View the Video here. While Unitarian minister Theodore Parker is best known (at least amongst UUs) for originating the concept of the arc of the moral universe, as well as for keeping a loaded pistol on his sermon-writing desk in case he needed to assist someone escaping slavery, Parker’s greatest influence on our living tradition is found in his 1841 sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity”. He preached that certain elements of religion may be regarded as permanent and essential, while others are transient and accidental, subject to transformation with the passage of time. Let’s consider how Parker’s nineteenth-century insight applies to twenty-first-century Unitarian Universalism.