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