Information bulletins
“I was born in Eastman, Georgia, a small Southern town south of Atlanta during the latter part of the Great Depression. FDR was President and the primary agenda of his New Deal was to lift the country out of poverty. Jim Crow was the law of the land. I was the eldest of three, and…
Dina Raley never quite fit in the Catholic church of her upbringing. It had always seemed forced, superficial, and unwelcoming. Most other churches seemed no different and so there was no attraction to religion. What changed was a realization that a church could provide community and be an outlet for social justice activism. She then…
Teresa Meeks was brought up in a pretty conservative Protestant church in Falls Church. She stayed with it until a close friend was fired by the church for being gay. After that, she was only interested in communities that supported LGBT members and staff. Her journey began with Arlington UUC and then Paint Branch where she met her future husband Fred Teal.…
Margo Kelly grew up in an Irish Catholic family but the religious part did not quite fit. While she liked the rituals, she did not like the patriarchy or the church’s stance on many social issues. For a time, she found the folk services at National Cathedral filled some of the gaps, but found the…
Jamie Jorgensen was happily Mormon for most of the first forty years of his life. He remembers with affection the structure and community that the church gave him with special fondness for his year and a half doing missionary work in Brazil. Over time, differences began to build up. Jamie leans non-theistic and socially liberal, neither of which are standard Mormon doctrine.…
Laurie Mears started off as a child in Unitarianism, and that’s important. Unitarians were rare birds in Kansas in the 1940s and early 50s, and the congregation held their children as precious. She always felt that folks were interested in her and who she was becoming. Fast forward to college, where she meets Preston Mears…
Pre-K Colin arrived with his parents Drew and Beth in the early 1980’s and like many of our children found Bobbi Pohl teaching his RE class. Colin went through the whole RE curriculum, the predecessor to OWL, and then YRUU. From this experience, UUism came to mean seeing our place in an interconnected web of…
In 2017, the Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective urged UU congregations to adopt an 8th Principle in Unitarian Universalism and commit “to the dismantling of white supremacy, within the stated principles of our faith.” At our 2020 Congregational Meeting, UUCSS committed to spend a year “in deep study and mindful reflection about what adopting…
Carolyn Savadkin and her husband came to UUCSS from Paint Branch UUC in the Fall of 1966. They were looking for a church that was socially active willing to preach and work against both the Vietnam War and racism. On the day they Signed the Book, Fred Cappuccino was in the pulpit and announced he…
Jo Paoletti learned the basics about the UU faith from an elementary school friend – UU’s don’t believe that Jesus is God and John was drunk when he wrote the Book of Revelations. She didn’t revisit UUs again until 1982, when she was horrified at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres in Lebanon and…