Category Archives for "Rev. Mike Morran"

A Reframed Piece of Mike’s Mind…Starting in October, our Racial Justice Project at First Unitarian Denver is going to be initiating a conversation among our congregation about racism and reparations.  My column this month provides a little of my own thinking about the background for this conversation.      Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote:      Basically, Americans […]

A Reframed Piece of Mike’s Mind…Starting in October, our Racial Justice Project at First Unitarian Denver is going to be initiating a conversation among our congregation about racism and reparations.  My column this month provides a little of my own thinking about the background for this conversation.      Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote:      Basically, Americans […]

A Forested Piece of Mike’s Mind…By request, my column this month is portions of the TREES sermon from August 1st.Elif Shafak, the brilliant Turkish/British author, in a perspective-taking experiment wrote:  Humans do not see trees. They walk by us every day. They sit and sleep, smoke and picnic and secretly kiss in our shade. They pluck […]

A Maladjusted Piece of Mike’s Mind…My column this month is the conclusion of the sermon from June 18th.Krishnamurti famously said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”  Which is another way of saying that being maladjusted is about the sanest, most spiritually mature thing we could do.I […]

An Annual Piece of Mike’s Mind…We’ve made history this past year.  For the first time since First Unitarian Denver has had a building, over a year has passed without a single public gathering in our space.  I suppose this is also true for many other organizations, but I’m fond of this one.            That doesn’t mean […]

A Discerning Piece of Mike’s Mind…By request, my column this month is a portion of my sermon from April 18th:…Jem Bendell advocates for what he calls Deep Adaptation, capital “A”, and he lays out four principles as a framework that everyone can begin talking about, developing, and doing right now.  The four principles are resilience, […]

A Frustrated Piece of Mike’s Mind…By request, here are the words spoken during the pastoral prayer on Sunday, March 28th, in response to the shooting in Boulder…:Very aware that I have family members and a few friends who will passionately disagree, I don’t care. I don’t care if extensive mandatory background checks, mandatory wait times, […]

A Reminiscent Piece of Mike’s Mind… Last month, February 22nd to be exact, was the 23rd anniversary of my ordination into the Unitarian Universalist ministry, a day for which I had spent the previous four years preparing.  From deciding I wanted to be a minister, to applying to seminary, to graduating, psychiatric evaluations, chaplaincy training, an […]

An Unequivocal Piece of Mike’s Mind…In 1792, writer Mary Wollstonecraft called for the full participation of women in the rights and duties of citizenship.  Her essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Women becomes a foundation for the early movement for suffrage for women.In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivers her feminist speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, […]

Witnessing a Piece of Mike’s Mind…As I write, it is the day after a large group of white people briefly took over the Capitol building in Washington DC, where a joint session of congress was taking place. The seditionists were attempting to slow or stop certification of the presidential election that all reliable authorities had […]