[New post] Berry Street Essays: 200 years of UUism

philebersole posted: " THE THROUGH LINE: 200 Years of the Berry Street Essay, edited by Kate R. Walker (2021). In 1820, the Rev. William Ellery Channing, minister of Boston's Federal Street Church, was the proponent of a heretical theology called unitarianism.  He called tog" Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on Phil Ebersole's Blog Berry Street Essays: 200 years of UUism by philebersole THE THROUGH LINE: 200 Years of the Berry Street Essay, edited by Kate R. Walker (2021). In 1820, the Rev. William Ellery Channing, minister of Boston's Federal Street Church, was the proponent of a heretical theology called unitarianism.  He called together fellow unitarian ministers to hear a lecture entitled, "How Far Is Reason to Be Trusted in Explaining Revelation?" and to talk about the new ideas. They agreed to meet the following year, and they and their successors have met every year down to the present.  The talks are known as the Berry Street Lectures because the building in which they originally met opened on Berry Street; the meetings currently are held in a different place each year. They are of interest not just to us Unitarian Universalists, but to anyone interested in the trajectory of religious liberalism. The Rev. Kate R. Walker found that the present-day record of the Berry Street Essays was woefully incomplete.  She and her helpers did a great service to history and to Unitarian-Universalism by tracking down missing texts.  The archive now includes roughly three-quarters of the original essays, some of them in the form of summaries or reports. Her new book, The Through Line, consists of reviews of the essays during 13 different periods of history, plus texts of essays for 19 different years, and an introduction and conclusion by herself. Two essays are by UU ministers I personally know and greatly esteem, the Rev. Richard S. Gilbert and the Rev. Mark D.  Morrison-Reed. The essays are interesting snapshots of liberal religious thinking, past and present, but the reviews don't add much. The reviews are marred by "present-ism," aka "the whig interpretation of history."  UU ministers of the past are condemned for not sharing the present-day understanding of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, etc., not to mention most of them being white, male and members of the New England elite.   It would have been better to omit the reviews and include more essays, at least one more for each era reviewed. Fortunately the Unitarian Universalist Ministers' Association has created a web page with links to all the known essays. You can browse through them on the Ministers' Conference at Berry Street: Essays web site.  In my opinion, you'd get as much or more out of reading them on-line as by reading the book. Read more of this post philebersole | November 1, 2021 at 8:03 am | Tags: Berry Street Essays, Kate R. Walker, The Through Line | Categories: Books, Unitarian Universalism | URL: https://wp.me/pMUbO-pWj Comment    See all comments    Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Phil Ebersole's Blog. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2021/11/01/berry-street-essays-200-years-of-uuism/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com