April 8: Flower Communion Rev. Paul
This service celebrates the renewal of life with our annual flower communion, in which members, friends, and guests bring a cut flower to add to beautiful and diverse display after which each person takes home a different flower. Paul will have a poem and a short homily. An Easter Dinner will follow the service. All are invited to bring a dish to share and their own tableware.

April 15: Dayenu Rev. Paul
Dayenu is a Hebrew word that roughly translates “it would be enough” and is sung by Jews as part of the Passover celebration that recounts their liberation from Egypt. All of us can learn from this ritual the importance of our freedom and how we show it

April 22: Earth Day and Earth Justice Bob Hitchner & Courtney McKenny
Earth Day is one day event that allows us to spot light our 7th principle. What is the deeper meaning of Earth Day and how does it impact how we live Earth Justice every day of the year? Hear from fellow UUFMers about their thought on our obligation to the Earth.

April 29: An Introduction to the Qu’ran Ashfaq Taufique
Our guest speaker is the President of the Birmingham Islamic Center and will educate us about the Qu’ran, it’s origins, it’s role in Islam, and how it is like and not like the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Testament.

March 11: Theological Dictionary: Grace Rev. Paul
Grace has been given a bad name by those who profess, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Who wants to believe in that God? Still, understood as unmerited blessings, grace is a more accessible term. None of us, for example, “deserved” to be born in the United States or to inherit the genes responsible for our health and intelligence. That’s a very different way of understanding grace.

March 18 The American Idol Problem Rev. Paul
Do you ever wonder how someone with absolutely no talent never hears that until he or she tries out in front of a real judge? This sermon is dedicated to the question of when, if ever, we have a duty to burst someone’s bubble with a difficult truth. (Hint: the answer is very rarely.)

March 25 UUSC Social Justice Sunday Rev. Paul
This service honors our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and will feature our first-ever Fair Trade chocolate communion. Paul will draw on his legal background to update us on several of the social justice issues in the news, including Prop 8, the “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, and contraception coverage in insurance plans.

One of the popular quotes making its way across Facebook the last few weeks is this one from Albert Einstein: “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” There are probably a few sermons in that quote. I’m using it today as an excellent example of confirmation bias.
Just think of the proxies we have about intelligence. In this context, I’m using proxy to mean symbols that represent attributes or qualities. For example, we’re all familiar with studies showing that people consistently rate job applicants who wear glasses higher than similarly qualified applicants. In that case, glasses are being used as a proxy for intelligence.
If it sounds like confirmation bias is just a synonym for prejudice or stereotype, you’d be close. We all have stereotypes or preconceived notions like “people who wear glasses are smart.” When we meet smart people who wear glasses, that registers with is as evidence to support our view. When we meet smart people without glasses, we tend not to notice that or remember it or rationalize why that is an exception. That’s confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is how we perpetuate prejudice.
Of course, there are a lot of people who wear glasses who aren’t smart, and there are a lot of people who don’t where glasses who are smart. It’s the people in this latter category who often are judged like the fish who cannot climb a tree. If we stop and think about it, we know that’s the case, the key phrase being “if we stop and think”. Confirmation bias is what happens when we don’t think or engage in critical inquiry.
What you notice or ignore is just one part of confirmation bias. Another part is what you actively seek or avoid. I’m a liberal, so I follow so-called liberal media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times. When I’m home, the TV usually is tuned to MSNBC, which I freely acknowledge has a liberal bias. I’m a big fan, too, of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Sometimes, though, I like knowing what the other side is saying. When I’m driving, I’ll tune in to Rush Limbaugh just to hear his take on something. At my field office at the nearby McDonalds, the TV usually is tuned to Fox News. In this area, just about every TV in a public setting like is tuned to Fox News, so that’s pretty hard to avoid.
For a democracy that requires an educated citizenry, this is very important. One of my pet peeves is people who complain about media bias. Of course the media is biased. That’s not the problem. It’s our bias that is the problem.
There is no such thing as totally objective reporting. Language is inherently subjective, and even the best reporter must choose words that are filtered through that reporter’s experience, culture, education, and—yes—his or her own confirmation bias. I worked my way through college as a news writer for a radio station in Indianapolis. One time, my boss was writing up a story about an incident in a bar. Arguably, it could have been called a fight or brawl. Riot seemed too much but altercation seemed too little. So, he settled on “brouhaha.”
It’s our duty to diversify our sources so that we might come to our own informed conclusions. When we don’t, this happens. This is excerpted from the Los Angeles Times:
“A new survey of New Jersey voters comes to a provocative conclusion: Fox News viewers tend to be less informed about current events than those who don’t watch any news at all.
The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all,” said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson.
“And it seems Jon Stewart may be more reliable than cable news anchors. On Occupy Wall Street, the survey found viewers of “The Daily Show” were 12 percentage points more likely to say protesters were predominantly Democratic. MSNBC viewers were the most likely to say the protesters were mainly
Republicans.”
(http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/21/news/la-pn-fox-news-poll-20111121)
I hope you noticed that I included a critique of MSNBC to balance out the critique of Fox.
Confirmation bias is an attribute of the human condition. We all do this. Confirmation bias has a profound influence on our faith. A person who has a positive faith in human kind will see the good in others, and confirmation bias may blind him or her to very real dangers in this world. Likewise, a person who has a negative faith in human kind will see the worst in others, and confirmation bias may deprive that person of all the love that exists and the good that may be.
I’m going to offer an example that ought to hit home with most of us and then examine the implications of that example for our Unitarian Universalist faith.
We aspire to be a very open, diverse, non-creedal religious community. We talk about being a better person or parent or partner in ways that transcend traditional religious boundaries. Any given week, I might use a story from the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or a favorite poem to illustrate a point. We welcome all who come to us in good faith, whether they self-identify as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or the ever-popular “spiritual but not religious.”
Still, it seems at times we have a love-hate relationship with Christianity. Many who self-identify with that label and who don’t embrace the understanding of Christianity practiced in the dominant culture in this area come here to find an expression of that faith they can embrace with integrity. Others come to us as wounded refugees: woman and men who have been victimized by the worst elements of that tradition because they are gay or divorced or unmarried or simply could not believe what they were expected to believe.
In either case, I suspect all of us resent others who impose their faith on us, whether by leaving religious tracts in waiting rooms for us to read or inviting us to join in a sectarian prayer at an office retirement party. Let’s talk about that and see how confirmation bias is at work here.
Christianity is a very diverse religious tradition. Consider just one spectrum that places Catholic monks and silent Quaker meetings at one end and Evangelicals and charismatic Pentecostals at the other end. By definition, we’re going to see and hear more from the more outspoken end of the spectrum, if you will. If that’s all we’re exposed to, confirmation bias is going to lead us to think all Christians are like those we see and hear. Those experiences then shape our expectations. When we meet a Christian a who doesn’t meet our expectation, confirmation bias leads us to dismiss that experience as an aberration or exception.
Confirmation bias is a two-way street. We are the subject of confirmation bias when we regard the wearing of a cross or the placement of a Bible on desk as a proxy for the particular type of Christian that most offends or threatens us. In that way, confirmation bias acts as a defense mechanism. Of course, every subject has an object. We are the objects of confirmation bias when a person who hears that we attend church or refer to something that happened in our children’s religious education class uses that information as proxies for that person’s particular expression of Christianity.
As I’ve said and will say again, confirmation bias is part of the human condition. It never will go away. This message is about awareness, and not just of our own confirmation bias. It’s never good when others treat us like a stupid fish that can’t climb a tree. There’s a world of difference, though, between assigning that treatment to a malicious prejudice and confirmation bias. The latter allows for the possibility that information can fix the problem. I humbly suggest that a lot of our indignation and resentments might disappear if we made that distinction.
Our awareness of confirmation bias has profound implications for how we approach faith. Ours is a faith that insists that each person is capable of discerning truth through his or her own experience, reason, and conscience. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister and the son of a Unitarian minister, said in his Divinity School Address:
“Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”
Of course, we didn’t invent the idea of experiential religion. This is a Buddhist teaching:
No one saves us but ourselves,
No one can and no one may;
We ourselves must tread the Path;
Buddhas only show the way.
(Buddhism: A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith and Phillip Novak, GoogleBooks, 67.)
If we are as committed to faith informed by reason as we say we are, we must acknowledge that the science of confirmation bias teaches us that our ability to go it alone has limits. We imagine ourselves as seekers finding our own paths. Yet, confirmation bias tells us that we may be using a compass that is taking us in the wrong direction.
It is for this reason that other religious traditions positively discount or even deny the value of personal experience in moral decision making, insisting that sacred texts, ancient prophets, and church traditions are necessary precisely to avoid confirmation bias. Of course, those sources have problems, too, including their own version of confirmation bias.
All things considered, I’m pretty happy being a Unitarian Universalist. The good news is that we don’t have to make a choice between going it alone, with all of its risks of confirmation bias, and surrendering our judgment to sacred texts, ancient prophets, and church traditions. We have access to both, and this may come as a surprise to you, so do others.
Long before modern science explained confirmation bias, the ancient Hebrews knew that human understanding was subject to bias, rationalization, and self-service. Within their community, individuals known for their insight and wisdom became prophets, and the prophets who stood the test of time eventually made it into the Bible. Most of us would dismiss out of hand the idea that selected human beings acquired special knowledge by supernatural means. Yet, we should not be so quick to dismiss the ancient prophets. Some of them had some pretty good things to say.
Even though they believed that God gave God’s message to certain people to give to us, the people who compiled the Bible still had the problem of deciding whether a particular person was the real thing. In the first letter of John, we are told: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. 1 John 4:1-3. I respectfully suggest that the tests the Biblical writers used to try those spirits offer some insight into confirmation bias.
The Bible contains many criteria for distinguishing true and false prophets. I’m going to summarize several of them, but rest assured that there are Bible verses for everything that follows. A true prophet does not glorify himself or say things to please the crowd. We would agree with that. A true prophet speaks consistently with other things taken to be true. So, if you accept the Ten Commandments as a touchstone, for example, a true prophet would not encourage us to kill one another, covet our neighbor’s possessions, or lie. We might use a different touchstone, but we can embrace the principle. A true prophet does not advance his own self-interest. Most of us would agree with that.
Arguably, all of these and the many other criteria in the Bible for distinguishing between true and false prophets are ways to check confirmation bias. They are ways to calibrate that compass I described earlier. I’m not saying here that you must use this list. I am saying you need some kind of list—some standard outside of yourself—to test your own decision making for confirmation bias. It might be the teachings of your parents or a mentor like a favorite teacher or coach. That’s a variation on tradition. It might be a book that transformed your life. That’s your sacred text. The good news of Unitarian Universalism is that you get to make up your own list. Even that, however, is not unqualified.
As I said earlier, we are a religious tradition that believes faith must be informed by reason, which in this case means science. Thus, Unitarians were among the first to weave together the Biblical creation stories with the science of evolution, which required a new way of reading the Bible. In our time, new understandings of human sexuality have called us to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of our GLBT brothers and sisters. Likewise, the science of climate change challenges us to re-think what it means to have dominion over the Earth.
Although the relationship of religion and science is a popular topic these days, our ancestors in faith have been discussing for a long time. This is from James Freeman Clarke, a 19th century Unitarian:
“Science helps religion, enlarges its views, brings it down from speculation to reality, teaches it to verify its doctrines with experience. Religion awakens the soul to a sense of responsibility, rouses the thirst for knowledge, gives impulse to progress, and so animates science with a higher life.” (JFC, Messages of Faith, Hope and Love: Selections for Every Day in the Year, Google Books, September 1.)
It is that higher life that we seek here. Higher, so that we may see ourselves as part of something larger and more meaningful than just ourselves. Higher, so that we may accept the frailties that are part of the human condition and on our best days rise above them. Higher, so that we may draw on our lives and experiences and ancient prophets and sacred texts and modern science to help us love more freely, forgive more quickly, and act more justly.
May it always be so. Blessed Be. Amen.

February 12: Saints, Sinners and Santa Clause Rev. Paul
Last year’s “you pick the sermon” auction winner Steve Chandler has asked Paul to explore the question “Under what conditions would it be possible to re-kindle complete, unquestionable dedication to the veracity of THE rotund, red-nosed, air-borne annual gift-giver that has been for centuries and remains today, a cornerstone feature of the Western childhood experience?” More succinctly: can we keep the culture and leave behind the dogma?

February 19: Overcoming Hate Rev. Robert Graetz
This Sunday is the actual anniversary of the hate-crime murder in 1999 of Billy Jack Gaither because he was gay. Later that day, we will gather at the capitol steps for the annual Vigil for Victims of Hate and Violence. Our guest speaker will share his experiences and perspectives on how far we’ve come since 1999 and how far we have yet to go.

February 26: Seeing Things My Way Rev. Paul
“Confirmation bias” is a psychological term that refers to the practice of seeking out information that supports pre-existing viewpoints and screening out facts that might contradict our views. We religious liberals who insist that faith be grounded in truth, reason, and critical inquiry would never do that, right?

January 8: A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory Rev. Paul
The New Year is a traditional time for resolutions, which typically include wish-lists for the future. It’s a good time, too, to take stock of where we are at that very moment—for better and worse.

January 15: Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday Rev. Paul
Paul will use the story of Prince Whipple, a slave owned by a signer from New Hampshire of the Declaration of Independence to talk about the legacy of slavery in the North.

January 22: Cain and Able Rev. Paul
The ancient story of Cain and Able involves jealousy, murder, and forgiveness. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all tell this story, but each tradition has a slightly different take on it’s meaning, and Paul has a take that differs from all three.

January 29: Exporting Hope Rev. Paul
Like so many other virtues, hope is one of those attributes that we may keep only by giving it away. Giving hope to others is especially difficult, though, because the intended recipients, who presumably have no hope, have filters telling them that whatever worked for you will not work for them.

In the Christian tradition, this is the time of Advent, which means a time of anticipation, which should not be confused with mere waiting. It is a time of faith, and hope, and eagerness—while waiting. Yet, while all Christians may share this time of anticipation, if we ask the question, “For whom are you waiting?” we likely would get very different answers. Some would say Jesus, others the Christ, and others God. Others might answer the question differently, some saying a redeemer who will save their souls, others a king who will restore the throne of David, and others a teacher who will show us the way in life. Just for today, I’ll stick with Jesus.
Christians aren’t the only ones for whom the birth of Jesus is a significant event. Jesus is an important figure in other religions as well. Arguably, not all Christians assign the same level of divinity to Jesus as, for example, Muslims and Baha’is. So, today, as the Christian world enters into the last week of Advent, let’s examine how different Christians and how different world religions might answer the question, “For whom are you waiting?”
Let’s begin at home, so to speak, and look briefly at different Unitarian Universalist ideas about Jesus. I’ve devoted a lot of attention to this in other sermons, so we won’t spend a lot of time here.
Our ancestors recognized the differences within the Christian tradition and embraced them. “What a difference between the Christ of the Unitarians and the Christ of the Methodists,” Theodore Parker wrote in the early 19th century, “—yet may men of both sects be true Christians and acceptable with God.” Parker continued, “What a difference between the Christ of Matthew and John—yet both were disciples, and their influence is wide as Christendom and deep as the heart of man.” (see end note)
Nonetheless, Unitarians did have an image of Jesus distinct from that of other denominations. Yet, Unitarians always have aspired to respect differences of opinions on the nature of Jesus. Parker himself had a fairly human view of Jesus, but an exalted one, calling him the “organ through which the Infinite spoke” and asking this:
“…was he not our brother; the son of man as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety,–sweet and celestial as they were,–are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in a mirror, we may see the image of God, and go on from glory to glory, til we are changed into the same image, led by the spirit which enlightens the humble.”
Other early Unitarians had a higher view of Jesus, seeing him as human but given a unique, divine mission. A few years before Parker’s sermons, William Ellery Channing offered this description of what he called Unitarian Christianity:
“We believe that Jesus is of one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. … We believe that he was sent by the Father to effect a moral, or spiritual deliverance of mankind; that is, to rescue men from sin and its consequences, and to bring them to a state of everlasting purity and happiness.” (see end note) In that same sermon, he explained that Jesus carried out this mission, with his teaching and the example of his life. Like many Unitarians of his day, Channing also believed in a personal, theistic image of God and in the miracles in the Bible, stating that Jesus’ resurrection “bore witness to his divine mission.” For Channing, the virgin birth and the resurrection tell us more about God than Jesus.
To close this section, I offer a more contemporary image of Jesus from a minister writing on the UU Christian Fellowship website, which you may find at www.uuchristian.org:
“The Jesus I relate to is thoroughly human: someone who can get stressed and angry, someone who can lash out at people who care about him, someone who can make impossibly high demands on people. For me, encountering what I perceive as Jesus’s imperfections helped me to accept my own imperfections. I love the stories about Jesus; I love working with the texts. I feel most creative and inspired when I engage with the stories and the texts and the traditions. Personally, I separate “Jesus” and “Christ.” I use (or translate) the word “Christ” as the “Body of God.” I have an incarnational theology. My faith is: we are all part of the Body of God, and Christ is in each of us.” (www.uuchristian.org)
Let’s turn now to some other traditions, and permit me to dismiss quickly one of them. The answer to the question, “what do Jews think of Jesus?” is that Jews don’t think of Jesus very much. While I think it’s very important for Christians to put the life and teachings of Jesus in the context of his Jewish faith and culture, it’s rather patronizing to tell Jews that Christians and Jews have something in common because Jesus was a Jew. If Jews study Jesus, it’s because they are learning about the faith of others, not their own.
Now, I’d like to turn to two traditions that pre-date Jesus and consider how contemporary followers may regard him. Hinduism is the world’s oldest contemporary religion—that is, still practiced today—with texts dating back over 3500 years. Hindus believe there is one ultimate God, Brahmin. Different aspects of Brahmin are manifested by lesser gods, of which there are many. The three most well know are Shiva, Vishnu, and Krishna. From time to time, some of these gods take human form, which is where we get the word avatar. It’s quite common for Hindu’s to have personal gods or for a village to have a personal god, which arguably may be compared to Catholics and their saints.
Likewise, Hindus, particularly in a diverse, pluralistic culture such as ours, may incorporate Jesus into their faith and regard Jesus as an avatar of Brahman. I don’t know a lot of Hindus, but I know several, and they tell me that they are perfectly comfortable with some level of divinity in Jesus that is less than the ultimate God but more than mere human and that their faith may be informed and enriched by his life and teachings.
By the same token, Jesus may be very special to Buddhists, but without any connection to divinity. Buddhism is not a theistic tradition. Buddhism emphasizes the validity of personal experience and teaches that you shouldn’t embrace the teachings of a master until you have come to believe them for yourself. The first Buddha said, “if you see the Buddha by the side of the road, kill him” by which he meant, “don’t make gods for yourself.” This is not to say, though, that Buddhists don’t have teachers or value the instruction that comes within community. Buddhists are encouraged to give thanks for the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha or community of practitioners.
Much has been written about the similarities between the teachings of Jesus and of the first Buddha and subsequent incarnations of the Buddha, and thus Buddhists may regard Jesus with the same reverence given to the other great teachers of that tradition.
That leaves two more traditions that I’d like to talk about today, Islam and Baha’i, two traditions linked in much the same way Buddhism and Hinduism are related and Christianity and Judaism are related. Both traditions regard Jesus as more than human, uniquely divine, and not the incarnation of the substance of the one true God.
Muslims believe that God has sent a succession of prophets to instruct humankind, including Abraham, Moses, Noah, and Jesus and culminating with Muhammad.
Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the final revelation of God, correcting mistakes in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament. Those documents, Islam teaches, were written by humans and contain human errors. The Qur’an, according to Muslims, is the literal words of God dictated to Muhammad and recorded by his followers to whom he recited the teachings.
The Qur’an has its own account of Jesus, correcting what they regard as mistakes in the Gospels. Muslims accept the virgin birth of Jesus and the miracles, but they reject the resurrection. Rather, they believe Jesus ascended directly to heaven. Likewise, they reject the doctrine of vicarious atonement by which Jesus is believed to have suffered our punishment for us. The Qur’an states: “He who finds the right path does so on his own account, and he who goes astray does so at his peril. No one bears another’s burden.” Qur’an 17:15, 6:164, 53:38
The Baha’i faith similarly sees Jesus as part of tradition of great prophets, including Muhammad, but differs in two other important aspects. Most importantly, Baha’is don’t believe revelation stopped with Muhammad or even with the founder of their own tradition, Baha u llah. They believe in what they call progressive revelation, which sounds very similar to our own use of the phrase continuing revelation. The other important difference is that Bahai’s don’t limit this progression to the Abrahamic faiths. As explained in one of my source materials for this sermon, “The Baha’i Faith is perhaps unique in that it unreservedly accepts the validity of the other great faiths. Baha’is believe that Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad are equally authentic messengers of one God.” (Wm. Hatcher and J. Douglas Martin, The Baha’i Faith, Harper & Row, 1985, 2.
Let’s spend a moment with that phrase “messenger of God”. That’s the same phrase Muslims use for Muhammad, but Bahai’s understand it differently. They believe these messengers are Manifestations of God’s truth. As one scholar wrote, “Though he inhabits a human body, the body of the Manifestation is to ordinary bodies as diamond is to stone. It should be made clear, however, that the Manifestion is not viewed as divine incarnation. … The Manifestation acts like a mirror; he reflects the sun, but he is not the embodiment of the sun.” Wm. Garlington, The Baha’i Faith in America, Praeger Publishers, 2005, 24,35.
Interestingly, that word mirror is the same one used by Theodore Parker and used, albeit differently, by many others in the Christian tradition. This metaphor is meant to suggest that we see in Jesus either the image of God’s self or the perfection of humankind, which some would say are the same.
To go back to Channing, in his essay titled “Likeness to God” Channing wrote that we may aspire to be not just like Jesus but God. God, in his view, is not a body but rather is the spiritual perfection of ideals like love, forgiveness, and justice, which Jesus was able to obtain and which we are no less capable of attaining, though Channing believed that this path to perfection only starts with our mortal bodies here on earth and continues for eternity in heaven.
So, we’ve come somewhat full circle. The one for whom we may be waiting during this time of advent necessarily starts with one’s conception of the ultimate reality. If you have a theistic image of God that is beyond the universe and composed of some substance that is not in nature’s palate, so to speak, the question becomes whether Jesus is similarly composed of that same substance or perhaps some of that substance or whether that God endowed a special knowledge of Truth with a capital T into a fully human Jesus of the same substance as the rest of humankind. A very different expectation comes from the belief that God or some other noun for the ultimate reality such as the Dharma or the Tao or simply nature, is fully contained in the universe and composed of the same substance as the rest of the universe. If so, then Jesus may be the superior model, the great exemplar, or the highest teacher, but not divine in a theistic way.
I tend to fall into that latter category. Jesus is not the only source of my inspiration. There are few stories that explain suffering better than the Buddha’s story of the mustard seed and there are few myths that call us to stewardship of our mother Earth more powerful than those of the Native American traditions.
Still, like the contemporary UU minister I quoted earlier, I feel creative and inspired when I engage in the life and teachings of Jesus. They make me a better man. There are few answers to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” better than the story of the Good Samaritan. There is little if anything to improve upon Jesus’ call for social justice than the verses summarized by the phrase, “What you do to the least of these, you do to me.” There hardly are better examples of the full inclusion of everyone in our society than the examples of Jesus touching the outcast, eating with oppressed, and praying with the marginalized.
It is that vision that I anticipant: a vision of humankind in which the ideals of heaven are made real here on earth. That is my advent.
May it always be so. Blessed Be. Amen.

Note: Quotes from Parker are from his sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity”. Quotes from Channing are from his sermon “Unitarian Christianity”. Both are widely available on the web.