The Rev. Christina Sillari joins us from Portland, Maine. She served First Parish Church in Portland for eleven years as their settled minister. Contact her at: .
Lindy Gifford was raised a white UU (i.e. WASP) in New England, not so incidentally, also the land and race of Unitarian Universalism’s birth. In part because of some early childhood experiences with our faith, she has always been drawn to other faiths and cultures. At first, she attended to this curiosity by studying anthropology and archeology at Tufts University and becoming a free-range archeologist for a time. Eventually, curiosity became a stronger longing and she was ordained an interfaith chaplain by the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine (ChIME) in 2014. She has been a member of Midcoast Unitarian Universalist Fellowship since 2003.
How do we ground ourselves in times of transition to open to the spaciousness of new beginnings, without denying the gravity of what surrounds us or the pain of how we got here? Can exploring how people have acted magnificently, give us the energy to act in defiance of negativity? Can the very grief we … Continue reading Hope in Challenging Times
Pluralism often refers to a society where groups of people with different cultural and religious beliefs and practices coexist peacefully, while maintaining their separate cultures. Most of us know that it is vital to all of us as citizens of the United States and the World, but why would Unitarian Universalism—one religion—put Pluralism forward as … Continue reading What does “Pluralism” have to do with it!?
The movement behind the likely Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe versus Wade gets its energy from the religious right. Now more than ever we need to confront the beliefs that undergird this view. How can we free ourselves from internalized belief in what theologian Christena Cleveland calls whitemalegod and embrace a more liberating conception … Continue reading Black Madonna and whitemalegod: Rethinking Religious Archetypes
Pentecost Sunday is May 23 this year. Growing up UU, I knew little about Pentecost until recently, when I decided to learn more about the Christian heritage of both Unitarianism and Universalism. Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples of Jesus, is considered to be the day the Christian church was born. The … Continue reading Pentecost and Mary Magdalene
The native peoples of North America, or Turtle Island, have much to teach us about how we might heal and repair our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the earth – and more and more, they are stepping forward to model that for us. I have been listening with fascination as they speak of the … Continue reading Listening for the Ancestors
