Awakening the Soul

This devotional book is intended as a spiritual resource for nurturing your soul. What is truly personal is also truly universal. Where you touch the Holy, it reaches to touch you, and your life will be transformed. If enough of us begin with our own spiritual disciplines, a whole community may be transformed, or a neighborhood or city or nation.
--from the Preface

In the first daily devotional guide for Unitarian Universalists since the nineteenth-century Day Unto Day (American Unitarian Association), John Morgan has discerningly compiled a unique collection of 365 devotions on prayer, forgiveness, suffering, compassion, social justice, Unitarian Universalist heritage, and many other topics. Mirroring the pluralism in our congregations, the contributions to this book come from many roots--Christian, Buddhist, mystic, Jewish, pagan, humanist, and agnostic.



"In Awakening the Soul, John Morgan reflects on a year's worth of texts and stories and concepts that range broadly from the parables of Jesus through the writings of George de Benneville--teacher, physician, and lay minister--to the life of James Reeb, Unitarian martyr for civil rights. These reflections represent a lifetime of conscious struggle and conscious wonder and invite us to reflect on our own lives, our struggle, our wonder. My soul was awakened."
--Reverend Frank Rivas, First Universalist Church, Minneapolis


John Crossley Morgan graduated from Albright College, and earned an MA in philosophy from Oberlin College, an MDiv from Andover Newton Theological School in Boston, and a DMin from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Before entering the ministry, he directed both inner-city and rural programs for older adults and also was a working journalist. He has served congregations in Maine, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as well as a national denomination and two of its districts. He is "retired," but writes a regular newspaper column while also working with community groups. He has published eight books, the most popular being the first daily devotional book for Unitarian Universalists since 1898. He is contributing editor of The Universalist Herald, the oldest, continuously published magazine for religious liberals. He is married and has a son and two daughters, and two grandchildren.