We are delighted that the Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, will be returning as a GA presenter!  He will be following up last year’s hugely popular UU University program track, Theology for a Secular Age with an eight-part workshop series entitled The Necessity of Virtue.

In The Necessity of Virtue, the Rev. Dr. Guengerich will ask us to ponder, “What is your ethical basis for deciding what to do and how to live? How do you determine what you ought to do? The two most popular answers look either to commandments or to outcomes. Neither satisfies: divine commands are human ideas projected onto the divine, and the greatest good for the greatest number can trample the needs of the few. A more promising answer suggests we do what an ethical person—someone who has fulfilled his or her distinctive potential as a human being—would do. The key to happiness, Aristotle insists, is virtue: the state of character in which we fulfill our potential by living as human beings ought to live. In religious terms, this path leads to salvation not by grace or by faith, but to salvation by character.”

In the first workshop of this series, The Key to Happiness, we will explore how we can utilize our distinct human ability to think and reason to achieve the state of character known as virtue.  This will be followed by seven workshops that will delve into the virtues of Wisdom, Courage, Compassion, Justice, Temperance, Transcendence and Hope in order to achieve that key to happiness.