Love at the Center: UU Theologies
Sophia Betancourt's preface to Love at the Center invites Unitarian Universalists to explore love as the heart of our faith. Rooted in the recent self-evaluation led by the Article II Study Commission, she emphasizes that while our covenantal review shapes our governance, it also deepens the values we share as a community. Love, she notes, is the value most often named by Unitarian Universalists as central to our faith, guiding us in all that we do and challenging us to embody its profound requirements in the world.
The book brings together powerful testimonies from more than two dozen leaders, offering diverse expressions of how love is central to Unitarian Universalism. These reflections reveal love’s presence in our long histories, natural surroundings, acts of justice, and even in quiet moments of reflection. Betancourt reminds us that our theological tradition does not rely on a singular truth, but instead places faith in love itself. It is this love—a love that abides, that rebuilds our struggling world, and that calls us to care for one another in beloved community—that grounds our movement and pushes us toward justice.
Rev. Marco Belletini
“On Love”
Rev. Marco Belletini is Minister Emeritus of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio.
“And so, bearing witness both to our world as it is, and as Love can imagine it, we would claim that vision of a just world in our own lives as a summons to mission. And because of a growing sense of kinship with all beings, inviting our compassion, we begin in this celebration to engage our mission with our whole lives: body, mind, and heart.”
Connie Goodbread
“Unitarian Universalism: One Holy Love for All”
Connie Goodbread serves as HOPE for Us Conflict Engagement Team Director at the Unitarian Universalist Association.
The Love we are talking about is the Love that is inside of us and all around us. It holds us, supports us, and is greater than us. No one is outside of this one holy Love.
This Love is not sentimental. It is not always soft or comfortable. Because it is the Love that holds us all, there needs to be space for each of us and boundaries around behaviors that are not loving. We are responsible for making space for others.
In relationships with Love at the center, people ask for what they need and people ask others what they need. We each make space for others and do not claim more than our share of space. Our needs will not all be the same. They will differ and will change at different stages of our lives.
Unitarian Universalism is a covenantal rather than a creedal faith. Covenant is the first spiritual discipline/practice of Unitarian Universalism. In communities where Love is at the center, this Love is made real by expressing and living out the values we individually hold sacred.
Rev. Susan Frederick Gray
“Beloved Community is Love at the Center”
Rev. Susan Frederick Gray was the ninth president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, elected to a six-year term in 2017.
“The belief in universal salvation meant that no one was ever cast outside of God's love. God's unconditional love for all of humanity inspired the religious imagination of Rev. Hosea Ballou, who was one of the most influential ministers to articulate and shape our Universalist theology. Ballou spoke of God's desire for humanity's happiness and joy and for a society that would nurture in its conditions the quality of love and care that God has for all people.
”This Universalist theology, with love at the center, still animates our tradition. But other sources have also come to shape our tradition in similar ways. In the 1980s with the advent of the Seven Principles, interdependence became another core value, rooted in the ways that the teachings of science and a reverence for the natural world inform our faith. But for Unitarian Universalists, interdependence is more than just a value or principle. It is an existential understanding of humanity and our relationship to the world and creation. In other words, it is not just a belief, but an undeniable quality of our existence.”
Rev. Ashley Horan
“Death and Glory, Love and Evil”
Rev. Ashley Moran is Vice President for Programs and Ministries for the Unitarian Universalist Association.
“For me, there is a physical sensation of Love that is fully in alignment with both the cellular level of my own being and the cosmic level of the universe. I think of the first exquisitely overwhelming moments when I held my newborn babies to my sweaty chest after they struggled through birth into this life; the breath hitch of awe I feel standing on a pine-covered outcropping overlooking an expanse of open wilderness water in the Northwoods; the pulsing energy of thousands of voices raised in song and chant during a march or a direct action, when change feels not only possible but unstoppable .... At these times, I feel what I can only describe as the physical equivalent of the sound made by a full orchestra playing the soaring final note of a glorious piece of music, when the frequencies of each of the instruments resonate in a harmony so perfect all those who can hear it transcend together. When I experience this full-body sensation of alignment with the frequencies of love, I find myself so clearly knowing, "This! This feeling! This is what I was made for; what we were all made for."
Dan McKanan
“Love is the Heart of this Church”
Dan McKanan is the Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School
"Neutrons and protons and electrons want to dance with one another and make atoms. Atoms seek each other out to make molecules. From the very beginning of life on earth, organisms found creative ways to connect. The earliest plants and animals were symbiotic communities of bacteria, each with a unique function that benefited the others. Each new relationship unleashed new creativity, culminating in the beautiful, interdependent ecosystems of the world today."
Mary Katherine Morn
“Love and Power at the Center”
Mary Katherine Moran is Lead Executive Officer at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
“Imagine love as a force that frees us, each and all, to the fullness of our humanity. Imagine that love centered, at like distance from every point on the circle. Imagine the community care that holds the tension of the circumference and the radius. We know too well the limitations that disrupt right relationship around the circle of humanity. It is the pull toward the center that will hold us together.”
Rev. Rebecca Ann Parker
“Love is a Circle in Time”
Rev. Rebecca Ann Parker is President Emerita and Professor of Theology Emerita of Starr King School for the Ministry.
"The strength to love, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, is what makes Beloved Community possible. Love is a creative activity, a combination of elements that together yields a transformation. Beloved Community is a result--like that childhood project to make a volcano in your kitchen: put soda and vinegar together and "Voila!" —something unexpected happens. But unlike the kitchen volcano, love that foments transformative justice does not happen just once. It recurs in a circular motion, in reciprocity with others.
“Beloved Community is created and sustained as a circle in time; manifested in diverse moments and places in which past, present, and future are gathered through love." Love embraces the past through faithful covenant with ancestors. Love looks to the future as people work to build a better world. Love finds immediate realization in the here and now, among those who rejoice in the good that is found, embody compassion and kindness, and engage with what needs to be healed, mourned, or repaired right here, right now."
“Ashley Horan: In the face of these kinds of horrific acts, if we define Love as a nebulous warm feeling toward an individual or a group and then propose that we "center Love" in our organizing, we are doomed.
“If "Love thy enemy" is code for "swallow your feelings, don't confront, don't disturb, don't take sides, turn the other cheek even when they keep on slapping you (or your neighbor)," then not only will we suffer the indignities and trauma perpetrated by those who would do us harm, but we will also be aiding and abetting that same violence toward others—a sin in and of itself.
“Universalism doesn't require us, individually, to love every other human; as I often quip, ‘That's God's job, way above my paygrade.’ But it does demand that we behave in ways that do not dehumanize or degrade our enemies, even as we actively resist them and strategically work toward a world in which all people can access the freedom and flourishing that Love wills for each and all of us.
“The time is now for Unitarian Universalists to reinvent and reclaim a Universalism that is neither naive about the realities of evil nor retributive in its tactics against those who perpetrate it. Putting Love at the center of our faithful organizing means nurturing both the clarity to act boldly for the liberation and thriving of all people and the earth and the fortitude to name and confront violence and hatred at all levels. Our spiritual task must be to resist numbness, engaging evil directly so that we may combat it with strategy, skill, and resolve.”
Rev. Sheri Prud’homme
“There is a Love Holding Us”
Rev. Sheri Prud’homme is core faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry.
"Love comes to me in my morning meditation with an energy that appears in my religious imagination as deeply pink, shimmering, woven with shining gold threads, and the words warmth, love, and caress. Resonant with the assertions of some of the great nineteenth-century Transcendentalist Universalist and Unitarian preachers, I also experience non-human nature as drawing me into communion with this love that they called God."
Rev. Adam Robersmith
“We Call These Things Love”
Rev. Adam Robersmith is Senior Minister at the Universalist Church of West Hartford, Connecticut.
"Love is what allows the world to exist. It is what holds all things together and makes existence coherent. Love is relationship at its best, a way of being that requires relational power, a power that values and respects that which it connects. This kind of love—relational and divine—is also practical and observable in our world."
Mykal O. Slack
“From Longing to Fully Living”
Myka O. Slack serves as the Community Minister for Worship and Spiritual Care and sits on the Organizing Collective Board for Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism.
"If longing is the spiritual and emotional tug of love, then risk-taking is the tangible, accountable embodiment of that love. It means saying the hardest things, the things that get to the heart of our UU values, in the hardest moments, even when it might also mean losing people we care about or ceding our own power and authority. It means not running from conflict because staying in the work of long-term re-alignment and reconnection is more important than smoothing things over for short-term comfort."
Rev. Karen Van Fossan
“Love is Abolition”
Rev. Karen Van Fossen is Water Protector, abolitionist minister, and author of A Fire at the Center: Solidarity, Whiteness, and Becoming a Water Protector.”
“From its beginnings, Universalism has been nothing if not practical, rooted in life on Earth. Because God loves everyone, particularly those who have been oppressed, some of the first Universalists on this continent, like Elhanan Winchester and Benjamin Rush, became slavery abolitionists. According to Universalism, God's love is not a final reward for a privileged class in the afterlife. Love is life itself, which means love can always find us—in a loved one's gaze, a chickadee's song, the collective fight for justice. That is the essence of abolition.
“Broadly stated, abolition is a collection of hopeful practices that foster wholeness and repair, decrease punitive ways of relating, and move cultures away from carceral systems, toward full participation of all people. These carceral systems, which include various kinds of policing-jails, courts, invasive foster-care entities, and more-wreak havoc on the planet and living beings, especially those who are marginalized. For some, abolition means genuine safety for all. For others, it means freedom from the systems that oppress us. In my world, it means that no one, absolutely no one, is beyond the reach of relationship—and thus love.
“As Cornel West has said, "Justice is what love looks like in public."