Sound Systems

Just saw this article in UU World: Sound Systems for Better Sunday Worship

It makes some good points about why proper sound and video systems help with a sense of community and inclusion.

Unitarians in the arts

There are many famous Unitarian poets and writers. Examples include:

• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
• Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
• e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
• Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)
• Edith Holden (1871-1920)
• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
• Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)
• Kurt Vonnegut

You have to be careful with lists of famous Unitarians, because sometimes they claim people who stopped being Unitarian part-way through their lives (like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Stearns Eliot).

The Poetry Chaikhana recently featured a poem by someone who is not on the usual Unitarian lists: Edmond Bordeaux Székely, although he was the grandson of Sándor Székely, a Transylvanian Unitarian bishop, who was himself a poet, and is buried in Cluj (Kolozsvár).

There are three poems by Edmond Bordeaux Székely at the Poetry Chaikhana site:

• God Speaks to Man
• Do not wait for death (from The Communions)
• I will praise thy works (from The Communions)

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.

Gaskell worship pack

In preparation for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Elizabeth Gaskell, the Worship Panel has created a new information pack (PDF).

It includes worship materials, background information, a directory of events, and a list of contacts. It was compiled by Rev. Dr. Ann Peart, with two sections by Kay Millard and Rev. Jim Robinson.

(via GA Uni-News)

The Famous UUs site has a biography of Gaskell.

In Gaskell's estimation, true Christianity was not to be found in organized denominations nor in liturgy nor in theology. She believed and acted on a religion of works, "the real earnest Christianity which seeks to do as much and as extensive good as it can." Local action for change by those most intimately concerned, not government legislation, was her solution to social problems. Those who have should help those who have not. For her such charity began at or near home. She took her motto from Thomas Carlyle, "Do the duty that lies nearest to thee." Unitarian rationalist feminist journalist Frances Power Cobbe, after reading a story by Gaskell, wrote, "it came to me that Love is greater than knowledge — that it is more beautiful to serve our brothers freely and tenderly, than to hive up learning with each studious year."