Introduction to social media

Report by Sue Woolley

Lifespan Religious Education Conference 2011
Star Island, New Hampshire, 16 – 23 July 2011
Report on Social Media Workshop by Sue Woolley

Thanks to the generosity of the Manchester Academy Trust and the Hibbert Trust, I was able to attend this conference. The basic structure of our own Hucklow Summer School is based on this Unitarian Universalist conference, so many elements were familiar to me: the morning devotions, the daily theme talk, the compulsory morning workshops, optional afternoon activities, and lantern-lit procession to evening worship.

The morning workshop that I attended was led by the dynamic Peter Bowden, who is a “church growth consultant and Unitarian Universalist change agent” (to quote himself) who has dedicated his life to helping UU congregations to understand social media and to use them effectively. His blog (which is well worth looking at) is UU growth. I am writing the workshop up without much comment, as the things he was telling us are just as relevant to Unitarian congregations in the UK as to UU congregations in the US, if not more so.

Read the rest of the report →

New worship resources page

I've just added a new worship resources page to the blog. If you have suggestions for additions to it, please post them in the comments below.

I have tried not to duplicate UALM's worship resources page too much, so if you expected to find something on the Unitarian Communications page and it's not there, have a look on UALM's page.

Finding Ada: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

This blogpost is part of Ada Lovelace Day, which is an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.

Cecilia Payne wrote a doctoral dissertation, and so in 1925 she became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe (now part of Harvard) for her thesis: "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". Astronomer Otto Struve characterized it as "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy". By applying the ionization theory developed by Indian physicist Megh Nad Saha she was able to accurately relate the spectral classes of stars to their actual temperatures. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines was due to differing amounts of ionization that occurred at different temperatures, and not due to the different abundances of elements. She correctly suggested that silicon, carbon, and other common metals seen in the Sun were found in about the same relative amounts as on Earth, but that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (by about a factor of one million in the case of hydrogen). Her thesis thus established that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent of the stars. When her dissertation was reviewed, she was dissuaded by Henry Norris Russell from concluding that the composition of the Sun is different from the Earth, which was the accepted wisdom at the time. However, Russell changed his mind four years later when other evidence emerged. After Payne-Gaposchkin was proven correct Russell was often given the credit.

She published several books including:
"Stars of High Luminosity" (1930),
"Variable Stars" (1938),
"Variable Stars and Galactic Structure" (1954),
"Introduction to Astronomy" (1956),
"The Galactic Novae" (1957)
"Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin : an autobiography and other recollections" (1984) ed. Katherine Haramundan)

She was also a Unitarian and a member of First Parish and Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. According to Owen Gingerich:

Payne-Gaposchkin was a many-sided personality known for her wit, her literary knowledge, and for her personal friendships with individual stars. She became the first woman in the history of Harvard University to receive a corporation appointment with tenure, and the first woman department chair in 1956. 

My other Finding Ada blogposts:
Lisa Barone
Hedy Lamarr

Growth resources

The UU Growth blog has a fantastic collection of resources to help congregations grow. There is a similar section on the GA's Unitarian website called Congregational support.

They also have several blog-posts on web gadgets and tools, much like our own series of similar posts. You can access their post categories by using the drop-down menu in the blog's sidebar.

Unitarian Knols

A "Knol" is apparently a unit of knowledge, and Google has a site where people can post articles and tag them by topic. There are several of these articles that might be of interest to Unitarians:

An introduction to Unitarian Universalism, by Brian Crisan
Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion that espouses no official creed.

The relationship between the Unitarians and the Brahmo Samaj, by Yvonne Aburrow
During the 1820s, Rammohun Roy made contact with Unitarians in Britain and America. He was a founding member of the Bengal Renaissance, a campaigner for women's rights and the abolition of sati, and founder of the Brahmo Samaj (a monotheistic reform movement in Hinduism). Since the 1820s, contact has been maintained between the Unitarians and the Brahmo Samaj.

Servetus & Calvin, by Standford Rives
Was It Murder by Calvin?
The trial of Servetus for alleged verbal crimes ended in October 1553 with a verdict of death. Servetus was burned alive the very next day. The question whether Calvin murdered Servetus as a judicial witness and prosecutor has dogged Calvin ever since.

Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau, Henry David (12 July 1817-6 May 1862), author and naturalist

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (25 May 1803-27 Apr. 1882), lecturer and author

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)
Unitarian author

New UUA website launched

The Unitarian Universalist Association has launched a new website.

It's a new day for UUA.org! Our new home page addresses topics of interest to newcomers to Unitarian Universalism, including a video feature and an interactive banner highlighting our principles and beliefs. A short "Find a Congregation" form makes it easier than ever to look for a local congregation. People already familiar with our faith may want to bookmark the new Resources for UUs page, which features expert-recommended resources, multimedia, and more!

Full Article

The new website works better in larger screen resolutions, and has a more modern look to it, but you can still find your way around if you are more familiar with the old style of the site.

Music in Worship

UUA Announce 'Music in Worship'

The UUA now have a new expanded 'WorshipWeb' with a facility called "Music in Worship". Among other things, this includes a UU Composers Database.

Contributed by Rev Dr Linda Hart

MP3 files of all of the songs in Singing the Journey (STJ) can be downloaded at the STJ website. The UUA online shop has a music section with CDs, songbooks, music for children, and hymnals.

CUUPS Podcast

The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans now has a podcast.

The first episode of the CUUPS Podcast features basic info about CUUPS and an interview with British academic Michael York recorded at the Dec. 2009 Parliament of World Religions provided to us courtesy of the Pagan Newswire Collective.

The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans promotes networking among Pagan-identified Unitarian Universalists, and provides for the outreach of Unitarian Universalism to the broader Pagan community.

Michael York has written a book on Pagan Theology.

A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication.

24 ways

24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you a little Christmas cheer.

Now all they need to do is find a way of sending chocolate through the internet...

There are two interesting Unitarian and UU blogposts about Advent:

• Advent – A Humanist Adventure (1984) from The Sermons and Musings of Carl J. Westman, DD.
• Celebrating Advent without misrepresentation, sentimentalism or parody (and a couple of recommended books) by Andrew Brown

And Stephen Lingwood has posted a video: Advent: How long shall we keep God waiting? It's very good.

International Unitarian & UU websites

The International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (founded 1995) is a body devoted to fostering connections between Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist groups around the world. There are about 500,000 Unitarians and Universalists in the world today. Many belong to large church organizations while others rarely meet another Unitarian face-to-face. The oldest groups, who are Hungarian speaking, have a continuous church history of more than 400 years. Some of the English speaking groups go back over 200 years. Many of the newest member and emerging groups have a much shorter history.

The International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) (founded 1901) is a UK-based charity working for freedom of religion & belief at a global level.

European Unitarian Universalists (founded 1982) is a support network and community for Unitarian Universalists (UUs) and UU fellowships in Europe.

Unitarians in other countries
A - F
G - O
P - Z

Unitarian Universalist blogs

Many Unitarian Universalists have blogs, and there is more than one blog aggregator for them. (A blog aggregator is a site that gathers content from other blogs - just a snippet of the text, the title and a link, and not the whole blog post, as that would be plagiarism.)

Unitarian Universalist blog aggregators:

• UUpdates.net: the latest content from many UU blogs and websites
• Philocrites' annotated guide to UU blogs
• UU World: weekly round-up of blog posts
• Discover UU: blogs section - imports snippets of many UU blogs