While Unitarian minister Theodore Parker is best known (at least amongst UUs) for originating the concept of the arc of the moral universe, as well as for keeping a loaded pistol on his sermon-writing desk in case he needed to assist someone escaping slavery, Parker’s greatest influence on our living tradition is found in his 1841 sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity”. He preached that certain elements of religion may be regarded as permanent and essential, while others are transient and accidental, subject to transformation with the passage of time. Let’s consider how Parker’s nineteenth-century insight applies to twenty-first-century Unitarian Universalism.
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The Rev. Andrew Millard (he/they/A) has served the Mission of the UU Fellowship of the Peninsula in Newport News since 2010. Born and raised in England, he came to the United States for graduate school in physics; some years later he joined the Sierra Club, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, the World Pantheist Movement and the Unitarian Society of Hartford (in that order). He went back to school at Hartford Seminary before transferring to the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. Andrew lives in Gloucester with Allison, their pre-teen daughter and their furry family.