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Bio: Rev. Tom Goldsmith, a native New Yorker, received his M.Div degree from Harvard in 1975. After serving two Unitarian Universalists churches in the Boston area, he arrived in Salt Lake in 1987. He actively serves on many local boards and has published widely on issues of peace, justice, and the environment.

Sermon Excerpt: Religion, either in the guise of faith, theology, or a feeling defying specifics…is basically concerned with what we refer to today as the existential issues of life: despair, guilt, death, meaninglessness, anxiety, sin…I could go on. These issues arise because we are (by nature), terribly self-conscious…we are keenly aware of ourselves as vulnerable beings occupying this tiny bit of space in the cosmos.

How does anyone make sense of this? Do you ever look up at a star-filled night and think how is it possible to be standing there…and that your existence…feels incomprehensible in the vastness of all these stars and galaxies and in an expanding universe still unfolding from the Big Bang. How do we make sense of this?

The great existentialist, Martin Heiddegar, called it “Dasein.” We are just there – – in the immensity of it all – thrown into existence and so intensely aware of our limitations. We can’t even begin answering the question: why? We grope to find something powerful that might explain how we got here and what our purpose is.

569 South 1300 East First Unitarian Church