About Rev. Robinson

Our congregation welcomes Rev. Edmund H. Robinson and his wife, Jacqueline Schwab, to our community. He will be our second consulting minister while the search committee continues interviewing for a permanent minister.

Edmund grew up in South Carolina as an Episcopalian, went to Yale in the 60's (where he was located on Staten Island for a summer as part of an Urban Studies internship), and married his high school sweetheart. They were both charter members of the first class at Antioch School of Law, a radical experiment in legal education in Washington D.C. Upon graduation in 1975, they started practicing law in Charleston, SC. Their apartment was right across from the gothic towers of the oldest Unitarian church in the South, and very soon they joined. Over the next 20 years Edmund was chair of the vestry, long-range planning, canvass drive and major gifts for the capital campaign; ran a debate series broadcast on public radio, a coffeehouse and a contra dance; sang in the choir; and got involved in producing folk music, working to oppose nuclear power, and reviving the ACLU. He and his wife also raised two children, Luke and Sally.

In the early 90's, when Luke was in college and Sally in high school, Edmund felt called to enroll in a ministerial program at Harvard Divinity School. The change proved too much for the marriage, and it came apart. Edmund then dated and married Jacqueline, who is an accomplished pianist known to the public for her work on Ken Burn's The Civil War and other films. Her website is www.jacquelineschwab.com. Luke is a web designer living in London, and Sally is a law student at CUNY Queens.

Since entering divinity school Edmund has been involved with the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), the oldest organization devoted to the dialogue between religion and science, the New Massachusetts Universalist Convention (NMUC), devoted to keeping alive the spirit of Universalism within Unitarian Universalism, and UU Religious Naturalists, a new organization devoted to promoting the religious naturalist perspective.

Edmund is an amateur folk musician and an enthusiast of traditional American, Irish, Scottish and English music and dance. He was musician for a Morris team and has played for many contra and English country dances. He also enjoys biking, sailing, canoeing and hiking.

Honors
Rev. Robinson received the 2002 Clarence Skinner Social Justice Award for his sermon on the death penalty, The Law of Love.

"I am certain of nothing except
the holiness of the heart's affections and
the truth of the imagination" -- Keats

From the Parsonage

April 29, 2008

This candidating week is and should be all about Susan - getting to know her and letting her get to know you. She and I have had a good ministerial talk, and I feel so good about the person to whom I'm turning over this ministry which has meant so much to me. I think she will do fine here. I just know you will extend to her all the love and caring with which you have embraced me and Jacqueline this year.

Susan is your future, but Jacqueline and I are not ready to say goodbye just yet. We'll be out of town the rest of this week, but I'll be back preaching in May and June.

Good byes, when they come, are hard enough. Any parting evokes all the other partings and losses we have experienced in our lives. But I think there are good ways to part and bad ways. I have been guilty of sneaking off sometimes without a proper good-bye. I don't want to do that with you folks who have been so supportive and receptive during my time here.

So let me announce now that my official going-away party will be the afternoon of Sunday, June 8. Save the date. I expect it will involve a dance, a potluck, some stories, songs, hugs and tears. As my birthday is June 7, the party will be my introduction to the seventh decade of my journey in what T.S. Eliot called the "dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying."

But back to Susan. The impression I have formed is that she is a great contrast to me, to Nate and to Ben. I expect you will find some things she has in common with your recent ministers, and a lot of respects in which she is different. That is as it should be.

There is a tendency in a congregation to hold the new minister to the standard of a previous minister who was beloved. This is natural enough, but it's short-sighted. Every minister ministers best by being who she or he is most authentically; we may try to emulate a quality of a minister we admire, but no minister should try to "be" another minister, and church goers should not expect them to. It is sometimes said that great ministers make great congregations, but I think that has it backwards: great congregations make great ministers. You have certainly brought out some of the best in me this year, and I expect that you will bring out different qualities in Susan that will serve you and her well. Don't ask her to be Ben or Nate or Edmund; ask her to be Susan, and get to know her for who she is.

And I am grateful to Providence and to the Search Committee, for sending hands so capable into which I can deliver this cargo which has become so dear to me.

Blessings,
Edmund