FAITH – A UNITARIAN PERSPECTIVE




"Faith is a commitment to live as if certain things are true, and thereby help to make them so. Faith is a commitment to live as if life is a wondrous mystery, as if life is good, as if love is divine, as if we are responsible for the well-being of those around us.... Faith is a leap of the moral imagination that connects the world as it is to the world as it might become." (GALEN GUENGRICH)




Galen Guengerich is Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church, an historic congregation located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. He is the tenth person to hold this position in the congregation’s 194-year history. His last name is pronounced GING (rhymes with “sing”) -rich.

He was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA, 1982), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1985) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 2004). His doctoral dissertation is titled Comprehensive Commitments and the Public World: Tillich, Rawls and Whitehead on the Nature of Justice.

He is author of God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age (Palgrave Macmillan) and writes a regular column on “The Search for Meaning” for psychologytoday.com.  His sermon at All Souls on Sept. 16, 2001—the Sunday after 9/11—was selected for inclusion in Representative American Speeches 2001-2002. Titled “The Shaking of the Foundations,” the sermon appears along with speeches by Governor George Pataki, President George Bush and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as one of seven “Responses to September 11th.”

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on how traditional religious beliefs and practices, both in the US and abroad, usually reinforce patriarchy to the detriment of women and democracy. In April, 2013, he visited Afghanistan with a delegation of Council members and fellows, meeting with top military, diplomatic, and civilian leaders in Kabul, as well as in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. In February, 2013 he spoke in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a visit hosted by Christopher Hudson, MBE, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. In January 2012, he was part of a 15-member delegation of senior clergy from New York City to visit Israel and the West Bank, the first such delegation to meet with a broad spectrum of religious and political leaders, including Shimon Peres, President of Israel, and Salem Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.