(photo ©2009 by kingwu/iStockPhoto)

Last year my husband and I invested in a Global Positioning System, or GPS. I have joked many times about how this simple electronic device has probably saved our marriage due to no more disagreements about navigating, interpreting maps, and trying to determine our direction based upon the angle of the [...]

Despite our best intentions to raise freethinking children who understand there are many possibilities for religious truths, the reality is most of us live and function in a world which frowns upon nonconformity where religious ideas are concerned. Even as our country grows more and more religiously diverse each generation, distrust of atheism, agnosticism, [...]

Because so many of us Unitarian Universalist parents come from other religious traditions or were raised unchurched, it’s often much easier for us to definitively state what we do not believe than what we do believe. Even parents who were raised as Unitarian Universalists may struggle with this if their own parents neglected to pass [...]

For many years, I rejected anything to do with the camping experience. A semi-flooded tent during a teenage camping nightmare was enough to turn me off of the idea forever.

However, my husband persisted and, eventually, I relented. It was becoming clear to me that I was cheating my kids out of the full nature experience [...]

Sexuality is so much more than just sex. It’s also the roles, behaviors, and values that people associate with the characteristics of being either male or female. For this reason, sexuality can be considered a basic part of our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lives. It is evident in the clothes we choose to wear, [...]

Messages about sexuality are everywhere in our culture, from the magazines lining the shelves at the check-out line at the grocery store to suggestive dances and lyrics in music videos. News reports casually mention the latest politician or celebrity to succumb to an extramarital affair (sometimes with particularly vivid detail), while television commercials promote prescription [...]

We were thrilled to see the response that greeted Michelle Richards’s “UU Parenting” blog when we introduced it back in February to coincide with the publication of her new book, Tending the Flame: The Art of Raising Unitarian Universalist Children. We envisioned the project as a [...]

UU World would like to thank Michelle Richards, author of Tending the Flame: The Art of Raising Unitarian Universalist Children, for writing our “UU Parenting” blog this spring. Michelle plans to continue writing about the topic at her website, and we’ll post an update with [...]

Before we have children of our own, it’s hard to imagine just how deeply we are capable of feeling love and how powerless we can be to that love at times. However, once children arrive, life quickly begins to revolve around the needs of that tiny infant (or adopted child) and some parents may find [...]

Since children are naturally full of wonder and are still able to see magic in the world, they do not need spiritual practices to help them connect; they need them in order to stay connected as they grow and mature. While children are born with an innate spirituality, most of them will lose it as [...]