The Lakes District

My older sister, Jean, is back east from Indiana. Somehow or another, we decided to go fishing on the rivers in Concord. We had to get fishing licenses first, so we couldn’t get on the river at sunrise (the best time to fish in summer because it’s cool). But by ten thirty or so, we had my canoe in the water, and we were paddling up the Assabet River.

The river was low, and there were a couple of places where there was barely enough water to float the canoe. We had a hard time getting through a couple of shallow places. The river was low enough that it seemed unlikely that we would catch anything except small fish. But the great virtue of the Assabet is that it is lined by overhanging trees, which shade it even in the middle of the hottest of summer days. Since we were fishing in the middle of the day, on one of the hottest of summer days, the Assabet seemed like a good choice.

We skirted barely-hidden underwater rocks, and paddled silently over deep, shady pools. We ducked to get under branches, and in the shallow parts I admired the pattern of sun and shadow on the sandy bottom of the river. We heard an occasional lawn mower — lawn care companies hired by the well-to-do householders who live near the river — but mostly we heard nothing but a few hot and lazy birds, or the plop of a turtle dropping into the water at our approach.

At last we got to a place where the river was blocked by a tiny water fall, all of twelve inches high. We could have gotten out and waded in water up to our knees and carried the canoe over the tiny falls, but we decided to start fishing. It took Jean a couple of casts to get back into the rhythm of casting — she said that it must have been twenty years since the last time she went fishing — but pretty soon, we were drifting downstream with the current, lazily casting and retrieving our lures, hoping we wouldn’t catch anything.

Of course we did catch some fish, mostly sunfish — voracious little pumpkinseeds and bluegills who lunged at the lures and stared at us with their goggle eyes as we unhooked them and released them back into the river. Jean caught a calico bass, and I caught a little six-inch largemouth bass. We got tired of catching the tiny fish. We both put on larger lures, too big for the little sunfish to get their jaws around, although sometimes they still would attack our lures. We drifted along with the slow current, casting into deeper holes where maybe a larger bass was lurking. In one such deep hole, I cast and felt a bigger fish hit my lure down in the murk. We cast a couple more times in that hole, but nothing came of it.

Really, though, we didn’t plan to catch much of anything. We wanted to go fishing for the sake of going fishing, not for the sake of catching fish. We were out fishing in the middle of the day on one of the hottest days of the year, in a shallow river where there shouldn’t be any fish at all except minnows. But the Pennsylvania Dutch side of our family are anglers, and I swear I could feel some kind of Pennsylvania Dutch witchery in my fingertips. So we caught more fish than we wanted to.

We took a break in the hottest part of the afternoon, and went to a nearby art museum that was air conditioned. We ate a quick dinner, and drove over to the Sudbury River. We drifted downstream in the canoe, catching a few more sunfish, and I got a small bass. When we got to Fairhaven Bay, we started fishing more seriously. Though it was only an hour before sunset, it was still hot. We knew the fish were still lying on the bottom, trying to stay cool, maybe snapping at a tasty morsel that drifted too close. So we fished on the bottom.

Fairhaven Bay covers about forty or fifty acres, and though it’s not as deep as nearby Walden Pond, it looks much the same. Henry Thoreau used to fish here, and he said that Walden Pond, Fairhaven Bay, and White Pond are Concord’s Lakes District — which I suppose means that these ponds should be the haunts of writers, just as England’s Lakes District has been haunted by writers. Even though Jean is a writer, and a college professor of writing, we did not talk about writing, or about the literary associations of Fairhaven Bay. We just fished off the bottom of the bay. We caught some more sunfish, and Jean pulled in a largemouth bass that was ten or twelve inches long.

Thoreau wrote that he got to the point where he didn’t like to fish, saying he thought less of himself when he went fishing. For me, the point of fishing is to not think much at all, except to think like a fish — which pretty much rules out everything except figuring out where the food comes from, and where you can find a sheltered spot near a good food source. As we paddled back to the landing, Jean and I talked a little bit about the morality of fishing, and I said I was willing to go fishing because I do eat fish and meat, and fishing helps me understand that eating fish and meat means that something has to die to feed me. However, I don’t suppose that a largemouth bass thinks about the morality of eating when it eats an insect, another fish, or a mouse (a bass will eat a mouse if one falls in the water). In my experience, most human beings don’t think much about the morality of eating. Thoreau probably thought too much about a lot of things.

When the sun disappeared behind the hills, we each had a last cast. We paddled back to the canoe landing, put the canoe on my car, and drove home.

Jean’s account of the same trip: Link.

Family values in the workplace

Last Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine contains an article by Eyal Press which explores the emerging legal issue of how and when an employer can fire an employee for taking family leave, either for the employee’s health concerns or because the employee is acting as a caregiver for a family member.

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act supposedly guarantees unpaid leave to employees with such serious health problems. But the law doesn’t cover employers with fewer than 50 people (which includes most churches), and it doesn’t cover caregivers.

On the other hand, an increasing number of former employees have successfully sued their employers after being terminated during unpaid medical leave. One scholar, Joan C. Williams, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, argues in her book Unbending Gender that offering unpaid leave is a feminist issue. The article by Press summarizes her argument:

Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.

I would argue that most Unitarian Universalist congregations structure their ministry positions around this “increasingly outdated masculine norm” of the worker who can “work full time… while enjoying ‘immunity from family work’.” On a practical level, many (most?) congregations expect their ministers to work fifty to sixty hours a week (while being paid for forty hours), presumably under the unspoken assumption that if the minister has children, there will be another spouse to take care of them. On the legal level, often this outdated masculine norm is implicit in the contracts signed by ministers. By contrast, Directors of Religious Education often find themselves with flexible jobs that allow lots of freedom for caring for children — not surprising, since religious education is still seen as “women’s work.”

It would be an interesting exercise to examine one’s own congregation for this outdated masculine norm. What if the sexton needs family leave — will it be available? Are flextime and flexi-place available to every employee whenever possible? What sort of norms do employee contracts embody? Do all employees have access to unpaid medical leave? In a denomination where the feminist revolution still isn’t finished, I suspect this is now one of our most important feminist battlefields.

Another peace post

One of my sister Abby’s favorite blogs is “A Commonplace Book,” written by the children’s book author Julius Lester. Recently, Abby alerted me to an excellent post by Lester about how few protests against the war in iraq that we’re seeing (link). Lester has a follow-up post, where he says that one of his readers says that much of the protest is now happening online (link).

Both posts are worth reading. But I’d also say that the news media are ignoring the few protests that do take place, e.g., the media ignored the March 16 protest at the White House that resulted in the arrest of 200 religious leaders including Jim Wallis (as I pointed out in a past post: link).

I don’t know what the answer is — more protests, get Congress moving — all I know is that we’re spending an awful lot of money in Iraq, with few positive results. Beyond that, any war carries a huge moral cost — and I think we’re already beginning to pay that moral price.

Appreciations of Richard Rorty

Philosopher Richard Rorty died on June 8.

Jurgen Habermas writes an appreciation of Richard Rorty: Link. Not much of substance, but a nice appreciation by the man who is now arguably the greatest living philosopher.

Daniel Dennett’s appreciation is here — scroll down half way to find it. Dennett said that a difference between Rorty and himself was that he wanted the approbation of scientists, while Rorty wanted the approbation of poets.

Recalling A. Powell Davies

When I was visiting my aunt and uncle last week, Uncle Bob got to talking about A. Powell Davies. You see, Uncle Bob grew up in All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and he was a member there when the legendary A. Powell Davies was minister. Uncle Bob remembers it was an exciting time to be a part of All Souls, with large numbers of newcomers joining the church during this time. And he remembers regularly seeing United States senators and representatives sitting in the congregation, attracted by Davies’s preaching.

One of the things that Uncle Bob said that grabbed my attention was that Davies had little to do with the general administration of the church;– there was an executive secretary who took care of that. Davies attended some of the key committee meetings, and of course he had a big say in the direction of the church, but mostly he served as a religious leader. (I said that I’d bet that he had at least twenty hours a week to prepare his sermons, and Uncle Bob said that was possible. I added that I’d never be up to Davies’s level as a preacher, but that if I had twenty hours to write a sermon, it would be a lot better than what I produce now, and Uncle Bob laughed and said he’d bet that it would make a difference.)

Uncle Bob is a retired business executive, and so I thought I’d ask him what he thought of John Carver’s “policy governance” model, which is now all the rage among larger Unitarian Universalist churches, and which promotes the idea of the minister as the CEO of the church. Uncle Bob listened politely, but it was obvious he didn’t think much of policy governance. Neither do I. We both agreed that the All-Souls-Powell-Davies model of having the minister as a religious leader, with an executive secretary (or executive director, or whatever you want to call the position) sounded pretty good to us.

Uncle Bob said something else that grabbed my attention. He said that Davies typically preached about current events. According to Uncle Bob, Davies would pick a current event, hash out the moral and ethical implications of what was going on, and end up with three or four ways forward. I may not have gotten this exactly right, but the point is that Davies really gave his congregation something to chew on each week. That’s what Uncle Bob said he really liked best about a sermon — he wants something that’s going to keep him pondering over the whole week — and that’s what Davies was able to do. And what Davies chose to talk about was not typically religious:– he talked about current events, not about the Bible (or if he were still alive, things like spiritual practices and Eastern religions).

Off the highway

Three of us — my father, my older sister, and I — drove down to visit my father’s brother, Lee. We’re staying in a hotel in Lima, Pennsylvania. The motel we’re staying in is right off U.S. Route 1, one of those small motels that all look pretty much the same:– bland prints in gold-toned frames on the walls, slightly worn desk and chest of drawers covered in wood-grain plastic laminate, little two-cup coffee maker next to the sink.

After eight hours in the car, I was ready for a walk. Dad came with me. We walked up towards the state highway — the motel sits at an intersection of a state highway and Route 1 — but there were no sidewalks, not even a verge on which to walk. Dad has a bad knee, so he gave up and went back to the room. I walked down towards Route 1 through a boarded-up gas station — still no sidewalks and no verge — nothing but a big mall across four lanes of traffic. I walked around the periphery of the motel parking lot, but there was no way out. This is not a pedestrian-friendly motel. We’re fenced in on all sides by highways, like the characters in J. G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island.

But I was desperate for a walk, so I walked back up to the state highway. A kid carrying a skateboard was walking precariously along the curb at the edge of the highway. I figured if he could do it, so could I. He looked surprised to see another pedestrian when we passed. A couple of hundred feet along the roadway, a construction entrance led into trees.

I walked in to find a completed road but no houses. Blackberry bushes grew along the side of the empty road, and some of them were ripe. After I ate a couple, I turned off and followed a path someone had mowed along the right-of-way for an underground gas pipeline.

I wound up at the edge of a farmer’s field, with chimney swifts circling overhead catching their evening meal of insects. A flycatcher was calling in the trees off to my right somewhere. I could barely hear the noise of the highways, although I could see, through a break in the trees, the huge mall across Route 1.

Some preliminary notes on evil

Does evil exist? This questions vexes many religious liberals. Of course evil does exist;– but how do we define it, and what forms does it take? Can we call a person evil, or just a mass of persons, a society? Does evil have an existence apart from persons and societies, or does it only manifest in the real world?

To avoid such vexing questions, some religious liberals deny that evil exists. Some others claim that evil is a false construction arising from the errors of religious conservatives or fundamentalists. A larger number of religious liberals simply avoid using the word “evil,” substituting words like “inhuman” (even though it’s quite clear that humans are fully capable of evil), or “pathological” (which may imply that disease is at the root of all evil, or perhaps even that evil is at the root of some diseases).

I think it makes more sense to say that evil does exist, and I think it makes more sense to use the word where I feel that it should be used. I’ll give you an example. I believe that torture is evil. I can’t imagine that there would be any doubt about that fact:– torture is indeed evil. But to say “Torture is evil” causes a small problem, because now you have to define what you mean by torture. George W. Bush has said that torture is evil, and he has asserted that the United States does not use torture (the events at Abu Ghraib prison were an aberration caused by some individuals going against U. S. policy). However, some critics have charged that the United States has engaged in torture. Both these critics and George W. Bush agree that torture is evil, but they have different notions of what constitutes torture, and therefore they have different notions of what is, and what is not, evil.

So while evil certainly exists, we don’t all agree on what is, and what is not, evil. In fact, consensus about what is evil may change over time. Five hundred years ago, there was no world consensus that slavery was evil. People like Paul of Tarsus accepted that slavery was a normal part of the human condition. Most societies around the world had some form of slavery. Yet today, five hundred years later, slavery is illegal in all nations, and there is a worldwide consensus that slavery is evil. Over the course of the past five hundred years, the working definition of evil has changed to include slavery.

I’d say, in fact, that the working definition of evil is always “in play.” Working definitions of what evil is can and do change over time. The important contests about what is, and what is not, evil take place in the public realm, just as the debate about the evil of slavery took place in the public realm.

This may help explain why some religious liberals are reluctant to use the term “evil” — if the definition of “evil” can change and evolve, who are we to make pronouncements about what is, or is not, evil? But this notion may well be based on two false premises. First, it may be that there is no such thing as absolute goodness, or absolute truth, or absolute evil. The accomodationist tendencies of religious liberalism, our willingness to adapt to the changing times, would seem to indicate that we don’t believe in absolutes. The process theologians among us even say that God can change and evolve (assuming that you believe in God) — so how can there be any absolute truth, absolute goodness, or absolute evil?

A second false premise may well be the assumption that one can remove oneself from debates about evil by simply not using the word “evil.” But if the definition of “evil” is a debate that is played out in the public realm, then to remain silent is to participate in that public debate by abstaining (abstention is still a kind of participation). Further, religious liberals act in ways that indicate what they do think is evil — the religious liberals I know believe that sexism is evil, and they act as if sexism is evil, and such actions are (in a very real way) a contribution to the ongoing debate about what is, and what is not, evil.

Fortunately, most religious liberals are willing to use the term “evil.” In one way, it speaks well of religious liberals that they use the term sparingly. On the other hand, it seems to me that we have to be willing to engage in the ongoing public debate about what is, and what is not, evil. If we believe, for example, that torture is evil, we have to talk about what torture is, and we have to talk about whether the actual torturer is evil, and we have to talk about in what way the society that condones torture is itself evil, and we have to talk about what it means that other people have other definitions of torture. If we don’t talk about these things in public, then we are abstaining from deciding such moral questions.

Just some preliminary notes on the topic of evil. Debate and discussion welcomed.

Changing cultural locations

From my perspective, Harvard Square in Cambridge has gone downhill over the past decade or so. My chief criterion for judging Harvard Square has always been the number and quality of the bookstores — there used to be more than fifty bookstores in and around the Square, and now there are only eight. People are pushier than they used to be and often nasty. The street musicians are mostly whiny singer-songwriters and pop-star wannabes.

This afternoon, I got off the subway at Davis Square in Somerville. McIntyre and Moore Used Books in Davis Square has become my favorite bookstore. People walking around the square seemed cheerful and friendly. The street musician in the subway station was playing Baroque music on an alto recorder.

Forget Cambridge. Forget Harvard Square. These days, Davis Square, Somerville, is where it’s at.

Stop whining.

While stupid alter ego Dan is prostrated by the heat (actually, it’s a combination of his allergies, the heat and stupidity), Mr. Crankypants is back for a moment to berate all the idiots who are mad at the New York Slime for publishing a review of the latest Harry Potter doorstop-sized book before the official release date of the book. The horror!

The people who write in to the public editor of the N. Y. Slime say how “disappointed” and “upset” they are with the newspaper’s editors. Wait, isn’t this the newspaper that published George W. Bush’s false accusations that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Is this is the newspaper that you would trust with a review of a book that you really care about? Apparently, the answer to this second question is “yes”:

“I am shocked that The New York Times didn’t consider how upsetting this review would be to fans, like me, who have taken this journey with J.K. Rowling for many years and desperately just want to enjoy the final book without knowledge or hint of what is coming,” said Karl Hinze in a typical e-mail to Times editors.

Mr. Crankypants has advice for Mr. Hinze, and all the other Harry Potter fans who read the reviews before they read the book: Don’t read book reviews of books you care about, before you read the book. Especially not in the Times.