First Unitarian Church of Dallas

The Political Theologies of Populism: Virtual Book Talk
2026-06-11 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | TX
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Join us for a virtual book talk with Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen, discussing his new book “The Political Theologies of Populism.”
The Zoom link will be sent upon registration to the email address you used to register.
Click here to purchase the book from the publisher.
It is also available from Amazon, www.bookshop.org, and for order through local bookshops.
An excavation of populist movements in the US and their associated religious tropes.
In this work, author Colin Bossen argues that for over a century, American populist movements—even explicitly secular ones—have drawn on religious ideas and practices to infuse their politics and bring people together. Bossen explores Pan-African populism, white supremacist populism, and early twentieth-century pluralistic populism in the United States that coalesced into well-known, vastly different groups with a lasting presence in the American imagination: the Universal Negro Improvement Association (also known as the Garveyites), the Ku Klux Klan, and the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the Wobblies). This book employs both historical analysis and political theory to unpack the trajectory of these groups and to illustrate how their respective search for belonging showcases as similar principles, despite their extremely different beliefs. This is a finding that, Bossen argues, exemplifies the mechanisms behind twenty-first-century politics, including the rise of Trumpism. This groundbreaking comparative analysis challenges readers to consider the repetition of history in today’s political landscape and shows them how to rise to the challenges of our current political moment.
About Colin Bossen
Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen is senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston and a visiting fellow with Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford. He is the coauthor of Resistance and Transformation: Unitarian Universalist Social Justice History and author of the forthcoming publications American Populism and Unitarian Universalism and Unitarian Universality Theologies: A Global Study.

Screening of Wall-E
2026-06-18 18:00 - 20:00 | First Unitarian Church of Dallas, 4015 Normandy Ave., Dallas, TX, 75205, United States
As part of our Inspiration Sermon Series, we will screen Wall-E*, a film that explores resilience: our ability to survive hardship, reclaim what matters most, and imagine a better future. The film will be followed by a brief discussion.

Rev. T. J. will preach on these themes the following Sunday, June 21.

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The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Dallas - Book Discussion & Signing
2026-06-21 12:30 - 14:00 | First Unitarian Church of Dallas, 4015 Normandy Ave., Dallas, TX, 75205, United States
First Unitarian Church of Dallas welcomes Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf for a discussion with Rev. T. J. FitzGerald about their new book The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Dallas.
Sunday, June 21 in the Sanctuary
12:30 – 1:15: Discussion
1:15 – 1:30: Q&A Session
1:30 – 2:00: Book Signing
Click to register in Realm.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, 32 states passed laws allowing involuntary sterilization on those deemed biologically “unfit”: convicted criminals, the disabled, the poor, and people of color. Texas, despite a history of violent racism, was not one of them. In The Purifying Knife, Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf explore this curious instance of the Lone Star State’s exceptionalism. The first history of the eugenics movement in Texas, it is a narrative that intersects with debates over race, immigration, abortion, the role of women in society, homosexuality, medical ethics, and the politics of disability in the state—debates resonating today in Texas and beyond.
From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Americans embraced eugenics. Yet the Texas legislature ultimately rejected nine of ten laws advocated by the state’s eugenicists and their predecessors. Phillips and Friauf trace this unlikely resistance to a variety of influences: wealthy cotton growers concerned that the anti-immigrant politics of the eugenics movement would deprive them of a source of easily exploitable labor; a populist distrust of higher education and the academic elites who enthusiastically supported the eugenics movement; and the forces of anti-Darwinist fundamentalism and pre-millennial dispensationalism in the 1920s, among others. The Purifying Knife also details how eugenical ideas survived long past their decline in the 1940s and have entered a disturbing afterlife in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
A thoroughgoing look into a rare case where the eugenics movement “failed” in spite of its power in the United States and around the world—while still wielding a toxic influence—Phillips and Friauf’s work offers insight into the history of the LGBTQ community, abortion, and immigration policies in Texas, and persuasively argues that the long arc of eugenics history has helped shaped contemporary politics in the Lone Star State.

About Michael Phillips:
Michael Phillips is a scholar of American racism, right-wing extremism, and apocalyptic religious beliefs. He covered crime as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before earning his Ph.D.in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002.
He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Based on his award-winning dissertation, his first book, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history. He recently retired from teaching American history after a 20-year career as a professor.
Since then, he won a one-year senior research fellowship at Southern Methodist University. He has served as an historical consultant for and appeared in the award-winning documentary about the Kennedy assassination and its long-term impact on Dallas, City of Hate. He was also an adviser and appears in a series of short films about Dallas history, Recovering the Stories, periodically broadcast on Channel 13 and available on the KERA website.
In 2019, he won a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to examine the history of eugenics in Texas. As a result of that research, he most recently co-authored, with Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas History, published by the University of Oklahoma Press on June 3.

About Betsy Friauf:
Betsy Friauf is a Fort Worth native and a UNT grad. She spent 30 years as a journalist, for the Denton Record-Chronicle and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She then served as deputy chief communications officer for the Fort Worth city manager, senior communications specialist at the UNT Health Science Center and finally Children’s Hospital, Dallas and Plano.
In all these jobs as well as periods of freelancing, she was primarily a writer and editor on a variety of topics from breaking news to emergency instructions during tornadoes to the covid vaccine. Working with Michael Phillips she has won numerous awards as an independent scholar, including for the essay ““Those Boys Didn’t Learn to Hate Here”: Racial Violence in Texas, 1965-2020” which appeared in the book Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020, which won the Texas State Historical Association’s 2025 Gail and Chuck Swanlund Award for Best Texas History Anthology.
Now retired, Friauf is active in immigrant rights and resistance to fascism.
