Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder, Colorado

08/31/2026

"Purity culture" -- the conservative Christian movement for absolute abstinence from s*x before marriage -- applies fear, shame, control, and perfectionism to separate people from a whole, healthy relationship with their bodies and each other. But the belief that anything less than purity equals failure has footholds in progressive traditions, too, and a surprising, subtle place in our life.

08/28/2026

We're hiring a musician to lead community singing and provide instrumental music for a weekly Sunday evening dinner service starting October 4th!

Community singing without hymnals or sheet music (songs in the style of the Singing Resistance or Music That Makes Community) during the service deepens our relationships to ourselves, to each other, and to something larger than any of us. Instrumental music before and after the service creates a grounding and supportive space.

Dinner church is a gentle, restorative evening of grounding and connecting over a meal before the week begins. Through ritual and reflection, silence and singing – but most of all through shared food and honest conversation – we help each other put the fragmented parts of our lives together into a whole.

If this sort of music-making and music-leading sounds like the thing for you, or you know a musician who'd be a great fit, find more detail about the role and how to apply at the Indeed posting. https://www.indeed.com/job/songleader-and-instrumental-musician-sunday-evening-service-98749ff5626d6df7

08/27/2026

Beloveds, if you are able, I hope you will watch this Sunday as NASA launches their Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to explore some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark energy.

The telescope is named for lifelong and devoted Unitarian and later Unitarian Universalist, who was also NASA’s first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman. A longtime member of the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation RRUUC in Bethesda, MD, Roman was as committed to serving her community, especially around issues of poverty and food insecurity, as she was to fearlessly advancing science in her role at NASA.

Details about the launch are in the story linked in the comments below.

08/24/2026

Emerson's 1838 message to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School was not well received at the time. One Unitarian periodical wrote: “…[Emerson’s comments] so far as they are intelligible, are utterly distasteful to the instructors of the school, and to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are esteemed to be neither good divinity nor good sense.”

But in his remarks, Emerson doesn’t disavow Christianity, doesn’t repudiate Jesus, doesn’t condemn the institution of the church. He says something much more fundamental, and more threatening: he tells his audience that they have been missing the point of the faith they claim to practice.

08/16/2026

08/10/2026

This weekend more than 150 of us, babies to elders, gathered for our biannual all-church retreat.

For three days we played, laughed, talked, hiked, swam, sang, learned, ate, made art, made music, and made real connections with one another. Deep gratitude to the organizers, and deep gratitude to the participants who made the experience what it was.

The organizing team did a beautiful (and enormous!) job of creating the container for the retreat. And then, just like on a Sunday morning in the church building, the participants filled that container with life.

*

At our Sunday morning mountainside service, we closed with these words:

Like solstice and equinox, like our water ingathering in fall and our flower service in spring, this shared retreat is one of the poles around which the life of our congregation moves.

In every gathering that marks the passage of years, we look back and we look forward. We remember that since we gathered two years ago, there are empty chairs among us -- people we loved and knew in this community who have passed on. And, since we gathered on retreat two years ago, there are new friends, new relationships, new babies here together.

As individuals and in community we look back at the trail we’ve covered -- some of it rough, some easy, all of it remarkable -- with the holy hidden everywhere at every step right in among among the ordinary.

On retreat we rediscover something which exists in the day to day world but that we have forgotten how to find. New relationships discovered or deepened, the quiet moments and the loud celebration, the delight and growth -- these ordinary, remarkable moments are the rocks that you are bringing back home, and passing forward to everyone who comes through our doors.

The poet Philip Booth, writes a last good word to send us onward:

Beyond here there’s no map.
How you get there is where
you’ll arrive...

Whatever your route, go lightly,
toward light.

Amen

07/27/2026

As we celebrate the 78th birthday of our congregation, Rev. David writes:

This week in 1948 – more than a decade before the Unitarians and the Universalists merged to become the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations – we became the very first Unitarian fellowship: organized without a minister and without a building because we weren’t going to wait around for everything to be perfect and in place before we started living our values in a community of mutual support.

That’s still the way we do church today. A little scrappy, but entirely convinced and committed that we will figure out all the things that need figuring out to make our community possible. We’re still beautifully imperfect because now, like 1948, the goal -- the point, the mission, the work of the congregation -- is to grow our souls and help to heal the world in community. And there’s nothing we have to wait for to start doing that essential work.

Deep in the DNA of the congregation is the commitment not to go through living alone – that human beings are not meant to be autonomous and isolated, but connected in relationship.

Deep in the DNA of the congregation is the commitment to co-create the community. A 1958 newsletter inviting folks to a 10-year anniversary dinner says “don’t forget to bring your own table service.” You don’t have to bring your own silverware anymore, but you do still co-create this community.

For the first nine years, before they called their first minister, the fellowship mostly met on Sunday evenings over dinner for connection and conversation. (I was delighted by that, because this fall we’ll launch a Sunday evening dinner service, but it turns out that we’re not really launching something new, just resuming a program that’s been on hiatus for 70 years.)

“We have graduated!” declares a handwritten pamphlet at our 10-year birthday. “This is our commencement. From a fellowship of a few seekers of truth in liberal religion we have developed into a growing church – with sermons and services vital to our lives and the lives of our community.”

“Unitarianism,” the writer continues, “is not an ‘easy’ religion. There are no creeds and no sacraments. No authority tells one what to do or what to believe. But it has a rich tradition of deep social conscience, of leaders devoted to attitudes and works among mankind that free men from tyranny and ignorance.”

That’s still the work – one way to describe it – though we’d use different language to say it all these years later. The form of our meetings is different, the building is different, our own understanding of what our values call us to is different – broader and better informed, may it be so every year.

78 years later we still follow love at the center of living, like a compass-heading in the wilderness. Not because tradition tells us to, not because guilt or shame threatens us, but because the essential work of growing our souls and helping to heal the world in community has not changed.

Happy birthday UU Church of Boulder!

07/04/2026

This July 4th, at the 250th birthday of America, we share an excerpt from a 2022 sermon on retelling the creation myth of our country. Rev. David writes:

"MLK declared that 'America is essentially a dream as yet unfulfilled.' But the failure -- generation after generation of America (and on this land before this nation) -- to live up to its dream doesn’t tarnish the dream, it just adds a complexity and irony. We haven’t lost some vision of justice and compassion that we formerly had -- we never, in fact, had it. There were no good old days. Make America great again? When? Pick a decade.

America is a dream perennially unfulfilled: the person who wrote “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” deluded himself with the absurdity that owning human beings was perfectly fine and normal. That fact doesn’t make the aspiration of his statement less true, but you can't be honest about our progress toward realizing the American dream unless we accept the American reality.

This is what we’re called into: to face reality without making a complicated thing simple...

The essence of our national dream is not that we are or have ever been wholly a land of liberty, opportunity, and equality, but that we are working towards a destination we may not reach.

Our aspirations to opportunity, freedom, and equality are no less real or worthwhile for our inability fully to realize them. The past wasn’t failure, it was incomplete. And the present isn’t failure either, it’s just incomplete, too."

07/02/2026

On this week of our 250th birthday as a country, Rev. David speaks to how the stories we tell about our national history can reveal or conceal our history -- and can create or destroy our shared future. He writes:

"The fact is that the past is messy and complicated and not immediately obvious and no one is all good or all bad, just like us, now. Our ancestors may have had ideals we share, but they also lived them out in horrific ways: all men are created equal – good, fine, nice – also, the person who wrote those words owned human beings.

But the *mythic* past is simple. It’s not really about the complicated fact of the past, it’s about a set of feelings we have in the present: we are the right ones, the pure ones, we today are the ones who stand for character and loyalty and leadership and godliness – just like then.

The mythic past where the great, dominant group ruled over all the others is the starting point for fascisms around the world: it is a story about how things are supposed to be.

That story is what people are pledging allegiance to when they hang Confederate flag in front of their homes right here in Boulder county. That story is what Christian Nationalists right here in Colorado mean by "Christianity" and by "nationalism."

"Once, things were right," says this myth, "and white men ruled over women and everyone and things were good -- surely you want things to be good again?"

05/11/2026

It may be that you think of curiosity as the practice of asking questions: what this, what about that? But below the waterline, the practice of curiosity is also the discipline of humility, courage, and tenderness – toward yourself and others both.