Posts about recent or ongoing activities within the church community
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…
The presidential election is past, but there are still two critical races left that will determine the control of the U.S. Senate. The state of Georgia, which has a widely documented history of voter suppression, will hold January 5 runoff elections for two U.S. Senate seats. On November 3, none of the candidates in the two…
Bob and Bev McGaughy knew their time with mainline Christianity was over when their young son Danny pointed to a cross on a church steeple and said, “That’s where the Jews killed Jesus.” This led to twenty years at All Souls UUC that better fit their religious understanding. They moved again when their daughter Ay…
Erica Anderson grew up Catholic in northeastern Pennsylvania, but Catholicism had never held much meaning for her. After a time of being unchurched and now out of college she began looking for the community that a church provides. Erica found the UU Fellowship of Centre County in State College, Pa. which was much more in…
The Southern Baptist world knew that Tamara Bowman, age 12, was trouble when she added Christianity to a comparative mythology paper. For many years, after going off to college, Tamara was happy to be free of religion. That was until her daughter Elise, age 4, started asking questions, such as why her friends couldn’t do play dates on Sunday and who was…
Veronika Martin grew up in a non-religious household in Germany, which was not unusual. When her family moved to the US in 1976, she was somewhat surprised that people were always asking her to come to church with them. Over time her response became that she was a universalist with a small “u” as most spiritual practices “were a valid path to…
Jake Ryder does not remember a time growing up when he wasn’t attending UUCSS. Kids RE, OWL, Coming of Age and YRUU were all tucked away before starting at Rochester Institute of Technology. While pursuing degrees in networking and cyber security he developed a real interest in criminal justice, particularly concerning the unequal treatment of…