Contributor Profile:  John A. Buehrens

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The Rev. John Buehrens was president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations from 1993 to 2001. He served congregations in Tennessee, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, and California before retiring in 2017. He is the co-author with Forrest Church of A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism. His other books include Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals (2004); A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century, with Rebecca Ann Parker (2011); Universalists and Unitarians in America: A People’s History (2011); and Conflagration: How the Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice (2020).

“We Unitarian Universalists have been living off the intellectual capital of James Luther Adams for half a century now.” It was in the 1980s. The speaker was a respected older UU minister. His assertion surprised me at first, since he was a self-declared religious humanist, while JLA was clearly a UU Christian. After serving for forty years as both UUA President and as an historian, my sense of the depth of our indebtedness to JLA […]

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John A. Buehrens: How James Luther Adams Became Important to Me and Why He Still Is