as preached at the First Unitarian Church of Worcester, November 27, 2016 I am grateful to be back with you. It now seems worlds ago, but I was last with you the Sunday you installed Sarah Stewart as your twelfth minister. I understand you colloquially know her as M12. M12’s installation took place, you might remember, a couple of weeks after the death of Freddie Gray. In the days leading up to...
It has been a week and a half since Donald Trump was elected President. In the past ten days he has begun to make clear the direction of his Presidency. He has articulated a plan for his first hundred days and started to make political appointments. The agenda of his administration is a hard right agenda. Here are ten things I expect from it: 1. President-Elect Trump has made it clear he is...
The comedian W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America premiered on CNN this past weekend. The show’s first episode focuses on the contemporary Ku Klux Klan. A portion of my dissertation is on the 1920s Klan. I decided to watch the show to get a better sense of the Ku Klux Klan of today. I am glad I did. Overall, I found the program to be informative and, often ironically, funny. One of the most...
This morning I tweeted “Now that #HarrietTubman is going to be on the #twentydollarbill can we have #reparations for #slavery? #blacklivesmatter.” Someone I knew in high school responded on my Facebook page, “I know this is your big issue, do you have your economic plan/analysis for viewing somewhere?”* My first impulse was to reply to this comment by directing the commentator to John Conyers H...
preached at the First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, June 28, 2015 I have both the great fortune and the great misfortune of being in First Parish’s pulpit this morning. I have the great fortune because this has been a historic week in which we have seen the arc of the moral universe bend more than slightly towards justice. The Supreme Court voted to legalize same sex marriage...
It is a pleasure to be with you today to celebrate the installation of the Rev. Sarah Stewart as your twelfth senior minister. I have known Sarah for more than two decades. We became friends in high school when we were both members of Young Religious Unitarian Universalists in Michigan. I doubt you could have selected a more conscientious, intelligent, and compassionate person to lead your...
Yesterday during coffee hour someone came up to me quite upset about my support of the protestors who blocked off I-93 on Thursday. I was going to try to articulate a response on my blog but I instead found a piece on Dr. Rebecca Haines’s blog, “Discrediting #BlackLivesMatter with ambulance concerns is disingenuous. Here’s why,” that more-or-less said whatever I would have to...
preached January 18, 2015 at the Winchester Unitarian Society, Winchester, MA There is a particular scenario that I have experienced several times since I left my pulpit in Cleveland, went back to graduate school and started on my career as an itinerant preacher. It runs something like this: I receive an invitation to lead worship for a wealthy, overwhelming white, suburban, Unitarian...
In the 1920s and the 1930s the NAACP used to hang a flag outside the window of its offices in Manhattan with the words “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.” The narrative often told in histories of the civil rights movement is that lynching declined and was outlawed in the 1960s. Lynching is often described as extra-legal punishment; that is punishment that takes place outside of the bounds of the...