Autumn watch

In this part of the world, this is the best time of year for food.

At the downtown farmer’s market on Thursday, the produce was incredible, and cheap. From Mary, I bought the usual dozen eggs and two loaves of her oatmeal bread, a few pounds of her freshly dug red potatoes, some other vegetables — and she had the first Westport Macomber turnips of the year: huge white mild turnips, originally a cross between radishes and more traditional turnips, which you can eat raw or cooked, a local vegetable that you can’t find outside of southeastern Massachusetts. This turnip is one of the finest fall vegetables and its arrival should be heralded with a trumpet fanfare: a fanfare for the uncommon turnip. From the fruit grower, I got several pounds of Cortland apples; I used to be a big fan of Winesaps and Northern Spies, but his firm white-fleshed Cortlands have a superb texture and make just about the smoothest and best apple sauce: substantial, not at all watery, and nicely flavored. From the Mattapoisett farmers, I got carrots and cantaloupe (they’re still picking cataloupes) and cauliflower and, best of all, cranberries — real cranberries, with little bits of twigs and tiny leaves from the cranberry plant, in all shades of red from deepest crimson to pale green faintly tinged with red: just as small blueberries taste better than the huge agribusiness blueberries you find wrapped in plastic in the supermarket, so real cranberries are more flavorful, both more tart and sweeter at the same time. The next day, we drove out to Alderbrook Farm in Russell’s Mills and bought some local honey, and I made a huge pot of apple cranberry sauce, made from the Cortland apples and the Mattapoisett cranberries and the local honey — it turned a warm reddish-pink color — and I spread it on the oatmeal bread, and ate until I’d eaten too much.

On Friday, Carol called me on my cell phone and said, would I like to go to dinner at the farmer’s house? Carol worked for a couple of days pulling weeds at a nearby organic farm this week; she needed to get out of the house and away from the computer and the freelance writing, besides the fact that a little extra money is always welcome in our household. So we went for dinner at the farmer’s house, with another couple we know slightly. Before dinner, we walked around the farm; it is in its glory in this season. The summer squash spill out over the edges of the raised beds, covered with flowers and half-grown squash; the celery stands large and robust; the fall beets have grown tall leaves, rooted in deep red balls shouldering their way up out of the dirt; the salad greens show bright colors against the dark earth, light green and dark green and deep red. And the herbs were just as beautiful as the salad greens — curly parsley and Italian parsley, rosemary (Carol had weeded the rosemary bed that morning), different kinds of sage, chives, and other herbs I couldn’t recognize. After we met young Murphy, an Irish Jack Russell terrier who is being trained to catch the voles which plague the farm, and Murphy’s owner who was plowing up one bed of the farm with a tractor-mounted rototiller, we went in for dinner. Dinner included New Bedford scallops sauteed in fresh leeks and herbs, boiled potatoes newly dug, sweet and tender, and some kind of wild mushroom I had never eaten before.

So what if today is the autumnal equinox? So what if the nighttime will be longer than the daylight for the next six months? So what if winter is coming in? This is the best time of year for food, the best time of the year to be alive.

September 20 in Jena, Louisiana

Meg Riley, Board President for Faith in Public Life and Director of Advocacy and Witness at the Unitarian Universalist Association, was in Jena, Louisiana, on Thursday for the big demonstration in support of the Jena Six. A letter from Riley describing the demonstration is on the Faith in Public Life blog here.

Riley brought her eleven year old daughter, which sounds like some of the best religious education you could give.

The Harvard Coop is evil

In a Harvard Crimson article from 19 September 2007 titled “Coop discourages note-taking in bookstore”, reporter Gabriel Daly writes that students are getting thrown out of the Coop for noting down prices and ISBN numbers of books in the store:

Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.”

The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site.

Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property.

Umm, no an ISBN number is not the Coop’s intellectual property. What a flagrant example of misusing intellectual property law to intimidate people.

But wait, the Harvard Crimson reports that the Coop has gotten even more hostile.

The Coop has not been the same since they asked the Borg, er, Barnes and Noble to manage the store. I spend hundreds of dollars a year on books, but you can be sure I’ll pass by the Coop and walk a few blocks down the street to Harvard Bookstore, the last remaining independent leftist bookstore in Harvard Square.

via

One Web Day 2007

How would you like to change the world in the future? — that’s one of the questions asked by the organizers of One Web Day. I changed this question a little bit, and asked how the Web should change in the future. Short answer: we need better Web navigation, and better online content.

Watch the video, and see what you think — and if you think you could have done better than I did, you’re right, so get out there and make your own online video! New media can change the world — but only if you help create it. (3:03)

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

Local theology

Let’s see if I can make some loose connections between a few things — just sort of thinking out loud….

In the past forty years, the main stream of conversation for academics and intellectuals interested in the humanities has meandered away from the narrow confines of the established Western canon, and gone off on multiple tangents. Those of us who are willing to admit to being intellectuals are no longer satisfied with reading books by DWMs (Dead White Men) — we’ve gotten fascinated by books written by women and persons of color, we’re reading books that were once only of local interest, and we’re looking in to folk literature and oral history and other, less fixed, media.

We’re meandering through a tremendously exciting intellectual landscape. Instead of just reading Walden, Nature, and The Scarlet Letter, we can read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and discover that it is just as good a book as those old standbys from the old American Renaissance canon. Instead of just reading Henry James, we find out that Sarah Orne Jewett was pretty darn good in her own right, and less ponderous than James. We still keep an eye on the great classics — Shakespeare and the King James Bible still tower above the rest of the literary landscape as the tallest mountains — but we’ve discovered that we don’t need to spend all our time climbing Mount Everest when there are many other equally interesting mountains and hills right in our own backyards (as it were) to explore.

And somehow this all connects with what I’ve been feeling about Western theology. I know I should be interested in reading Thomas Aquinas and Kant and (because I’m a religious liberal) Schleiermacher. But I’m far more interested in learning about Mary Rotch, a New Light Quaker who was read out of New Bedford Friends Meeting in the 1820’s for her liberal views, who joined the New Bedford Unitarian church, and who apparently had a profound influence of Emerson. As a Quaker, she didn’t prepare written sermons, but some of her vocal ministry apparently was recorded, and now I’m trying to track that down. She was no Thomas Aquinas, she wasn’t even a George Fox, but what she had to say deeply influenced many people here in New Bedford, and through her influence on Emerson her ideas spread even farther afield.

It’s a truism in certain circles to say that all theology is local theology. Local theology is the intersection of a religious tradition in on elocality, its local history, its place in a wider religious community or network, and the lives of the people in that religious community along with the lives of others in that region. Schleiermacher natters away to the cultured despisers of religion (read: upper middle class) about how religion is just symbolic; Aquinas and Kant spin their ontological fantasies about the nature of God and the ground of morals; and all the while, other people are actually living out religion and creating theology through the way they live their lives. I’m much more interested in local theology than the theology of academics and DWMs.

So when someone says to me, “Do you believe in God?” I want to respond flippantly, “Depends on where I am,” or more seriously, “Do you mean the God of the academics, or the God which may or may not manifest in the lives of people living in New Bedford?” Because when people talk about God in New Bedford, they tend to mean something different than the God I heard talked about in Geneva, Illinois (in Geneva, God does not bless the fishing fleet each year) — to say nothing of the fact that those who disbelieve in God in New Bedford disbelieve in a different God than those who disbelieve in God in Geneva, Illinois. And we can distinguish an even finer grain than that, for Unitarian Universalists in New Bedford believe or disbelieve in God in different ways than Unitarian Universalists in Geneva, Illinois.

As I said, I’m just thinking out loud here. Maybe some day I’ll make some sense out of what I’m trying to say.

Talk like a pirate

Fortunately, Ms. M sent email reminding me that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

In our church office, Linda, our secretary, and I are both big fans of talking like pirates, and we have been taking full advantage of this annual celebration. Claudette, our administrator, just looks at us and shakes her head.

A couple of minutes ago, Claudette said, without turning around from her computer, “OK, it’s time for me to go. Anything else you want before I take off?”

Linda said no, but I said, “Just one thing. We want to hear you talk like a pirate just once today….”

This strange, gruff voice came from Claudette’s desk. “Arrr, why would I want to do that foolishness?”

After a moment of shocked silence, Linda and I laughed. “Hey,” I said, “You’ve got the best pirate voice of any of us!”

“Of course I do,” said Claudette, grinning. “I’m older and wiser than both of you.”

“‘Pegleg Claudette,’ that’s what we’re going to call you,” said Linda.

Minor updates

Today, I devoted what free time I had to working on some long-standing issues on the main Web site.

  • I added a few new readings to the collection of responsive readings, as well as fixing the page navigation a little.
  • On the quote page, I added some new quotes, got rid of some old ones.
  • A few other minor odds and ends added, subtracted, repaired, updated.

If you have any comments or complaints about the changes, or about anything else on the main Web site, here’s your chance — leave your thoughts in the comments to this post.

One Web Day 2007

I’ll be participating in the 2007 edition of One Web Day, this Saturday, September 22. The organizers of One Web Day are encouraging us all to make short videos and “post them on blip.tv or youtube or dotsub.com tagged onewebday2007 .” If you don’t make online videos, they’re suggesting you write something on your blog or Web site. And if you don’t have a blog, write a nice juicy comment on someone else’s One Web Day post. Their suggested topics include how the Web has changed your life, how you hope the Web will change the world for the better in the future, or even something you’ve done online with people in other countries.

Here’s a short version of their manifesto:

The internet is made of people, not just machines. It’s up to us to protect it. We can use OneWebDay around the world to raise awareness of the threats to the internet — including censorship, inadequate access, control of various kinds — and to celebrate the positive impact of the internet on human lives.

Since I’m a Unitarian Universalist minister, my One Web Day post will probably bring up Tim Berners-Lee’s essay WWW, UU, and I. But I’m thinking that I might want to explore the links between visual art (especially performance art, conceptual art, and video art) and the Web. Check in on Saturday, and see what I come up with.

Update, September 18:

Tim Berners-Lee has posted his One Web Day video, and he uses his video to talk a little bit about the future of the Web. Of course he talks about net neutrality, and says that a key aspect of the Web is the fact that anybody can connect to anybody; that’s something we must keep in the future.

He also warns against “web rot,” which occurs when people design Web sites carelessly: “they don’t make good HTML, they don’t close their tags.” He encourages all those of us who make Web sites to validate our HTML. (Admission: my Web site does not validate because somewhere, somehow, I used two invalid div id values. Rats. At least I closed all my tags. And I’ll correct the div id value problems RSN.)

The right thing to do

I missed the phone call, but I got the message: “Hi, this is Dr. ——, and I’m just calling to se how you’re doing….” It was the periodontist. He said that if I had any problems, I could call him at a phone number that I knew was not his office number (it was a different area code); perhaps a cell phone or home phone. It was not a mechanical or rote phone call; he sounded genuinely concerned, and if I was having problems this evening (I’m not, everything is fine) I would have had not hesitation in calling him.

Did I feel good about that call? You bet. The two hours I had spent in his office that morning had not been exactly pleasant. It was very nice to get a phone call tacitly acknowledging the unpleasantness. It’s tempting to say that it’s “good customer service,” but I’m not a customer, I’m a patient who had some minor outpatient surgery. So let’s say that the phone call was the right thing to do.

It occurs to me that much of what I tend to call “church marketing” isn’t marketing at all; it’s just the right thing to do. Of course you write a handwritten note to someone who signs the church guest book; it’s the right thing to do. Of course you welcome any all visitors to your church, treating them like honored guests; it’s the right thing to do. You don’t do it to grow your church, you just do it.