This is a great review -- I read this book a couple years ago, and wrote a short review here (note: the one comment to that post is very spoilery).
I enjoyed your anecdote about visiting a UU church, as my background is "kid from my town's scary-sharp non-evangelical homeschooled family" -- we joined the local UU church when I was 12, at which point I feel in love with it. I'm not musically talented, but I appreciated that my church at the time had a budget to pay local musicians to perform in services. Also we weren't precisely atheist, but we partly got recruited into the church by homeschooler friends who were atheist and then left after the much-beloved atheist minister was replaced by someone who was theologically Christian. But they stayed in the Wednesday morning philosophy discussion group, which had a life of its own! The one you visited sounds a bit more out there than any UU church I've been to (and also great!) but both it and Dana's church are very recognizable as UU to me.
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I enjoyed your anecdote about visiting a UU church, as my background is "kid from my town's scary-sharp non-evangelical homeschooled family" -- we joined the local UU church when I was 12, at which point I feel in love with it. I'm not musically talented, but I appreciated that my church at the time had a budget to pay local musicians to perform in services. Also we weren't precisely atheist, but we partly got recruited into the church by homeschooler friends who were atheist and then left after the much-beloved atheist minister was replaced by someone who was theologically Christian. But they stayed in the Wednesday morning philosophy discussion group, which had a life of its own! The one you visited sounds a bit more out there than any UU church I've been to (and also great!) but both it and Dana's church are very recognizable as UU to me.