Citation for The Rev. Dr.  Hugo J. Hollerorth

Presented by The Rev. Dr. M. Susan Harlow,
Angus MacLean Associate Professor of Religious Education

Innovator, visionary, committed educator and minister, faithful leader in implementing new curriculum for changed times, we honor you today for your service to Unitarian Universalism and the wider society.

Receiving your ministerial degrees from the University of Chicago and its Federated Faculty, you began your ministry in the Evangelical and Reformed Churches which in 1959 became part of the United Church of Christ.  You became a Unitarian Universalist when you served as minister at the Central Unitarian Church of Paramus, New Jersey from 1959 to 1965.  From 1961 to 1965, you taught religious education as a member of the faculty at the St. Lawrence University School of Theology where Angus MacLean was Academic Dean. 

In 1965, you became the Director of Curriculum Development at the Unitarian Universalist Association and until 1980, you ushered in a new direction in religious education curriculum design, known informally as the "multi-media kit" era.  Designed to provide teachers and leaders with a wide variety of materials, strategies, and activities for diverse learning styles and needs, the kits were based on the "discovery method" of educational theory and covered such complex and critical subjects as decision making, culture building, freedom and responsibility, listening, and meaning making.  In cooperation with your wife, Barbara Hollerorth, the ever popular "The Haunting House" was created.  Still in use today, this profoundly religious curriculum resource provided children and their leaders with "opportunities to orient themselves to the boundlessness and complexity of the power filled world" and to explore homes and houses as places of solitude, dreaming, and meaning making.  Influenced by Angus MacLean's teaching that "the method is the message," you worked to create curriculum resources that honored the Unitarian Universalist principle of a "free and responsible" inquiry as an integral part of the UU faith.  If our children are to live and honor this principle, you believe, then we adults must live this method with them. 

Shortly after assuming your position at the UUA, you began receiving letters from local congregations asking if the religious education department published sex education materials or could recommend resources available elsewhere.  You found that other agencies had excellent materials on the human anatomy, venereal diseases, conception, childbirth and birth control, but that no one published liberal religious materials on the "most puzzling and troublesome" issues for youth of "masturbation, making out, homosexuality, and love making."   Meeting deryck calderwood at a Fall Conference of the Liberal Religious Education Directors Association (LREDA), you recruited calderwood "to lead [the] efforts in developing a sexuality curriculum responding to the needs of [junior high] young people."  "About Your Sexuality" used ongoing dialogue and mutual exploration in a process designed to gain accurate information, develop communication skills, build accepting attitudes and values, and assist with responsible decision making in all aspects of human sexuality.  It also contained a filmstrip with explicit visuals of all aspects of sexuality that became the focus of a lawsuit involving the Brookfield, Wisconsin Unitarian Universalist congregation and the local district attorney, a legal case that went to the U. S. Supreme Court.

Hugo J. Hollerorth, we honor you today for your vision, for your commitment, for your dedication to religious education solidly grounded in the best of educational thinking, and for your willingness to tackle the complex and critical concerns of our times.

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