What's New

This page lists pages we added, deleted or changed in the last six months. If you are one of our regular visitors, this will tell you what's new*.

July 21, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Sunday Services. Rotated portraits.

June 24, 2010: Split Calendar and News, which was more calendar than not, into Calendar, which will be upcoming events, and News, which will be past events and have pictures. The primary motivation was to have a place for the weekly updates about our new building from our contractor, but once it was there a flood of possibilities opened up, including a group photo of cool guys in Hawaiian shirts at the annual Father's Day Picnic.

June 20, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Sunday Services. Rotated portraits.

June 20, 2010: Deleted almost all reference to our 2009 - 2010 ministerial intern, Paula Braxton. One of the rules of being an intern is that when the year is up, you have no contact with your former congregation for a year. This teaches interns how to cut off contact. We have a similar rule for ministers after they retire or transfer; no contact with their former congregation for a year. This keeps the old ministers from second guessing their successors. So, even though we enjoyed having her and learned from her time with us, by the UUA rules she has to be a "non-person" to us. We did not make the rule, but we have to comply with it.

May 24, 2010: Added Minister's sermon Margaret Fuller: A Life Too Soon Ended:
Margaret Fuller was part of the group of New England intellectual lights we call the Transcendentalists. She was an ardent feminist as well as a linguist, teacher, social critic, author and editor. This Sunday marks her 200th birthday. What can she offer us today?
(Delivered May 23, 2010).

May 21, 2010: Added intern's semon UU Mystics
Are there UU Mystics? How do they interact with this faith? What does it mean to be a mystic in the 20th and 21st century?
(Delivered May 16, 2010) (Deleted June 20, 2010, for reasons above.)

May 19, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Intern's Insights, Sunday Services. Rotated portraits. Changed Frances David to Frances Dávid, with an acute accent over the "a", in all pages.

April 17, 2010: changed basic.css. We now have an ivory background instead of white.

April 17, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Intern's Insights, Sunday Services. Added 20 new portraits, removed some old ones. Rotated portraits.

April 7, 2010: Added HTML "title" tags to all 208 image tags. We had "alt" on them. Now we have title, too. While I was at it, I added "ssi_" as a prefix to the file names of all the SSI modules. I used a PC version of DEC's EDT, a text editor as old, reliable and accurate as a Lee-Enfield .303 bolt-action rifle. It took about an hour. There are less than a thousand people in the world who will understand everything in this paragraph.

April 6, 2010: Added Guest Sermon Deeply Religious
by Rev. Keith Kron. For 10 years, Rev. Kron was the director of the UUA's Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Concerns. He writes: "I was asked by someone upon learning I was a minister, if I were "deeply religious." Not surprisingly I gave her multiple answers to the question. In 25 years of being a Unitarian Universalist, and having been in over 400 UU congregations, I've learned a lot about our faith and about me. How have we changed in 25 years and where do we need to go? What has a minister (who may or may not be deeply religious) who's been from Fairbanks to Miami and from Newfoundland to Hawai'i learned about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist ?"
(Delivered March 28, 2010)

March 19, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Intern's Insights, Sunday Services, Adult Classes Rotated portraits.

March 2, 2010: Added minister's sermon Have We Grown Up?
Mike Durall's latest book. Durall says that developing spiritual maturity is the underlying purpose of our congregations. What do you suppose that means? How can we encourage spiritual growth if we accept each other the way we are? Do we ever grow up completely? Should our congregations adopt that old Army slogan - "Be all that you can be!" - as spiritual advice?
(Delivered March 7, 2010)

March 2, 2010: Added minister's sermon It's Basic
A recent opinion column in the New York Times says that our basic human pleasures are food, sex and giving. Maybe that last is a surprise to you. But when you look more closely, we all want to be generous people - people who share the gifts of life in their many forms. I suspect it's actually about love - which we only get when we give it away.
(Delivered February 28, 2010)

February 23, 2010: Deleted Minister's sermons
Should They Be History? (March 8, 2009)
Ambiguity - Slippery, Sometimes Confusing Stuff (February 24, 2008)
What Makes a Gift? (December 16, 2007)
at her request.

February 18, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Intern's Insights, Sunday Services. Rotated portraits.

February 1, 2010: Added minister's sermon A Time for War, A Time for Peace
President Obama invoked the "Just War" tradition when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize last month. There's no small irony in receiving the prize while in the midst of fighting two wars. What is Just War theory? How does it relate to peacemaking? Are they opposites? Why is it so hard for people to live in peace? Can we do anything to encourage an outbreak of peace?
(Delivered January 24, 2010)

January 17, 2010: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Intern's Insights, Sunday Services. Rotated portraits.

January 14, 2010: Added minister's sermon Spreading the Word
How can we spread the word of Unitarian Universalism without being pushy? Without coming off as a zealot? Surely there's ground between secrecy and proselytizing! Let's find that! Do you remember when we talked about 'elevator speeches'? Maybe it's time to polish them up. When you say you're a Unitarian Universalist and get a blank stare in return, what can you say about us? What should you say?
(Delivered January 10, 2010)

December 16, 2009: Updated Calendar and News, Grace Notes, Intern's Insights, Sunday Services. Rotated portraits.

December 11, 2009: Revised Contacts and Staff page.
Added mini-biographies and a row of thumbnails across the top.

* [Ed. Note 1: You are welcome to read the old pages again, of course. I read the complete Sherlock Holmes every couple of years, and I've listened to Beethoven's Fourth, which always reminds me of kingfishers darting along a river, hundreds of times. In both cases I know how the work ends, but I still enjoy it.]

[Ed. Note 2: This page has two other purposes. It lets me keep track of what I've done for my quarterly report to the board, and the steady, regular "updated Services, Calendar . . ." entries every month show the casual visitor how - dare I write it? Faithful this web master is to his task.]