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When some initial planning was being done for suggested speakers and themes for Spirit of Life, my name came up as one who could be considered to speak on Easter.
I accepted the invitation. Thank you for the trust shown to me.
But my initial thinking was to offer something just a bit different in structure. Instead of an Address based on challenging doctrines and creeds with theological argument,
I have chosen to present six short ‘thought cameos’ but still with much help from scholarly friends around the world.
I am sure the more literalist and conservative professionals ‘out there’ will consider the cameos inadequate, perhaps even heretical. Likewise, such an attempt as this in a so-called ‘secular’ society is fraught with danger.
Or worse, irrelevance!
Never-the-less I offer them with the not so cheeky invitation that you may just wish to ponder them some more, sometime.

To read this address by the Rev. Rex A.E. Hunt on the Easter theme, please click here.

Today, I would like to invite us to reflect on the 5th of our 7 principles….. “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.”
Over the past couple of weeks of thinking about this reflection, what I have found particularly clarifying, is the word “secular.” I find something in that word “secular” liberating just now. And I have become curious about what that was. How do you think about the word secular? Perhaps you might share your thoughts at the end on our uses of the word secular.
I’ve been trying out this word and found the word “secular” to be quite useful in trying to explain what chaplaincy in a public and multicultural university is and could be. Once in a while I have said that “I thought my religious sensibilities are secular.” I have to be a little careful where and how I use it. Some find the use of that word to be provocative and disloyal to the traditional calling of those who are “religious” professionals. How can you be a chaplain and be “secular”?

The full text of this interesting and provocative talk by the Rev. daniel Jantos can be found here.

This a sermon by the Rev. Geoff Usher.

Life is a gift.
We have life – not because we made it, but because we received it. Life was given to us through other people: through our parents, and their parents, and the countless generations of ancestors from whom we are
descended through all those who lived in ancient times and through our friends, to whom we turn for companionship, with whom we share the beauty, the pleasures, the trials and the pain which life in all its richness brings to us.
Blood is thicker than water, but the bonds of true friendship go beyond those of family – they are different because they are voluntary.
We cannot choose our relatives: we get them as part of the package deal when we are born. But we can choose our friends. And – the ultimate compliment – others may choose us to be their friends

This thought provoking talk can be read in full here.

by Rev. Rex A. E. Hunt

There is something deeply ‘human’-ising being in a garden.

Listening to the rustle of eucalyptus leaves in a light spring wind overhead.
Watching a bee flirt with a yellow daisy bush.
Kneeling onto a patch of soil planting a newly purchased seedling,
while gently moving aside a startled reddish-purple Squirter earthworm or two…
Biophilia—the love of nature and living things.

To read this talk, please click here.

This talk was given by the Rev. Geoff Usher.

In March 2009 I went to Japan for the Council meeting of the International Association for Religious Freedom, held at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine near Suzuka.
While in Japan I was given a copy of a book by Ervin Laszlo, entitled “You Can Change the World: The Global Citizen’s Handbook for Living on Planet Earth.”
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The first chapter is entitled “The World in Our Hands”, and I have taken that as the title for this sermon, in which I want to share with you some ideas from Laszlo’s book. It sets out the simple message that we must not wait for fundamental change to come from “above”, from the elected or appointed leaders of contemporary society.
Meaningful change must come from “below”, from the people – the ordinary people like us – who live in those societies.

The complete sermon can found here.