tittle, however, is quietly holding a remarkably civil and interesting discussion on the nature of truth as it relates to the nature of Jesus as person or savior, over at his “Keep the Faith.” The reactions to some of his writings serve to remind me that Unitarian Universalism is not the well-known universe that it seems from where I often sit, surrounded by like-minded individuals, and that it is possible to have meaningful dialogue with people who are not familiar with our tenets, or even the notion that there can be more than one truth.

My personal frustration with religious dialogue is often that I feel I have to start at the very beginning, with ideas that I have become very comfortable with, such as an absolute rejection of one-true-way theology, and have the same arguments over and over rather than getting into deeper discussion. I admire Matt’s patience with some of his readers and find his methods of responding inspiring.

Something I think our faith movement is missing is an ongoing public discussion between our own ministers, whether in sermons that respond to each other or in public lecture series or debates on particular theological topics. This was something that was somewhat common in earlier times, particularly the late 1800s-early 1900s when sermons were printed in newspapers.

It seems that the only opportunity that our ministers have today for this kind of thing is the once a year Berry Street Lecture at General Assembly, where a minister is chosen to lecture on whatever they choose, and another is chosen to respond. Sometimes the ideas presented there resonate into other ministers’ sermons over the next year, the most recent example being responses to William Schultz’s “What Torture’s Taught Me,” where he challenged the notion of “inherent” worth.

Our ministers are too busy, it seems, with all of the complexities of running their churches, and the theological development of our movement suffers for it. This is part of why I run Best of UU — to collate some of the ideas floating out there in individual churches into one place, and hopefully inspire some discussion on those ideas and the different approaches to them.

So how do we “fix” this? Should theological discourse be abandoned to those with the luxuries of time and graduate programs? Or is there a way to keep that dialogue going, for the good of our movement as a religious body? And wouldn’t that ongoing dialogue also better equip our members to go out into the world and talk about our religious ideas with people outside our circles, like Rev. Matt’s readers, to spread our good news as we know it?