Natasha Barden came to the United States from Ukraine with her family in 1989 and settled in New York City. She attended NYC public schools through high school and then went on to college in upstate New York eventually settling in Silver Spring with her former husband. A coworker at GAO spoke glowingly of her Virginia UU church and how there was a time…
A Strong Community for Liberal Faith
Posts by Jeannette Jackson
Jimmy Schreiber and Marcia Joiner met and became friends in a Young Religious Unitarian Universalist group when they were 16 and 14, respectively. They went off to separate colleges but became a couple living for a time in a DC hippie commune with future UUCSS member Carolyn Kirk Dutcher. Later, they bought a house in…
Sydney Alexander grew up in UUCSS. Or at least from age five on. Her family started out in the Lutheran Church but her parents were seeking a more humanistic spiritual philosophy. Sydney noticed that at UUCSS children were welcome in the sanctuary and the overall tone was more open and welcoming. During middle school, she…
Corita Waters grew up in Greenbelt, Md. on the same road that she, her wife Andrea, and children currently live on. Her parents were very active members of the Lutheran church on the University of Maryland campus and Corita remembers going to church multiple times per week. She was an acolyte and sang in the…
Jim Street grew up near Four Corners and never moved away, going to school at the University of Maryland and then becoming a teacher in the area. He did not set out to teach, but in his third year at UMd teaching seemed like a reasonable thing to do as he saw a way of…
Pat Scheid grew up in a large Catholic family in rural Western Michigan. She spent lots of time in the library because of her love of reading. It became an escape where she could learn about other people and places outside of her little home town. Upon leaving home for college, she left Catholicism behind,…
David Rodriguez grew up in New Jersey, the youngest of nine in a Catholic Puerto Rican immigrant family. He did not have a strong attachment to Catholicism and when two older siblings became UUs he became interested. An older sister became a UU hospital chaplain and an older gay brother found an inclusive community. The…
Brian Hopkins grew up in the Methodist church and has fond memories of the camaraderie and caring that church community provided. His parents were deeply religious, and he saw in them a commitment to love and volunteering. Alas, the Methodist view of God did not square with his work, decades of recording mayhem for News…
Dennis Scurry, MD did not quite fit into his wife’s Pentecostal church. His random remarks suggesting that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier did not go over well. They did however fit Dennis who loved the interplay of discussion and ideas. He found his way to UUCSS and on December 6th, 1987 signed the book. His daughter Ebony Contreras recalls…
Zoë Randol was looking for a container for some things she did not grow up with, a container for spirituality and a container for religious community. She missed out on this, and her own unstructured efforts were not fulfilling. She does remember having UU friends and going with her family to the local UU Christmas…