In the church

There was a memorial service in our church this evening for a woman who died in her senior year of college. An hour and a half after the service was over, I went into the Main Hall to start turning out lights. Two women, contemporaries of the woman who had died, were sitting in the back of the church. They looked up at me, and got ready to go.

“You don’t have to go yet,” I said. “I’m just turning out some of the lights to save electricity.”

They sat back down. “It’s a peaceful place,” one of them said.

I left them alone, but kept thinking about what they had said. The Main Hall at the Palo Alto church is a pleasant enough room in 1950s-style architecture. I tend to think of it from a very pragmatic standpoint: how we’re going to do Sunday worship, how we can arrange the chairs so everyone can see and hear, here’s what needs to be fixed, here’s what we could do to increase functionality. With my pragmatic bent, I can forget that it is indeed a sacred place:– that even though it is a room of no great architectural distinction, people who walk into it for the first time sense something special about the place, and respond to that by feeling soothed and perhaps more centered.

Even though churches are privately owned and maintained, they are public places. One of the central purposes of a local congregation is to keep the literal and metaphorical space open so that people can walk into it and feel soothed and more centered.

Religious Education Week at Ferry Beach

I have no shame about promoting Religious Education Week, July 10-16, at Ferry Beach in Maine: we have truly kick-ass programming line up. Not only do we have excellent programs for religious professionals and serious volunteers, we also have an excellent children and youth programming, and a tradition of superb intergenerational community — it’s worth attending just to watch the intergenerational programming in action. We often have people attend from as far away as Illinois and Ohio; I’ve coordinated conferences at Ferry Beach that drew people from as far away as New Mexico and Alaska. If you’re involved in religious education, you should think about attending.

Workshops for religious professionals:

Adult OWL Training — Get trained to lead the Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education program for adults. Our trainers will be Chris and Rev. Bobbie Nelson, both long-term experienced sexuality educators. You simply cannot find better OWL trainers than Chris and Bobbie nelson!

Worship Renaissance Module — The well-known UUA training in how to do worship for all ages. Led by Rev. Liz Strong, recently retired district religious education consultant for Mass. Bay District, and Sadie Kahn-Green, DRE at Chelmsford, Mass., both of whom are experienced at leading worship with all ages.

New DRE workshop — Relentlessly useful introduction to everything you need to know as a new religious educator. For religious educators who have been serving for up to three years. Seminarians also welcome. Led by Rev. Dan Harper.

Social Media and Religious Education — Learn about Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media, and how to integrate them in religious education. Led by Shelby Meyerhoff, Public Witness Specialist at the UUA, and Will Kahn-Green, project manager at the Participatory Culture Foundation.

DRE Credentialing workshop — Join with other DREs pursuing UUA credentialing, for support and study. Led by Rev. Helen Zidowecki

Prices and more info here.

Conference staff include: Continue reading →

Mary Daly is dead

The news is gradually filtering out that Mary Daly (1928-2010) died yesterday. I heard the news first on Facebook via Amy. Mary E. Hunt has sent out the following announcement, which has been disseminated via iRobyn and other blogs:

With a heavy heart, yet grateful beyond words for her life and work, I report that Mary Daly died this morning, January 3, 2010 in Massachusetts. She had been in poor health for the last two years.

Her contributions to feminist theology, philosophy, and theory were many, unique, and if I may say so, world-changing. She created intellectual space; she set the bar high….

Mary E. Hunt — Hoechenschwand, Germany

With all due credit to all the other women doing feminist theology during the 1960s, Mary Daly was indeed world-changing. Beyond God the Father, her greatest work, is still a radical book. For people in my generation, it’s easy to forget how radical she was and is: we’re too aware of the inadequacy of her responses to womanist and third-wave feminist theologians; we’re too critical of her binary, either-or, definitions of gender. But Mary Daly’s work is part of our intellectual foundations — in many ways, we would not be who we are if it were not for her.

Daly was a voice for liberation. Maybe I disagree with the details of what she says, but basically she’s right: women have historically been oppressed by religion, they continue to be oppressed by religion, and that oppression has to end, whatever the cost. That oppression continues within Unitarian Universalism: last I heard our women ministers still earned less, on average, than our male ministers; sexual misconduct by male ministers all too often gets passed over lightly; better than 90% of our religious educators are women (’cause, you know, raising children is women’s work) and most of our religious educators receive inadequate pay.

I would feel better about Daly’s death and the rest of this if the rising generations were more radical in their feminism, but they are not. We live in a world where feminism is either in retreat, or has been co-opted by consumer capitalism merely in order to expand the pool of consumers to be exploited. When you remove their equality as consumers, in many ways women and girls are less equal today than they were 20 years ago.

Mary Daly, we’re going to miss you.

The year of the e-reader? Probably not.

Will this, finally, be the year when e-readers take off? I don’t think so — yet there are two interesting developments worth paying attention to.

First, I’m quite interested in the prototype e-reader about to be released by Silicon Valley start-up Plastic Logic. Not only does it have many of the features I’ve been longing for, on 6 December 2009, the U.K. Independent reported that Plastic Logic’s “Que” e-reader may help the struggling newspaper industry:

“The Que, an A4 sheet of plastic no heavier than a magazine, is powered by electronic circuitry using plastic as a base rather than traditional silicone. This makes for a much lighter, more robust product that is also easier to make than other e-readers…. The screen displays newspapers and magazines in the same format as on the [printed paper] page…. Many analysts believe the Que could benefit the struggling newspaper industry as it strives to find ways of charging for content.” [But the authoritative blog Media Bistro disagrees, saying e-readers will not save newspapers.]

This video shows a prototype of the Que, and this quick look is almost enough to make me excited. But one problem is already obvious:– Plastic Logic refuses to mention price and they’re aiming it at “business users,” which means the Que will probably be too expensive for ordinary mortals like me. However, they supposedly plan to mass-market the Que through Barnes and Noble stores, meaning that they may eventually be aiming for a more reasonable price.

Second, Sony just released its latest and best e-reader, the PRS 900 “Daily Edition.” Continue reading →

New Year’s Day blog upgrade

I did a major upgrade of this blog. I had to update the stylesheet, which means things might look a little odd here and there until your browser empties its cache.

If you run into any problems, please let me know in the comments form. Thanks!

New Year’s resolutions

Mr. Crankypants is watching as people write about their resolutions for the new year on their blogs, and on Facebook. Mr. Crankypants says: Hah! half these resolutions will be forgotten within a month, and another third will be forgotten by next Wednesday. And the remaining sixth? — forgotten by tomorrow morning.

Despite that law of nature, Mr. C. will make his own resolution: he resolves to be even crankier in the new year. Especially when it comes to liberal religion and California state politics.

Wait, what was that new year’s resolution? Can’t remember now. Getting crankier and crankier because can’t remember. #@$%!

Not teaching, but still doing religious education

One in a series of entries in my teaching diary. First 2009 entry.

Sunday 27 December 2009

There was no Sunday school today, so I got to go to church to hear the sermon. I arrived a little bit late, and sat down just before the opening words. I could see Marco and Natalie sitting on the other side of the Main Hall with their godmother; I tried to catch Marco’s eye, but I don’t think he noticed me. Roger Jones, the visiting preacher, gave an excellent sermon — I was glad our church brought in a really good guest preacher on this low-attendance Sunday. Marco and Natalie stayed in for the whole worship service, and Roger’s sermon was good enough that I suspect Marco (and maybe Natalie) could pick up something from it; at the very least, the children got to hear the speech rhythms of a good preacher, rhythms which can be hypnotic and entrancing in their own right. I wanted to try to talk to Marco and Natalie after the service to see what they thought about it, but unfortunately I had to leave immediately; but I will make a point of asking them about it the next time I see them.

Later in the afternoon, I took a break and went over to the Baylands Nature Preserve, to go for a walk, and to do some birding. There were hundreds of wintering ducks in the marshlands, and I was standing on one of the dikes looking through my binoculars at a pair of Gadwall when I heard a familiar voice saying, “I don’t know if Dan wants to be disturbed.” It was Lucy, standing there talking to her daughter Dorit, who is in my Sunday school class.

I said hello to both of them. Lucy said she didn’t want to bother me, but I told her (truthfully) that I was pleased to see them both. Dorit is now six and three-quarters. I began talking to her about birds, and quickly figured out that she was interested in birds, and had some basic knowledge of how to tell different kinds of birds apart. “Would you like to look through my binoculars?” I said. Dorit nodded, and we went over to a nearby bench so I could sit next to her (when you’re six foot five, you either have to kneel down or sit beside a child when you’re going to let them use your binoculars, and it was too damp for me to want to kneel). The three of us sat on a bench looking out at tidal flats with American Avocets, various kinds of ducks, and lots of shorebirds. I asked Dorit if she knew how to use binoculars, and she did — she held them up, managed to hold them steady, and used the focusing knob. They were kind of heavy for her, though, and not much fun to use. So we just sat there looking at the birds without binoculars. It was a little chilly, and after we talked for about five minutes, Lucy and Dorit went off one way, and I went off the other way.

Strictly speaking, birds have nothing to do with religious education. But I remember that I liked it when the adults in my childhood church shared their interests and passions with me — it was nice to be treated by adults as a person instead of a child. So talking to Dorit about birding may have nothing to do with religion, but it has everything to do with being human; which I suppose is just another way of saying that it has everything to do with religion.

2009 in review: The year in Unitarian Universalist blogs

Here are four things Unitarian Universalist (UU) blogosphere this past year

1. The slow disappearance of Philocrites Philocrites, once the most influential UU blog, has practically ceased publication. At the beginning of the year, Chris Walton, the author of Philocrites, was posting about once a week, but he has not posted anything since 17 July 2009. Chris is still the editor of UU World (both the print magazine and the related Web site), and I’m glad he’s doing that. But I miss the personal voice of his blog, along with his superb reportorial and intellectual skills. We’re still waiting for another blog to fill that authoritative role Philocrites once had in the UU blogosphere.

2. Peacebang moves to Facebook Peacebang, another prominent UU blogger who prefers to remain anonymous, announced on 3 December 2009 that henceforth she would be ”  ‘mini-blogging’ on FaceBook.” If you have a Facebook account, you can “become a fan” of her page. (Her non-UU blog, Beauty Tips for Ministers, remains publicly accessible on the Web.) Among UU bloggers, Peacebang was one of the best writers, and I miss having her unique voice publicly accessible to anyone, even people without a Facebook account.

3. Rate of growth slowing in UU blogosphere? UUpdater, the administrator of the UU blog aggregator site UUpdates [pron. “oop-dates”] is now reporting 414 UU blogs. A year ago, UUpdates had something like something like 350 UU blogs. In February of 2005, when I started this blog, there were a little over 40 UU blogs, and the growth curve was very steep for about 3 years thereafter — but now it appears to be leveling off. Are the various social media sites drawing writers away from blogging? Or have we simply found all the Unitarian Universalists who want to blog about liberal religion?

4. Kudos to prolific and long-term bloggers I continue to be astounded by two long-term, prolific UU bloggers. Rev. Scott Wells has been blogging at Boy in the Bands since May, 2003 — and not only does he post at least once a day (sometimes more often), he’s literate, knowledgeable, and fun to read. Chalicechick has been blogging for exactly five years tomorrow, but before that was acknowledged as the doyenne of the UU forum at Beliefnet — she doesn’t post on her blog as often as does Scott, but she has an active Twitter feed, and both blog and Twitter dispense her trademark mix of snark, heart, and good writing.

Though he’s not a blogger per se, I continue to be astounded by the work of UUpdater, mentioned above. His blog aggregator gets an enormous amount of traffic, and I hate to think what he pays for Web hosting. Yet year after year, UUpdater writes code, deals with maintenance issues, and delivers a feed of UU blogs that I absolutely depend on — all out of the goodness of his heart. He gets too little credit for his work — so send him email telling him how much you love what he does.

5. Help from a professional As I said last year, I feel the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere is simply too big for one person to comprehend any more. This is a good thing — the more we talk about our liberal religion, the better I like it. But that means it’s impossible for me to keep up with all these UU bloggers any more. Thank goodness for the bloggers at The Interdependent Web blog, part of the uuworld.org Web site — they must read an enormous number of UU blogs each week, finds the best posts, and then they summarize and link to them. I’m glad the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) has paid staffers Chris Walton, Kenneth Sutton, and Shelby Meyerhof working The Interdependent Web — another reason to make sure your congregation pays its fair share to the UUA.