by Rev Geoff Usher
The Lawrence Lectures on Religion and Society were established to inquire into the nature and relevance of religion as it relates to personal meaning and fulfillment, to formulation of values and ethical commitment. The Lectures were associated with the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, California, where I gave the annual Earl Morse Wilbur Lecture in January 1986.
On 17 October 1980, Theodore Roszak gave the Lawrence Lecture entitled “The Personal and the Planetary” .My sermon today is based on Roszak’s Lecture, for which he took as a text a couple of lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins:
And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man?
And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man?
We begin by going back some three centuries to the period when the ideal of democratic equality first entered the political consciousness of the modern world.
Few of us today would question the great transformation in moral identity which first taught people to think of themselves as equals:- equal in dignity, equal in their access to the rights and goods of the commonwealth. That conviction holds an axiomatic position in our lives.
And yet, it was once a shocking and disruptive new idea.
These sermons were given on two days, and are presented here as Part 1 and Part 2.
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