UUBRidge

During the hustle and bustle all around us, we’ll take time during this service to honor the darkness and our own light in that darkness. We’ll walk the beautiful, wooded spiral created by Hearthstone School (inside), holding each other in community.

Happy New Year!

In the United States, we speak, usually negatively, of the welfare state. In the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, the same two words, ‘welfare state,’ capture the very purpose of national government: spreading welfare equally among all citizens. Can the U.S. take a page from the Nordics and begin to reverse […]

SANGO-Kenya has now been working in rural villages in Western Kenya for four years. The program has grown every year in response to the ever-increasing needs, many caused by climate change. They now have nearly 500 farmers in the program, 250 farmers just beginning. That translates to their direct impact extending to approximately 2,500 women, […]

**Based on the information received from Hearthstone and the low temperatures, we will host this Sunday’s service virtually in the interest of safety. Click here to join via Zoom, password: 077806. Sigmund Freud asked: “What Does Woman Want?” It was a question of a frustrated psychologist.  UU women and girls have asked that question, too.  Barbara […]

Mankind has been grappling with sexuality since the days of the cave men and women. It’s testosterone and hormones versus morals and taboos and laws. Probably every approach to it has been tried, with a wide variety of approaches. There are no universal answers. We don’t even have the right questions.

A divorce and career-oriented life left David Brooks feeling empty and alone. He realized he had fallen for lies our culture tells us about finding fulfilment, lies which have been largely responsible for a “social and relational crisis” in our country. In this TED Talk video, Brooks combines his own story of recovery from despair […]

Books are being taken off the shelves in libraries, and even rainbows are banned from a Virginia school system. We will address the question, “What’s Going On?” as it relates to our civic life, and we will explore the role of religion – the good and the bad – as we try to figure out […]

This video presentation by Bryan Stephenson—an American lawyer, social justice activist, law professor at New York University School of Law, and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative—is about the incarceration of innocent people. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 70,000 Virginians are currently incarcerated. Black people make up about 20% of the […]

This is the third in a series of services on meditation. Gary will briefly review the meditation techniques that he previously shared. He will then discuss some long-term effects of regular meditation practice and identify a few problems that may arise and how to deal with them.

Today’s world, with its daily examples of greed, self-interest, and cruelty, can be frightening. Some of this fear, which can veer toward despair, arises from our perception that there is nothing individuals can do to push back on behalf of a kinder world. This video, by the head of TED, Chris Anderson, points to a […]

“My mission to change the narrative of mental health,” a video from TED, was a welcome reminder that mental health has become a subject we feel able to talk about more freely. Some people in public life, such as Sen. John Fetterman, have led the way by talking about their own struggles, and that has […]