Mailbox, Summer 2006

What our readers tell us.
By Jane Greer
Summer 2006 5.15.06

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COMPANION ARTICLE

Letters, Summer 2006 Readers respond to the Spring 2006 issue. (Summer 2006)

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We received a landslide of letters (relatively speaking) on our Spring issue’s cover story, “Welcome to the Ecozoic Era.” Twenty-one letters out of a total of forty-nine were devoted to Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow’s work, which melds science and religion into a new way of thinking about evolution.

Many readers saw the process of evolution as strictly scientific, devoid of religious meaning. But others saw Dowd and Barlow’s thesis as a means of understanding the role humans play in the bigger picture of all creation. Writes Bill Toaspern of Pleasant Hill, California, “It’s foolish to behave as if we believe the purpose of evolution was to create humans for the purpose of controlling nature and the evolutionary process. It’s enough to be a part of the miracle.”

The second largest group of letters, five, was about the UUA’s redesigned logo (see “Letters,” Spring 2006). All five expressed disappointment with the new design. Says Jim Landfried of Cambridge, Massachusetts, “The design of the ‘old’ UUA logo makes perfect historical sense and, after twenty-five years, is recognized around the world. The new UUA logo disguises and obliterates history and will confuse almost everyone who sees it.” The new chalice logo has been adopted by all UUA departments, including UU World.

We had four responses to Barbara Wells ten Hove’s essay on growing up Uni tarian Universalist (“A Stranger in My Own Home- town”) and three about the story of the revitalization of one of the country’s oldest Universalist churches (“Gloucester’s Revival”).

The “other” file contained sixteen letters on a range of subjects including a letter objecting to the UUA’s opposition to Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, one urging caution about fasting, one advocating that all congregations write a core statement of their beliefs, and one suggesting greater emphasis on the Six Sources of Unitarian Universalism rather than just the Seven Principles (see page 6).