For Your Consideration
The Touchstones Project
An Intriguing Way
of Doing Church
A Unitarian Universalist congregation can transform the people it serves, inspiring them to help transform the world. This requires an intentional, sustained, integrated, holistic process of deepening that informs, nurtures, and challenges.
Please note that the materials can easily be adapted for use by all liberal, progressive congregations.
Developed over eight years, the Touchstones Project has been dramatically expanded to make a meaningful difference in people's lives: those within your congregation and those who live in the community that your congregation serves.
We invite you:
1. To browse our website to learn how
what we offer can transform
your programming.
2. To request our materials for the
theme of beauty to facilitate a
comprehensive review by your staff and key volunteers.
3. To schedule a conference call with
us so that we can answer any
questions that you and others
may have.
4. To order a trial subscription for
three months to implement and
evaluate our program.
5. To become a member of the
Touchstones community by
extending your subscription for the
balance of the program year, which
ends in August of each year.
Click here for information about subscriptions.
April Theme
Reflections on
God / The Divine
“God is... / A three letter word, / Partner in profanity, / Companion of the sublime, / The deepest down / darkness in me, / The rainbow ..., / The mystery beyond all knowing / …The question as inescapable / as it is unanswerable, / …God is the theist’s joy, / The atheist’s foil, / The agnostic’s doubt. / God is a simple / deep dark / Light bright / up-tight, three letter word.” Rev. Richard Gilbert
Video
Interview with God
Richard Holdman
A creative way of sharing wisdom, whether divine or not. Consists of beautiful music and photos with the “interview” in text. (3:36)
Video Link: https://vimeo.com/8898059
The Value of Doubt to Faith
Irma Zaleski
I once met a Korean Zen master who, after I had asked him some question I no longer remember, wagged his finger at me and said: “Thinking, thinking, thinking! Checking, checking, checking! No good! No good! Don’t know! Don’t know! Don’t I know!—That is your answer!” I don’t think I really understood then what the master meant, but I never forgot him or his “answer.” There was a joy in that meeting, a lightness of heart….
It was only years later …that I was able to understand his words better, and to recognize how relevant they were for the …way to God.
I realized that we should never attempt to solve our doubts in matters of faith by rational arguments or inner debates.
…We must face our doubts, acknowledge them and simply let go of them. We shout “Don’t know!” …as a sign of our assurance that Truth is immeasurably bigger than all our thinking and checking….
If …we practice “not-knowing,” doubt …may yet prove to be not an enemy of our faith, but its ally and friend. Struggle with doubt may help us to understand ever more clearly the limits of thought…: a powerful means of the “unknowing” that is the heart of faith.
There is no greater danger to faith, to wisdom and to love than the presumption that we know it all: that we have understood it all, that there is nothing more to discover or learn. Doubt makes it very difficult for us to fall into such a presumption. It forces us to recognize how little we know.
Source: https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/excerpts/view/18663
Like our Facebook Page where we post something inspirational each day related to the theme.
Touchstones Themes
for 2019-2020
Our theme-year began in
September 2019. Please see the
attached flyer for information about
the themes for the coming year.
Annual theme for 2019-2020
Building Beloved Community