Foreword
Introduction
The Prison of Our Provincialism
The Ultimate Loyalty
It Is Time to Grow Up
How Sin Will Be Conquered
Is This Your Religion?
The Measure of Our Humanity
This Is Not Religion
When Can Truth Be Found?
Why I Come to Church
What Must We Do to Be Saved?
To Go On Being Kind
The Love That Never Faileth
The Courage to Persevere
Tough Love
Where the Trouble Begins
The Approval That Is Hardest to Get
The Hope of a New Age
An Age Without a Soul
Am I a Christian?
Would Jesus Join a Christian Church Today?
The Danger of Preaching from the Bible
Faith in Action
Ideas That Get Lost
Human Rights and Religion
The American Commitment
The Test of Religion
There Is No God in the Sky
A Sunset in My Soul
There Has to Be Belief
Spiritual Nurture
Our Daily Prayers
Where Is God?
God: An Endless Pilgrimage of Possibility
A Common Destiny
In 1978, at the age of twenty-nine, I arrived at All Souls Church in New York City with exactly five sermons in my barrel. Three of them were about Thomas Jefferson. At the end of my first year, after religiously spending twenty hours a week on sermon preparation, I met with the president of my congregation, who suggested, politely but firmly, that I devote a little more attention to my preaching.
That summer I read every sermon I could find. None moved me more than those of A. Powell Davies. The few sermons of Davies I could get my hands on were so arresting that I wrote to Russell Adams, then chair of the A. Powell Davies Memorial Committee. Munificently, he sent me everything in print that Davies had ever written, including almost 100 sermons. Twenty years later—realizing how little Davies’ central insights have aged—I returned to the well that first refreshed me. This book is the fruit of that small labor.
A. Powell Davies was born on June 5, 1902, in Birkenhead, England, a suburb of Liverpool. Of Welsh ancestry, he summered on his mother’s parents’ farm in Penymynydd, Wales. Educated in Liverpool and raised Methodist, he pursued his theological training at Richmond College, University of London. Upon graduation, Powell married Muriel Hannah, daughter of the minister of his home church. After a short ministry in Ilford, a suburb of London, the young minister and his wife sailed for America in 1928. By 1929 he was settled in the Pine Street Methodist Church of Portland, Maine. Four years later he completed his pilgrimage to Unitarianism. Called shortly thereafter to serve the Unitarian Church in Summit, New Jersey, he remained there for the next eleven years. Davies completed his ministry and his life in Washington, DC, at All Souls Church, where he made his name and served with distinction until his death on September 26, 1957.
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