Muslim reformation?…

Currently in the works, a radical revision of the Hadith:

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam – and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

The country’s powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

Link to BBC story.

Wow. For us religion geeks, this is huge news. It seems unlikely that U.S. news media will cover the story in any meaningful way, so now I’m trying to figure out where I can go for solid coverage of this story. Any ideas?

Via.

In the waiting room

On Friday, it finally became clear that I wasn’t going to shake the chest cold I’ve had since November, so I made an appointment with a nurse practitioner at my doctor’s office. My appointment was this morning.

It’s always a long wait when you go to a doctor’s office. The TV yammered softly away on one corner of the big waiting room; voices coming from the TV are compressed to be more intelligible, so it was hard to overhear other people’s conversations. A woman got up and stood facing into a corner of the waiting room, talking softly on her cell phone: “I can’t heeear you,” she said in a gentle voice; of course she couldn’t leave the room, because you have to be there when they call your name. She lowered her voice even more, switched to Portuguese, and all I could hear were sibilants: “zh — ss — zzh.”

An older man and a middle-aged woman sat next to me. He had an oxygen bottle beside him. The woman said, “There’s a lot of people here today who were here yesterday.” The man said: “What?” She repeated herself. “Busy,” he said.

A medical assistant poked her head out of one of the doors leading into the offices. “John So-and-so,” she said. Behind me, I heard a man say, “I can’t be-lieve it! You’re calling me? I can’t be-lieve it.” — in a deep booming sarcastic voice with working class New England accent.

The older man and the woman next to me talk in low voices, keeping up a continuous, and often hilarious, commentary on people in the waiting room, and on mutual acquaintances. “—- said he’s cut back on eating meat,” said the woman. “Huh,” snorted the man, “when he came over to my place, he ate plenty of meat.” “He’s putting on weight,” she said. “Look at her,” he said, “what, do you have to be 200 pounds to get a job here?” “What do you weigh,” she said innocently, “240?” “Nah, 220,” he said, sounding disgusted with himself, “I used to be 240 but being sick I’ve been losing weight like anything.” He started describing the spaghetti he was going to make for a friend of his, with shrimp and a sauce with lemon and white wine. “Why’re you going to make that for him,” she said, “he won’t appreciate it.” “You’re right, I’ll make spaghetti and meatballs,” he said, “two or three meatballs.” “Two meatballs,” she asked incredulously, “that’s all?” “Yeah, I’ll eat one, and I’ll give him one,” said the man. They both laughed quietly.

Another medical assistant poked her head out of one of the doors. “George So-and-so,” she said. “About time,” said a cigarette-ravaged voice from across the room, “fer chrise sakes.” A woman sitting right behind me said softly to her friend, “Boy, the place mobbed today.”

The older man said to the woman next to me, “What’d he say?” She replied, “About time for Christ sake.” They both laughed. “Nobody likes to wait,” he said. The woman opened her cell phone to check the time. “10:30. That’s pretty bad,” she said. “What’s pretty bad?” he said. “We’ve been waiting an hour for a 9:30 appointment. He said something about spending his life in a doctor’s waiting room.

Then they called my name, so I got up and walked into the doctor’s office. I got examined, they took chest X-rays, it’s official: I have bronchitis.

Four types of emergent church

Back in January on the blog Gathering in Light, Wess Daniels offered a typology of emergent churches, and he names his four categories Deconstructionist, Pre-Modern/Augustinian, Emerging Peace Church, and Foundationalist. Curiously, I find myself most in sympathy with the Emerging Peace Church model of emerging church, which Wess describes as follows:

This model of the emerging church stresses the non-conformist tendencies of Jesus, and thus the church should follow in his footsteps through non-violence, love of enemy and caring for the poor. This one may be closest to a kind of new monasticism that has so often been written about in recent times. While there are people from the various peace churches involved in this type of church, there are also people from a variety of traditions who are seeking to contextualize the Gospel within our culture. This group does not accept any one style of culture as being good, thus their non-conformist attitude is directed at modernity and postmodernity alike. They see Jesus (and his incarnation) as their primary model for engaging culture….

As a post-Christian Transcendentalist, my Christology would doubtless differ substantially (!) from those who might claim identity with this model, and doubtless many of them would be less than thrilled by having a post-Christian identify with them. But Wess’s description of this type this comes pretty close to summing up why I consider myself in sympathy with the emergent movement.

Another caveat:– While Wess’s typology is useful for understanding the emergent movement, he leaves out important parts of the movement — e.g., emergent Jews. Along these lines, the real task for emergent Unitarian Universalists is not to fit oursevles into a pre-exiting category, but to articulate what, exactly, we find so frustrating with the existing (20th C., late modern, unreflective, methodologically conservative, smug) practice and theology of Unitarian Universalism as we find it in most of our congregations — to be true to our own unique community of memory, while moving forward methodologically.

The words of the teacher

Screen grab from the video.

In which a toy car is a Biblical prophet.

[OK, this may be a little too “post-modern” or non-linear for some of you, but it’s short (only 1:52). Bible geeks: yes, the text is from Ecclesiastes 1.1-9, 15; KJV; a little bit re-arranged.]

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

3rd anniversary

On February 22, 2005, this blog went live. Three years and 1,132 posts later, where the heck are we?

The blog continues to be reasonably healthy. Last month, this site saw just under 4,000 unique visitors; during calendar year 2007, the site received approximately 38,000 unique visitors. By the standards of the Big Blogs, these are tiny numbers — the Big Blogs get tens of thousands of unique visitors each day. But for a personal blog on liberal religion, over a hundred unique visitors a day is fine and dandy.

Of greater interest is the current healthy state of the liberal religious blogosphere. UUpdates, a site that aggregates Unitarian Universalist blogs, now tracks some 323 blogs. Many of these blogs are well worth reading — in fact, there are so many good ones that I can’t keep up with all the blogs I like. I’m also finding more and more liberal Christian, humanist, liberal Jewish, and Pagan blogs out there that are worth reading.

What I continue to miss about the liberal religious blogosphere is the lack of face-to-face contact. Here in Boston, Unitarian Universalist bloggers have managed to gather for an annual picnic; and Unitarian Universalist bloggers typically meet a couple of times at General Assembly. As we see more and more Unitarian Universalist bloggers, my hope is that we start building regional networks — ideally, we’d include not just bloggers, but those who read the blogs as well; and not just Unitarian Universalists, but other religious liberals, too. And ideally, we will become more place-based, instead of being place-less.

30 new congregations in 2008

At Reignite, Stephen reminds us of Lyle Schaller’s advice:

The single best approach for any religious body seeking to reach, attract, serve, and assimilate younger generations and newcomers in the community is to launch three new missions annually for every one hundred congregations in that organization. A significant fringe benefit of this policy is that it usually will reduce the resources for continuing subsidies to institutions that will be healthier if they are forced to become financially self-supporting.

For Unitarian Universalists in the United States, that would mean about 30 new congregations/missions in 2008. (But I estimate we’ll see less than ten new church starts this year.)

Coincidentally, the latest issue of UU World magazine came in the mail yesterday, and it contains a good article on the history of the fellowship movement. The fellowship movement, at its peak, resulted in over 50 new congregations a year:

The tenth year of the fellowship movement proved to be a high water mark for new starts in a single year. Of 55 fellowships organized in 1958, 33 have survived — more than from any other year. But from that peak, a slowdown began. The flagging energy and limited budget of the small staff were partly responsible. Munroe Husbands, the program’s director, had one assistant and a budget of only $2,300 in 1957, with which he was expected to start 25 new fellowships and service the existing ones. But there were also other reasons for the steady decline in new fellowships. Just as congregations reach growth plateaus, so did the movement as a whole. The program had already planted fellowships in the most promising com munities, leaving fewer targets for additional growth.

I’m inclined to question the conclusions of the last two sentences. While there’s no doubt that the movement reached a growth plateau in 1958, was that a cause of the declining number of new church starts, or a result? Inadequate funding for the major growth initiative of the denomination could be a big part of the reason for the decline that occurred in Unitarian Universalist membership from c. 1961, until a small amount of growth began happening c. 1980.

Rather than quibble about the past, though, I’m more interested in asking the question: what do we do now? Can we encourage grant-making bodies within Unitarian Universalism to stop funding existing congregations, and devote all their grant money to “missions” and new church starts? How about encouraging districts to re-allocate services from existing congregations to “missions” and new church starts (OK, given how self-centered many congregations are, that’s politically improbably, but a guy can dream)? How about allocating lots of funding for innovative “missions” like FUUSE and Micah’s Porch, instead of funding advertising in Time magazine? My district, Ballou Channing District (southeastern Mass. and Rhode Island) is going to have a Unitarian Universalist Revival this spring — should we be doing more of that?

What are your ideas? How would you encourage 30 new Unitarian Universalist congregations in 2008?

Interfaith peace witness

For some months now, I’ve been planning to head down to Washington D.C. for the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq on March 7 — the weekend just before the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. I arranged to take a week of vacation at that time. Even though I’d call myself a post-Christian, I’m still someone who tries to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and as such I found last year’s Christian Peace Witness to be the most theologically significant opposition to the unjust war in Iraq. We worshipped first, protested second; that felt like the right thing to do. And the protest took the form of standing in witness, in the spirit of what Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock wrote in their book Proverbs of Ashes:

Salvation begins with the courage of witnesses whose gaze is steady. Steady witnesses neither flee in horror to hide their eyes, nor console with sweet words, ‘It isn’t all that bad. Something good is intended by this.’ Violence is illuminated by insistent exposure.

Last year’s Christian Peace Witness for Iraq also represented the largest single act of civil disobediecne in opposition to the Iraq War: some 222 people were arrested for crossing police lines and praying for peace in front of the White House.

This year: March 7, 2008

In addition to Christians, last year’s Christian Peace Witness for Iraq included Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and post-Christians like me. In recognition of this religious diversity, this year’s peace witness is being co-sponsored by an interfaith group calling themselves Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partnership.

Workshops begin on Thursday, March 6, at 6:30 in the evening (along with civil disobedience training, required for those planning to be arrested). Worship services will take place on Friday, March 7, at noon (I’ll be worshipping at All Souls Unitarian Universalist church); and the interfaith witness and nonviolent action will take place at 2:30.

If you can’t make it, why not sponsor an interfaith peace witness in your own community, similar to the Christian prayer vigils that will be taking place. If you are going to the peace witness on March 7, let me know and maybe we can connect at All Souls Church.

Eclipse

Carol remembered that we were going to be able to see a total eclipse of the moon tonight. The almanac said the eclipse would begin at 8:43; at nine o’clock I remembered to look out our front window. It’s a little hazy here, but I could see the moon pretty clearly: already, the circle of the earth’s shadow has covered a significant portion of the bright disc of the moon.

When I was a child, I seem to remember a number of winter nights when my mother would stay up late to watch partial or total lunar eclipses; or would set her alarm clock so she could awaken in the middle of the night to see them. I only remember seeing one or two, if they happened early in the evening; I was never interested enough in astronomical events to miss sleep for one. I don’t remember the other members of our family being all that interested in eclipses, either. But in memory, my mother never missed a lunar eclipse.

Beginning of lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipse as of 9:00 EST, New Bedford, Mass.