After yesterday’s service, I was reflecting on all the Generosity I witnessed flowing through our community. How grateful (and honored) I feel to be able to lead such a generous congregation, one that doesn’t just speak their values, but actually lives those values. That’s how we do it–that’s how we choose hope!

It reminded me of something I learned about when I was a new UU leader, attending workshops to learn as much as I could about this faith: James Luther Adams and his 5 Smooth Stones of Liberal Faith. I want to share it with you now. I think Adams’s theology can guide us through these times we live in, his five smooth stones giving us something tangible to hold onto as we step into the future.

From our Soul Matters Worship Resource Packet:

James Luther Adams stands among the most influential Unitarian theologians of the twentieth century, crafting a vision of hope not as mere sentiment but as creative engagement with history and institutions. For Adams, hope emerged from the “pull of the future” and the conviction that human beings, acting together in voluntary associations, could shape society toward greater justice and compassion. He lived through the rise of fascism and observed firsthand the failure of religious platitudes to confront evil, leading him to insist that real hope required institutional embodiment—ethical commitments made concrete in the social structures people build and tend. Adams grounded hope in prophetic imagination: the belief that a different future is possible if communities continually renew themselves through criticism, self-correction, and active participation in public life. He challenged Unitarian Universalists to refuse complacency and cynicism, urging them to be agents of transformation even when progress seemed slow or impossible. Through Adams’s theology, UU tradition chooses hope by embracing not just personal optimism but shared responsibility for building the “creative thrust toward meaning in history.”

What are the five smooth stones?

According to Adams, the five smooth stones of religious liberalism are:

• Revelation is Continuous: “Religious liberalism depends on the principle that ‘revelation’ is continuous.” Our religious tradition is a living tradition because we are always learning new truths.
• Covenant: “All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion.” We freely choose to enter into relationship with one another.
• Justice: “Religious liberalism affirms the moral obligation to direct one’s effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community. It is this which makes the role of the prophet central and indispensable in liberalism.”
• Agency: “… [W]e deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.” Good things don’t just happen, people make them happen.
• Hope: “[L]iberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.”

(Adams’ five smooth stones are explained in the essay “Guiding Principles for a Free Faith” in On Being Human Religiously: Selected Essays in Religion and Society, Max Stackhouse, ed. Beacon Press, 1976, pp. 12—20.)

We begin with truth, covenanting with one another to build a community that brings about Justice, knowing that we have the agency to do so, and that brings us hope!

Take good care of yourselves and one another,

Heather