Celebrate Harvest Sunday at Union Chapel

Union Chapel will celebrate Harvest Sunday and Sylvester Manor this Sunday, Aug. 25. Reverend Galen Guengerich of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan will preach about “The Honorable Harvest.” Special music will be performed by the staff of Sylvester Manor.

Everyone is invited to attend this non-denominational service at 10:30 am.

Reverend Guengerich is Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church, an historic congregation located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He is the 10th person to hold this position in the congregation’s 199-year history. He served as a minister of All Souls for 25 years, the last 11 as Senior Minister. 

He was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA, 1982), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1985) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 2004). 

Reverend Guengerich is the author of God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age and the forthcoming The Way of Gratitude: A New Spirituality for Today. He writes a column, “The Search for Meaning,” for psychologytoday.com, and has written for Reuters, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, TIME magazine and Huffington Post. He also appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); he chairs the Multifaith Clergy Advisory Council at the 92nd Street Y, and the “Humanities in a Conflict Zone” initiative at the Minerva Center for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

In 2012, Reverend Guengerich was part of a 15-member delegation of senior clergy from New York City to visit Israel and the West Bank, the first such delegation to meet with religious and political leaders including Shimon Peres, President of Israel, and Salem Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

He visited Afghanistan in 2013 with a delegation of CFR members and fellows, meeting with top military, diplomatic, and civilian leaders in Kabul, Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. In 2012, he was a Lecturer in Preaching and Worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and his sermon at All Souls on the Sunday after 9/11, “The Shaking of Foundations,” was selected for Representative American Speeches 2001-2002.

He served for 12 years on the Board of Directors of Interfaith Alliance, and on the boards of Dads and Daughters, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights organization; and the New York City Audubon Society.

He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Holly G. Atkinson, MD, who is Clinical Medical Professor and Medical Student Adviser at the CUNY School of Medicine. They enjoy sailing out of Dering Harbor and hiking in Mashomack.

Their daughter, Zoe, married Connor Dowd last September on Loch Lomond in Scotland, after meeting in college at St. Andrews. She works as an analyst for a biomedical engineering consulting firm in Chicago. 

Please join us on Harvest Sunday with Sylvester Manor on Aug. 25 at 10:30 a.m.