Rev. Steve Brown.

Live-stream.

Guest minister Steve Brown invites us to consider dignity and truth, two key themes of the “human condition.” Artists, poets, philosophers, and theologians have pondered these themes for millennia. Steve’s vocation has been to translate theories about dignity and truth into practice at the community level. Engaging with UCWC on these themes, Steve will draw on readings and insights from contemporary writers such as angel Kyodo William, Isabel Wilkerson, and Luis Alberto Urrea in the context of some timeless wisdom drawn from Shakespeare and the prophet Isaiah.

Steve Brown was born in Tucson, Arizona, grew up on a cattle ranch in the Santa Rita Mountains near the Mexican border, and before the COVID pandemic divided his time among Tucson, Cape Cod, and Brisbane, Australia, where his daughter Amelia and her family live. After graduating from Yale in 1971, with a major in African American Studies, he and his wife Alice lived for many years in Manchester, Vermont, and then in Craigville Village on Cape Cod. In 1988 Steve received a Master’s of Arts degree in Pastoral Ministry with a focus on education from Boston College, and was Commissioned as a Minister of Healing and Reconciliation. Since then, he has pursued his vocation in both public and private sectors, through “Commonwealth Solutions,” a consulting firm that catalyzes relationships that promote human dignity as the foundation of human rights and public health. Steve has written and published several books of fiction, set in “San Kino County” a fictitious locale in the Sonoran Desert. Now “semi-retired,” he brings his vocation to a community-based effort to establish “Desert Sage School”, the first Waldorf-inspired public high school in Tucson.