Our Monthly Spiritual Themes guide our Chalice Circles, which are small, intentional groups of members and friends that gather for spiritual enrichment through personal sharing. For more information on Chalice Circles, please email chalicecircles@uuprinceton.org. Our Chalice Circle thoughts and questions around the theme of Obligations this month are:

“…Isaiah Berlin declared the ‘most fundamental of all political questions’ – [to be] the problem of political obligation, and its mirror, disobedience. Ethical philosophers concerned with finding a moral basis for the rules of society now looked for a moral basis for breaking them.”―Katrina Forrester

How do we determine when we cannot tolerate the intolerable? What obligations can guide us in breaking the rules of society?

 

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”―Marshall McLuhan

Notice McLuhan did not consider a need for officers. How will the crew manage earth on its own? 

 

“Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources – and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.”―Alberto Moravia

Do you think this proposition still holds? The younger generations hold the older at fault for the mess the world is in. Is that new, or is it always so? 

 

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”―Neil deGrasse Tyson

Science is always discovering things about the universe that make no sense to us…until they do. What obligation do we have to consider nonsensical ideas, in science or religion or art? When have you found a kernel of truth, of enlightenment, when giving the non-sensical a chance?