It was warm enough yesterday that we opened most off the windows in the apartment. I spent the afternoon building a planter box for our little balcony, and a raised bed for our small garden. Overhead, the California sky was as blue as it ever gets in midsummer. The breezes were gentle, the air was perfumed with springtime flowers. Intellectually, I believe that the weather is as nice as it is, but since I’m a New Englander to my core there’s a part of me that’s quite sure it will snow again before spring really comes, or a hard frost will come and kill off whatever we plant in the garden.
Straight Edge for our time
A couple of days ago, I happened to be looking up Rev. Hank Peirce, and stumbled on a 2008 interview with Hank in Double Cross, a hardcore fanzine. The interviewer asked Hank about his straight-edge reputation:
[Doublecross:] When did you become Hank Straight Edge and not just Hank? Were you straight edge the second you heard of the concept?… Are you still proudly straight edge?
…You are right on with the description of how I became Straight Edge, as soon as I heard the concept I was sold. I already wasn’t doing drugs or drinking and was so psyched that there was a name for it and bands who were singing about it…. I just looked at how all of the idealism of the 60s shit the bed once drugs were introduced. Fuck, the kids getting high and drunk in [my home]town were the ones who I was getting into fights with every day, so why the fuck would I want to be like them in any way?
Unsystematic theology: Salvation
Second in an occasional series of essays in unsystematic liberal theology, in which I assume theology is a literary genre more than a science, a conversation more than a monologue, descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Back when I was a Unitarian Universalist kid, I vaguely remember hearing an old Unitarian profession of faith that has long since been superseded in liberal religion. Written originally by James Freeman Clarke in the late 19th C., that old profession claimed that Unitarians believed in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever. I doubt many religious liberals would accept Clarke’s affirmation today, because second-wave feminism made us realize that gender-specific language doesn’t work. But the notion of “salvation by character” remains important for many religious liberals. Liberal religion wants to affirm that human beings are in large part responsible for their moral choices. We can choose to solve society’s problems, we can choose to address social sins; and when we choose to tackle social problems and social sins, we are exhibiting good character. Salvation happens through the conscious efforts of persons of good character.
Thus it appears that religious liberals link sin and salvation, where sin is understood primarily as social sin: we humans have to save humanity from social sins like racism, global climate change, and so on. If we think of religion as having both a horizontal dimension — relationships between human beings — and a vertical dimension — relationships between human beings and the divine — liberal religion characteristically emphasizes the horizontal dimension, and attenuates the vertical dimension of religion; so too with salvation. Many religious liberals do not affirm the existence of a divine being or beings, and for them the vertical dimension of salvation is vastly attenuated; salvation is a human responsibility, with a small vertical dimension insofar as humans respond to abstract ideals. Many religious liberals do affirm the existence of God, Goddess, or other divinity/ies, but they are very unlikely to say, “It is up to God [or whatever] whether or not the world is saved.” Religious liberals assume it is up to us humans, not a divine being, to solve problems.
All this seems to be generally true, yet at the same time I am aware of a fair number of religious liberals who would like to have a stronger sense of personal salvation: perhaps, these people say to themselves, it is not enough to try to save the world; we also long for personal salvation by character. Continue reading
Unsystematic theology: Sin
First in an occasional series of essays in unsystematic liberal theology, in which I assume theology is a literary genre more than a science, a conversation more than a monologue, descriptive rather than prescriptive.
The very notion of personal sin causes problems for many religious liberals. We religious liberals tend to be optimistic folks who believe human beings are mostly good. Rather than say that someone is sinful, we are more likely to say that someone has been forced by circumstances to act in a certain way. We are usually careful to separate the behavior labeled “sin” from the person who engaged in that behavior. We like to give individuals the benefit of a doubt. Even if we reluctantly conclude that someone has been sinful, we hope for the possibility that person might be reformed. We generally think of personal sin as something that’s done intentionally. An accident is an accident; an error is an error; personal sin requires a certain amount of free choice, and you have to choose to engage in sin.
On the other hand, we religious liberals are generally willing to talk about social sins. Even religious liberals who dislike to use the word “sin,” which seems to them old-fashioned and overly punitive, might be convinced to call racism or sexism a “social sin.” The word “sin” seems to carry too large an emotional impact to be applied to individual persons; but for most of us the vast amount of damage done by racism or sexism warrants the use of such a powerful word.
But who is it that is sinning when we’re talking about broad social ills? Take racism, for example: we know racism is social sin, we know that individuals engage in racism, but is it the individual racist who is committing the sin? We are much more likely to talk about personal sin when an individual has participated in broader social ills, but even then we tend to assume that an individual can be educated out of their sexism or racism (or other social sin). We imagine that sin is too big to be carried out by one individual; sin is so big we imagine it as being carried out by groups of people. Continue reading
Web site = front door
Because I don’t have any duties at the Palo Alto church this Sunday, I checked the Web for worship services at other Bay area Unitarian Universalist congregations. I did not feel welcomed by several Web pages.
One congregation’s Web site made me click through the home page and still other page before I found Sunday morning information, and even that page didn’t tell me how long the service lasted, what else might be happening on Sunday morning, what most people wear, what kind of music I might hear, etc. Another congregation prominently displayed information from last Sunday morning, including a reminder to set my clock ahead. Another congregation’s Web site didn’t display properly on my just-updated Firefox browser; I eventually found Sunday service information in the monthly newsletter, which was a huge PDF file.
Then I found the Oakland Unitarian Universalist church’s Web site. Right at the top, it tells me that I’m welcome. There’s a prominent link for newcomers to plan their first visit to the church. There’s a big picture of Sunday’s preacher smiling, and a short description of what the worship service will be. (Please note that the San Mateo Unitarian Universalist church, just a few blocks from our house, also has a good Web site, but I wanted to check out one of the other congregations in the Bay area.)
Peter Bowden likes to say that a congregation’s front door is not the door at the front of your physical building, it’s the front page of your Web site. Your Web front door doesn’t have to be snazzy, but it does have to be open and welcoming to all. Homework assignment: go check out the front page of your congregation’s Web site. Come back and tell us if your congregation’s front door is open and welcoming to newcomers or not.
Field test version: “Tales from Near and Far”
We’ve been developing a story-based mixed-age Sunday school program here at UUCPA. I finally collected nearly all the stories we’ve been using, or will be using, and put them into a small paperback book which I’m publishing using Lulu.com. Total cost for each paperback is only $4.02 + shipping — cheap! — so I purchased a copy to give to every family that’s enrolled in the program. That way, parents/guardians will have a better idea of what’s going on in the class, be ablet o catch up on stories their kids have missed, and have an opportunity to read these stories to their kids and talk about them together.
This book is a field test version of these stories (most of the stories have appeared on this blog). There are typos, some of the stories are a little rough, the final version will have a guide for parents/guardians. I’m embedding a full preview of the book in this post (the third button from the right puts the preview into full screen mode, so you can read the book comfortably).
If you purchase the book and use it in your congregation, please give me feedback, and tell me what age group you used it with, and in what setting (Sunday school class, children’s chapel, worship service, etc.)
Two hot stoves
Tomorrow at noon — that’s when congregations which choose to use the search process of the the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) can invite a minister to be the final candidate for an open ministry job. This is when we all gather ’round the old-fashioned hot stove, waiting to find out which club snapped up which ball player’s contr… — er — which congregation has snapped up which minister. Or as Hank Peirce puts it: “Who is being invited to be the candidate at what church? Where will those couple of big name ministers who have been sweet talking so many churches actually end up? Who will hire the young minister with little track record? What church is brave enough to call someone they need, and not just someone who makes them look good?”
You can gather round the hot stove in two places this year. Christine Robinson’s hot stove is on her blog. Hank Peirce’s hot stove is on its own Facebook page.
There are rules for decorum whilst sitting around the hot stoves. No fair using insider knowledge to announce a congregation’s candidate before the congregation has made its own official announcement. No bad-mouthing anyone, no ad hominem attacks. However, if a young freewheeling minister gets picked by a big corporate church that will require him/her to cut his/her hair, you may call out “Johnny Damon!” If a minister over 70 snags a plum congregation, you may call out “Phil Niekro!” or “Knuckleballer!” If you think a pick is going to result in a decades-long match with lots of home runs with no steroid use, you may call out “Hank Aaron!”
Hymn to Mother of the Gods
This is from a translation of the Homeric hymns that I just got today:
Sing to me, Muse, clear-voiced daughter of great Zeus,
about the Mother of all gods and all people.
Clash of castanets and kettledrums, the trill of reed pipes
please her, as do the howl of wolves, roar of fierce lions,
echoing mountains and wooded valleys.
You and all the goddesses, rejoice in my song.
Now that’s what I call a hymn: vivid images and sounds, excitement, and the sense that you’re invoking something that’s really out of human control.
Good translation, too. Trans. Diane J. Raynor, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004.
Death of the codex? Maybe not.
Christian Century magazine just published an excellent essay on their Web site titled “Booting up books.” The author, Rodney Clapp, begins by saying, “Hardly a day passes without someone declaring the death of the book.” Clapp goes on to say:
The form of the book that many now think is passing away is the codex, in which leaves of paper are bound into a single brick. Invented by the Romans in the third century before Christ, the codex is a remarkable piece of technology—it is compact, durable and affordable. With its folio organizational system (that is, page numbering and chapter labeling) and such devices as a table of contents and an index it is an efficient and precise vehicle of textual memory and communication.
This is a good distinction to make. When people claim the book is dying, what they really mean is that the codex is dying. (I do wonder if there were people mourning the death of the scroll after the codex was invented, but I digress.) Yet Clapp says the codex may not be dead after all:
The electronic book, as its name admits, depends on an abundant and cheap supply of electricity. It has been commonly assumed that electronic reading media would be less ecologically burdensome than the “dead-tree” technologies of print media. But Chris Anderson argues on his blog The Long Tail that “dead-tree magazines have a smaller net carbon footprint than Web media.” Nicholson Baker in McSweeney’s observes that in 2006 computer server farms consumed 60 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, while paper mills consumed 75 billion kilowatt hours. This means servers and paper mills already leave “a roughly comparable carbon footprint”—and server energy consumption is increasing exponentially.
Maybe now that we’re past peak oil, we better not count on the electronic book lasting for more than a century.