General Assembly 2009
Dan Harper
Rev. Dan Harper is currently the minister at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, MA, and as of August 1 he will be the minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, CA. A self-declared text-based-content geek, Dan writes far too much at Yet Another Unitarian Universalist, and has just published the book Liberal Pilgrims: Varieties of Liberal Religious Experience in New Bedford, MA. Dan lives with his partner of 19 years, Carol Steinfeld, who is the guiding force behind Pee-On-Earth Day.
Doug Muder
Doug Muder is the other columnist for UUWorld.org, the one who isn’t Meg Barnhouse. He doesn’t have a CD and didn’t write those clever books of short essays like Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal. (That was Meg.)
When Doug is doing his bad Troy McClure imitation, he suggests that you may remember him from:
- his two UU World cover articles — “Not My Father’s Religion” about UUism and the working class, and “Who’s Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance?” about why liberal religion is so threatening to fundamentalists.
- his political blog “The Weekly Sift” or the stuff he wrote as Pericles on DailyKos
- his seldom-updated UU blog “Free and Responsible Search “
- the General Assembly journal he’s kept online the last three years
- the “Spiritual Writing” panel at the 2007 GA in Portland. (You remember — he was the panelist who wasn’t Meg Barnhouse.)
- rumors about the intro-to-UU book he keeps claiming that he’ll finish “soon”
Doug is in his third career. First he was a mathematician. Then he wrote spectacularly ill-conceived computer books like VRML For Dummies. Now he writes and sermonizes about religion and politics. Fortunately, he is married to Deb Bodeau, who has a real job with health insurance. They live in an old mill building in Nashua, New Hampshire and attend First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts.
Sara Robinson
Sara Robinson is one of the few trained social futurists in North America. Her particular area of interest is the role religion, culture, and other deep cognitive frameworks play in the way individuals and societies imagine the future and choose their strategies for approaching and managing change.
As a Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, her weekly columns focus on long-term trends affecting progressive social and political change. Sara has covered authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006. Her recent work has also appeared online at Firedoglake, DailyKos, OpenLeft, and Alternet; and in print at The Progressive Christian and more wonky policy journals.
A native of California’s High Sierra, Sara spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She shares her home with her husband Evan, two teenagers, and a Norwegian Buhund who is her constant companion; and is the church aesthetics maven at North Shore Unitarian Church in West Vancouver.
Deb Weiner
Deborah Weiner is the UUA’s Director of Electronic Communication and a lifelong UU. This is her 23rd GA…each one a new adventure! She is the author of a chapter on congregational life in the book Being Together, published by the Lindsay Press, and has led congregational and district workshops on outreach and growth topics for many years. In her copious spare time, she performs with Revels, Inc.’s Revels Repertory Company, most recently playing an Appalachian story-teller named Myrtle. She also sings in a new ensemble, Pisces Rising, performing early music in the Lexington area.
She lives in Lexington, MA with her husband, Ben Soule, and is the mother of two children, two cats, and one dwarf hamster!