The Dionysian Naturalist

Unitarian Universalism:  A Faith of Conscience, Justice, and Earth   Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. I. A Radical Heritage: The Faith of Heretics and Prophets Unitarian Universalism (UU) is the anti-authoritarian faith—born from heretics, reformers, and free spirits who challenged orthodoxy and insisted that conscience, not creed, is the measure of truth. It stands in a lineage of radical dissent stretching back centuries: from Michael Servetus, executed in 1553 for questioning the Trinity, to the early Unitarians who championed reason over revelation, to the Universalists who dared to proclaim that a loving God would never condemn anyone to eternal damnation. The theological DNA of UU is revolutionary. It holds that no single tradition has a monopoly on truth, that revelation is continuous and evolving, and that moral insight deepens as humanity matures. Its saints are rebels: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who walked away from his Unitarian pulpit to preach self-reliance and the divinit...

  The Parsonage at 302 Chicopee Street Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D   The First Congregational church and parsonage in about 1892 My grandfather, Rev. Asa Wright Mellinger, was born on September 21, 1897, in Washingtonville, Columbiana County, Ohio, in a log house within a Pennsylvania Dutch–speaking Mennonite family. From that heritage he carried a lifelong ethic of simplicity and steadiness. After attending Mount Union College—where he met my grandmother, Edith Marion Ford—he pursued theological studies at Boston University and Harvard in a joint program, earning a Master of Sacred Theology in 1925. His thesis, written as a play titled A Thorn in the Flesh, explored the life of the Apostle Paul, foreshadowing the narrative imagination that would later enliven his sermons. He was fluent in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, yet he lived without pretense, embodying the Mennonite virtue of plainness even as he mastered the languages of Scripture. When he accepted a call...