In recent months the Dublin Unitarian Church has placed its sermons on the web at http://www.unitarianchurchdublin.org. This enables members of our congregation, who may wish to do so, to listen again, at their leisure, to what they hear on Sunday. If you are missing from a service (not that we encourage you to rely entirely upon remote access to our spiritual riches) you can hear the missed sermon from wherever you may be in the world.
Thanks to the efforts of our webmaster Peter Geoghegan the message of freedom reason and tolerance preached by the Dublin Unitarian Church will be readily available to a worldwide audience by the method which has come to be known as Podcasting. This article is to explain Podcasting for the benefit of people who may not be familiar with it.
Most people will be familiar with the Apple iPod, a little device the size of a mobile phone, which enables you to carry your entire CD collection in your pocket. The iPod is one of many devices allowing you to do this.
Podcasting is the process whereby audio files can be downloaded to your computer and from there (if required) to a device such as an iPod.
The best known means of distributing these sound files is through the program known as iTunes (another Apple invention). The iTunes program is freely available on the web at http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
Without Podcasting your means of accessing audio files such as our sermons is to log into a website and download the individual file. This is very useful but not very convenient. You have to remember to do so every time. And if you are interested in audio files from different sources you have to track them all down and individually save them. The painless solution to this 21st century problem is Podcasting.
Through the iTunes program where reference to our church will appear adorned by one of the little logo’s (see back cover) a person can “subscribe” at no cost to the audio files coming from our church. Hey presto, every time you log into iTunes you will receive automatically, the latest audio files from here. You can listen to them on your computer or (if you have an iPod or such device) you can download them and carry them with you for listening to in the car, on the bus, Dart or Luas, or as you walk by the sea. There is a search facility in iTunes through which you can locate subjects of interest to you. You can subscribe or unsubscribe as you wish and only those subjects which interest you will be downloaded to your computer. It is really a form of Radio-On-Demand where you listen to what you want when you want, free from the limitations of scheduled programming.
Searching in iTunes for Podcasts under the heading Unitarian brings up 7 results to which I have subscribed myself. Among them are the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego and the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Rochester NY. Thanks to Podcasting I have brought their sermons in my pocket as I take a break in the middle of the day. Thanks to the efforts of Peter Geoghegan (which may have borne fruit before you read this) I am looking forward to having Rev. Bill Darlison in my pocket as I go for my lunchtime walk. If you see me laughing on the street you will know the reason, strangers will know the truth as they say “isn’t yer man mad”.

Tony Brady