Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

Seeing White is an award-winning podcast series (originally aired in 2017) about a history that we probably didn't learn about in school. It's guided by 3 questions: Where did the idea of “whiteness” come from, what does it mean, and what is it for?  During this 8-session learning circle, you will probably hear or read, about parts of American history, going back to colonial America, that you might not be familiar with.  The goal of the discussions is to spark curiousity (an interest in learning more) rather than guilt, shame or anger. 

This sequel to Seeing White is a podcast series about democracy and whether we have ever really had one. The title is taken from a Langston Hughes poem, Let America Be America Again.

The series touches on concerns like authoritarianism, voter suppression, gerrymandering, neoliberalism, foreign intervention, and the role of money in politics - but goes much deeper.  Past participants say this information is critical to understanding how our system came to be and what it will take to move closer to the Beloved Community. 

 The latest Season 8 from Scene on Radio (with co-hosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika) explores what passes for journalism today. This 8-part series explores the deep challenges facing American journalism, and the nation’s news and information crisis. It seems everyone’s mad at the media, but we’ll ask, what’s really wrong with the news? Is it what we think it is? What would a more independent and democratic media look like? 

 How did our democracy become a kleptocracy, where "one person one vote" has been transformed to "one dollar one vote"?  The Lever has unearthed never-before-reported documents revealing this 50-year plot as a coordinated effort by wealthy individuals and political ideologues.  Across 11 audio episodes, the series traces this historic thread from the Watergate scandal in the '70's to the Citizens United decision, current Supreme Court outrages, and the 2024 election.  It's a story of infamous figures like President Nixon, Senator McConnell and Fox News founder Roger Ailes, plus operatives and oligarchs you've never heard of. 

The extreme inequality, lack of opportunity, persistent poverty, and ongoing destruction of our planetary environment due to our current neoliberal economic system is both inconsistent with our values and pushing us towards human extinction. Rising anger about this has helped fuel the “fake populism” represented by Donald Trump. 

What would an economic system supporting our values look like? One such vision is “Doughnut Economics,” developed by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, which proposes managing the economy specifically and deliberately to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. The goals are to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend – such as a stable climate, fertile soils, and thriving biodiversity. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a serious approach to reframing our economic assumptions and objectives that can help guide human progress toward the social and economic justice in harmony with the Earth that we envision for the beloved community.  

Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.

America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.  

Link to Syllabus 

  Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book,  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art,  Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.  

 Creating congregations and groups within our congregations that are welcoming, inclusive, and multicultural is a big task. Becoming aware of how our culture and “positionality” affect both how we Unitarian Universalists are perceived and how we behave, is a helpful foundation for exploring how we attract people to our congregations, how we engage and hold on to them, and how we eventually build a “beloved community.”

This learning circle will use the book Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions (2nd Ed., by Tiffany Jana and Michael Baran), as well as videos by Will Guidara who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality and Peter Bowden who heads up the UU Growth Lab. 

We will talk about basics like microaggressions. But, more importantly, we will look at how we individually and within our congregation’s approach being more welcoming and inclusive--and where we might be missing the mark, even though we are very nice about our approaches.

 A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. This book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.  We will read one essay per week, and meet for 16 weeks.  It is a journey well worth the commitment. 

Thirty years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history in The Fourth Turning is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal and World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution.

Now, right on schedule, our own fourth turning has arrived…and Neil Howe has returned with an extraordinary new prediction. What we see all around us—the polarization, the growing threat of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even bringing on America’s next golden age. Every generation alive today will play a vital role in determining how this crisis is resolved, for good or ill. 

 Check back for dates and programming for our Spring 2027 semester

Registration Opening Date: TBD

Program Start Date: TBD

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