Quote from UUA Executive Vice President Carey McDonald:

“My view of the proposal from the Article II Study Commission is that it’s a deepening and expanding of the language of the Seven Principles to include commitments and actions. It’s being clear about the values that are at our foundation and what they call us to do as people of faith. I think it does a very good job of articulating what it means to be a UU today.

Regardless of the outcome of the vote, individual congregations and UU communities can hold and value the Seven Principles as a meaningful part of our religious tradition, just as some have adopted the Eighth Principle on their own.”

Quote from the Article II Study Commission:

“The Commission spent a long time studying and analyzing the current version of Article II. What became clear was that we don’t explicitly name the values that we share, and that our covenant does not have enough verbs.

Shared values are what hold any organization together, and we often speak of our shared values without naming them. We asked Unitarian Universalists what were the values we shared. We took the many answers we received and synthesized them into the values in our draft. After our first draft was released we changed one of the named values from Evolution to Transformation.

We created a covenant related to each of our named values, as well as a very brief description of the values. The covenant has many verbs and is stated in broad enough language so as to allow congregations to find their way to live into our shared values.”