Flaming Chalice: Symbol of Unitarian Universalism

Flaming Chalice, Symbol of Unitarian Universalism, published by the Unitarian Universalist Association on its own website, is the denomination's own account of the origin and meaning of its central visual symbol, tracing it to a design created for the Unitarian Service Committee during the Second World War and its later adoption by the merged Unitarian Universalist tradition. Its strength is that it is the tradition's own authoritative statement of what the symbol means within its own practice, the correct source for how Unitarian Universalists themselves understand the chalice. Its limit is that it is a denominational self-description rather than an independent historical or scholarly account, so a claim about the chalice's specific wartime origin story, or about how the symbol's meaning has shifted since, is better checked against an independent history of the Unitarian Universalist Association as well.