Auckland Unitarians

With Rachel Mackintosh Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 15th January 2023 If you think about the vastness of space, and how enormous our galaxy is, and how big our planet is, and how small we are, I’m not really eating all that much cheese. Thanks to Kay for finding and sharing that. For more information see https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/thats-how-the-light-gets-in/

with David Hines. David Hines and panelists © 11th December 2022 A panel of leading religious and non-religious leaders discuss the government’s new religion in schools programme. The panel:- Paul Morris , Emeritus Professor, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington / Te Herenga Waka. Secular Education Network chair  Penny Ehrhardt,  and New Zealand Associ...

With Ted Zorn. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 8th January 2023 Today, I want to talk about finding our humanity in a technologized world and the dangers of relying too heavily on technology to do tasks that we expect to be done by humans. Specifically, I want to delve into the questions raised by the fact that a machine like ChatGPT can write a speech, a personal letter, or your child’s ess...

With Alix Geard, Ted Zorn. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 1st January 2023 On this first day of the year, I want to talk about meaning. Specifically, I want to talk about how we take our small blue planet’s gravitationally-bound sweep around its star and turn one point on that circuit into a time for parties and new year’s resolutions and setting up a calendar for the year to come. About ho...

With Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 18th December 2022 I don’t consider it Christmas until I have watched It’s a Wonderful Life . I ticked that off last Sunday. So, for me, it’s now Christmas. I don’t know when it became one of my treasured Christmas traditions, but I can’t remember when it wasn’t. When my kids were teenagers, there was lots of eye-rolling when I insisted t...

With Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 4th December 2022 Shakespeare had it wrong. When Juliet tells Romeo, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” she is arguing that it does not matter that Romeo is from her family’s rival house Montague. The reference states that the names of things do not affect what they really are. I disagree. Nothing could be further from the t...

With Dr. Rebecca Stafford Worship Leader:- Rev. Sally Mabelle Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 27th November 2022 For more information see https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/the-why-what-and-how-of-gratitude/

With Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul Spoonley Worship Leader: Ted Zorn Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 20th November 2022 Kia ora tatou katoa. Nga mihi na mihi nui. Nga mihi kia koe, Ted. Thanks for the introduction, and te whare e tu nei. Tena koe. I acknowledged the house in which we are standing, sitting. Ted has kindly mentioned the book, Histories of Hate . And so I’ve got a long,...

With Lyn Farhi Worship Leader: David Hines Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 13th November 2022 Morena Everyone. I am Lynn Farhi. It is great to be here this morning. As some of you know I have a love of art and creativity in all its forms. Today for brevity’s sake I will just speak about Art and its therapeutic uses. I have used Art therapeutically for the last 14 years in hospice volunteer w...

Worship Leader: David Hines Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 6th November 2022 The image of an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff is a common one in politics. Left-wing and right wing politicians both use it for different policies. Left wing politicians use it to say: let’s not be tough on criminals, let’s spend money on fixing the social background that made them that way. Right wing polit...

Worship Leader: John DiLeo Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 30th October 2022 When I signed up to lead today’s service, I figured it would be easy to come up with things to say. I mean, after all, there’s no shortage of writings and opinions around the Church’s appropriation and subjugation of non-Christian customs and occasions. I also figured it would be really easy to find information on w...

Worship Leader: Rachel Mackintosh Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 23rd October 2022 Ki te kahore he whakakitenga ka ngaro te iwi “Without foresight or vision the people will be lost.” This past week a colleague of mine who lives in Taranaki mentioned the town of Patea, which he described as being “nothing since the freezing works closed”. For 100 years from 1883, the local freezing works had...

Worship Leader: David Hines Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 16th October 2022 A couple of days ago I heard about a friend who was 80 years old and said he had aged more in the past year than the previous 10 years. He had a heart attack and prostate problem in the same year. I had a similar experience this month. I went to my GP for my routine checkup, but I took a longer than usual list of q...

Worship Leader: David Hines Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 9th October 2022 After two years of waiting, I’m excited that a government proposal for religious education in state schools is about to be revealed. But I’m also concerned, because very important questions have still not been answered. Includes contributions from:- Sara Passmore, NZ Humanists Penny Ehrhardt, Secular Education Netwo...

Worship Leader: John DiLeo Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 2nd October 2022 As I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, the themes and musings present in the services I lead tend to reflect things that are on my mind at the moment. In this case, it happens to be birthdays. Mine is this coming Tuesday. It also happens to be one of those “milestone” birthdays – I’ll be turning 55. For more info...

Worship Leader: Nina Khouri. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 25th September 2022 So, the government has now lifted basically all remaining COVID restrictions. We don’t have a traffic light system anymore, we have very few mask requirements, government vaccine mandates are ending and you don’t even have to isolate if a household member tests positive, so long as you monitor yourself for sympt...

with Ted Zorn & Kate Lewis Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 18th September 2022 I’ve titled my random musings today “FOMO, Imagined Lives and Reclaiming Joy”. FOMO is an acronym for “Fear of Missing Out”. I’ll start with a confession. I chose this topic because I suffer from FOMO and it has had a profoundly negative impact on the quality of my life and in some cases, the lives of people I...

with Rev. Max Moss Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 11th September 2022 Today's talk was a reading of " A Dead Soldier Looks at the War " by Rev. David Rankin For more information see   https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/a-dead-soldier-looks-at-the-war/

with John DiLeo Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 4th September 2022 Today's talk was a reading of “ The Answer I Wish I'd Given " By Erika A. Hewitt For more information see   https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/because-we-can/

with Rachel Mackintosh Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 21st August 2022 Burning Down the House was part of the soundtrack of my adolescence. The song came out two years after the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand that had united a nationwide protest movement from across the political and socio-economic spectrum, where tens of thousands of us had marched together periodically in the year lea...

with John DiLeo  Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 14th August 2022  I grew up in a rural part of Connecticut, in the northeastern United States. My home town, Plainfield, was small, the population was almost entirely white Europeans, and – as far as those in authority in my life were concerned – everybody was cisgendered and straight. As was the social norm of the time, when someone...

with Nina Khouri Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 7th August 2022 For more information see:- https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/that-i-might-know-my-mind/

with Derek Handley  Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 31st July 2022  The songs and first reading discussed in this podcast are not included in this audio, links to them can be found on the webpage below. For more information see https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/i-am-the-first-and-the-last/

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 24th July 2022 Think back two and half years ago to the day before you heard of Coronavirus breaking out in Wuhan, China. Whatever that was like for you, that was normal. For me, I was a newlywed. I had not even learned what that new normal meant for me yet. I certainly hadn’t anticipated that we would spend most of two and a half years s...

with Rev. Clay Nelson  Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 17th July 2022  I would like to give you a peek behind the curtain to see one of the blessings, or possibly curses, of being in my line of work. If you have been doing it as long as I have, it is nearly impossible not to see the world continuously through theological lenses. It is not a conscious decision anymore. It is just my...