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….

Cranky for a reason

And you wonder why Mr. Crankypants is cranky? Because he’s 48, that’s why. A University of Warwick professor has done research showing that simply being middle-aged is depressing:

Using data on 2 million people, from 80 nations, researchers from the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in the US have found an extraordinarily consistent international pattern in depression and happiness levels that leaves us most miserable in middle age…. The researchers found happiness levels followed a U shaped curve, with happiness higher towards the start and end of our lives and leaving us most miserable in middle age….

For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year. Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20 year old. Link to press release.

This news bit comes via Will Shetterly, whose commenters point out that for some of us middle-aged folk, age 20 sucked too. For his part, Mr. C. wonders if the average 20 year old just doesn’t have enough experience to realize how depressing the world is — never questioning why it is we are all in this handbasket, nor asking where it is we are all going.

A little more nuance with that, please

The January, 2008, issue of Locus celebrates the 90th birthday of Arthur C. Clarke with a number of special features, including a December interview borrowed from BBC’s Focus magazine. The interviewer asks, “What is the greatest threat that we, as a race, are facing?” and Sir Arthur replies:

Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation. It’s spreading the most malevolent mind virus of all. I hope our race can one day outgrow this primitive notion, as I envisaged in 3001: The Final Odyssey.

I think Clarke underestimates the threat of global climate change, nuclear weapons, and continuing population growth, but as he admits elsewhere in the interview, “I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy, if only because it offers us the opportunity of self-fulfilling prophesy.” There are a few other threats I’d throw in there before I got to religion — global poverty and associated malnutrition, the growing crisis around clean water supplies, violence against women, etc., etc. — threats that can physically kill you long before religion’s “mind virus” infects you.

Having said that, organized religion that “pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation” is indeed a dangerous thing; George W. Bush’s religion, which appears to have driven him to an ill-considered war in Iraq, is a case in point. Like Clarke, I am wary of religion that claims to deliver morality;– although I’m quite comfortable with a religion that allows consideration of moral issues in a skeptical but supportive community because it seems to me that moral issues are impossible to resolve on one’s own, and today’s market-driven society here in the United States allows precious few places where groups of people can talk through moral issues openly. Like Clarke, I am also wary of any religion that pretends to deliver spiritual salvation;– although I’m comfortable with a religion that simply states that all persons are automatically saved as a way of making the point that all persons are worthy of dignity and respect; but aside from that, I have no interest in a religion that claims to provide salvation only to a chosen few. (And yeah, I admit my bias, I like to think that my religion is one with which I can be comfortable.)

So I think Clarke makes one or both of the usual two errors that people make damning judgement of religion. The first error lies in damning all religion based on a small set of direct experiences with organized religion; and the second error lies in damning all religion based on portrayals of religion in the media. The first error uses too small a sample for adequate statistical analysis, and ignores exceptions that really must be considered before making such broad pronouncements. The second error is the classic error of relying on second-hand sources of questionable accuracy; if adequate first-hand observation isn’t possible, it’s always better to rely on serious peer-reviewed scholarly works, to get better data and a more nuanced analysis of that data.

Harbor seals

Sunday night’s storm left enough snow to make walking difficult on our habitual routes, so this afternoon I walked along the piers nearest our apartment. I walked out State Pier, past the crane belonging to the Cuttyhunk Ferry Company, dodged a pickup truck driving past the wire and rigging warehouse of New Bedford Ship Supply, watched the Martha’s Vineyard ferry head out of the harbor, dodged another pickup truck belonging to the state environmental police, and went down to the end of the pier to take a look at the harbor in the waning light of a cloudy evening.

When I got to the end of State Pier, I was following a Red-breasted Merganser quite close to the pier when I swuddenly found myself looking into the face of a Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina) down in the water less than fifty feet away. It looked up at me, and I looked down at it. Another seal head popped up out of the water next to the first; two more seals rolled up out of the water farther out. The first seal dove under the water, and resurfaced again at a safer distance from the pier; I could hear the second seal breathing, a sort of huff–ffff sound as it exhaled sharply and then inhaled; then it dove under the surface and disappeared.

It is really remarkable to come upon such a large mammal in the middle of an urban environment. And seals are large, typically some five feet long and weighing over 250 pounds — in other words, about the size of a small American Black Bear (Ursus americanus). If I came across a Black Bear while I was walking around downtown New Bedford, I’d doubtless feel a tingling of fear and a little bit of awe; because seals stick to the water, I don’t feel fear when I see them, but the sense of awe is definitely there. I don’t feel that same awe when I look at a merganser or a gull — they’re too different, and I don’t feel much of anything when I look in their faces — but a seal has a real and recognizable face, and it’s pretty much the same size as I am.

I stood watching the seals for quite a while. At one point, I counted seven seals with their heads above the surface of the water, or just having gone under the surface moments before. I stood stock still, and after a while they began to ignore me, and they came in closer to the pier. I listened to a couple more of them breathing, huff-ffff. At last a deepwater lobster boat came close by going one way, and a small tugboat passed close by going the other way, and the seals moved further away from the pier. The light was beginning to fade, so I headed home.

Neither moral nor managerial

Mr. Crankypants here, and as usual he has something on his mind, which is this: Why is it that people in the United States assume that everything a minister says has to do with morality? — actually, morality and guilt. As if ministers are predominantly supreme moral and ethical arbiters. Speaking as someone whose alter ego happens to be a minister, Mr. Crankypants is uniquely placed to assure you that, on average, ministers are not that much better at moral and ethical distinctions than are non-ministers. It is true that ones would like a minister who is not going to molest one’s children nor rob one blind, but having an honest minister does not mean one should feel guilty every time one sees one’s minister.

Nor, despite what the acolytes of John Carver will try to tell you, are ministers essentially supermanagers and/or superadministrators. Trust Mr. Crankypants, most ministers have little formal training in management and administration, and even less skill. The effort to equate ministers with Chief Executive Officers is a lost cause, unless your congregation plans to pay your minister a salary equivalent to a CEO salary (we’re talking six figures for a chump CEO, and seven figures for a competent CEO for a nonprofit organization, just so you have no illusions about this). It is true that there are a few ministers with MBAs, but if your minister gave up a well-compensated position in the business world, you would be wise to be a little bit suspicious about why he or she decided to drop that seven-figure salary in favor of the pittance your congregation pays.

No,– in Mr. Crankypants’s experience, it is unwise to expect a minister to be either particularly moral or ethical (thus no need to feel guilty when you see your minister), nor to expect your minister to be particularly adept as a manager. At best, we can hope for minister who approximates to a holy person. But we’ll probably have to settle for someone who actually does maintain a daily spiritual practice, and who might be occasionally inspired (a word which literally means, O best beloved, infused with spirit, or Spirit). Ha! –too bad my stupid alter ego, Dan, is none of the above; except that he does maintain a daily spiritual practice.

Now that that is settled, Mr. Crankypants will head off to bed.