The UUA General Assembly met this past week. One of the business items was to vote on changing Article II of the UUA bylaws. This is the section that covers the purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the principles and the sources of our living tradition. Those principles were voted...
On Thursday, June 8, members of Live Oak joined me at the Cedar Park city hall for their City Council Meeting, where there would be an official proclamation about LGBTQIA Pride Month in our area. What should have been a fully joyful time was dimmed by the news that a...
Some summers, things at Live Oak kind of slow down. But not this year! And especially with our hosting the Queer EmPower Pride Conference and Festival on July 15, we are expecting lots of visitors to our Sunday services. Every Sunday, potential new friends and church members walk through our...
Our intern minister, Carrie, has a poster up in her office, reminding her that “We are many, they are few.” These days, it’s an important reminder. The laws passed by our legislature, and around the country, try to tell us otherwise. It is easy to believe that those of us...
“May 29, May 29, May 29,” I have been singing naively in my head since about, well, since about January. Monday was “Sine Die,” the last day of the Texas Lege regular session, their 140 days of what has often felt like brutal assaults against our religiously pluralist society and...
As I’ve shared before, I create videos on TikTok, mostly to teach about Unitarian Universalism. When my father was a young man, out in the panhandle of Texas, he heard a Unitarian minister named A. Powell Davies on the radio, preaching and occasionally challenging fundamentalist Billy Graham to a debate....
Ministers of UU churches in blue states have reached out to me, wanting to know how they can help. We are all at a loss and we search in vain for historical references that might provide instruction: do we need an underground railroad, church partnerships like the American/Transylvanian churches, are...
Being a part of the Live Oak community means that each of us is a member of the pastoral care team, even if we never attend a meeting. We have created an intentional, intergenerational “village” here, where we both give and receive care. What is pastoral care, anyway? I imagine...
Someone I know called me this week to say they had been hit by scammers. But the more they told me about it, the more alarm bells were ringing. Guess what? There are scams based in protecting you from scams! It’s called phishing, and even though we most often hear...
I know that many of our members were concerned when last week, when we saw the Tennessee House of Representatives vote to expel two of their members for “breaking decorum.” Unitarian Universalist President, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray issued a press release, titled Tennessee Teaches Us We Cannot Normalize Authoritarianism. We Must...
