ANNOUNCING: Seeking Paradise: A Unitarian Mission for Our Times

So, I've written a book! It's actually something I've been working on for a long time, on and off, (like more than ten years), so I'm really happy to finally get it out there. It will be officially launched at the Unitarian Annual Meetings in Birmingham in April.

It is an exploration of whether and how a liberal and pluralistic church can do evangelism. It explores a Unitarian theology that is committed to a self-transcending sense of mission. I argue that we cannot try to grow a church only because we are seeking our own institutional survival. We must have a sense of overarching mission that is cosmic and theological. That mission, I argue, is seeking paradise, seeking a beloved community on earth where we overcome alienation with ourselves, our neighbours, the earth, and God. We then take that mission of seeking paradise into our neighbourhoods and practice dialogue, solidarity, and connection to make paradise real.

It's a journey through theology, history, and ministry that I hope will open up a lot of questions for people, and point to a future direction for the Unitarian community that is rooted in a deep spirituality and a coherent language of faith.

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Swords into Ploughshares

"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Isaiah 2:4 Palestine Action are doing just this: beating swords into ploughshares i.e. putting weapons out of use. In doing so they are fulfilling this biblical mandate. They are expressing God's peace as expressed in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. God desires that our swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, that we should unlearn war. That the government wants to make this action illegal has to be confronted in the strongest terms. To rush to condemn attacks on weapons but not attacks on children is perverse. To call attacks on weapons terrorism but not attacks on children is perverse. When government comes to such an extreme position - legislating that peace is war, that weapons need more protection than children - then they have fundamentally gone wrong. This is the definitio...

Is humanism theologically tolerant?

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Clergy-wear during protests

OK, I'm wandering into the territory of Beauty Tips for Ministers here, but a couple of recent conversations have brought up the issue of what clergy should wear for protests. I know a number of Ministers who only wear clerical collars for protests. The logic is that it's important to identify as a Minister when you're supporting something society doesn't expect clergy to. So Ministers will wear a collar at gay prides or pro-choice rallies to make this point. Now I could understand this if it you wore a collar going about your general business, and also did during a protest, but I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea of wearing clerical wear ONLY for protests. The seems to be something worth exploring. I have said before that I'm not in favour of special titles or clothing for religious leadership, mainly because Jesus explicitly said this was a lot of nonsense. Religious leaders should not need these articial crutches. I have no problem with certain liturgical c...

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