This week I'm heading out to the States. Next Sunday (6th July) I'll be preaching at First Church Boston if I have any Boston-area readers that want to come and say hi. The weekend after I'll be in New York City, and was wondering where to worship. Any recommendations from anyone about good churches, UU or otherwise?
When I started this blog nearly 4 years and nearly 300 posts ago one of the labels I used for it/me was "radical." Perhaps I used it a little unreflectively. Recently I've been pondering what radical means. A couple of things have made me think of this. Firstly this blog series from my friend Jeremy, which explores a distinction between "radical progressives" and "rational progressives." There is also this definition of radical, liberal and conservative from Terry Eagleton quoted at Young Anabaptist Radicals : “Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.” What interests me is finding a way to express the tension I feel sometimes between myself and the wider Unitarian movement. One way to express this is to say I tend
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All Souls, is the city’s largest congregation and has the highest public profile. This is the Church served so long by the great Forrest Church, who is still listed as “Public Minister” and continues to write and speak while gracefully facing terminal cancer. Of course neither Forrest nor new Senior Minister Galen Guengerich will be preaching the Sunday morning you will be in the city. According to their web site http://www.allsoulsnyc.org/ David Robb, Minsiter of Adult Education, will be in the pulpit.
On the more intimate level is Fourth Universalist Church, now led by another remarkable minister, Rosemary Bray McNatt. The congregation is about a tenth the size of All Souls. It still retains a distinctly Universalist tone within a Unitarian Universalist context. July 13 Associate Minister Beth Putnam will be preaching according to their web site http://www.4thu.net/