We continue our Sunday Evening Adult Faith Development Program for the 2023-2024 season online on Sunday, May 12, 2024, beginning @ 7 pm, continuing our discussion of the 9th session of a NEW 10-part series on Ethics and Unitarian Universalism entitled “What We Choose.” This week’s session will explore an “ethic of risk”.

It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges…

— Sharon Welch

Dancing in the road.

Unitarian Universalist ethicist and theologian Sharon Welch’s work was born of her observation that those who engage in justice struggles always do so from a position of incomplete understanding and limited perspective. In the feminist movement, she learned it is impossible to control or guarantee the outcome or success of a particular action. She observed that oppressed communities have found a way to sustain resistance generation after generation in the face of repeated failure and defeat. She contrasts this with what she names as middle-class cynicism and despair which comes from an inability to control the outcome of action or to solve complex social problems.
This workshop will introduce and consider Welch’s ethic of risk, which includes a redefinition of responsible action, grounding in community, and strategic risk-taking. An ethic of risk leads us to a different kind of response to the moral issues of our time—issues of oppression and violence against people, groups, and the environment. Welch challenges us to form communities of accountability with people of different perspectives, values, and mores. Participants consider Welch’s stance that because an individual perspective on moral issues is always partial, “a single actor cannot be moral.”

“Introduction” to Workshop 9: Tapestry of Faith: What We Choose: An Adult Program on Ethics for Unitarian Universalists