The Unitarian Earth Spirit Network (UESN) was founded in 1990 by Rev Peter Roberts, assisted by Jo Rogers as Sec/Treasurer. Roberts felt that the British Unitarian movement had two main streams of belief (Liberal Christian and Humanist) adequately represented, but that another mode of thought that was not formally represented, a Nature / Earth / Creation centred religious voice. The UESN provides a forum and creative expression for this and has become a recognised, credible part of the British Unitarian movement.
The Network started life as the Unitarian Pagan Network, but some members were unhappy with the term 'Pagan' because of negative associations. For a while, it became the Unitarian New Age Network - but still, members remained unhappy with this title. A ballot was run offering a variety of titles for the Network, and "Unitarian Earth Spirit Network" won hands-down.
Famous quotes containing the words unitarian, earth, spirit and/or network:
“I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Alas! While your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternalize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and die unknown?”
—Thomas Paine 1737–1809, U.S. writer and magazine editor. Pennsylvania Magazine, pp. 362-4 (1775)
“The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow-man so well, and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him. He took up his life and he laid it down for him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.”
—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)