This Sunday is our Annual Wolfson Lecture featuring Guest Lecturer and 2024 Wolfson Award Winner, Rev. Dr. David Breeden.  The congregation is invited to a special reception featuring local Middle Eastern fare in Fellowship Hall following the service.

The Title of Rev. Dr. Breeden’s talk is “”Tending the Fire: Unitarian Universalist Humanism and Religious Neutrality.” Where in he will explore the traditional place of liberal religion as a “third way” between more dogmatic traditions and secularism. At one time, as you know, liberal Protestantism was the third way. However, has the quick rise of the “spiritual but not religious” changed this social dynamic? Are there perhaps four “ways” now, with UUism constituting a fourth way that embraces both various forms of liberal religion, now including paganism, Buddhism, etc. and also humanism? If this is the case, might religious humanism (which I term “congregational humanism” and consider “religion neutral”) serve as a way of making UU congregations more inviting to people following and/or exploring the many eclectic ways to be religious/spiritual in the United States today?

Rev. David Breeden, PhD has a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, with additional study in writing and Buddhism at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He also has a Master of Divinity degree from Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago. He recently retired as Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis.

Breeden is an associate member of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought and chairs the Education Committee of the American Humanist Association. He serves as adjunct faculty at United Theological School of St. Paul, MN, teaching in the Humanist Track. He is the recipient of the Khoren Arisian Award for Significant Contributions to Humanism from the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association and is also the recipient of the American Humanist Association Distinguished Service Award (2023). He gave the 2022-2023 Minns Lectures, “Resistance at the Margins: Pentecostalism, Unitarian Universalism, and Intimations of Liberation.” 

Religious Naturalist Ursula Goodenough says of his most recent book: “Radical Noticing is a wonderful title for this collection of the acuity that inhabits the mind and heart of David Breeden. He takes you there, and then there, fully embodied and mortal and insistent, and the fogs drift away.”

A fuller listing of his many books is available here. 

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