Author: Daniel Harper

Catchphrase

Recently, I’ve noticed a new catchphrase in mass correspondence that comes from both the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA). Instead of addressing us recipients as “friends” or “colleagues,” or something similar, some of the people sending us this correspondence address us as “Beloveds.” (And yes, this word always seems to be capitalized.)

I’ve spent most of my career in Unitarian Universalist congregations cleaning up after misconduct by professional staff. Most of that misconduct was sexual misconduct, and most of the people perpetrating sexual misconduct were men. I never heard those perpetrators say “Beloved,” but some of them talked rather freely about how much they “loved” “their” congregations, and “their” congregants. (I’m putting the word “their” between quotation marks because that in my experience that sense of possession was also characteristic of sexual misconductors; and unfortunately, the word “Beloved” also carries connotations of possession.)

Now, I understand the intent behind addressing me as a “Beloved.” At least I think I do. I think the person calling me a “Beloved” intends to include me in a “Beloved Community”? Or maybe they just want to signal that love is at the core of Unitarian Universalism? Actually, I’m not real clear on the intent behind calling me a “Beloved.”

But it creeps me out. Yes I know, maybe I have a little bit of secondary trauma from dealing with a number of religious communities that have been traumatized by sexual misconduct. Yes I know, the word “love” in the English language incorporates a whole range of meanings and I don’t need to interpret that word as necessarily creepy. And yes, OK, maybe I’m being oversensitive.

Even so — when I’m addressed in correspondence as “Beloved,” it does creep me out. Once I hit that word, I find I rarely read any further. It just sounds so yucky, and it stops me dead.

Another anniversary

I was talking with someone I know about the deaths of our respective parents. This person’s parents died four and six years ago, and I got the sense they still feel it fairly strongly. My mother died twenty-five years ago today. I thought I’d feel strongly about the twenty-fifth anniversary my mother’s death, but that hasn’t been the case. Of course I still think about her. But twenty-five years is a long time. She died so long ago now that I don’t really remember what she looked like, I mostly just remember what photographs of her look like. And I don’t really remember what she sounded like, I mostly just remember the one audio recording my younger sister made of her. Then too, she had dementia the last few years of her life, so some of my most vivid memories of her are from that time. So, for example, I remember sitting in my parents’ dining room talking to my mother. She obviously had no idea who I was, but was very polite to me. My father walked by, smiled at her, she smiled back. When he was out of earshot, she turned to me and said, “Who was that man?” That kind of memory is more recent and more vivid than most of my other memories of her. I often feel that my memory is unreliable, and perhaps this is one reason why: the memories I wish were most important, and thus most vivid, often seem to get obscured by other memories.

An anniversary

Thirty years ago this past August, I began working as a director of religious education (DRE) at a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I’ve been working in UU congregations in one capacity or another ever since: as a DRE (twice), an interim religious educator, an interim associate minister, a minister of religious education (twice), and as a parish minister (twice).

Over thirty years and nine congregations, I’ve never seriously considered switching careers. The pay isn’t great (when I moved to Massachusetts, I discovered that I qualified for low and moderate income housing). The job security isn’t all that great (not any more). But I’ve stuck with it, mostly because congregations do a lot of good in the world. For example, research shows that kids who are part of a congregation are less likely to engage in risky behaviors (substance abuse, suicidal ideation, etc.), and are more likely to have good mental health. It’s pretty good having a job where I feel like I’m helping make the world a better place.

But it is kind of odd to think that it’s been thirty years….

Updated curriculum

I just finished an update of an 8-session curriculum (with an additional ninth alternate session) titled “From Long Ago.” This curriculum is based on stories from the old Sophia Fahs book From Long Ago and Many Lands. To avoid some of the biases Fahs had, I went back to the original sources she used, and referred to other translations and sources, to completely rewrite all the stories.

Version 2.0 of the curriculum has now been released — see it here. In addition to cosmetic changes and light editing throughout, I’ve added more illustrations. I also added several stories; version 1 of the curriculum required access to the 1948 Fahs book, but with the addition of these stories, Version 2 is now completely independent of the Fahs book.

I’m planning to release additional over the next few months. These new releases will be numbered as Version 2.x. I’ve already rewritten some other stories from the Fahs book, and am working on new session plans for those stories.

To allow for updates, this is an online-only curriculum for now. Someday if I have time, I may create a print-on-demand version, for those who prefer a hard copy (it’ll be expensive, though, due to the numerous color illustrations).

Website updates

What with the new job two years ago, and moving across the country, and the death of my father-in-law and his wife, and a few other major life events like that, I haven’t had time to properly maintain my main website, my sermon website, or my religious education curriculum website.

For the past month or so, rather than creating new content for this blog I’ve spending my time fixing a multitude of problems on these websites. Mostly I’ve been working on small things, like updating formatting, correcting typos and other errors, etc. — nothing I can point to and say, “look at this cool new stuff” — time-consuming stuff most people won’t notice but which is nonetheless necessary.

A couple of things I worked on that might be worth glancing at:

If I make any other significant progress on these websites, I’ll post an update.

Ella Jenkins

Today I got to listening to Ella Jenkins songs on Youtube. I was mostly curious how she used her ‘ukulele when she was singing with children.

But as I watched the few videos there are of her actually singing with kids, I began to appreciate how good she is working with children. She was especially good with preschoolers and early elementary grades. There’s a great photo on her website showing her sitting on the floor in the middle of a circle of young children leading a song. Of the 18 children visible in the photo, every single one appears engaged with the music — even the ones who are looking away are clapping along with the song.

Her music is also just right for young children. Her singing is understandable and straightforward, and she’s brilliant at using call-and-response techniques to get kids singing. Her skillful ukulele accompaniment is understated, so that it supports but never overwhelms the singing. Both the songs she has written, and the folks songs she has found, are prefect for singing along. Pretty much everything she does seems designed to get kids to sing along with her.

You can watch her in action in a video where she sings “Who Fed the Chickens” with another group of preschoolers. This is a call-and-response song with hand motions. Ella sings, “Who fed the chickens?” and the children respond with “I did,” or “she did,” or “they did,” or “we did,” while pointing at the appropriate person or group of people. Ella makes it all fun, and the children respond. It’s also worth noting that the video was recorded in 2012, when Ella was 88.

Woman seated on a low chair holding a ukulele, with a group of young children in front of her.

Ella Jenkins is pretty fabulous. Makes me want to play the baritone ukulele.

Early birth control activist

An excerpt from a book I’m writing about early Unitarian congregations in Palo Alto, Calif., 1895-1934. It’s also part of my series of posts on obscure Unitarians. The first biography is of Sylvie Thygeson, an early birth control activist. Birth control activists in the early twentieth century deserve greater attention, and hopefully her biography helps expand the amount of information in this area. Sylvie’s daughter Ruth was also a birth control activist, but since her life was short and outside the scope of my main research, I only have a brief biography of her.

N.B.: This supersedes an earlier post on Thygeson, and includes substantial additional research.

Sylvie Thygeson and her daughter Ruth

Sylvie Grace Thompson Thygeson

An advocate for woman suffrage, and an early birth control activist, she was born June 27, 1868, in the small town Forreston, in north central Illinois. Progressive activism had a long history in her family. Even her name “Sylvie,” a French name, came from the family’s activism. Her paternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, and her grandmother were abolitionists and conductors on the Underground Railroad. When Sylvie’s father was a boy, he met an African American girl named Sylvie who was part of a family of fugitive African Americans escaping from slavery in Louisiana. When his own daughter was born, he named her after that African American girl.

Late in her life, Sylvie told the story that even though her paternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister, in the town she grew up in “we were the only family that were atheists.” Although their precise beliefs about the non-existence of God are unclear, they apparently had no formal religious affiliation.

She entered high school at age twelve and graduated at sixteen, after which she taught in a country school. But her teaching career only lasted for a month, until her father died. After his death, she was sent to live with an uncle in St. Louis, Mo. Her uncle, an appellate judge, gave her a job as a stenographer. She later recalled her time in St. Louis as a broadening experience, one that made up in part for her family’s inability to send her to college. As it happened, her uncle also gave her the beginnings of a solid legal education, and she learned enough about law in her two years in St. Louis to later gain her admission to law school as a second-year student.

Continue reading “Early birth control activist”

Online resource for practical theology

Practical Theology Hub is a website that says it’s “a space for anyone with an interest in practical theology to share their reflections and explore new ideas.” It’s “not an academic website” but rather publishes short articles from partitioners, academics, students, and “retirees.”

Here are some of the titles of recent articles that caught my eye: “Growing closer to God through stained-glass windows: A dyslexic autistic perspective” (Christianity); “Neoliberalism, Social Inequality, and Christianity of Liberation” (Christian); “Food and interdependence: Responsibility in food donation” (Buddhist); “Avatar Discipleship – Who am I engaging with the avatar or the person?” (Christian); “My Friend, Siddhartha” (Indic religions); “Two Peoples Living in This Land” (Judaism); “Armed Resistance, Islam, and the Limits of Secular Approaches” (Islam).

Ecological board games

The Religious Education Association is holding an online talk this evening. One of the presenters will be on ecological board games:

“Paul H. Van Straten, Memorial University of Newfoundland: ‘Anticipating the Opportunities and Challenges of Using Commercial-off-the-Shelf Games to Educate People on Environmental Sustainability in a Christian Context.’ Some studies show that digital games and board games can be used to facilitate religious learning in Christian post-secondary settings. Would game-based learning be a viable option for educating Christians on environmental sustainability in a congregational church environment? This paper analyzes several commercially-available ecological digital games and board games to explore potential learning opportunities and challenges for integrating such games in a Christian small-group study environment.”

Although the paper will tell about games in Christian communities, I imagine the findings will be applicable to Unitarian Universalist communities as well (perhaps with some tweaking and language changes).

This is actually a topic that I’ve been working for some years now. I’ve used various ecological games in Unitarian Universalist religious education for children and teens since at least 2006. Recently, I’ve been working on ecology games for adults. To this end, I recently attended an online talk by Thomas Maiorana, professor of design at U.C. Davis, where he introduced a board game he’s developing that’s intended to promote wildfire resiliency in local communities. (You can watch a recording of the talk here.)

Local congregations and faith communities should be ideal settings for ecology board games. So I’m looking forward to tonight’s presentation, in hopes that I’ll learn about some new games, and more importantly learn about implementation strategies.

For the record, some of the ecology board games I’ve used in UU settings include:

  1. Wildcraft: A Cooperative Herbal Adventure Game teaches players about some common wild herbs. It plays well with mixed age groups, and in my experience kids up through middle school have fun with it. At approx. $50, it’s expensive.
  2. NOAA’s Carbon Cycle Game shows how burning fossil fuels affects the carbon cycle. You can play this as a tabletop game, or as a run-around game.
  3. Family Pastimes publishes several board games with ecological themes. I’ve played three of their games — A Beautiful Place, Earthquake, and Dragonfly with young children, and all three were fun and well-designed. Better yet, they were inexpensive, just $12-15 each. (But these aren’t adult-friendly games.)
  4. Promoting Wildfire Resilience. Thomas Maiorana hasn’t yet made the board game publicly available, but will do so soon on this website.

In addition, the following are run-around games, not board games, but worth playing:

  1. Lynxes, Hares, and Leaves is an active run-around game I got from environmental educator Steve van Matre’s book Acclimatizing. I’ve played this successfully with mixed age groups including adults and kids. Here’s an old version of my adaptation of this game. Someday I’ll get around to posting my updated rules.
  2. The Food Chain Game is another run-around game that I’ve played successfully with mixed age groups. This is my heavily adapted version of a game from the old Project WILD curriculum. Again, one of these days I’ll post my rules.

Other games I’m intrigued by, but haven’t yet played, include the following:

  1. Several ecology games in this listicle on the Edge Effects website
  2. Wildfire: A Learning Game, a free game which you download and print yourself
  3. Two adult-friendly games from Family Pastimes: Climate Crisis and Somewhere Everywhere Water Rising

Another one

Well, sadly the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) just sent out another notice of a minister removed from fellowship.

I keep on posting these notices here, just so there’s more of an online record of these events. By posting this, I’m not making any judgement about the minister in question, nor about the MFC’s decision. Since I’m not privy to the facts of the case, there’s no way I could make a judgement. My only purpose in posting this is to hopefully increase transparency just a teeny bit when ministers are removed from fellowship.

Here’s what the email from the MFC said:

“The Ministerial Fellowship Committee voted recently to remove the Rev. Kelly Spahr from fellowship for violation of MFC Rule 26, which requires ministers to notify the MFC immediately of any complaint of abuse and/or neglect of a child or any other person brought against the minister, and/or any complaint of domestic violence, harassment or request for a restraining order brought against the minister.”

Note that Rule 26 doesn’t appear to mean that a minister has engaged in, or been convicted of, abuse, domestic violence, etc.; the rule merely says that a minister must notify the MFC if such a complaint is lodged against them; i.e., even if there’s a false accusation, a minister still has to notify the MFC. This makes sense. But this also makes me realize that I haven’t read the MFC rules in a couple of decades, and if I ever knew about this rule I’ve long since forgotten it. Now I feel ignorant. And it looks like I had better review the MFC rules in the very near future.

Update, 10/23: Another email from the MFC came in at 7:56 yesterday evening: “The Ministerial Fellowship Committee voted recently to remove the Rev. David Kohlmeier from fellowship for egregious violation of the MFC’s rules and UUMA Guidelines, as well as our fundamental Unitarian Universalist values.” Kohlmeier had already been suspended from fellowship in 2022. Online, you can find plenty of news stories about Kohlmeier, but here’s a quick summary: In September, 2022, he was arrested in a sting operation and charged with using social media to solicit sex from minors. In March, 2024, he pleaded guilty to “felony attempted involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child under 16.” To make an obvious point: in this case, the legal facts are clear. Kohlmeier worked at the Falmouth, Mass., UU congregation from 2017 to 2021, and at the Harrisburg, Penna., UU congregation from 2021 t0 September, 2022.

June, 2025: Edited.