Today as the Senate prepares to consider health care reform legislation I took the time to write several Senators urging them to support the bill being placed before them. If you have time and support health care reform you might want to use these letters as models for your own.

Dear Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Charles Schumer:

I am writing to express my support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Act now before the Senate. The United States needs health care reform and while this bill is far from perfect it will ensure that around 94% of Americans have health care coverage, a major improvement over the current situation. Importantly it will also help to curb health care costs over the long run. I hope that as part of the legislative process you will consider an amendment to allow for the creation of single payer health care at the state level. As demonstrated by the experiences of most other industrialized countries, single payer is the best way to manage a health care system over the long term.

That aside, the major reason why I am writing to you is to urge you to strip Senator Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs if he fails to support the Patient Protection and Affordable Act. If Senator Lieberman cannot support the Democratic Caucus as the Senate considers probably the most important piece of legislation before it during my lifetime then he does not deserve to be numbered among the Caucus’s leaders. 

Sincerely,

The Rev. Colin Bossen

Dear Senator Joseph Lieberman:

I am writing to urge you to support the Patient Protection and Affordable Act now before the Senate. The United States needs health care reform and while this bill is far from perfect it will ensure that around 94% of Americans have health care coverage, a major improvement over the current situation. Importantly it will also help to curb health care costs over the long run.

It is time now to demonstrate whether you are a member of the Democratic Caucus for your own political expediency or because you genuinely care about the American people. Concurrent with this letter I am writing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin and Vice Chair of the Conference Charles Schumer to urge them to strip you of chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs if you fail to support this legislation. I also pledge to send a campaign donation to any progressive Democratic or third party candidate who runs against you in 2012 if  vote fail to support the Democratic Caucus at this critical juncture.

Please, Senator Lieberman, make the right choice for the country and yourself and support the Patient Protection and Affordable Act.

Sincerely,

The Rev. Colin Bossen

Dear Senator Voinovich:

I am writing to urge you to support the Patient Protection and Affordable Act now before the Senate. The United States needs health care reform and while this bill is far from perfect it will ensure that around 94% of Americans have health care coverage, a major improvement over the current situation. Importantly, it will also help to curb health care costs over the long run. 

Back in August you wrote me to express that you were opposed to health care reform because it would add to the national debt. Now it appears that the legislation will largely be deficit neutral and that over time it will save middle income Americans money, allowing them increase their consumer spending and investment in small businesses. Over the course of many years this should spur economic growth and, in turn, greater tax collection, allowing the government to reduce the national debt. I hope that you will express a consistent position and as a sign of your concern for the long term state of the economy and the national debt vote in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Act. Anything less would hypocritical.

Sincerely,

The Rev. Colin Bossen 

As someone who was raised Unitaran Universalist but has both Jewish and Protestant ancestors I have always been interested in the intersections between Unitarianism (and now Unitarian Universalism) and various variants of Judaism. While researching something else entirely today I stumbled across a reference to The First American Congress of Liberal Religious Societies. The Congress met at Sinai Temple in Chicago and represented Unitarian, Universalist, Reform Jewish and Ethical Culture congregations. The proceedings of the meeting are available on-line and maybe sometime I’ll get around to reading them. This is also not the first time I’ve stumbled across interchanges between Reform Jews and Unitarians. While researching the curriculum I am writing as part of Tapestry of Faith last year I discovered a whole series of speeches by Rabbis given at the May Meetings of the AUA in the 1900s and 1910s. There’s a great essay waiting to be written by someone on the interchange between Unitarianism and Judaism out there…

Preached at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, October 25, 2009

Over the next decades Greater Cleveland will survive and thrive or struggle and decline as a single entity. Cleveland Heights, Beachwood, Shaker Heights, Lakewood, Lorain, the city of Cleveland itself or any other community in the region will rise or fall with the region as a whole. Our future is, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., caught up in "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." This point was brought home to me this past summer when my family and I were in Paris. 

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Four recent and not so recent sermons are now on-line:

Standing on the Side of Love (October 4, 2009)
The Bounty of the Earth (March 22, 2009)
In Search of Redemption (March 8, 2009)
Generation to Generation (March 1, 2009)

My project of reading the Bible is going a little slower than I hoped. At this point I had planned to be through Judges but today I just finished Leviticus. Outlining the books, even when I am just working writing my first impression outline rather than creating a refined one, seems to take quite a bit longer than I had anticipated. I suspect that this means I might not finish the project of reading the whole Bible by June. If that happens it will be no great tragedy. I will just continue to plug away until I complete both scriptures. With that said, my rough outline follows below.

Leviticus Outline

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This week I put five of my sermons on-line. Over the next few months I should complete put up the backlog of sermons I acquired while our web-site was in transition. Read the new sermons on-line by clicking on the links below:

Here is my rough outline of Exodus. Once I am done with reading the whole of the Bible I might come back and revise these rough outlines. As I read along I learn that somethings that appear as stand alone episodes are really part of larger narratives.

Exodus Outline

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