Community
News

March
2023

President's Column
Hello, Friends!
Hello, Beloved Community!

First, on a personal note: THANK YOU 😃 for being such a Meaningful and Supportive part of my life!
I have been focusing on Gratitude of late, and I have to share that CUUC has made such a profound impact on my life in so many positive ways; our church community is precious to me, and sometimes I just have to Say It Loud!

We live in a world where there is so much to concern us, and the stress of negotiating with all that encompasses is very real; knowing that I am a part of a group with common goals and aspirations - for our locality and for the larger areas around it - indeed, for our planet and the creatures we share it with - Matters Greatly to me!

I have been reading "The Green Ammendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment" by Maya K. van Rossum (who came to CUUC this very winter to sign copies of this seminal book and speak about the issues that have motivated her eco-activism, which the book relates) and when I set it down to check out the latest news, I am continuing to read stories about the catastrophic effects of the train derailment in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, which has released toxic chemicals into the environment significant enough to kill wildlife and endanger the residents... it's as if the book has "sprung to life" and the details of news reports are underlining and highlighting every point the author makes.
I know that this can be a turning point for Americans as we grapple with the increasing realization of how fragile our environment truly is, and how important it Must become for the interconnected human populations around the world to make priorities of saving our natural resources and slowing the advancement of climate change, which imperils us all.

Recently, our church received an email inviting us to show the documentary feature "The Ants and the Grasshopper," which shares the story of an African woman who, motivated by increasing levels of drought in her homeland (Malawi), and inspired by her Christian faith, becomes a crusader for Climate Change activism, traveling to the United States to warn against the effects of ecological damage spreading around the globe and the danger to interdependent human beings, and focusing on the changes we can and must make to fight for a better future, Together. 

This compelling vision, of a path towards a planet that will sustain and support the generations to come, is also what motivated Maya van Rossum to write her book. When corporate profits are focal, and lobbyists throw money [quite legally!] at politicians in the United States in order to secure legislation that protects corporate profiteering at the expense of our citizens' health and safety, it is Time For Change.

The Good News is that Change Is Possible.
It requires a willingness to work for the desired results, and, as van Rossum discovered, it may require lawsuits and court decisions, but it Is Possible!
The Values that we see as Critical to the formation of both our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Traditions AND the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution are STILL AROUND - cynicism and self-interest has Not Eradicated them Yet - and increasing numbers of people are awakening to the reality that these Values can guide our actions as we seek to make Justice - Social Justice AND Environmental Justice - REAL.
Ideals are Valuable, but they exist to Move Us to Action in Real Ways.

And thinking about the challenges we face - not only as individuals, but in our communities, as residents of neighborhoods, cities and states, interdependent parts of a nation that is part of a greater world in which our human lives ARE indeed interconnected and interdependent - becomes Easier when I remember that I am surrounded by a Community of people who share the same goals and dreams.

So I Come Back to Gratitude.

THANK YOU, CUUC.
Together, We Can Do So Much.
Together, We Are So Much More...

Namaste.

- Joe WolfArth



Joe WolfArth

6PM at church 403 West St

Our March Full Moon Drum Circle at CUUC will take place at the church property - 
403 West Street in New Smyrna

At 6 PM on Sunday March 5th 2023

Dress Comfortably, we will Drum Outside (weather permitting!)

Bring: 
Drums, Percussion Instruments (or use one of our at the Circle!)
A Comfortable Chair (or use one of the chairs on hand)
Your Favorite Beverages/Snacks (we Do have Bubbly Waters on hand)
An Intention for what you would like to see MORE OF in 2023 (personally Or in a Bigger Focus!)

COME! Bang a Drum With Us!


For More Information, Call (386) 308-8080

Upcoming Events

March 5th
Full Moon Drum Circle
NOTE NEW TIME
6 pm
At Church
403 West St
NSB
Contact Joe WolfArth



March 7th
Dream Circle
via Zoom
7:00 p.m.
Please email David Herr your email address
and he will send  notices and reminders
of the upcoming meetings.

March 13th
Board of Trustees Meeting 
1:30 p.m.
CUUC
403 West St. NSB
All are Welcome

March 16th
Book Club
3:30 p.m.
Lost Lagoon Wings and Grill
Invitation to members to follow via email
or contact Michele Moen for details.

March 21th
Dream Circle
via Zoom
7:00 p.m.
Please email David Herr your email address
and he will send  notices and reminders
of the upcoming meetings.

Sanghas at Community Unitarian Universalist Church

 At 7 pm Wednesdays, the newly-formed Sangha, Blue Heron meets. We invite all who are interested in group meditation to join us.

Book Club Picks for 2023


MARCH 16TH

Bruce H. Lipton
The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles
Science 2016

The Biology of Belief is a groundbreaking work in the field of New Biology. Author Dr. Bruce Lipton is a former medical school professor and research scientist. His experiments, and that of other leading-edge scientists, have examined in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. The implications of this research radically change our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton's profoundly hopeful synthesis of the latest and best research in cell biology and quantum physics is being hailed as a major breakthrough showing that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.


APRIL 20TH

Barbara Kingsolver
Flight Behavior
Fiction 2012

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.

Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.


MAY 18TH

Donna Woolfolk Cross
Pope Joan
Historical Fiction 2009

For a thousand years her existence has been denied. She is the legend that will not die–Pope Joan, the ninth-century woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to become the only female ever to sit on the throne of St. Peter. Now in this riveting novel, Donna Woolfolk Cross paints a sweeping portrait of an unforgettable heroine who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept.

Brilliant and talented, young Joan rebels against medieval social strictures forbidding women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak–and his identity–and enters the monastery of Fulda. As Brother John Anglicus, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she becomes enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion, and politics. Triumphing over appalling odds, she finally attains the highest office in Christendom–wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But such power always comes at a price . . .

In this international bestseller, Cross brings the Dark Ages to life in all their brutal splendor and shares the dramatic story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of her day.


JUNE 15TH

Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me
Mystery/Thriller

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers: Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.

As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered; as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss; as a US Marshal and FBI agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.

Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth, together. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they are also building a new future. One neither Hannah nor Bailey could have anticipated.


JULY 20TH

Bonnie Garmus
Lessons in Chemistry
NPR Book of the Year
 Historical Fiction 2022

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

AUGUST 17TH

Ann Patchett
BelCanto
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
Fiction 2008

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.


SEPTEMBER 21ST

Isabel Canas
The Hacienda
Suspense/Horror/Gothic Novel 2022
Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches...

In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost.

But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined....


OCTOBER 19TH


Tana French
Witch Elm
Mystery/Thriller 2018
Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who's dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life: he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden - and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.

The Witch Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, when we no longer know who we are.

NOVEMBER 16TH

Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
Nobel Prize Winner 2007

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways.
What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.

DECEMBER 21ST

Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Fiction 2017

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?

Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ‘80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story near its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

The descriptions and pictures were taken from GoodReads website.