This website needs new energy and attention. It has more than 148k collected, searchable items…. It is automated, requiring little attention day-to-day.

Moving forward…

I am looking for interested Unitarian Universalists who will take ownership of this collection, the Facebook page, and the domain name. I will provide transition technical support (and possibly other support). I want this site to continue and thrive. It is now stable and manageable, although has much room for improvement and growth. There are many pages of relevant UU information created online that are being lost or obscured. There are other ways this information can be used to inform the community moving forward.

Let’s discuss.

Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly 2001, Cleveland, Ohio

Sponsor: Unitarian Universalists (UUs) for Ethical Treatment of Animals

The Schweitzer Sermon Award is given annually to the preacher who best articulates Albert Schweitzer’s principle of “reverence for life.” Following the worship service and delivery of the sermon, UUs for Ethical Treatment of Animals will hold a brief annual meeting.

Retrieved from archive.org

Another person who believes in the ethical treatment of animals, i.e. don’t eat them, is Atlanta  Trauma Therapist Nyambura Kihato. She now practices with Karuna Counseling!

This website collected more than 168,000 UU-related news articles, blog posts and tweets using the WordPress plugin, WP RSS Aggregator.

While it is a fine plugin for grabbing and displaying the latest few dozen news articles, it was not made to archive 168,000 items. At about the halfway point of that collection, this site was bogging down my rented virtual server, so I moved it into my home test server. That bought me a bit of time. The split content/meta data table structure of WordPress eventually overloaded even the newer replacement server box.

So, I am moving the entire collection to FreshRSS which has a much more streamlined database. Since there’s no easy way to embed FreshRSS inside this WordPress site, it may be a few weeks before the database is accessible again (it’s basically been bogged-down offline for months, anyway!).

During the conversion, I am having the system attempt to archive attached media in archive.org – a time-consuming process. I plan circle back and try to archive the content of other historical items that are still currently available online. Once this whole process is done, I plan to make a copy of all the data available on archive.org, as it is a trusted repository.

I am also interested in helping with any project that uses this information. I feel that Unitarian Universalism needs to be better understood and needs to continually engage in self-reflection, especially as I personally find that the UU world is decreasingly important in my spiritual life {long story, only upon request! ;-}.

Peace, Earl Daniels

The Twitter campaign revealed here is apparently not something that Unitarian Universalists (UUs) are doing, yet deserves some exposure here. This WWUUD site has an automated collection system that pulls in UU-related information into the Stream. As an automated system, it often gets information that is not really of interest to UUs, or is even negative.

Since the information is concentrated here in a list that I occasionally review, some odd trends sometime appear.

Near the end of 2018, a handful of Twitter accounts started tweeting about the July 27, 2008 Knoxville UU Church shooting. These tweets have been coming at an increasing rate, for a total of at least 130 messages, listed below.

I do not know the motivations of those with these accounts. It appears to be a small part of a much bigger campaign. I do think it has some intent to shift conversations, search engine results and possibly even sway public opinion. And I know it makes me uncomfortable that someone, some robot, or a few people, are putting much effort into this.

I welcome others to investigate these accounts and draw their own conclusions. Post on the WWUUD Facebook page if you have any idea what’s going on!

View the list in a full window

When Dr. Uhlenbeck found out she’d won, she was leaving her Unitarian Universalist Church when she received a text message from a colleague telling her to look out for a call from Norway. “I pressed the button and called [the Abel committee] back and they told me I’d won—and I had to sit down,” Dr. Uhlenbeck told Glamour.

Read the whole story…

Ordained

by Rev. Dr. Lynn Ungar 

Nothing in life is ordained, nothing.
An acorn contains the exact plan for an oak,
but earth and wind and water have a say
in how the tree will grow, or fail to thrive.
You can set off down the road to Graceland
and end up in Dollywood instead.
You might be set to spend your life
talking to people about sex,
and find yourself dealing in God.
It happens.
You do not ordain yourself,
nor does the past,
nor the fates,
nor some omnipotent deity.
If your life is to be ordained,
it is by the sum of the parts,
the gathered force of love nudging you
irresistibly toward the next step.

A poem, title unknown, by Rev. Lindi Ramsden, from her 2014 Berry Street Essay

Change does happen;

sometimes so slowly we can’t see it.

So we foster friendships beyond the familiar, organize for the long haul,

invest ourselves in the daily tasks of change, building networks of trust.

AND THEN,

When public assumptions start to crack and open, stunned by reality into the necessity for change,

We are ready to move history:

ready with ideas and networks, songs and strategy, courage and compassion.

A good farm has soil built up, slowly, over generations, yet also knows the urgency of the harvest.

Justice too,

requires the long view

and powerful work in the ripe moment.

Clayton Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church in Newbury, South Carolina, joins a growing list of UU congregations making the commitment to offer sanctuary to immigrants who have not received full consideration of their plight and life here in the United States.

• News article from The State newspaper
• Fox Carolina article
• See more sanctuary-related posts in the WWUUD stream

At our 1972 General Assembly, we passed a General Resolution calling for “the banning of smoking from all closed places of public meeting.”¹

We were out front on this issue, as this was one year before Arizona became the first state to have some smoke-free public places.²

It was a small social justice issue, yet it’s good to see the arc of the universe still bending towards justice!³

^{1 “Smoking in Public Places,” UUA.org, June 1972, https://www.uua.org/action/statements/smoking-public-places}

^{2 Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Secondhand Smoke Exposure and Acute Coronary Events, The Background of Smoking Bans (National Academies Press (US), 2010), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219563/.}

^{3 Unitarian Minister Theodore Parker, 1853}

What UUCA is doing…

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta: A Tribute to Cliff Valley on Facebook from @1911CliffValleyWayMemories

on Twitter from@terrykearns: 2018-09-13 the Unitarian Universalist Congratulation church buildings at 1911 Cliff Valley Atlanta are almost gone. Think this was the 4th building for the congregation, the latest was the West Peachtree home of the Abbey restaurant Remember? #teardown #teardownatl #preserveatlpic.twitter.com/zE8YgtqYUF

The last sermon from Cliff Valley Way – “Faith Calls Us On” – Rev. Anthony Makar

Sandra Lopez sought sanctuary last year.

Now she is leaving.

“Sandra is leaving the sanctuary of our congregation and goes into the larger sanctuary of our community,” the Rev. Shawna Foster, minister at Two Rivers Unitarian Universalist, said in the statement. “This valley wants to keep families together and is committed to the unity of our neighborhoods by supporting sanctuary for almost a year.

During a video meeting with the UU Mystics, one of the participants mentioned people who are “allergic to the mention of God.”

We in the UU world are all too frequently places of woundedness, whereas our mission is to become places of healing.¹

We do this by approaching others on an “affect” level, to connect heart-to-heart.

We also have much to do in helping people find concepts of God that work for them…

^{1 I cannot find the source of this idea, but somehow attribute it to Thandeka.}