Monthly Archives: October 2007

Friday video: The empty jar



Story time, Unitarian Universalist style! In this week’s video, I read Jesus’s parable of the empty jar, from the Gospel of Thomas (one of the books that didn’t make it into the official Christian scriptures). Then I talk about a few possible interpretations of the parable, but since I’m a Unitarian Universalist minister I refuse to come up with one final correct interpretation. (5:05)

Note to nitpickers: Yeah, I know I’m posting the “Friday Video” on Saturday. Before you start picking nits, remember that I do this as a hobby, and sometimes life makes it difficult to keep to schedules.

’87 Worldcon GoH wins Nobel

The five novels in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, by Doris Lessing, are among my favorite science fiction books. Their stories and images continue to haunt my imagination. The fourth book in the series, The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, tells the story of how to face the collapse of a planet’s entire ecosystem. The first book in the series, Shikasta, contains one of the more interesting sustained meditations on racism that I have ever read, and as I thread my way through anti-racist theology, I find Lessing’s words coming up through memory. And the second book in the series, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five has no real relevance to current events (not that I can remember, at least), but the image of contact between the three different, and increasingly transcendent, zones of existence still fuels my imagination.

Two bits of trivia about Lessing: The Associated Press reported that Doris Lessing was less than enthusiastic about winning the prize at first, which makes me like her better….

Doris Lessing pulled up in a black cab where a media horde was waiting Thursday in front of her leafy north London home. Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: “Oh Christ … I couldn’t care less.”

And the last bit of trivia: Lessing was the Guest of Honor (GoH) at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). (Via.) Whaddya bet she wins an honorary Hugo award for lifetime achievement at the 2008 Worldcon….

New look

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be making some changes to the appearance of this blog.

I’ll be switching to a fixed-width page, to match my main Web site (something that I’ve been planning to do for ages). You’ll see a smaller font on the first page which will make easier to scan articles to find one you want to read — just click on the header to any individual post to show that post in a larger, easier-to-read font.

All navigation will be shifted to a sidebar on the right-hand side, and I’ll be making some changes to the way the navigation works. I’ll be adding tags sometime in the next month, so posts will be marked with both a general category, and a more specific tag (or tags), so you can more easily find articles on the subjects that interest you. It will take at least a month for the navigation to settle down.

Behind the scenes, I have switched to a moderately-tweaked version of the default theme for WordPress (my blogging software). The default theme will allow me to use all the new php calls included in the latest upgrades of WordPress, without me having to revise a whole lot of code. I’m also upgrading to the latest version of WordPress to take advantage of widgets and other time-saving devices, again so I don’t have to revise a whole lot of code. The less time I have to spend revising code, the more time I have to spend writing something worth reading.

Note that during the upgrades and changes, the blog might not be accessible for short periods of time. Safari users, you may have to “Empty cache” under the “File” menu in order to see the changes correctly. If you see any other problems, please send email to me at danrharper AT aol DOT com.

Worth watching

Peter Bowden of UU Planet sent me a link to a video of Seth Goodin talking to Google employees. Seth Goodin is the marketing guru who wrote the book Purple Cow. (I wrote about Purple Cow back on November 9, 2005.)

One of Goodin’s key points in the video lecture is that the whole landscape of marketing has changed in the past twenty years. It used to be that the way you did marketing was first to come up with a whole bunch of money. Then you took out as many ads as you could, trying to grab people’s attention to tell them about your product. When you made a profit, you poured that money back into advertising. Goodin calls this approach the “TV-Industiral Complex.”

But a new way to do marketing has emerged. First, you create “something worth talking about,” and “if you can’t do that, start over.” Next, you find people who want to hear from you, and you tell them about that “something worth talking about.” Then those people tell their friends about that “something worth talking about” — you don’t tell people about that something worth talking about and you don’t spend lots of ad dollars promoting yourself — you rely on enthusiastic users, not on ads, to tell others. Then there’s a last key step: get permission from those first people to tell them about whatever new things-worth-talking-about that you come up with.

Goodin’s second approach to marketing should be easy to use to spread the word about Unitarian Universalism. Unitarian Universalism is something worth talking about — it’s a religion that provides all the wonderful aspects of a warm religious community, but it’s also a religion where you don’t have to swallow unswallowable doctrines or creeds. We have something worth talking about, and Unitarian Universalists do tell their friends — “No, no, you have to check out my church, it’s this cool religious community where you don’t have to believe in God unless you want to.” Thus while other churches are losing members, Unitarian Universalism is slowly growing, because we Unitarian Universalists are willing to talk to our friends.

Now along comes the new marketing campaign from the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). The UUA is buying print ads in Time magazine, which is probably a waste of money, because the old marketing approach of spending lots of money on ads just doesn’t work any more. But the UUA also came out with a cool ten-minute video. It captures who we are — it captures that warm feeling you get when you go to your Unitarian Universalist church — it captures that lack of creed or dogma — it makes you feel good about being a Unitarian Universalist, so you want t o show it to your friends to help them understand who you are. You can get a DVD of the video to give to your friends so you can sit there and watch it with them — or you can tell your friends to watch it on YouTube.

Plus, without being heavy-handed, the video captures the cutting edge of who we are — we care about the environment, we welcome gays and lesbians, we have racially mixed churches (OK, maybe your church isn’t racially mixed, but ours here in New Bedford is, and yours could be someday soon). This new video is worth talking about! And some of us are already talking about the video, and showing it to our friends. And maybe — just maybe — we need to do lots more new media, because I suspect the future of our religion has to add a new-media component to our traditional face-to-face churches.

That what I got to thinking about as I watched the Seth Goodin video. There’s lots more food for thought there. Definitely worth watching. Link.

Time of change

The Board meeting at church went late (they always do, don’t they?), and I just had to go to the supermarket afterwards. So it was ten o’clock when I finally pulled up in front of our apartment. A middle-aged couple was out walking their dog, looking in the windows of the art gallery that’s on the first floor of our building. That is unusual. You see, when we first moved in, we quickly learned that our neighborhood was quite safe at any time of day or night. But we never saw people out walking dogs at night, we never saw joggers, and the only people we saw out walking late at night were homeless people and people wandering up from the waterfront looking for a bar. Aside from that, after six o’clock the streets were pretty much empty.

The neighborhood has changed over the past two years. Fancy new apartments got built, luxury condos got built, a few new stores opened up. One morning a year ago, we saw the first jogger running along our block, although he was probably just lost because we never saw another one. But about six months ago, we did start seeing a few dog-walkers after dark. A couple of weeks ago, a new police station opened three blocks away, and it seems as if we’re seeing even more people walking around after dark. Smells like gentrification to me.

Midwesterners and liberal religion

I was out in Naperville, Illinois, for three days last week, co-leading a workshop of worship for religious educators. Most of the dozen people in the workshop were from the Midwest. I was reminded of a few regional differences between Midwestern religious liberals, and New England religious liberals.

  • Midwestern Unitarian Universalists are nice. They are friendly, courteous, and pleasant in a way that New Englanders just aren’t. (On the other hand, I do like the edginess of New Englanders.)
  • Midwestern Unitarian Universalists do not take their religion for granted, the way many New England Unitarian Universalists seem to do.
  • A related point: Midwestern Unitarian Universalists have a visceral understanding that they are a tiny minority of the population. Because of this, they don’t seem to have the sense of entitlement that New England Unitarian Universalists often suffer from (as if we’re God’s gift to New England, not that we believe in God).
  • Maybe I didn’t see a representative sample of Midwestern Unitarian Universalists, but most of the people in this workshop came from growing congregations, and they were all committed to growth in a way that I just don’t see among most New England Unitarian Universalists.

As much as I like our little church in New Bedford, and as much as I love New England and New England Unitarian Universalists, I did have a moment of nostalgia at this workshop, thinking about the year I spent serving in a Midwestern Unitarian Universalist church. New England Unitarian Universalists do have this tendency to make excuses about why New England Unitarian Universalist churches aren’t growing; we could learn from the Midwesterners who are just rolling up their sleeves and making growth happen.

Comments on the new video

Today we showed the new video on Unitarian Universalism, “Voices of a Liberal Faith,” to half a dozen people after church. Everyone seemed to like the video.

Someone who has been coming to church for two months wanted a copy to send to family, so family would understand that we Unitarian Universalists are not a “cult.”

Someone who grew up in the church wanted copies to show to friends who have never quite understood what Unitarian Universalism is.

One or two others said they would like copies, too. Both newcomers and old-timers alike felt that the video captured who we are and what we stand for. I told everyone that I had ordered twenty-five copies, and would be able to give them out at church next week. I know this video was meant as a marketing tool, but now I’m beginning to see it as a celebration of who we are and what we stand for — makes you proud to be a Unitarian Universalist.

Download a Windows Media (.wmv) or Real Player (.ram) version of the video here.

See it on You Tube here.

New media links

I like keeping an eye on new media around the Web. While I’m out in Chicago leading a workshop (with no time to produce a video), I’ll share some links to sites that have got me thinking about new ways to use new media. Check these out, and see what you think….

Just reading the titles of the sessions for Podcamp Boston 2 is already making me think. How about “Podcasting on the Cellphone [and] Building a (near) Realtime Audience”? And then there’s “Podcasting as a Tool for Non-Profits: What does it take to do a high-quality podcast for your organization?” Or how about the session titled “What is the sound of your brand?” Link.

I’ve been following an online animated video called Unleashed. The animation is minimal, but effective. The sound quality is exceptionally good. The whole online show is low-budget but very effective — and the basic structure should be relatively easy to replicate. Link.

Speaking of low-budget, “xkcd” is a very low-budget online comic strip. The drawings are crude, but the strip is funny and has developed a huge online following. Once again, this structure would not be hard to replicate. Link.

All these sites represent new ways of delivering new media content online. The real problem, as always, is coming up with content that people will want to have delivered to them….

An immigrants’ church

I’m out in Chicago leading a workshop. While I’m there, I’d thought I’d treat you to some interesting Unitarian history.

The following comes from an unsigned manuscript in the First Unitarian church archives. This manuscript, titled “How our church began,” gives the history of North Unitarian Church, which merged into First Unitarian in 1971. It should be obvious that when the author refers to a “Bohemian man,” she means someone who literally came from Bohemia, a part of Europe now part of Germany and the Czech Republic. Thus, the “Bohemian man” is a recent immigrant to the United States.

In the year 1889 Mr. Paul Revere Frothingham came to New Bedford as assistant minister to Mr. Potter who was the minister of the Unitarian Church on Union and Eighth St. He had a very pleasing personality and was liked very much by young and old alike.

In the year 1892 Mr. Potter tendered his resignation and Mr. Frothingham then became minister of the church.

It wasn’t long after Mr. Frothingham became minister that he began looking around to see what he would do to improve the community. With Mrs. Frothingham they started a club for girls, called ‘Girls Social Union’ they met in the chapel of the Unitarian Church. There were classes in sewing, millnery, & cooking, besides having fun playing all sorts of games. This was given free of charge to any girl who was interested in becoming a member.

In 1894 it was decided to hire rooms in the North end of the city 1651 Purchase St. where the girls could meet and they would be nearer their homes as they all lived in the north end of the city. It was in the same rooms Mr. Frothingham established a free kindergarten and secured a trained teacher for the children. Later this kindergarten was taken over by the city and called the ‘North End Day Nursery.’

The beginning of this movement is quite interesting, for at that time a Bohemian man living in the north end, having read of the day nursery and of a sermon by Mr. Frothingham translated was deeply impressed, and said this is what I believe, and would like my children to go to the Sunday school where Mr. Frothingham is the minister. The children went to Sunday school, soon other children joined, and this was the beginning of our [church]. Don’t know the exact year but think it might [be] 1896 or 1897.

In other words, back in the early 20th C., at least one Unitarian church was willing to promote outreach to recent immigrants.