Feb. 2025 Saturday Worship with JD Stillwater

2025 Feb 19 | News, Worship Service, Worship Services

NAUA 3rd Saturday Worship Service – Nature’s Scripture: the Interfaith Promise of Science.

Underlying the human world of strife and separation is an oft-neglected landscape of commonality between faiths: the natural world. At precisely the time when our religious and political divisions threaten the existence of life on Earth, science offers a sweeping interfaith vista filled with revelations and insights as spiritually meaningful as ancient scriptures. Read as “scripture,” science offers a common text for all the world’s faiths.

January 2025 Service – Enlightment Values

2025 Jan 21 | News, Worship Service, Worship Services

Enlightenment Values of Freedom, Reason and Tolerance. January’s monthly worship service focused on the Enlightenment Values of Freedom, Reason and Tolerance, the very same values that were adopted by the NAUA and that stand at the core of Western liberal tradition. The full service title is: “The Enlightenment Values of Freedom, Reason, Tolerance; Advancing the Human Condition Materially and Spiritually; Our Core Strengths.” The worship team will make this a group effort. Join in exploring and honoring the primary core values and Principles of our liberal faith.

Jan. 14, 2025 – When we Almost Got it Right – Societies that Worked

2025 Jan 12 | NAUA Academy, News

As we hear distressing stories of violence and oppression from around the world, we may benefit from reminding ourselves of times and places when human beings did organize themselves into durable just societies.

In this talk Dr. Reimers discusses some of these times and places: from the world’s first cities in 4000 BCE, to  the Indus Valley civilization, widely revered as the most advanced society of 2000 BCE, to the small democratic city states in Central America, which held off the encroachments of the Aztec empire for centuries, to the peaceful coexistence among Christians, Jews and Muslims in 12th-century Andalusia  which lit the spark for the European Renaissance a century later.

Dr. Reimers further discusses what principles and strategies they used to organize their societies, how they ended, and how their experience may inform our ideas of justice today.

Dr. Mark Reimers is a quantitative neuroscientist who has worked at the National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Michigan State University. He was the leader of the Richmond Humanists in Virginia and UU forum in Lansing Michigan. He has lectured on a wide variety of scientific, humanist, religious, and behavioral subjects.

Solstice Service, 2024

2024 Dec 22 | News, Worship Service, Worship Services

I’ve been attending Unitarian Solstice services for as long as I can remember, but I have never enjoyed one as much as this Solstice. Maybe it was the music, the poems, Rev Manning’s talk or just being (virtually) with 50 old and new friends.

From all of us at NAUA, warmest wishes for a thoughtful, rejuvenating and joyful holiday season!

 

Liberal Religion—Is It Time for Hospice?

2024 Dec 12 | NAUA Academy, News

Religious participation is plummeting. “Church” has become a bad brand. Should we resign ourselves to palliative care for our aging congregations?
Can we find ways to feed the hunger for meaning and community?
 
One thing is certain: We cannot church the way we always have and hope for different results. 

Speaker: Rev Peter Morales is the former president of the UUA. Before becoming UUA president he was senior minister at Jefferson Unitarian Church in Colorado. Jefferson was one of the UUA’s fastest growing congregations during his tenure. Before entering the ministry he was editor and publisher of a community newspaper in Oregon. He has lived abroad as a Fulbright lecturer in Spain and a Knight International Press fellow in Peru. Peter lives in Sequim, WA with his wife Phyllis.