What Does it Mean to be a Unitarian Universalist? (part 1)

And am I one?

In the last year or so, we (my wife, young son, and I) have been attending a small UU congregation in northern Michigan.  It’s a good, open place where religious exploration is at the top of the agenda.  But the meetings are twice monthly, the service area covers hundreds of square miles, and, really, there’s only so much they can offer in a congregation numbering in the tens.  So, of course, I go to the internet.  Welcome to the Future!

There are plenty of on-line resources out there for exploring UU.  The UUA website, and its various subpages.  There are blogs, and there are congregational web pages.  There are podcasts and video channels.  My explorations have been, in the main, the UUA pages and some blogs I’ve come across with Google searches.

That’s probably where the problem I’m having comes from.  A lot of what I’ve read comes from an inside the club perspective.  There was a dust up a few months ago about congregational polity.  Lately there’s been some talk about Universalism, and what it means for UU’s that some conservative Christians have gotten all worked up about it again.

I want to keep this post short, so I’ll close here with the thing I find weird, which is that problem I mentioned at the beginning of the previous paragraph.  I’ll get to why in a later post.  What I find weird is this–a major (possibly predominant) thread in UU discussions is the … um… atomistic self-definitional color of the conversations.

I’ll come back to the question “am I one?”  I promise.

(Note about old UU posts.)