Friday 21 December 2007

The Oberwesel photo!

For those of you who either were present at the ICUU biannual meeting in Oberwesel, Germany, last November, or who are curious about how good we all really look, you can find the ICUU group photo here. (Thanks to Matt Fick for his expertise and helpfulness.)

Tuesday 4 December 2007

International U*U web resources

Although the website of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists intends to be the main site on the Web on international, multingual resources for the Unitarian and Universalist world, fortunately it is not the only one. Although, alas, there are not many. Here you will find a few more.

A good place for general information is the Wikipedia entry for the ICUU. It is up-to-date on membership information and it includes the declaration of Principles and Purposes and even a list of non-affiliated Unitarian churches worldwide.

Among denominational websites, the site of the Canadian Unitarian Council is an excellent place to find out information about international U*Uism. It is currently showing news on the election of the new President, the Canadian Rev. Brian Kiely, in its homepage, and there is an International page with many useful links to other English-language websites.

The geeky and dynamic Canadian leadership has created several new electronic resources: you may want to check the new ICUU Facebook community, and a mailing list devoted to ICUU news.

Although hard to find, there is also some international information in the UUA website. Rather than lose your nerves with the embedded Google search engine, you'd rather want to go directly to the International Office page. There you will find links to pages devoted to the Global Chalice Lighting series and to the ICUU RE curriculum, Garden of Unitarian-Universalism, a work-in-progress that aims at including and updating teaching materials on Unitarianism as it manifests around the world. There are also links to the international work of the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church council.

The revamped website of the British Unitarians also includes a section on Unitarians Worldwide, with links classified alphabetically.

Among non-English websites, the site of the French-speaking Assemblée Fraternelle des Chrétiens Unitariens (AFCU) is particularly noteworthy. Being the almost single-handed effort of a committed French Christian Unitarian leader, Jean-Claude Barbier, it includes a wealth of information and photos not only about international Unitarianism, but also European liberal Protestants and Catholics, religious debate, and news and anecdotes from around the world, and it is updated almost daily. It is complemented by another blog devoted to Unitarian history.

Finally, among other sites, let me mention the Transylvanian and Hungarian Unitarian pages (with many links but scarce updating), and, inmodestly, my own Spanish-speaking UU-Hispano website, which includes a news blog that now has a new editor, Mexican Unitarian leader Francisco Javier Lagunes.