Month: July 2011

Historical document on the sexual revolution within UUism

For some years now, I’ve been looking for documentary evidence about the way the sexual revolution played out in Unitarian Universalism from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. I have lots of anecdotal evidence, stories told to me by people who saw, or in a few cases experienced first-hand, the “open marriages,” the “wife-swapping,” the sex games, etc., that took place in Unitarian Universalist congregations and other Unitarian Universalist organizations such as camps and conference centers. These decades-old memories are of definite historical interest, but documentary evidence is also essential to a fuller historical understanding of this topic.

Recently, I realized I had one such document, which I uncovered a dozen years ago when I was working on a contract with the Unitarian Universalist Association’s (UUA) Youth Office to write a training manual for youth advisors, and I’ll include it in full here. Continue reading “Historical document on the sexual revolution within UUism”

New blog on theism vs. atheism

Chris Schreiner, who is both brave and smart, has started a new blog on how to get theists and atheists to talk with one another sanely and productively. I say that Chris is brave because every time I have tried to start such a conversation, I find myself standing in the middle of two warring camps who are hurling things at each other. Chris is also really smart: he’s a minister, psychotherapist, and author of five books, including Bridging the God Gap: Finding Common Ground Among Believers, Atheists and Agnostics; beyond that, when you sit and talk with him, you quickly discover that he is kind, perceptive, well-read, and articulate.

So what are you waiting for? — go read his new blog, Theists and Atheists, Communication and Common Ground.

Creativity and maintenance

Finally, after years of cudgeling my brains, I’ve managed to track down a quote by Gary Snyder on the relationship between creativity and maintenance. It comes from a 1973 interview, which was then reprinted in Lookout: A Selection of Writings:

I like to sharpen my chain saw. I like to keep all my knives sharp. I like to change the oil in my truck.

Creativity and maintenance go hand in hand. And in a mature ecosystem as much energy goes to maintenance as goes to creativity. Maturity, sanity, and diversity go together, and with that goes stability. I would wish that we could in time emerge from traumatized social situations and have six or seven hundred years of relative stability and peace. Then look at the kind of poetry we could write! Creativity is not at its best when it’s a by-product of turbulence.

The concept in this quote, as you can see, could be applied to the current state of the U.S. economy, or to the adoption of new media by creative persons and by religious groups. But I think I’m going to use the concept in this quote for tomorrow’s sermon on spirituality and work.

Religion in the deficit debate

As I watch the deficit battle in Washington with fascinated horror, I can’t help but noticing the threads of religion that run through it:

Barack Obama is a self-avowed quasi-Niebuhrian pragmatist who has come out of the mainline Protestant tradition. Like so many mainliners these days, he has distanced himself from organized religion; part of that mainline pragmatism is to stick to religion only when it doesn’t get in the way. He doesn’t seem to be drawn or driven by any particular transcendent moral or ethical ideals. You will also notice that he doesn’t go to religious services on a regular basis.

There are at least two religious types within the Tea Partiers. First, there are the followers of the Prosperity Gospel. Generally speaking, the Prosperity Gospel holds that religious success (salvation) is tied to material success; in one common American form, it ties in with residual American Calvinism, and holds that the wealthy are the elect, and those without money are hellbound without possibility of salvation. Whatever the specific form of Prosperity Gospel, if you’re not wealthy, you are morally culpable, you need to pray harder, and the government should not help you out.

Second, you can find the libertarian atheists among (or at least allied with) the Tea Partiers. These are often people who follow the fundamentalist atheism of Ayn Rand and her cohorts. This often takes the form of deifying the individual human, and rejecting as anathema any coordinated effort to help out the poor and unfortunate, who are not deified. The fundamentalist Randian atheists reject any call to a higher moral authority out of hand; sometimes, they’re hard to distinguish from the quasi-Niebuhrian pragmatism of Barack Obama and his cronies.

Ordinary Christian evangelicalism, committed to its own high principles around various social issues, continues to affirm that the churches can and should play a major role in delivering social services. They find themselves allied with the Tea Party’s efforts to de-fund government as much as possible. Catholics who are aligned with their religion’s hierarchy are in much the same position. However, both the Christian evangelicals and the Catholics are committed to government intervention in social issues like marriage and abortion, and many Christian evangelicals and most Catholics remain committed to letting the government fight poverty, out of their Christian commitment to helping the poor; at some point, they will have to confront the vast gulf between themselves on the one hand, and the Prosperity Gospelers and Randian atheists on the other hand. (My guess is that many of them will jump the gulf and join the Prosperity Gospelers or the fundamentalist Randian atheists.)

What is most striking to me is that so many theological groups are missing from the public coverage of the debate. Where, for example, are the mainline Protestants who have been influenced by the various liberation theologies (the feminist, black, GLBT, etc., liberation theologies)? Also missing from public coverage is any mention of the various groups doing ecological theology, including liberal Christians, humanists, and Neo-Pagans.

Religious liberals have been left out of the debate? — this should not be a great surprise. Most religious liberals and religious moderates long ago decided that they would keep their religion out of any discussions of public policy. And having once ceded the public square to fundamentalists, religious conservatives, and religious nutcases (i.e., the Prosperity Gospelers, etc.), we’re finding it very difficult to get back in.

How to annoy someone from Indiana

My older sister lives in Indiana. We were talking on the phone yesterday when she idly asked, “So how’s the weather out there?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Just so-so. The fog stayed in longer than usual in the morning so I don’t think it got above seventy-two degrees yesterday. And last night it was down in the fifties, so cold I had to close the window.”

“Augh!” she said, or at least she said something that might have been spelled that way. “I hate you! It’s been over ninety here for days, and it doesn’t get any cooler than about seventy-eight at night!”

That’s how to annoy someone from Indiana.

The professor was a fox

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus, by tradition the first poet after Homer, and the inventor of iambic verse, wrote: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing.”

The following tale, in which the professor takes the role of the fox and the boatman the role of the hedgehog, gives one interpretation of this saying:

A professor was being ferried across a river by a boatman, who was no scholar. So the professor said, “Can you write, my man?” “No, Sir,” said the boatman. “Then you have lost one third of your life,” said the professor. “Can you read?” again asked he of the boatman. “No,” replied the latter, “I can’t read.” “Then you have lost the half of your life,” said the professor. Now came the boatman’s turn. “Can you swim?” said the boatman to the professor. “No,” was his reply. “Then,” said the boatman, “you have lost the whole of your life, for the boat is sinking and you’ll be drowned.”

Rev. Henry Woodcock, The Hero of the Humber: History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe, Foreman of the Humber Dock Gates, Hull, 2nd. ed. (London: 1880), p. 32.

On wickedness

I’m preparing to write a sermon on the Unitarian Universalist Association’s purposes and principles, titled “Why the Seven Principles Must Change.” I’m thinking of using one of several passages from Agatha Christie’s murder mystery A Pocketful of Rye as one of the texts on which the sermon will be based; Christie, whatever her faults may be, is fairly sound on the topic of wickedness. At this point, I think the second passage below best captures what I’m trying to say in the sermon. If you have any similar quotes that could serve as a necessary corrective to the excessive optimism of the “Seven Principles,” I’d love it if you left them in the comments.

———

1. Calming himself, [Inspector Neele] said, “Oh, there are other possibilities, other people who had a perfectly good motive.”

“Mr. Dubois, of course,” said Mis Marple sharply. “And that young Mr. Wright. I do so agree with you, Inspector. Wherever there is a question of gain, one has to be very suspicious. The great thing to avoid is having in any way a trustful mind.”

In spite of himself, Neele smiled.

“Always think the worst, eh?” he asked. It seemed a curious doctrine to be proceeding from this charming and fragile-looking old lady.

“Oh yes,” said Miss Marple fervently. “I always believe the worst. What is so sad is that one is usually justified in doing so.”

———

2. “It sounds rather cruel,” said Pat.

“Yes, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “life is cruel, I’m afraid….”

———

3. “…It’s very wicked, you know, to affront human dignity….”

———

4. “…One needs a great deal of courage to get through life….”

Preliminary review of Google+

My sister Abby and I did some experimenting with Google+ last night. Its real strength appears to be the way it has both integrated and implemented various online communications tools together. It integrates email, microblogging, social networking, chat, videoconferencing, etc., in the same interface.

And each of these online communications tools has been implemented reasonably well. You can send a message directly from Google+ to any email account using a simple, straightforward procees. Microblogging from Google+ is as easy as Twitter (though I haven’t yet figured out how to do it from my phone). The social networking feature seems better designed than Facebook or MySpace, and presumably draws on Google’s extensive experience running Orkut (which has never been popular here in the U.S., but is hugely popular in Brazil). Abby says the chat feature is identical with Google Talk, which she has been using for some time; in addition to chatting via text, you can also use video chat. The videoconferencing tool, called Hangouts, allows up to ten persons at once, although we were only able to test it with the two of us.

Some people are claiming that Google+ is going to kill off Facebook. But I’m not convinced that they are aiming at the same market. I can immediately imagine how I might use Google+ at work, whereas I can’t imagine using Facebook at work except for the most rudimentary communication. Google+ is not primarily a social networking tool; it is an online communications tool.

At this point, I can say that I like Google+ pretty well. I’m already thinking of ways I can use it at work (interoffice communication, online committee meetings and small group ministries, interoffice communication, text-based discussions about sermon topics, etc.). It’s good enough that I’m willing to invest some time in experimenting with it. But I’m not yet willing to say it is the best most awesomest online communications tool ever. Ask me again in a month, and I’ll have a better answer for you.