The SUUF Podcast

January 25, 2026

Cydney McFarland
 
Helping Hands is Skagit County’s largest direct food provider with six distribution locations across Skagit County. We work to address the inequity in the food bank experience by focusing on participant autonomy and lowering the barriers to entry. We do not have any income or residency requirements, and all our locations provide participants with a choice of food that works best for them. Helping Hands also serves as a touch point to help connect participants with other local programs and services that can help provide stability for individuals and families. Our goal is to ensure that our community has access to the food and resources they need to help them thrive. For more information, visit HelpingHandsSkagit.org.

January 18, 2026

Kurt Hoelting

In his 2010 book, Circumference of Home, Whidbey Island writer Kurt Hoelting shares insights from a year of car-free living, during which he explored the Whidbey and Skagit regions on foot, by bicycle and sea kayak. Now, in his new memoir Apprentice to the Wild, Hoelting shares stories from his life as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide in Alaska, and his embrace of Zen practice and mindfulness teaching as gateways to the “wild within”.

During our January 18th service, Hoelting will speak of the theme of “Embracing the Storm”–a theme central to his new book–during his sermon at the Skagit UU Fellowship on January 18th. “How, then, shall I live?”, in the face of the storms now gathering on our human horizons? What can we respond fruitfully and with resilience to these storms, with the courage that faith requires, and the compassion that faith makes possible?

January 11

Joseph Bednarik

Joseph Bednarik serves as the Co-Publisher of Copper Canyon Press, a nonprofit literary publisher dedicated to poetry. He studied philosophy at Haverford College and speaks regularly at Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Salish Sea region.

January 4, 2026

Rev. Dr. Barbara ten Hove

Doubt is often frowned upon in religious circles but our faith encourages us to doubt and question. Can doubt lead us to faith? And when is doubt not helpful even in our progressive religion?

December 28, 2025

Rosalinda Guillen

C2C is a food justice organization that bases their beliefs “on the notion that society should arrange its relationships so that everyone has equitable access to the fundamental democratic processes affecting their everyday lives.” C2C strives to “develop projects that come from and are led by the folks from communities that need to affect change for improving the lives of their families and future generations.”

Rosalinda Guillen (she/hers) is the founder of Community to Community and a lead strategist and visionary with the non-hierarchical ecofeminist leadership of C2C. Her perspective is fundamentally influenced by her introduction to the multi-racial, working-class community organizing model of the Rainbow Coalition, the Cesar Chavez house meeting model, The World Social Forum, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil and growing up a farmworker in La Conner, WA. Rosalinda has organized farmworkers in WA State and the strawberry fields of Salinas, CA. She has represented farmworkers in the Legislatures of California and Washington States, and in ongoing policy and Movement guiding dialogues on immigration issues, climate change, labor rights, trade agreements, ecofeminism and strengthening the food sovereignty movement towards a Solidarity Economy.

December 14, 2025

Rev. Bruce Bode

The phrase “Follow Your Bliss” found its way onto refrigerator magnets through the PBS interviews of journalist Bill Moyers with scholar of world mythology Joseph Campbell in the six-part series titled The Power of Myth. The phrase has been taken in a variety of ways. What did Campbell mean by this phrase? And what, for him, was its point of origin?

December 7, 2025

Mychal Loving

The Four “R’s”: How Reconnection, Resistance, Resilience and Regeneration can help us cope with, and strategize living, in our current “Dark Night of the Globe”.

November 30, 2025

Joseph Bednarik

Our congregation of theists and atheists, mystics and materialists explore the use of a powerful linguistic practice:
 
The creation of metaphors. Sharing the words and ideas of revolutionary astronomers, leaping philosophers, and visionary poets, we will focus attention on the miracle of our existence and wonder aloud whether God is Love.

Joseph Bednarik serves as the Co-Publisher of Copper Canyon Press, a nonprofit literary publisher dedicated to poetry. He studied philosophy at Haverford College and speaks regularly at Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Salish Sea region.

November 23

Amber Lang of The Family Promise of Skagit Valley

This is a 4th Sunday Service — The mission: to come together as a community to support homeless families as they work to provide their children with loving homes. The vision: a nation in which every family has a home, a livelihood, and the chance to build a better future.

November 16

D’vorah Kost

The topic I plan to speak on is the recognition that all humanity is one family, albeit with different cultures, languages, religions and beliefs. Developing relationships with those who are different from us is key to a deeper understanding of what it is to be human and to learn to live in peace.