“Keeping It Together While Democracy Is Falling Apart”
Our spring conference opens on Monday, April 27. We have arranged for eight sessions—three on Monday, three on Tuesday the 28th and two on the 29th. Our theme—“Keeping It Together While Democracy Is Falling Apart”—will be presented during the first session on Tuesday.
We are lucky to have Dr. Glen Thomas Rideout to present the theme. He is a writer, worship artist, and longtime leader in UUcommunities, where his work has centered on how people remain human, responsive, and connected during seasons of profound change.
Drawing on music, ritual, and close pastoral attention, he has accompanied communities across generations—especially elders—through moments when familiar forms no longer steady life in the same way. He understands Unitarian Universalism at its best as a tradition that turns anxiety about the unknown into a relationship with it, inviting each life into deeper rapport with mystery rather than retreat from it. His writing and teaching attend to thresholds rather than answers, and to the practices that help people move with time rather than withdraw from it. Glen lives in Minnesota. His ministry is alive wherever love and the people call him.
Dr. Rideout believes there are seasons of life when time stops behaving like a straight line and begins calling to itself from multiple directions at once. He said, “For the elder, this widening is often felt immediately—when the forms we trust most no longer hold us in the familiar old ways: memory answering memory, body and story renegotiating their terms.”
When asked how our members might adapt to the challenge of our theme, he replied, “The work, then, is not to retire into withdrawal but to remain—to know when to recline and when to rise, to relax in order to revive, to return transformed—bearing a posture of openness that teaches us what is still possible, even where we least expect it to last, when the songs need to be sung.”
Other features of our conference are two worship services and a service of remembrance, a minister’s and a partner’s odyssey, connecting rooms for stronger and more personal interactions, and a concert on Tuesday evening.
Registration is now open. Please visit uurmapa.churchcenter.com/registrations/events/3106236
The fee is $70, but tariffs have been deferred until April 6th. If you register before that date, the fee is only $50.
If you have never attended one of our conferences, the board is happy to waive your registration fee. If you need assistance with the fee or the registration process, help is available from our registrar, Barbro Hansson. Write her at conferences@uurmapa.org
We look forward to greeting you in April at our spring conference. In the meantime, know that every one of us has a part to play in our struggles for inclusivity and justice. If you live in the USA, you might be a little closer to the heat, but if you are not, you are still here, you are more than a witness, and we’re all in this together.