We face many daunting dilemmas in the world today, such as poverty, war, climate change, hyper-polarization, and more.\u00a0 One can easily lose faith in humanity\u2019s ability and determination to make progress toward addressing them.<\/p>\n
Unitarian Jon Alexander asks us not to despair, but to examine, and perhaps change, the \u201cdeep story\u201d we tell ourselves about who we are.\u00a0 He distinguishes between two unconsciously-adopted narratives that drive how we live: the Consumer Story and the Citizen Story.<\/p>\n
Those who buy the Consumer Story see themselves primarily as independent, self-contained individuals, whose role in life is earning what it costs to buy whatever products and services promise to make them happy.\u00a0 And they seek improve the world through their individual choices, e.g. to recycle packaging, take shorter showers, or cast a vote for a preferred candidate.<\/p>\n
Those who embrace the Citizen Story, in contrast, see people primarily as inter-dependent social beings, who flourish when they collaborate with each other to improve everyone\u2019s life.\u00a0 They see positive changes coming when people from diverse backgrounds pitch in to work together, contributing their unique skills, passions, empathy, ideas, and resources where they\u2019re most needed.<\/p>\n
Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship members tend to prioritize the Citizen Story. They welcome working with other people who care about the same things they do to get stuff done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We face many daunting dilemmas in the world today, such as poverty, war, climate change, hyper-polarization, and more.\u00a0 One can easily lose faith in humanity\u2019s ability and determination to make progress toward addressing them. Unitarian Jon Alexander asks us not to despair, but to examine, and perhaps change, the \u201cdeep story\u201d we tell ourselves about … Continue reading On Citizenship [#53]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6826"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8840,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6826\/revisions\/8840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}