Unitarian Church of South Australia. Unitarian Meeting House, 99 Osmond Terrace, NORWOOD SA 5067
The 2017 ANZUUA Conference was held in Adelaide, South Australia, over the weekend of 20-22nd October.
The theme of the 2017 conference is ‘How Unitarianism flourishes and grows in Australasia’. The keynote address “Religion in Australia: Decline or Quiet Revolution?” was given by Dr Hugh Mackay, a social researcher and the author of sixteen books – ten in the field of social psychology and ethics, and six novels. His latest book, Beyond Belief was published in 2016, and his sixth novel, Infidelity, was published in 2013.
I got a surprise recently to count how many white lies I had told in a single week, or deliberate evasions to keep people in the dark and my score was five. I should add a couple to that for the times when other people said things that were wrong; and I zipped my lip, and deliberately left them with a false impression, because the truth was not something I was not ready to talk about with those people.
As most of you know, Rachel and I took off for paradise last week to celebrate her birthday. We hoped to get off the grid on a 14-hectare island 45 minutes by boat from Nadi, Fiji. We weren’t disappointed. We did find paradise. Temperatures in the low 30s. Gentle tropical breezes. Sea turtles to feed. Excellent food served by a friendly staff. Coral gardens and a flamboyant tapestry of diverse fish feeding from them, oblivious to their face-masked observers. Time to read books with no obvious use for a future sermon, on hammocks strapped to coconut palms, interrupted only by colourful parrots squawking overhead.
Its quite difficult trying to pick a sermon topic a month ahead, so Clay can put it onto the church noticeboard.
So a month ago I took a big gamble, and I thought, On October the first we will have had the election, but we still won’t know who is going to be the government. Continue reading Relentless Positivity→
I wrote this sermon prior to knowing yesterday’s election results. All I know is that those results will be very much on our minds this morning. It has been a roller-coaster campaign with leadership changes in three of the parties. Poll results shifted almost daily, sometimes dramatically, leaving confusion in their wake. There were the usual outbreaks of dirty politics and debates about what influence they would have on the final outcome. There were the debates about the debates and who “won”. But once the dust, or stardust, if you will, settles I believe historians will see this as the “compassion election”. Continue reading Compassion: The Doorway to Faith→
Steff Werman, Jonathan Mason, Viv Allen, Henri vanRoon, and Kurt Payne share their thoughts on various issues around our upcoming election, with questionmaster Clay Nelson.
When the Unitarians and Universalists were debating whether or not to merge into one association a joke was frequently told. The Universalists were afraid of being swallowed up by the Unitarians. The Unitarians were afraid they would have indigestion.
Like all the best jokes, it revealed layers of truth. In any merger, there is always an element of fear that you will lose your identity. In this case, the Universalists were the smaller of the two parties. Being swallowed up was a realistic fear. For the more powerful Unitarians the fear was how would they absorb the Universalists into the denomination.
This was an issue of classism rarely discussed openly, only joked about. For example, Universalists believe God is too good to damn them. Unitarians believed they are too good for God to damn. Unitarians considered themselves to be of the elite due to their social status. They would have looked upon the Universalists with some disdain, as they were lower down the social ladder. If it had not been necessary for survival, I suspect class differences would have never allowed the merger. Continue reading Class and Religion→
A group of the more musical Auckland Unitarians supporting the #500Now campaign asking candidates across all parties at this year’s general election to commit to taking 500 more refugees now.
