Monthly Archives: February 2008

To go, or not to go?

I’ll be going to General Assembly, the annual gathering of United States Unitarian Universalists, this June. Many other Unitarian Universalists have decided not to attend this year, because General Assembly will be held at the Fort Lauderdale convention center — which, as it happens, is within the security boundaries of Port Everglades, a bustling port that requires government-issued identification for anyone who enters — which means that “for better or for worse, it will be the United States government that decides who can or cannot be with us — in worship, in community, and in our plenary sessions,” according to Rosemary Bray McNatt. That’s a pretty creepy thought.

I’ll be going, in spite of the creepiness of the United States government checking my identification before I can enter a worship service. I guess I have never believed that General Assembly is an open meeting. For more than half my working life, I have worked jobs where I would have found it difficult to find the money to pay to travel long distances and stay in hotels for five days while attending General Assembly — assuming that I could have even gotten the time off from work.

General Assembly has always erected huge economic barriers to participation by many (probably most) Unitarian Universalists. Every once in a while, that fact is mentioned in passing, but it is usually dismissed offhandedly. I find it harder to dismiss this fact. The central purpose of General Assembly is for duly appointed delegates from congregations to transact the business of the Unitarian Universalist Association in an allegedly democratic process. The economic barriers to attendance at General Assembly — barriers which keep many potential delegates from attending — mean it’s not a real democracy.

Then there’s the undeniable fact that having thousands of people travel each year to General Assembly releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. Other denominations, much bigger than ours, get along fine with general meetings every second year, or even every four years. With the latest projections that the Arctic ice cap will melt by 2013, how can I in good conscience get on a jetliner to attend a meeting that I feel does not need to be held every year? How can I in good conscience contribute to the desertification of central Africa and the flooding of Bangladesh, just so I can attend General Assembly every year? (I’ll be taking the train again this year instead of flying, which will cut my pollution enormously — about 990 lbs. of CO2, as opposed to about 1,930 lbs. if I flew, or 1,160 if I drove, according to carbonfund.org.)

So why am I going to General Assembly this year? For the simple reason that I volunteered to serve as a reporter for the UUA Web site. From a selfish point of view, this is a fantastic learning experience for me, a chance to hang out with geeks, videographers, photographers, writers, and editors who are all far more talented than I. Less selfishly, I feel that reneging on my commitment at this late date would be worse than tolerating the insanity of security checkpoints.

As for next year, I don’t know. The insanity of security checkpoints hasn’t stopped me this year, but the idiocy of an effective economic oligarchy and the heavy environmental cost may well keep me away from General Assembly next year.

Just the facts, ma’am

As the United States news media focuses on campaign minutiae — like the ongoing New York Times in-depth coverage of campaign advertisements (who cares?), and the fluffy personality pieces about candidate spouses — it’s hard to find solid factual information. So I turn to the BBC news Web site, which now features US elections map: state-by-state guide, an interactive map which shows who won (or is projected to win) how many delegates in which states.

Speaking of terrible election coverage, our local daily newspaper, the New Bedford Standard Times, never seems to have reported the result of many of our local elections last fall. They give us in-depth coverage of the Patriots (which is covered far better by the big regional papers like the Boston Globe), but ignore such important news stories as who won the New Bedford school committee race. I learned who was elected to the school committee from the local freebie paper, The Weekly Compass.

No wonder newspaper readership is rapidly declining in the United States. They feed us pundits and pablum, and expect us to suck it down and like it. When readers like me turn to the Web for our news — because that’s where we can get the facts we’re looking for, instead of pundits and pablum — the newspapers howl that blogs don’t provide “real journalism.” As it happens, blogs like Justin Webb’s BBC blog have given me more real news and factual information on the U.S. election than the New York Slime or the Wall Street Urinal.

Too bad, because I’m actually very fond of newspapers. But it seems to me they’re doing the damage to themselves, by not providing the facts readers want.

Spring watch

At 6:30 this morning, I was suddenly wide awake. This is unusual, because I always get up at seven on work days. But now the days are longer, and the sun rises early enough to make me think that it’s past the time when I should be awake and out of bed, which made me awaken with a start this morning thinking, Have I slept through the alarm? I looked at the clock and reassured myself that I had another half hour to sleep.

The temperature got up to 50 degrees today, warm enough to feel like spring. But it was dark and gloomy for most of the day, and even though we got rain instead of snow the sky had all the gloom of winter. February is always a difficult month in New England: the days start to get longer, we get occasional spells of warm weather, but you can’t get decent vegetables, it’s bound to snow again, and we’re still sunk in winter gloom. People talk about “spiritual practices,” but as a born and bred New Englander I mistrust “spiritual practices,” because I know the only thing that’s going to stand up to February is good old fashioned religious discipline: so I write every day whether I want to or not (and believe me, today I don’t want to), and I religiously take a long walk every day. With a little bit of discipline, I can ignore the winter gloominess and focus on the tiniest signs of spring, like the fact that I came awake a half an hour early this morning.

Written work by three remarkable sisters

Some of my regular readers are quite interested in Transcendentalism. There’s been some interesting research into the Transcendentalists recently, and of particular interest has been the attention that scholars have finally been paying to Transcendentalist women. The publication of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism in 2005 has renewed my interest in these three gifted women — Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, an educator who was in the absolute center of the Transcendentalist movement; Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne), who was one of the first American women to make her living as a visual artist; and Mary Peabody (Mann), who was an educator and a writer.

In the past, I have found it difficult to locate writings by these women, but now you can find quite a bit of their work on the Web here’s what I’ve found so far:

Five letters from Sophia to Elizabeth.

Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide, a book co-written by Elizabeth and Mary.

Christianity in the Kitchen, an interesting cookbook by Mary.

Record of a School, a book about education by Elizabeth.

If you’re new to the Peabody sisters, you’ll find a good summary of their lives here.

Question for readers

I wound up having an interesting conversation at coffee hour today with several parents of Sunday school children. We were standing out in the church garden, watching children run around like wild things. As such things go, we have a pretty good garden for children to play in: there are some safe trees to climb (with low branches overhanging soft grass), and a small grassy lawn to run around on. But….

But it’s a small garden, a fairly formal garden, and we don’t really have room for active games. I mentioned that I’ve been thinking that we could install a couple of tetherball posts — tetherball is good because is doesn’t take much room, and you can take the whole thing inside when you’re done (even though we have a fence around our garden, it is a city garden, and things do get stolen). One of the parents suggested one of those moveable basketball hoops — there’s not enough room for a real game of basketball, but you could play shooting games like “Horse.” And what about Frisbee golf? — we don’t have enough room for a real Frisbee golf course, but we do have enough room for a child-sized course (if you’re willing to lose the occasional Frisbee over the fence).

I would be very curious to know if any of my readers might have suggestions based on their own experience in churches that have very little space. How have you integrated sports and/or active games into your church grounds?

Frederick Douglass, religious liberal?

I found a wonderful reading from an article written by William L. Van Deburg, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Van DeBurg claims that Frederick Douglass became more and more religiously liberal the older he got:

It would be a mistake to portray [Frederick] Douglass as a piously conservative Christian. His biographers have correctly noted that he was not orthodox in his doctrine. His belief that religion should be used as an instrument for social reconstruction led him to despise the passive attitude shown by many Negro ministers.

As he progressed in his abolitionist career, Douglass was influenced by those champions of Reason, Transcendentalism, and Unitarianism whose doctrines he had [once] condemned. In an 1848 essay, he noted that the destiny of the Negro race was committed to human hands. God was not wholly responsible for freeing those in bondage. By 1853, he was willing to criticize Henry Ward Beecher’s reliance on God to end slavery. If Beecher had been a slave, Douglass noted, he would have been “whipped … out of his willingness” to wait for the power of Christian faith to break his chains.

Increasingly, enlightenment terminology crept into Douglass’s writings and speeches. Negroes were adjudged to be ‘free by the laws of nature.”

The slaves’ claim to freedom was “backed up by all the ties of nature, and nature’s God.” Man’s [sic] right to liberty was self-evident since “the voices of nature, of conscience, of reason, and of revelation, proclaim it as the right of all rights.”…

Douglass was also affected by the words of transcendentalist preacher Theodore Parker. The [Unitarian] minister’s ideas on the perfectibility of man [sic] and the sufficiency of natural religion were eventually incorporated in the abolitionist’s epistemology. In 1854, Douglass noted, “I heard Theodore Parker last Sabbath. No man preaches more truth than this eloquent man, this astute philosopher.”

The article is titled, “Frederick Douglass: Maryland Slave to Religious Liberal,” and it comes from By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, edited by Anthony Pinn (NYU Press, 2001). If you’re a Unitarian Universalist, this whole book is worth reading, if for no other reason than to help you counter the people who say, “Oh, we’ll never get many African Americans in our Unitarian Universalist churches, they’re all Christians.” Pinn demonstrates that there is an important strand of African American humanist thought extending back at least into the 19th C. — if we Unitarian Universalists were more aware of that fact, we might discover that our churches are a lot whiter than they need to be.

Then we could go on to recognize the existence of Latino/a, Lusophone, and Francophone humanists and free thinkers….