Wintry thoughts

It’s one of those winter nights: blowing snow, freezing fog, not a fit night for any creature to be out. It’s a good night to sit at home and think somber thoughts….

I had lunch today with another minister; she’s in her twenties, and like me has times when she despairs of Unitarian Universalism — the churches that go into complete denial when faced with the stark choice between changing and dying; the worship services that lack meaning and spiritual depth but which cannot be changed because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”; this denomination that continues to shrink relative to the growing population of the United States. Perhaps worst of all, she pointed out that Unitarian Universalists, for all our blather about social justice, give less money per person in charitable donations than any other denomination.

We talked about how you can accomplish “culture change” within the institution of the local church. Can change occur from within Unitarian Universalist churches? Or is there too much inertia within the system to allow for meaningful change? We didn’t come to any conclusions, but we agreed on the need for change:– it’s change or die, change or lose most of Generation X and the generations after them. I don’t care what you call that change — the term “UU Emergence” is useful only because it points people to the rich conversations that have already happened in evangelical and Jewish circles — but whatever you decide to call it, change has to happen.

Winter

Today, at last, I saw a thin skin of ice on some protected parts of New Bedford harbor. A tiny stream trickles out of a culvert between the public access boat ramp and a marine construction yard on the Fairhaven side of the harbor, and where it entered the harbor I could see the thinnest skin of ice, broken up into tiny shards by the small waves that ruffled the surface of the water. Yesterday, when Carol and I were walking around that boat ramp, we saw no ice at all.

Thirty or forty gulls stood around on the parking lot for the boat ramp, mostly Ring-billed Gulls, with half a dozen yearling and third-year Herring Gulls. Most of the gulls just stood around under the cloudy sky, facing all different directions. One of the Herring Gulls picked idly at something green. An adult Ring-billed Gull thought about challenging the bigger, younger gull for whatever it was, took a few desultory steps towards the green thing, but turned away as soon as the Herring Gull looked at it. I walked over to see what the green thing might be — the gulls got out of my way very reluctantly — and discovered that it was one of several slices of honeydew melon, almost translucent from having been frozen, well-pecked, dirty, not at all appetizing.

An American in Kenya

Charlie Clements, the head of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) here in the States, is making a trip to Kenya to assess needs for aid following the recent political crisis — and he’s blogging his Kenya trip here. As yet, he has not made contact with any of the Kenyan Unitarian Universalists — I even wonder if any of those fragile new UU congregations (the oldest was started in 2004) managed to survive the crisis intact.

Low tide

Carol and I walked over to Fairhaven late this afternoon. By the time we got to the public access boat landing, the tide was quite low.

“Want to walk down on the beach?” I said to Carol. The beach in question is perhaps 100 feet long, a short section of muddy, pebbly beach in between the paved boat landing and the piers of the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

“OK,” she said. “First one to find the prize wins.”

We walked the short section of beach. There were lots or broken bottles, and small bits of plastic that had washed ashore. But there were also lots of shells, a surprising number of shells for such a disturbed section of shoreline. Particularly common were shells of the Common Slipper Shell, but there were also plenty of Ribbed Mussels and Northern Quahog.

“Look at this oyster,” said Carol, poking at a six-inch specimen of Eastern Oyster with her toe. It was a good shell, but it wasn’t a real prize.

I saw one or two other Eastern Oyster shells, a few Atlantic Bay Scallops, and some barnacles. I was looking for Common Periwinkles, which you can find in some of the most polluted parts of the harbor, when suddenly I spotted something very unusual half-buried in the muck. I pulled it out and held it up to show Carol: “Look, a sand dollar!” I said. The organism was dead, but the shell — technically called a “test” — was intact and perfect.

She came over to look at it. “You win the prize,” she said. It really was a prize — to think that a sand dollar was living in a marine industrial landscape! Carol had me rinse it off so we could take it home; and now it is sitting in our kitchen sink, drying out.

How to do emergent theology

while there are still those people who want to do systematic theology, those people typically live in the world of academia, or wish they were living in the world of academia. Systematic theology has become theology for other theologians and scholars. From where I stand, it is theology that has lost its connection with the reality of my world.

So where do I stand?

  • In the Buzzard’s Bay watershed in southeastern Massachusetts. (Systematic theology ignores watersheds and bioregions because it grows out of assumptions that theology applies in the same way to every watershed.) We are a postindustrial landscape where parts of the landscape contain intense concentrations of toxic wastes. We are in a postagricultural landscape where sprawl eats up farms and cranberry bogs. All this shapes the theological tasks of healing and redemption.
  • In a diverse community of human beings who don’t always fit neatly into the binary American categories of race. (American systematic theology, when it recognizes race at all, has a tendency to divide human beings into black and white binaries.) The Native and African American communities blend together. The Cape Verdean community may be Black, or it may be Portuguese, depending on who’s doing the looking and the talking. A White person could be an Anglophone or a Lusophone or a “Hispanophone.” All this shapes practical theological anthropology in ways seemingly foreign to the academic theologians.
  • In a place where religious discourse is divided between by conservative Catholic rhetoric on the one hand, and conservative atheist rhetoric on the other hand. (Systematic theology never seems to touch on the realities of the religious discourse in which we engage in the workplace and the wider community.) Our few liberal religious groups have silenced themselves by morphing into social groups who do not talk about religion. All this shapes theological discourse — talking openly about liberal religion is a radical act because doing so is a refusal to accept the generally accepted rules of religious discourse.

So how do you do theology when you’re so far away from systematic theology? A few academic theologians give us ways to do theology that matters. I have found Anthony Pinn particularly useful. Pinn writes as an African American humanist theologian who sees through the usual stereotype that “all African American religion is Christian.” In his essay “Rethinking the nature and tasks of African American theology: A pragmatic perspective ” (American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, May, 1998) Pinn writes:

…[M]y effort [is] to move beyond a strictly polemical discussion of Black Theology toward a more constructive and pragmatic posture that is based on three pragmatic moves. The first movement entails my rethinking conceptions of religious experience in ways that recognize the multiplicity of religious experiences. Thus, theology is done with a knowledge of and acquaintance with the variety of religious expressions. In this regard, the reader will recognize the intellectual shadow of both William James and Charles Long within this first move. The second move seeks to think through theology as empirical and historical discipline. Understood in this way, theology becomes a way of seeing, interpreting, and taking hold of African American experience. This thesis is expressed through an examination of theology’s objective and goals, using in large part Victor Anderson’s notion of “cultural fulfillment.” The third move entails reflections on methodology within African American theology. I argue for a critical, pragmatic commitment that gives priority to experience (and the objective of fulfillment) over “tradition.” William R. Jones and Gordon Kaufman provide the framework for this third movement in my pragmatic critique of African American theology.

Recognize multiplicity of religious experience: know how religion is actually done in the world around you. Understand theology as empirical and historical: observe, then interpret, before you theorize. Give priority to experience: leave the academy behind and get out into the world.

I think all this feeds into “UU Emergence,” that is, getting religious communities to deal directly with postmodern realities. There is no grand narrative any more. Instead of timeless systematic theology, tell stories about who and where you are now. There is no one religious movement that will take over the whole world. Instead of universal religious forms, let locality shape liturgy. There is no single genius who can speak for all humanity. Instead of trying to find a top-down authority that knows all and sees all, observe and feel and describe and build networks of mutuality with others. There is no one book of theology that will solve everyone’s theological problems. Instead of trying to write universal systematic theology, write ephemeral blogs.

Maybe it all comes down to getting out and walking around the place you live (I do mean walk, and not drive). I think I’ll do just that, right now.

Socialist sermons

Since 1992, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Standford University has slowly been issuing The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., a multi-volume series of King’s writings; new volumes come out as they get the funding for research, editing, and publication. The most recent volume, published in January, 2007, collects King’s sermons. In an article titled “The Prophet Reconsidered: 40 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., new studies emphasize his economic and social philosophy,” Christopher Phelps reports that King’s sermons are far more leftist than you might think:

The most recent volume [Vol. VI of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.] comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

This is a very different MLK than we get in the popular media these days! More about the book, including how to purchase for approx. US$40. Thanks to Fred for sending me the January 18, 2008, article on King.

More about UU blogs

Aaron Sawyer has put together DiscoverUU, an attractive Web site aimed at newcomers, that aggregates a wide range of Unitarian Universalist (UU) blogs (full disclosure: I’m one of the included sites.) Unlike UUpdates, which aggregates every UU blog in existence for those of us who are already Unitarian Universalists, Aaron aims to attract newcomers by picking out a wide range of representative UU blogs and podcasts and arranging them in an online magazine format.

The site went live today — check it out so you can show it to your friends who you know are really Unitarian Universalists but who don’t yet know it themselves: www.DiscoverUU.com

Not that bad

A friend called today and said, “Well, I hear you’ve been having a real winter up there.” It certainly sounds that way on the news, with all the reports of snowstorms in New England. But so far I have found this to be a relatively mild winter here in New Bedford. The harbor hasn’t frozen at all this winter, except for one day when a little bit of ice formed in one or two tiny protected backwaters. And there have only been three of four days when ice or snow kept me from walking as far as usual: we have had snow, but always followed by a warm spell that melts all the snow away.

From my point of view, this winter feels milder than the last two winters. And it’s not just my point of view — the waterfowl agree. I have seen about half the number of wintering waterfowl on New Bedford harbor this year, probably because the birds are dispersed over the many inland waterways and ponds that aren’t frozen. Had this winter been as bad as the last two, I think I’d be seeing lots more waterfowl on the harbor.