Forums for May
May 1--Work. Did you choose your work, or are you doing your work under compulsion as the way to earn money? How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill and your pride is employed in your work? Do you respect the product or the service that is a result of your work?
May 8--Sharing and cooperation. Sometimes it feels a little devastating, the sweetness we cultivate in our children, our insistence that they share their ZhuZhu Pets and Laffy Taffy. Why even bother teaching them the values of sharing and cooperation, when our national ethos is the hoarding of food and medicine, land and resources, like the good capitalists that we are? Congratulations! we will say when they turn twenty-one. Now you can start drinking legally and stop behaving ethically! Maybe we're just helping them get all that pesky sharing out of the way so it doesn't burden them later, when they're clambering over each other towards the teetering heights of personal wealth.
May 15--The joys and responsibilities of stewardship. One UU congregation in Quincy, Massachusetts, recently put its heirloom silver on the auction block. The sale netted some $3 million to pay for building repairs. "It was a bittersweet moment," says the Rev. Sheldon Bennett. "We were letting go of something that's been a part of our story as a church, but we felt an enormous sense of relief and gratitude.” Are there material things that are intrinsic to your congregation's historic identity, to the UUA? What would it mean if these items were sold, taken away, or lost? How can we preserve our heritage while also being responsible stewards of wealth?
May 22--Spiritual lessons from those good-for-nothing grasshoppers. Other than "digesting, breathing, and being incidentally warmed or cooled," what are grasshoppers good for? We wonder. Entomologist J. Lockwood ponders grasshoppers' value to humanity or to the earth. "Our struggle to understand their languor arises from our approaching these creatures with the same question with which we approach one another: What do you do?" How have you measured the value of non-human earthly creatures as compared to human? Can you think of incidents when you have measured the value of plants or animals based on what they can do for you? What spiritual lessons can grasshoppers teach us?
May 29--Losing one’s faith. In his eulogy, following the brutal death of Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the "haunting, poignant, desperate question" we must ask is not who, but what killed James Reeb . Reflecting on the murders of Reeb; Matthew Shephard, a gay man killed in Wyoming in 1998; James Byrd, an African American dragged to death in Texas the same year; and other such crimes, what do you think was responsible for these violent deaths? In the eulogy, King said that "unmerited suffering is redemptive." Do you agree? Why or why not?
May 8--Sharing and cooperation. Sometimes it feels a little devastating, the sweetness we cultivate in our children, our insistence that they share their ZhuZhu Pets and Laffy Taffy. Why even bother teaching them the values of sharing and cooperation, when our national ethos is the hoarding of food and medicine, land and resources, like the good capitalists that we are? Congratulations! we will say when they turn twenty-one. Now you can start drinking legally and stop behaving ethically! Maybe we're just helping them get all that pesky sharing out of the way so it doesn't burden them later, when they're clambering over each other towards the teetering heights of personal wealth.
May 15--The joys and responsibilities of stewardship. One UU congregation in Quincy, Massachusetts, recently put its heirloom silver on the auction block. The sale netted some $3 million to pay for building repairs. "It was a bittersweet moment," says the Rev. Sheldon Bennett. "We were letting go of something that's been a part of our story as a church, but we felt an enormous sense of relief and gratitude.” Are there material things that are intrinsic to your congregation's historic identity, to the UUA? What would it mean if these items were sold, taken away, or lost? How can we preserve our heritage while also being responsible stewards of wealth?
May 22--Spiritual lessons from those good-for-nothing grasshoppers. Other than "digesting, breathing, and being incidentally warmed or cooled," what are grasshoppers good for? We wonder. Entomologist J. Lockwood ponders grasshoppers' value to humanity or to the earth. "Our struggle to understand their languor arises from our approaching these creatures with the same question with which we approach one another: What do you do?" How have you measured the value of non-human earthly creatures as compared to human? Can you think of incidents when you have measured the value of plants or animals based on what they can do for you? What spiritual lessons can grasshoppers teach us?
May 29--Losing one’s faith. In his eulogy, following the brutal death of Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the "haunting, poignant, desperate question" we must ask is not who, but what killed James Reeb . Reflecting on the murders of Reeb; Matthew Shephard, a gay man killed in Wyoming in 1998; James Byrd, an African American dragged to death in Texas the same year; and other such crimes, what do you think was responsible for these violent deaths? In the eulogy, King said that "unmerited suffering is redemptive." Do you agree? Why or why not?
posted by Donna | 6:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home