A video by George Williams about free-religion and the 36th Congress of the International Association for Religious Freedom

As the current President of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF), George Williams (with whom I’m working to translate the essays of Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei) was asked to make a short video talk about its current work promoting free-religion (jiyū shūkyō) to be shown at the British General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches meetings in April 2024.

This 14-minute long video has just gone live on YouTube and you can watch it at the link below. There are two Cambridge Unitarian Church related bits of content. At 1’26” a photo appears which shows, in the centre, H. Stewart Carter, who was the minister in Cambridge between 1946-1966 and also a member of the Secretariat of the IARF during the 1950s. The second appears at 11’11” where my own work with the Cambridge community gets a very positive mention.

I hope this will help you to see how my own current exploration of free-religion (jiyū shūkyō) or, as we have also been calling it in Cambridge, a creative, free-spirituality” — fits into a still small, but much wider, developing movement of modern, liberal religious thought and practice across the globe.