Date & Time
06/15/2025
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Hendersonville
Categories
…as told by six players through narration, dramatic and humorous readings from his poetry and prose, and songs from
The American Songbag.
Written and produced by John W. Quinley
Directed by Karen Moore
Sandburg’s Journey with Unitarian Universalism
Carl Sandburg never expected to go to college. After all, he hadn’t graduated from high school and had no funds to pay for school. But after serving briefly in the Spanish American War in Cuba, Lombard College offered him free tuition.
He worked several different jobs to pay for room and board, including one in which he climbed up a series of winding stairs to a bell tower where his ring announced the start of class. Between rings, he read deeply from the Universalist literature that was stored there.
Lombard, founded by the Universalist church in 1853, was one of the first colleges in Illinois to admit women and to be non-sectarian. It welcomed students from the working and middle classes and encouraged free thinking and activism toward social justice.
Sandburg came to believe in the inherited possibility of good in humanity. He wrote: “Some sacred seed lurks deep in each human personality, no matter how lowly its arrival on earth. To give any such seed the deepest possible roots and the highest possible flowering is the vision and hope of those ideas of freedom and discipline that constitute the American Dream.”
A Unitarian Universalist minister delivered the eulogy at Sandburg’s memorial service held in the nearby St John in-the-Wilderness Episcopal Church in 1967. A few years later, Paula Sandburg donated $25,000 to the UU Congregation of Asheville to build a social hall in her husband’s memory.
Sandburg never joined a church, but if he chose to, it would have been a UU Fellowship.
I know you will enjoy and be inspired by this new play, “The Many Lives of Carl Sandburg,” which celebrates his remarkable spirit.
— John Quinley
This is a free presentation, but donations are always appreciated