First Unitarian Church of Chicago

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

By The First Unitarian Church of ChicagoReligion & Spirituality
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First Unitarian Church of Chicago episodes

  • It's Ok Not to Be Ok - Rev. Teri Schwartz

    The Coronavirus pandemic affects each of us in different ways. Depending upon our personal situation, we may be confronting job loss, financial insecurity, illness or death of loved ones, or facing our own mortality. We might be utterly in need of alone time, or we might be completely isolated. Our relationships might be strained; our mental health might be compromised, we might relapse into old patterns; former grief and trauma might make a reappearance. Even the daily losses that might seem less consequential are consequential and have a significant effect on our minds, bodies, and spirits.  

    Our Universalist heritage reminds us of our utter worth. There's no right way to get through this time.  We don't have to earn our way into the future by a heroic act, nor by cleaning all of the closets or being a perfect homeschool parent. Getting through the day is heroism enough. This is a time when things aren't ok, and you probably aren't feeling ok, either--and that's totally normal--and you're not alone. Come join Rev. Teri for a good word and resources.  

    17 min
  • Planted at the Gates of Hope - Rev. David Schwartz

    We are a people who live in the full complexity of the world: a people who see the beauty of the world coming back to life around us is not in competition with the other reality of loss, mourning, anxiety and uncertainty. In our liberal religious tradition, the invitation of Easter isn't to some inevitable happiness ahead of us. It is instead the demanding, difficult, and deeply liberating invitation to face and weave together our grief and our celebration into the fabric of our full lives.

    17 min
  • Dark Patterns - Rev. David Schwartz
    The tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to -- like signing up for something when you wanted to unsubscribe -- are called dark patterns. They play on your assumptions and expectations to trick you into acting against your own interests. Even as people committed to the use of reason, and to the wholeness of mind and heart, we get tricked by dark patterns in liberal religion.
    19 min
  • A Free Religion for All Souls - Rev. David Schwartz

    The Rev. Dr. Lewis McGee, ordained a Unitarian in 1949, was one of the first Black UU religious leaders. Founding an integrated church in Chicago in 1949, preaching at the intersection of justice, race, and humanism, he offers contemporary guidance on what it means to be a religion for all souls.

    21 min
  • Come Back to Life - Rev. David Schwartz

    The oldest written story in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is a classic hero's journey: a story of adventure, bravery, love and grief. 4,500 years after its composition, it still speaks fresh words to our basic humanity, to our sense of what it is to be alive and have to die, and to what "happily ever after" might actually mean.

    15 min
  • The Empire Strikes First - Rev. David Schwartz
    The essence of the advent story -- a waiting for a rebirth of hope -- doesn't happen in the abstract: it unfolds in an occupied country within an empire of political and economic control. What does it mean to be a people neither pessimistic or optimistic, but hopeful and hope-filled in a world of empire?
    18 min
  • Out of Many, Many - Rev. David Schwartz

    You have as many non-human cells in you as you do human cells: about 30 trillion human and 30 trillion not. We're each our own ecosystem: a balance of more than 10,000 different species living together in constant growth and death and change. As a religious community, we embrace an intentional diversity of belief within these walls. As Unitarian Universalists we are united not by the list of things we believe, but by shared values, shared mission, and a shared commitment to how we treat each other in community. What does the invitation to that kind of life offer? 

    18 min
  • One Foot In, One Foot Out - Rev. David Schwartz

    In the moment between past journey and future potential, a threshold is a sacred place. Those "in-between" moments are also scary, exciting, hopeful, uncertain, anxiety-laden, and filled with possibility. What it means to be a people who take those thresholds seriously in the life of our congregation, our nation, our planet, and in our own lives.

    10 min

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