Andrew Kerr, Speaker
Summer (’09) Office Hours: 2nd & 4th Thursdays of the month, 5:00-8:00pm
Andrew J. Kerr has been part-time Speaker of the Free Congregation since May of 2008. Before that time, he presented a two-part Third Sunday series entitled “The Religious Possibilities of Atheism” and another two-part series entitled “The Reasonableness of Theism.” As Speaker of the Free Congregation, Andrew is responsible for Second and Fourth Sundays, which offer a Unitarian Universalist order of service, including a 15-20 minute Reflection.
Like the congregation’s first Speaker, Eduard Schroeter (served 1853-1885), Andrew is also a farmer. He and his wife, Jennifer, and their three children, Rachel, 15, Matthew, 10, and Joshua, 6, together own and operate Greenspirit Farm north of Dodgeville, WI. The farm and family grow about 3-4 acres of certified organic vegetables, small fruits, and apples, most of which are sold through a 100-member CSA. Before taking up farming, Andrew completed eight years of Doctoral studies in Religion and Philosophy at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
Andrew believes in a personal God, a God with whom one can have an intimate relationship. He feels this God strongly in the natural world, and he experiences God as a cosmic desire and striving for intimacy and communion with everything in the world. Andrew is committed to a rational, critical, open-minded, and open-hearted exploration of religion. A belief in God, or in anything else religious, needs to make as much rational sense as the truth of gravity, evolution, or mathematics, or an allegiance to democracy.
