Category Archives: Liberal religion

Disruptive

At last night’s meeting of the church’s board, Bill asked if any of us could help out in the soup kitchen the next morning (which is to say, this morning). First Unitarian sends a crew to make lunch on the third Wednesday of every month, but two of the five regulars were away on vacation, another two were down with some kind of virus, and one of the two replacements Bill had recruited to fill in had called to say she was sick.

Of course, most of the people at the Board meeting either had to go to work, or had already made other plans. But Maggi said she’d come right at nine to prepare food. I said I’d show up at nine thirty to help out, and I called Carol to see if she would be free — she was, and Bill had most of his crew.

This to me is one of the signs of a healthy congregation:– when something goes wrong, and you need volunteers at the last minute, enough people step forward to take care of whatever commitment needs to be taken care of. I don’t base this on any grand theory; all I know is that when this happens, the church feels like a real community to me.

By the time Carol and I showed up at nine-thirty, Bill, Maggi, and Maryellen (who had felt better and showed up to work) had already made most of the sandwiches and made up the desserts. Bill said Maggi and Maryellen couldn’t stay to serve the food, so Carol and I slipped home and worked for a couple of hours (fortunately, we both had flexible schedules today), and went back at eleven thirty to help serve lunch. There were a lot of people to serve. Bill said they usually serve 150 people on the third Wednesday, but today we served about 190, including some families with children. By noon, Bill was madly making more sandwiches while Carol and I served people. Finally, we ran out of sandwich meat and had to serve bread and butter. At least it was something to eat.

My carefully planned work schedule for today was completely disrupted. But sometimes volunteer work really is more important than anything else.

Delightedly annoyed (again)

The mail dropped through the slot in the door. Mr. Crankypants picked up the newest issue of UU World, the denominational magazine and mouthpiece, and opened it expecting to be delighted. UU World almost always has at least one article that annoys Mr. Crankypants, who delights in getting annoyed. And he was delightedly annoyed once again.

The first annoying article that caught his eye was titled “Not My Father’s Religion: Unitarian Universalism and the Working Class” by Doug Muder. (There may be other annoying articles in this issue, but Mr. C. is taking so much delight in being annoyed at this one that he hasn’t read any further.) Muder started off with one of Mr. Crankypants’s favorite critiques of Unitarian Universalism:– that we don’t welcome working class people. How true! But, annoyingly (delightfully annoyingly), Doug Muder places the blame on theology. Theology is a nice thing to write about, but to do so ignores a whole host of other, more than sufficient, reasons why working class people avoid Unitarian Universalist congregations like the plague.

What’s that you say? What are those other reasons?

You could start with social snobbery. Take, for an example, something Mr. Crankypants saw with his own eyes. The new Unitarian Universalist was talking with some long-time members at social hour one Sunday. The long-time members were talking about what their fathers did for work — lawyer, doctor, university professor, other professional high-status jobs. Wanting to include the newcomer, one of the long-time members turned to him and asked, “What does your father do for a living?” The newcomer replied, “He’s a janitor.” The conversation died abruptly and everyone drifted away from the newcomer. That newcomer lasted less than a year as a Unitarian Universalist.

You could add geography, demographics, and congregational lust for money. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many Unitarian Universalist congregations decided to move their church buildings out of the downtown and into the suburbs. Mr. Crankypants has heard an apocryphal story that in January, 1953, the Board of Trustees of one Unitarian congregation was discussing selling its downtown building in order to move out to the suburbs. The minutes of that meeting supposedly record that the Board chair asked, “Why not go where the money is?” To which the minister (whose salary was dependent on contributions) replied, “Yes, why not?”

You could add the Unitarian Universalist obsession with college education, coupled with little support for helping people get a college education. In our snobbier congregations, one is simply assumed to have a college degree (preferably from a “good” college). But don’t bother to ask your typical Unitarian Universalist congregation for a scholarship, for tutoring, for moral support, or for any other help while you’re in college. They only want to see you when you get out of college, are married and in your thirties with children and a job. (Oh, and be warned:– if you want to be a non-traditional student, and finally go to college when you are middle-aged, expect even less support.)

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The Case of the Pointless Paperwork

This afternoon, I worked on organizing my office. I hate organizing my office. It’s boring. I want to be making something happen, not straightening up my desk and filing paperwork. Of course, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do those mundane office chores. Somewhere, the poet Gary Snyder talks about how important maintenance is — you can’t always be creating things, he says, you also have to maintain what you’ve got. So I tried to tell myself that I was doing Snyderian maintenance this afternoon, even though I think what Gary Snyder had in mind when he was talking about maintenance was more along the lines of sharpening his axe or cleaning out the barn, chores which would have been much more attractive than dealing with paperwork.

In my opinion, the greatest theorist on the subject of paperwork was the great philosopher, Perry Mason….

….Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

“Yes.”

“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

“Yes.”

“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

“And did you answer those yourself?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

“Transferred them to another file.”

“What file?”

“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

[from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1939.]

In the book, Mason works on paperwork for about ten minutes before a new client walks into the office with another high-speed murder case. I should be so lucky. In my office, I plugged away all afternoon. I kept hoping that a client would walk in the door and want me to investigate a murder case. That didn’t happen, although the chair of the House and Grounds Committee did stop in for ten minutes to let me know how the various building maintenance projects were coming along.

By the end of the day, I had found lots of paperwork that had once been relevant, but was now so irrelevant that I skipped the “LAPSED” file and threw it right into the recycling bin. Such was the sad end of the case of the pointless paperwork.

The loss of a good blog

Over the past six months, one of the best religious blogs out there has been Speaking Truth to Power. Written by the pseudononymous uugrrl, it chronicles her thoughts and feelings as someone who was a victim of clergy sexual misconduct. But now she has announced that she’ll be taking the blog down for personal reasons. You have a few more days to read her well-written posts on clergy sexual misconduct.

I’m going to miss uugrrl. In the past, I’ve been in churches that had suffered from clergy sexual misconduct. I discovered that clergy misconduct can poison an entire congregation for years — and I learned that misconduct can have a negative impact on everyone in that congregation. Reading uugrrl’s blog has helped me to come to a better understanding of the evil of clergy sexual misconduct.

I’ll leave you with some critically important advice uugrrl offers to anyone who is a victim of clergy sexual misconduct in a Unitarian Universalist congregation (or in almost any denomination, for that matter):

If you are a victim of UU clergy misconduct, don’t report it…. To be clear, by “don’t report it,” I mostly mean don’t file a formal complaint. I don’t mean you shouldn’t tell anyone. It’s even okay in my opinion to tell the UUA [denominational headquarters], as long as you make it clear they do not have your permission to share your name or to consider you a complainant. Just do what feels safest. And be very careful. One good option is contacting Marie Fortune’s Institute.

Your thoughts on sin and evil?

I’m headed off to Washington, DC, for a couple of days, to stay with a Quaker friend. No, we’re not going to do any protesting against the Iraq War (we did that in March), we’re just going to hang out for a couple of days.

While I’m away, I’d love to know your thoughts on sin and evil. I’m really interested in any comments you may have on this topic. I’ll also share the specific questions I’ve been considering:

  • Is there a difference between sin and evil, and if so, what is it?
  • What feeling or emotions do you associate with sin? — with evil?
  • What is the worst sin you have ever seen or experienced (no personal revelations needed, you can speak in general terms if you like)?
  • In your opinion, what is the biggest evil that exists today (again, no personal revelations needed, you can speak in general terms if you like)?

Polished theological treatises on sin and evil are fine, but what I’m really hoping for is more in the lines of brainstorming:– raw ideas, feelings, thoughts, musings.

And here’s a special invitation to those of you who never post comments, an invitation to chime in, and write a little something. (This Web site averages more than 3,000 unique visitors a month, and less than one percent of you write comments!) If it’s your first time commenting, remember that your comment may be held for my review, so don’t panic if it doesn’t show up right away.

See you again on August 15….

Family values in the workplace

Last Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine contains an article by Eyal Press which explores the emerging legal issue of how and when an employer can fire an employee for taking family leave, either for the employee’s health concerns or because the employee is acting as a caregiver for a family member.

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act supposedly guarantees unpaid leave to employees with such serious health problems. But the law doesn’t cover employers with fewer than 50 people (which includes most churches), and it doesn’t cover caregivers.

On the other hand, an increasing number of former employees have successfully sued their employers after being terminated during unpaid medical leave. One scholar, Joan C. Williams, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, argues in her book Unbending Gender that offering unpaid leave is a feminist issue. The article by Press summarizes her argument:

Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.

I would argue that most Unitarian Universalist congregations structure their ministry positions around this “increasingly outdated masculine norm” of the worker who can “work full time… while enjoying ‘immunity from family work’.” On a practical level, many (most?) congregations expect their ministers to work fifty to sixty hours a week (while being paid for forty hours), presumably under the unspoken assumption that if the minister has children, there will be another spouse to take care of them. On the legal level, often this outdated masculine norm is implicit in the contracts signed by ministers. By contrast, Directors of Religious Education often find themselves with flexible jobs that allow lots of freedom for caring for children — not surprising, since religious education is still seen as “women’s work.”

It would be an interesting exercise to examine one’s own congregation for this outdated masculine norm. What if the sexton needs family leave — will it be available? Are flextime and flexi-place available to every employee whenever possible? What sort of norms do employee contracts embody? Do all employees have access to unpaid medical leave? In a denomination where the feminist revolution still isn’t finished, I suspect this is now one of our most important feminist battlefields.

Recalling A. Powell Davies

When I was visiting my aunt and uncle last week, Uncle Bob got to talking about A. Powell Davies. You see, Uncle Bob grew up in All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and he was a member there when the legendary A. Powell Davies was minister. Uncle Bob remembers it was an exciting time to be a part of All Souls, with large numbers of newcomers joining the church during this time. And he remembers regularly seeing United States senators and representatives sitting in the congregation, attracted by Davies’s preaching.

One of the things that Uncle Bob said that grabbed my attention was that Davies had little to do with the general administration of the church;– there was an executive secretary who took care of that. Davies attended some of the key committee meetings, and of course he had a big say in the direction of the church, but mostly he served as a religious leader. (I said that I’d bet that he had at least twenty hours a week to prepare his sermons, and Uncle Bob said that was possible. I added that I’d never be up to Davies’s level as a preacher, but that if I had twenty hours to write a sermon, it would be a lot better than what I produce now, and Uncle Bob laughed and said he’d bet that it would make a difference.)

Uncle Bob is a retired business executive, and so I thought I’d ask him what he thought of John Carver’s “policy governance” model, which is now all the rage among larger Unitarian Universalist churches, and which promotes the idea of the minister as the CEO of the church. Uncle Bob listened politely, but it was obvious he didn’t think much of policy governance. Neither do I. We both agreed that the All-Souls-Powell-Davies model of having the minister as a religious leader, with an executive secretary (or executive director, or whatever you want to call the position) sounded pretty good to us.

Uncle Bob said something else that grabbed my attention. He said that Davies typically preached about current events. According to Uncle Bob, Davies would pick a current event, hash out the moral and ethical implications of what was going on, and end up with three or four ways forward. I may not have gotten this exactly right, but the point is that Davies really gave his congregation something to chew on each week. That’s what Uncle Bob said he really liked best about a sermon — he wants something that’s going to keep him pondering over the whole week — and that’s what Davies was able to do. And what Davies chose to talk about was not typically religious:– he talked about current events, not about the Bible (or if he were still alive, things like spiritual practices and Eastern religions).

Some preliminary notes on evil

Does evil exist? This questions vexes many religious liberals. Of course evil does exist;– but how do we define it, and what forms does it take? Can we call a person evil, or just a mass of persons, a society? Does evil have an existence apart from persons and societies, or does it only manifest in the real world?

To avoid such vexing questions, some religious liberals deny that evil exists. Some others claim that evil is a false construction arising from the errors of religious conservatives or fundamentalists. A larger number of religious liberals simply avoid using the word “evil,” substituting words like “inhuman” (even though it’s quite clear that humans are fully capable of evil), or “pathological” (which may imply that disease is at the root of all evil, or perhaps even that evil is at the root of some diseases).

I think it makes more sense to say that evil does exist, and I think it makes more sense to use the word where I feel that it should be used. I’ll give you an example. I believe that torture is evil. I can’t imagine that there would be any doubt about that fact:– torture is indeed evil. But to say “Torture is evil” causes a small problem, because now you have to define what you mean by torture. George W. Bush has said that torture is evil, and he has asserted that the United States does not use torture (the events at Abu Ghraib prison were an aberration caused by some individuals going against U. S. policy). However, some critics have charged that the United States has engaged in torture. Both these critics and George W. Bush agree that torture is evil, but they have different notions of what constitutes torture, and therefore they have different notions of what is, and what is not, evil.

So while evil certainly exists, we don’t all agree on what is, and what is not, evil. In fact, consensus about what is evil may change over time. Five hundred years ago, there was no world consensus that slavery was evil. People like Paul of Tarsus accepted that slavery was a normal part of the human condition. Most societies around the world had some form of slavery. Yet today, five hundred years later, slavery is illegal in all nations, and there is a worldwide consensus that slavery is evil. Over the course of the past five hundred years, the working definition of evil has changed to include slavery.

I’d say, in fact, that the working definition of evil is always “in play.” Working definitions of what evil is can and do change over time. The important contests about what is, and what is not, evil take place in the public realm, just as the debate about the evil of slavery took place in the public realm.

This may help explain why some religious liberals are reluctant to use the term “evil” — if the definition of “evil” can change and evolve, who are we to make pronouncements about what is, or is not, evil? But this notion may well be based on two false premises. First, it may be that there is no such thing as absolute goodness, or absolute truth, or absolute evil. The accomodationist tendencies of religious liberalism, our willingness to adapt to the changing times, would seem to indicate that we don’t believe in absolutes. The process theologians among us even say that God can change and evolve (assuming that you believe in God) — so how can there be any absolute truth, absolute goodness, or absolute evil?

A second false premise may well be the assumption that one can remove oneself from debates about evil by simply not using the word “evil.” But if the definition of “evil” is a debate that is played out in the public realm, then to remain silent is to participate in that public debate by abstaining (abstention is still a kind of participation). Further, religious liberals act in ways that indicate what they do think is evil — the religious liberals I know believe that sexism is evil, and they act as if sexism is evil, and such actions are (in a very real way) a contribution to the ongoing debate about what is, and what is not, evil.

Fortunately, most religious liberals are willing to use the term “evil.” In one way, it speaks well of religious liberals that they use the term sparingly. On the other hand, it seems to me that we have to be willing to engage in the ongoing public debate about what is, and what is not, evil. If we believe, for example, that torture is evil, we have to talk about what torture is, and we have to talk about whether the actual torturer is evil, and we have to talk about in what way the society that condones torture is itself evil, and we have to talk about what it means that other people have other definitions of torture. If we don’t talk about these things in public, then we are abstaining from deciding such moral questions.

Just some preliminary notes on the topic of evil. Debate and discussion welcomed.

Dan, my stupid alter ego, is away visiting his aunt and uncle. Which means Mr. Crankypants has unfettered access to this blog for the next two days. Woo, hoo!

And there is something very much on Mr. Crankypants’s mind. Theories have been flying around the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere, accusing the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) of conspiring to muzzle various small, uninfluential groups. You see, recently the UUA Board changed the rules such that nearly all of the dozens of so-called Independent Affiliates of the UUA would no longer be Independent Affiliates. These groups suddenly found themselves un-affiliated, and the pundits said that the Real Target was — pick whichever group you happened to support, but which has lost its Independent Affiliate status under the UUA Board’s new rules. “Oh, the Horror of It All!” say the UU bloggers.

Mr. Crankypants would like to point out two things regarding the Independent Affiliates Imbroglio.

First, in spite of what the conspiracy theorists say, the UUA Board cannot be accused of conspiracy. Conspiracy requires a high level of organization, administrative follow-through, and general nastiness. The UUA Board is not known for being particularly well-organized, the efforts of Moderator Gini Courter notwithstanding. The administrative follow-through on too many Board initiatives has been lackluster. And on the general spectrum of nastiness, UUA Board members are closer to the Care Bears than to Niccolo Macchiavelli.

Second, it’s not like this is a surprise. This rule change has been in the works for four years. Even Mr. Crankypants, who as a general rule abhors and avoids UUA politics, knew this was coming. In fact, last year Mr. Crankypants looked at the proposed new rule, and figured out how to create a new Independent Affiliate, Unitarian Universalists for Care Bears (UUCB), that would easily meet the new rules, by building coalitions with our largest congregations to send free Care Bears videos to needy children in Transylvania and in the Khasi Hills of India, to help spread the word about Unitarian Universalism to those who are already Unitarian Universalists. Mr. Crankypants even figured out how to soften up certain key Board members so they’d vote in favor of UUCB’s affiliate status, by sending them “Care Bear” packages filled with seven pounds of the finest Fair Trade chocolate, just before the vote. Of course, Mr. Crankypants is way too ethical to use such manipulative tactics. (Instead, he called up another group, which shall remain nameless, told them his ideas, meekly accepted it when they called him “shamelessly unethical” over the telephone… and sure enough they were one of the first groups to receive Independent Affiliate status a few months later. Coincidence? Not hardly!)

Really though, Mr. Crankypants is glad the UUA Board has gotten rid of so many independent affiliates. See, it used to be that every single one of the Independent Affiliates got to have their very own workshop at General Assembly, the annual denominational meeting. Over the past decade Mr. Crankypants sat through far too many tedious, pointless, badly-presented General Assembly workshops sponsored by various independent affiliates. The Unitarian Universalists for Care Bears would show the new video they plan to distribute to impoverished children in Romania and India. The Unitarian Universalist Harry Potter Support Group would have a workshop on “Why the First Harry Potter Movie Sucks.” The Unitarian Universalists in Favor of Lots of Independent Affiliates would have a workshop on “How To Get Cheap Ads in UU World Magazine, Free Listings in the UUA Directory, and Your Own General Assembly Workshop for Just Fifty Dollars a Year.” If Mr. Crankypants wants to waste his time going to pointless workshops, he would rather attend science fiction conventions, thank you very much.

But now, praise Loki, all those many interminably boring workshops have been swept away. Doubtless they will eventually be replaced with many more interminably boring workshops sponsored by the UUA, but still. You get the point. Mr. Crankypants is glad the UUA Board has changed the Independent Affiliate rules.