Category Archives: Liberal religion

Axiocentrism, whatever that is

Browsing the articles at the excellent Religion Online Web site, I came across a 1979 article about Unitarian Universalism by Robert Tapp. It’s fascinating to read an outsider scholar’s view of our denomination, written at the moment when we were about to start growing (very slowly, but growing at last instead of declining). I found the second-to-last paragraph especially interesting. While we haven’t seen that theological convergence with humanism, the emergence of liturgical innovations in the 1980’s (flaming chalice, joys and concerns, etc.) makes the comment about feeling and acting like a minority group seem prescient. And the idea of “axiocentrism” just might be useful in our ongoing attempts at defining ourselves:

What of the future [of Unitarian Universalism] — if we assume that membership shrinkage has stabilized, that fiscal stringencies have been effected, and that a theological convergence toward a religious humanism has not only occurred but has at last received official recognition? A possible pattern is that of the Quakers — smallness, integrity and influence. But the Friends’ ethos and ways are difficult and must be learned — a kind of orthopraxy. A pattern of orthodoxy — precise beliefs, precisely enforced — seems even less likely. A third communal pattern could be based on shared values, both explicitly and implicitly religious — an “axiocentrism.” This model seems to characterize today’s UUs. Many of these shared beliefs and values are by-products of modernity and higher education. To the extent that U.S. culture is now tilting toward conservatism, those who hold such values may come to feel and act like a minority group — which seeks mutual support, recognizable in-group styles, viable defense patterns.

Full article: Link.

Plan ahead

Anne Principe, the Director of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist church in Brookline, Mass., pointed out to me that the Religious Education Association (REA) annual meeting and conference will take place in Boston this year. I have never been able to attend the REA annual meeting due to travel costs, but this will be close enough to commute. And this year’s topic sounds fascinating: “Culture that Matters: Intercultural Explorations in Religious Education.” I’ve already put it on my calendar.

November 2-4, 2007 — Religious Education Association annual meeting, Hyatt Harborside Hotel, Boston.

Link.

This is for you, Mass. clergy

The Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, a Massachusetts interfaith organization devoted to maintaining the right to same-sex marriage in our state, aims to get one thousand clergypersons to sign the Massachusetts Declaration of Religious Support for the Freedom of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. For faith traditions that do not have clergy, duly appointed lay leaders from a given congregation should sign. Deadline is May 9th, the earliest possible date of the Constitutional Convention at which the Massachusetts legislature could vote to send an anti-gay marriage amendment to a ballot vote.

If you know an eligible Massachusetts clergyperson or lay leader who should sign, send them to this page.

Thinking out loud about sermons…

The cover story for the latest issue of Christian Century, “Stolen goods: Tempted to plagiarize,” turns out to be an excellent article by Thomas G. Long on plagiarism in the pulpit — stolen sermons. I was planning to write something about this topic anyway, and then this afternoon our church music director told me that the Providence Journal printed a story this week alleging that the minister of First Unitarian in Providence has been engaging in plagiarism in his sermons over the past year. So here are some thoughts on plagiarized sermons.

Thomas Long’s Christian Century article notes that some prominent evangelical Christian preachers, like Rick Warren, market their sermons online. Long quotes Steve Sjogren, pastor as Cincinnati’s Vineyard community Church, as saying, “Don’t be original — be effective!” Long also quotes none other than Augustine as saying,

There are, indeed, some people who have a good delivery, but cannot compose anything to deliver. Now, if such people take what has been written with wisdom and eloquence by others, and commit it to memory, and deliver it to the people, they cannot be blamed, supposing them to do it without deception. [emphasis mine]

That last phrase is crucial: if you’re going to use someone else’s sermon — if you’re even going to reuse one of your own old sermons — you need to tell that to your congregation right up front. Long is careful to point out that “gray areas remain, of course, and judgment calls must be made.” Personally, I often worry about how should a preacher make attributions. Full footnotes just don’t work in a spoken sermon, but I think it’s usually OK for the preacher to refer to “Biblical scholars,” or to say something like “as Theodore Parker once said,” without having to give a full bibliographical citation.

Aside from the ethics of the matter, I feel Long’s most important point is that a good sermon should be written for a specific congregation. Using Christian language, Long writes:

In addition to the standard of truthfulness, the second factor to keep in mind is immediacy. While there is surely room in the pulpit for the “set piece” sermon and the oft-repeated illustration, finally preaching is a word from God for these people in this place at this moment. [emphasis in original]

I like to think about preaching as a conversation that takes place between the preacher and the congregation and the universe. The preacher is not really speaking for him- or herself:– the preacher has to try to give voice to those who have no voice; the preacher has to listen very closely to what people in the congregation say, and feed that back to the congregation; the preacher has to try to discern how the sacred lives and moves within the congregation, and draw the congregation’s attention to it. Those things are difficult enough as it is; using a sermon intended for another congregation will not make them any easier.

One important matter that Long does not cover in his otherwise excellent article is how congregations can become complicit in leading their ministers to plagiarize. If a congregations want their preacher to write high-quality, original sermons every week, are they willing to allow him or her a minimum of ten hours of study and writing time each week? — that’s at least one full day a week of uninterrupted study and writing time; and some preachers need more time than that. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many congregations that allow their preacher no more than an hour or two for study and writing. If a congregation is not insisting that their preacher spend ten hours a week on sermon preparation, and yet insists on an original sermon every week, that congregation is only leading that preacher into the temptation to plagiarize a sermon or two.

In the end, I’m less interested in reflecting on sermon plagiarism per se, and I’m more interested in what it is we expect from our sermons, and from our preachers. Some congregations will agree with Steve Sjogren, that we should worry less about being original or whether a particular sermon fits a particular congregation; and instead we should worry more about how effective a sermon is. Such a congregation may not even need a professional preacher — there are plenty of sermons on the Web, and anyone with a good voice could be drafted into reading sermons on Sunday morning, which would free up the paid minister for other roles in the congregation. On the other hand, there will be congregations who feel that sermons should be written for them, addressing their specific concerns and giving voice to their collective thoughts and yearnings. If that’s the case, those congregations will be sure their preacher carves out a substantial amount of time for sermon preparation — in which case the congregation will take care to hold that preacher accountable to create original sermons, written specifically for them and articulating both what they say and what they need to hear, each and every week.

Living your faith

My friends Jo is a teacher in the San Francisco Bay area, and she sent me a link to a video where she gets to describe the less-than-ideal conditions of her school. Link to video — Jo appears about halfway through, and again at the end. Boy, and I thought some of the churches I’ve served have had building problems. As the video tells us, children should not have to put up with such conditions. And you may notice that lots of the schools they show just happen to be in cities, not in the wealthy white suburbs….

Jo passed along this word from the American Federation of Teachers:

According to recent data, the cost to repair existing public schools or build new buildings exceeds $400 billion. To address this problem, the AFT is working to enact legislation that will provide $25 billion in interest-free bonding authority to school districts, with all decision-making about how to use that money remaining at the local level.

Jo is one of those classic idealistic Unitarian Universalists who lives out her faith in her daily life by teaching kids in the public schools. Historically, Unitarian Universalists have always had a high percentage of schoolteachers, and we have been committed to providing fair and equitable education for all children through public schooling. I’m proud of the fact that I’m related to Unitarian Universalists who lived their faith by teaching in the public schools:– my mother, her mother, and my aunt, all Unitarians, all schoolteachers. (I’m also proud of my older sister, who teaches non-traditional college students in the Indiana State University system, but I’m not sure she’d call herself a Unitarian Universalist any more.)

So here’s a shout-out to Jo, yet another Unitarian Universalist who’s living out her faith by working with and standing up for children.

Blogging against theocracy

Because I got delayed in the city of R’lyeh last weekend, I missed the “blogging against theocracy” blog swarm. But since it’s never too late to blog against theocracy, here’s my video on the topic. (3:51)

Thanks to ck for pointing me in the direction of Blogging against Theocracy.

Quicktime video — Click link, and where it says “Select a format” choose “Source — Quicktime”. Wait until the file downloads to your computer, and then click play. This should work for dial-up connections, and offers higher-resolution for all connections.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Open source Bible, pt. 2

Open source Bible is back again. A little geekier than part 1, but with a weekend project I know you’ll want to try. (4:59) Part one

Quicktime video — Click link, and where it says “Select a format” choose “Source — Quicktime”. Wait until the file downloads to your computer, and then click play. This should work for dial-up connections, and offers higher-resolution for all connections.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about books that changed your life. One such book for me was Slaughterhouse Five. In high school, I was something of a science geek, was one of the officers of the high school science fiction club, and I played Dungeons and Dragons. One day my friend Bill Schmitt (who was a math geek more than a science geek, and who did not play D&D), told me about these science fiction books I should read.

“There’s this guy named Kilgore Trout who keeps appearing in the books,” said Bill. “He’s a character, a science fiction author, in the books, but then there really is a science fiction book published by Kilgore Trout.”

Who could resist books with a recurring character, a fictional character who even (somehow) published a book in the real world? I went to the public library and took out a book by this author named Kurt Vonnegut, an author who was wild enough to create a character like Kilgore Trout. First I read was God Bless You, Mister Rosewater; and then Breakfast of Champions; and then Slaughterhouse Five.

Slaughterhouse Five was the one that changed my life, just a little. Vonnegut himself is a character in Slaughterhouse Five, along with Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim who is unstuck in time, and aliens called the Trafalmadorians who look like toilet plungers. The emotional center of the book is an eyewitness account of the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II. Vonnegut himself witnessed the firebombing of Dresden; so did Billy Pilgrim. Reading about the firebombing of Dresden, I began to realize that World War II wasn’t quite the “just war” that everyone said it was. Within two years of reading Slaughterhouse Five, I was involved in the peace movement.

So Slaughterhouse Five remains an integral part of my moral landscape. When I later learned that Vonnegut — fatalist, rationalist, bedrock humanist — belonged to a Unitarian Universalist congregation, I was not surprised. I had already known he was a kindred soul.

And now he’s dead. Or maybe he’s just unstuck in time. So it goes. Damn, I’m sad.

*****

Update: Sf author Cory Doctorow wrote the following about Vonnegut on BoingBoing:

“My first Vonnegut was Breakfast of Champions. I’d never read anything like it. It was a novel that was so easy, everything just happening, one thing after another. The book almost read itself. That was his gift, I think: to tell you things that were hard to hear, without you even noticing it. Like a nurse who can slide a needle into your vein without making you wince.” [Link]

Also via BoingBoing, a link to Vonnegut’s appearance on the Daily Show: Link.

BBC’s obit: Link. BBC’s appreciation: Link.

Vonnegut’s own Web site, with nothing there now but this one image: Link.

All things to all people?

Yesterday’s New York Times carried a story by Neela Banerjee titled “Sex Offenders Test Churches’ Core Beliefs: Safety Is Weighed Against Tolerance.” The story is about a Congregational church that is wrestling about whether they can welcome and accept child molesters and other sex offenders who want to attend their church once they get out of prison. Can a church minister to both sex offenders and to families with children?

“They are conflicting ministries,” the Reverend Patricia Tummino said about reaching out to sex offenders, to children, and to adult survivors of abuse. Since the late 1990’s, Ms. Tummino’s congregation, the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Middleboro, Mass., has dealt with two known sex offenders. “You can’t be all things to all people.”

I couldn’t agree more with Trish Tummino, my ministerial colleague from two towns over. Yes, former child molesters should be able to find a church to which they can belong; the problem is that they will probably need to find a large church, or a smaller church that does not have a ministry to children. But if you’re in a church with less than two hundred at worship each week (which includes most churches in the United States), there just isn’t enough room for both child molesters and children. Heck, I see this with divorces — when a couple divorces in a church with an average attendance of less than two hundred a week, typically one member of the couple gets custody of the church and the other member of the couple has to find a new church.

The only exception I can think of is the smaller church with at least two worship services, where one of the worship services has no Sunday school and no real accommodation for children — in such a church, a former child molester might be able to attend the child-free worship service. But really, as Trish says, smaller churches cannot be all things to all people — and thanks, Trish, for telling this somewhat awkward truth.

Parenthetical note: Trish was invited to talk about this topic live on MSNBC this morning at 10:45 EDT. Unfortunately, it looks like MSNBC didn’t put the video of Trish’s interview online.