Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey
Hate Facebook, but still want to check Hank Peirce’s list of which ministers will candidate where? Here’s a list of all congregations currently in search from Hank’s famous Hot Stove Report.
Now moved to a new post — click here!
Continue reading “Web version: Hank Peirce’s Hot Stove Report”
In the most recent issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, Johan van de Gronden, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands, says that markets are not capable of solving all the world’s problems:
As change agents, we’d do well to seek inspiration beyond the language of business and entrepreneurship…. Suggesting that sufficient entrepreneurial tools and practices will solve most of society’s ailments is a category mistake. It comes with the tacit assumption that society is better off when social entrepreneurs replace the many functions of government. This is the classic fallacy of development aid. When NGOs start delivering the services that many poor governments can’t deliver, they involuntarily aggravate the problem rather than build a solution. Governments spiral into a starvation cycle. If citizens cannot hold government accountable for basic services, for the proper spending of the collective revenue for the public good, then on what grounds would they favor one government over the other in the polls? And what reasons would citizens have to pursue a government career?
It seems to me that some of these characteristics are not alien to, say, the state of California. The world’s eight largest economy and home to some of the planet’s wealthiest individuals is barely capable of running a balanced state budget, while providing a minimum of basic and affordable services to its citizens, from health care to public schooling. There is tragic irony in this, as some of the world’s most generous foundations, finest NGOs, and best universities are part of the same societal fabric. And I think there is a correlation. When we place so much emphasis on the values of entrepreneurship to the extent that we start defining the poor quality of basic services as market failures, we may begin to think that the conception of a business plan in the mother of all solutions.
— Johan van de Gronden, “It takes three to tango: a European perspective on American civil society,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, spring, 2011, p. 23.
The peculiar American proclivity for insisting that markets provide solutions for all problems does interesting things to liberal religious congregations. This proclivity forces those of us in congregations to adopt entrepreneurial approaches in order to remain in existence, because we have to compete in the market with extraordinarily well-funded and well-supported alternatives, such as large market-driven conservative mega-churches that preach the gospel of prosperity, the entertainment industry, therapists, yoga studios, etc. In the same vein, this American proclivity also affects the expectations of those of us in congregations, such that we demand the constant innovation of products and services that is characteristic of American markets.
Those of us in liberal religious congregations have to carry an essentially impossible balancing act. We have to utilize the best resources of entrepreneurial endeavor, not just to thrive, but to survive; and as the years go by, we have to rely more and more on entrepreneurial endeavor. At the same time, we would be betraying our ethical and theological ideals if we go too far down the market-driven path of the prosperity gospel (“Come to church, build a purpose-driven life, and you will find financial success!”), or if we began to believe that the markets are more important than our historic ethical and theological ideals. This is a big part of the basic challenge facing liberal religion today.
In one of the few breaks in the rain this week, I managed to take a walk along the old salt ponds at the edge of San Francisco Bay in Palo Alto, now the Baylands nature preserve. It was low tide, so there were birds everywhere: shorebirds, gulls, diving ducks and dabbling ducks, egrets, grebes, geese, a White-Tailed Kite out hunting. And sitting among some California Gulls were half a dozen Black Skimmers (Rynchops niger), standing on the mud flats, all facing in the same northwesterly direction. Black Skimmers make me smile; they are such silly-looking birds, with their ridiculously large orange-and-black bills with the lower mandible sticking way out past the upper mandible, and black-and-white plumage on their heads that makes them look as though they’re wearing a baseball cap pushed to the back of their heads, and gawky red-orange legs.
But they’re not ridiculous at all. Their bill may look silly to me, but it is a precisely engineered product of natural selection and evolution, allowing the birds to skim fish from the surface of the water as they fly along. No doubt their plumage also has an evolutionary function; their legs only look a little gawky because these are birds that are meant for precision flying, not for walking around on dry ground. Black Skimmers are not silly at all, they are amazingly successful organisms: “This skimmer has undergone a remarkable range expansion north from Mexico into California since 8 Sept. 1962, when the first bird was found at the mouth of the Santa Ana River…” Arnold Small, California Birds: Their Range and Distribution, 1994.
A distinction that I’ve found provocative when thinking about moral decisions about eating is the three-way distinction between those decisions give priority to other human beings, those decisions that are most concerned with one’s own self, and those decisions that give priority to non-human beings. For example, one can distinguish between three types of strict vegetarians:
In reality, of course, many strict vegetarians use all three types of moral reasoning; but even so, usually one of these three types of moral reasoning generally will feel most important to any one person.
The first type of moral reasoning above is likely to be acceptable to nearly all religious liberals. Even though we will argue about the specifics, we commonly hold an ethical standard that we should act in such a way that we minimize harm to other people. Thus, if we all agreed that eating meat is really going to take food out of the mouths of starving people, causing them serious harm, we would generally agree that we should stop eating meat. (Of course, we don’t all agree that eating meat is going to harm others; the devil in moral reasoning is often in the details.)
The second type of moral reasoning above is least likely to be given much weight by religious liberals. While most of us would agree that it’s important to take care of oneself and to refrain from damaging oneself, nevertheless we are not particularly concerned with treating our body as a sort of holy temple; we’d place a much higher priority on making the world a better place for all persons. (I’d even say the reason many religious liberals take care of their health is to have more energy to make the world a better place for all.)
The third type of moral reasoning above remains under contention among religious liberals. While every religious liberal that I know feels that taking care of the entire ecosystem is a moral imperative, some religious liberals want to do this because we humans depend on the health of the ecosystem for our own health; that is, not harming the ecosystem is of secondary importance to not harming human beings — whereas other religious liberals want to take care of the ecosystem because they feel it is more important than human beings. (This latter position is sometimes referred to as Deep Ecology, or being “deep green” rather than merely “green.”)
If we let it, this conversation can take us to some interesting questions:— What’s most important in the universe: humanity, or something else? — and what do we name that something else? —God? —creation? (which begs the question, created by what or whom?) —earth? —the universe?
And those interesting questions, and others like them, can lead us to examine the roots of our theologies. Thus, one of the reasons I can’t call myself a humanist is that I can’t place utmost importance on human beings; I would call myself a Transcendentalist where my understanding of the universe tells me there’s something that transcends humanity, something before which I and all humanity must feel very small and insignificant; and this leads me towards some kind of Deep Ecology. By contrast, many of the liberal Christians I know are humanists; that is, even though they are committed to protecting God’s creation, they would consider human beings to be of utmost importance. (Here I’m using “humanist” in the broader sense of the word that goes back at least to Erasmus; I’m not using “humanist” in the new, reductive sense of the word that merely means “rejecting God”.)
From what I’ve seen, there’s an almost unresolvable difference between those who place humanity at the center of the universe, and those who place something else at the center of the universe. And in the latter group we can also find some unresolvable differences; there are those like me who place something hugely and transcendentally larger than humans (the ecosystem? God? Gaia?) at the center of universe; there are others who are more concrete and specific about what’s placed in the center of the universe (animals including perhaps human animals, etc.). All these nearly unresolvable differences help explain why our moral arguments about eating don’t often seem to get very far — we are often arguing from very different frames of reference.
Just in time for St. Patrick’s day, an Irish ballad about flying on one of those cheap airline flights. As is true with any great tragic aria, the gist of the song is simple: in spite of what airlines promise, there’s no such thing as a flight for 50p (that’s 50 cents for you Yanks). But the rhymes, the singing, the subtitles, the dancing, and yes even the bohran player allow the song to transcend its simple gist. And I apologize if you’ve already seen this — what the heck, watch it again. Happy St. Patty’s Day.
Oh, um, not quite safe for work.
Thanks to Will! And if you’re wondering, that’s Dillie Keane (yes she was born in Tralee though she now lives in England) with Fascinating Aida.
Yesterday’s “Science” section in the New York Times has an essay by Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the morality of eating meat as compared to the morality of eating plants. During a period when she was a vegetarian, Yoon said she struggled with the question of why she thought it was moral to eat plants, but not animals:
…I couldn’t actually explain to myself or anyone else why killing an animal was any worse than killing the many plants I was now eating.
Surely, I’d thought, science can defend the obvious, that slaughterhouse carnage is wrong in a way that harvesting a field of lettuces [sic] or, say, mowing the lawn is not. But instead, it began to seem that formulating a truly rational rationale for not eating animals, at least while consuming all sorts of other organisms, was difficult, maybe even impossible.
— “No Face, but Plants Like Life Too,” Carol Kaesuk Yoon, New York Times, 15 March 2011, p. D4.
This is a classic moral problem, and it has been resolved a number of different ways. At an extreme, there are fruitarians, those humans who will eat only ripe fruits, nuts, and seeds that can be used without killing plants; and some fruitarians won’t even eat seeds or nuts since they destroy potential life. Following that, different groups of humans may draw the line in different places. A rough list of moral stands on eating various organisms, in decreasing order of strictness, would look something like this:
The above list is based on moral stands against taking life. There are, of course, other moral considerations that may affect food choices. The list below has some of these other moral stands, listed in no particular order:
Obviously, being able to take any of the above moral stands presupposes that you are in a position to make decisions about what food you eat — i.e., you have enough income to be able to make choices, you live in a place where you have food choices, etc.
I’d love to hear from you about whether you take any of these moral stands. And let me know if I’ve missed any important moral stands on food. Then in later posts, I’ll look at some moral stands on food more closely.
Driving over the high point of the Dumbarton Bridge at the end of the day yesterday, I saw the Bay area at its most beautiful. The light rain had stopped. The land was green, and looked greener still because the light was diffused through the cloud cover. The dikes around the old salt ponds were green, and the water they contained ranged from silver to black depending on the thickness of the clouds above. And the hills of the East Bay were incredibly green, their low summits invisible in the low-hanging clouds.
Some acquaintances of Carol’s go to a nearby Christian church that is doing a really interesting social justice program. Next Sunday, they’re canceling worship services at both their campuses and doing a program they’re calling “Love Works.” They will be sending the whole congregation out to do good works in the community — “no strings attached.” Their Love Works programs will involve about a thousand people, and I’m quite impressed by the sophisticated organization of this project. For example, check out the Love Works online sign-up page, where work projects are sorted by categories, and you can look through the projects, pick one that suits you, and sign up online.
Note that there are opportunities for everyone to participate, including a virtual service project of spending an hour in prayer for those who are working that day, and providing refreshments at the closing celebration Sunday afternoon. And having a closing celebration is a nice touch, too.
If you have a moment, take a look at this and tell me what you think. Is it too good to be true? Is this something that liberal congregations should be doing (or maybe already are doing)? Would you participate in this, or would you just skip going to church that day?
I took BART into the city, and happened to arrive at the Powell BART station just as the San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade was passing by. People in the Bay area make a big deal about how the San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade is one of only three in the country to allow GLBTQ people to march. But the big deal for me was that many of the spectators topped off their bright green outfits with orange-and-black Giants baseball caps. Where I come from, you do not wear orange on St. Patty’s Day.
Overheard in a restaurant: …he wasn’t the best man, but he was going to stand right next to the best man. Well, it turns out he couldn’t hold his liquor. He barfed all over himself five minutes before the wedding started. All down his front. [The best man] took him into the bathroom and cleaned him up, and he looked fine except he had little bits of toilet paper all over him. He smelled pretty funky. But he made it through the ceremony OK.
One of the houses near where we live is a modest but lovely clapboard house with gingerbread trim, over a hundred years old (that’s really old for a house on the Peninsula), and still occupied by descendants of the family who built it. In front of the house is one of my favorite spring gardens in town; it’s not a formal garden but rather almost looks like the flowers just sprung up on their own; and at the moment, this garden is at its peak.
The garden is attractive from the sidewalk, looking at it over the white picket fence, but then you don’t really see the house. I managed to find a place where I could look down and see both the garden and the house:
