An interesting essay by Tolkien scholar Robin A. Reid points out that the beloved author’s works are also loved by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc. Why? Perhaps because Tolkien’s fictional universe sets up a fictional racial hierarchy similar to the real-world racial hierarchies promoted by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc. The essay’s title is, in of itself, interesting: “Why White Supremacy No Longer Provides Cover for White Academia.”
Reid also cites a recently-published article that uncovers the racism in Tolkein’s fictional world: “[I]n 2022, those of us working on racisms and Tolkien were amazed to discover a newly-published essay in The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Charles W. Mills’ “The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto.” … It turns out that this 2022 publication is over thirty years old: Mills wrote it at some point during the late 1980s and could not get it published….” Reid goes on to say that the simple fact that Mills could not get his essay published in the 1980s helps reveal how Tolkien scholarship has been dominated by white viewpoints and by white privilege.
I was out for a walk at dusk in nearby Wheelwright Park, and heard a strange sound coming from a nearby tree — a sort of whiny “cheep” kind of sound. I looked up, and there was a juvenile Great Horned Owl about 10 meters up.
The fading light made it hard to see much, but the bird appeared to have well-developed flight feathers. The prominent ear tufts which are characteristic of adult Great Horned Owls were just starting to form. And the plumage was a lighter color than adult plumage. So my guess is that this was a young owl out for one of its first forays from the nest.
As I stood watching it — and trying to take photos with my smartphone — I thought I heard another owl cheeping from a tree farther away. It seems like there were two young owls out trying out their new wings.
Someone I know was worried when I said I hadn’t bought Carol an Easter gift. I immediately felt guilty. Is that what one is supposed to do these days?
It turns out this is in fact a growing cultural trend. Religion News Service asked recently: “Is Easter the new Christmas?” They reported that there are now elaborate Easter gifts for children, along with Easter egg hunts for adults: “…at a time when fewer people are identifying as Christian and church attendance has been slow to recover from the pandemic, celebrations of the most sacred day on the Christian calendar are becoming bigger and more detached from their religious roots. In their place, events like the Adult Eggstravaganza Egg Hunt… the Boozy Bunny Egg Hunt, hiding plastic eggs containing candy and little bottles of alcoholic beverages for residents over the age of 21… [and] kiddie pools full of summery gifts….”
Gag me, as the Valley Girls used to say, with a spoon.
I’ve come up with a name for this growing movement: Consumer Capitalism As a New Religious Movement, or CCANRM (pronounced “kanrum”). No, this is not the Secular Age — this is the age when CCARM takes over from Christianity as the biggest baddest religion — when CCARM takes over from Buddhism as the most effective proselytizing religion among the Cultured Despisers of Religion.
Anyway.
I did not get Carol an Easter gift. She was happy that I did not. We did not have a special meal. We just had our usual cook-it-when-you-feel-like-eating meals. We went to the Sunday service at First Parish, we spent an hour at social hour talking with people, we took a long walk in Whitney-Thayer Woods. It was a good way to spend a nice spring day.
If you’re interested in early American sacred music (as I am), you might be interested in a new website being developed by Nym Cooke, a well known scholar and practitioner in the field. A friend forwarded me Cooke’s introductory email, which says in part:
“I invite you to explore a new website, Early American Sacred Music, at earlyamericansacredmusic.org. This constantly growing resource includes: — a searchable database with extensive information on over 2,100 American printed and manuscript sources produced before 1821 (the complete holdings of 22 libraries), and over 10,000 manuscript music entries; —600 pages of transcriptions from ca. 300 New England town and church histories, containing all that those sources have to say about early sacred music, and farmed out into 22 searchable subject files — with an index of the ca. 1,138 musicians those histories document….”
I’ll point out that this last item implies that anyone doing research on history of 18th century American congregations might find useful information on this website.
Also of interest to me was this statement: “Current inventorying plans include the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; the Boston Public Library; the New York Public Library; and a number of town historical societies in New England.” Again, this could make the site a very useful resource for historians as well as musicologists.
For some years now, this blog has used a WordPress plugin called “CaptchaBank.” This plugin forced you to solve an arithmetic problem before you could comment (and I have had to solve an arithmetic problem before I could login). It was a great plugin that kept the spammers at bay. And it wasn’t based on Google’s horrible “reCaptcha” which steals your data and has an appalling user interface.
Alas, Captcha Bank is no longer being maintained. I finally had to deactivate it.
Fortunately, Cloudflare has released a new form of Captcha which they call “Turnstile.” You can read about it here. They don’t steal your data. And Cloudflare is a company that I have at least a moderate amount of trust in (as opposed to Google, which sadly I can no longer trust at all). So I installed a plugin that runs Turnstile on WordPress.
With luck, everything will run smoothly and you won’t notice a difference. But if anything goes wrong, this will explain why you’re unable to comment. If that happens, please let me know (you can find my email on the About page).
At First Parish in Cohasset, where I serve as minister, 10-15% of our Sunday congregation each week attends online. This percentage is probably typical of most Unitarian Universalist congregations.
A recent study shows that in Black churches, the percentage is much higher. As reported by Religion News Service (RNS): “According to the Pew Research Center, Black Protestants outrank all other U.S. religious groups in choosing to worship outside of brick-and-mortar locations, with 54% saying they took part in services online or on TV in the previous month.”
African Americans were hit hard by the COVID pandemic, and many remain wary of in-person worship services. Although J. Drew Sheard, a bishop with the Church of God in Christ who was interviewed by RNS, points out, “That fear does not seem to prevail when they go to sports activities or the mall…. But they have been invoked with fear that you can catch COVID at church.” I can relate. I still have many COVID-related fears, and I’m still wearing my mask in church; the fear is still there. I completely understand why some Black churchgoers don’t want to show up for in-person services
Besides, I really do like online services. I like being able to attend Sunday services while sitting on a couch in my jammies drinking tea. That’s about as good as it gets. On the other hand, my favorite part of Sunday morning is social hour, and I don’t care for online social hours. So personally, I like having both options available: both online and in-person services.
I’m betting that online access to worship services is here to stay. W. Franklyn Richardson, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in New York, puts it this way: “The impact [of the pandemic] is not over yet but we see signs of church being normal…. [But] normal is a fluid word. Normal is change. Change is normal.”
I particularly appreciate their wide selection of mid-twentieth century pulp novels. I was just in MKE a week and a half ago, and bought a 1960s paperback reprint of Ian Fleming’s thriller Casino Royale from 1953. Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, is a wonderful example of mid-twentieth century pulp fiction: you simply can’t believe the amount of sexism and implicit racism, the plot creaks, and there are weird dominance and submission games going on throughout the novel. It reveals the strange paranoiac Zeitgeist of the 1950s better than any history book. But I digress.
Basically, it’s a bookstore that should not exist. So it kind of feels like Spider Robinson’s fictional Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, except that it’s not a fictional place. Here are some key excerpts from the Twitter thread to explain:
“On my way home from Milwaukee yesterday I did a triple take when I saw an ancient used book store, IN THE AIRPORT!!! I felt like I walked through a portal to a world where everything was a little bit cooler. I was so enthralled I went up to the register and was like ‘hey, I’m fascinated by this place, can we chat?’ A man with an orange hat, orange glasses, and an orange shirt pushed aside his laptop and said ‘oh, heavens yes.’ His name is Orange Mike, and he’s worked here since 1979. Every employee of the shop, including Orange Mike, makes exactly ‘8.125 dollars’ an hour to keep this place going. They are also all in their 60s. Orange Mike himself comes from the local pen & paper community, and used to review games for Dragon magazine. The stock here is eclectic and weird and not remotely curated. Half of it is giant history books that have probably been here since the 80s….
“The store’s existence comes down to the airport taking bids from local bookstores to occupy the space, and accidentally including used bookstores in the list. The owner shrugged and submitted the high bid. The airport tried to stop it but after six months of legal spats failed…. This store just shouldn’t exist. The airport doesn’t want them there, it makes no revenue, they have a hard time moving product, and all of its underpaid employees are at retirement age. And yet it persists. AT A MAJOR AIRPORT. I am blown away by this place existing. If you’re ever at MKE, go check it out while you can. It seems like something way too good for this world, which means it may not be there next time if you skip it.”
I spent four hours at Renaissance Books one day last year, due to travel plan complications. That bookstore turned what was an otherwise unbearable trip into something almost enjoyable. I was so grateful that now every time I’m in MKE (which is not very often), I spend as much money there as I can (the limitation always being: How many books can I fit in my carry-on luggage?).
Me holding a reprint of a mid-twentieth century pulp classic in Renaissance Books. God, I love that place.
This morning, the members of First Parish in Cohasset voted to call me as their next settled minister. We followed a non-standard path to this vote, and did not follow the UUA’s suggested contract-to-call procedure.
Actually, somehow the lay leaders and I both missed the fact that there was a recommended process. After we had all decided to proceed with a vote this spring, I discovered the UUA’s contract-to-call process. It’s thorough and complex, but it requirs many hours of volunteer time. Our congregation is small enough that following the UUA’s contract-to-call process would have left us with insufficient volunteer hours to complete other key tasks. Now that I’ve read it, I’d certainly recommend the UUA’s contract-to-call process to mid-sized and larger congregations; small congregations like ours might want to think about whether they have sufficient volunteer capacity.
Since our non-standard process might be of interest to others, here’s what we did: I was originally hired on a one-year contract which ends this June. In January, the board and I began to talk about whether they wanted me to continue. We considered various options together, including an open-ended contract; a call vote in the second contract year; a call vote this spring; or terminating the contract either this spring or next. The board held congregational meetings where they reached out to nearly every member, and based on feedback from members they decided to proceed with a vote to call this spring. Today’s vote was unanimous, implying some kind of consensus about this decision; I give all credit to the board for listening carefully to everyone before proceeding with a vote.
On the one hand, I’m not a big fan of the proposed revision to Article II of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) bylaws. On the other hand, the current UUA “Seven Principles” sound old and fusty, like they were written forty years ago (oh wait, they were written forty years ago). I’m the opposite of the stupid old mule paralyzed between two bales of hay that appear equally appealing, I’m like the stupid old mule paralyzed between two bales of hay that smell equally unappealing.
Anyway.
It appears that some amount of controversy is emerging about the proposed Article II revision. Our congregation here in Cohasset received an email which says in part: “A group of concerned UUs from across the county have created a website (www.savethe7principles.org) to share our analysis of this proposal and why we oppose it.” This email had only twenty names signed to it, so I guess it’s not a large movement. Nevertheless, we definitely don’t have the kind of consensus in 2023 that we had for the 1983-5 revision.
I just hope the Article II revision doesn’t turn into an extended “discussion” at General Assembly. I’m probably going to be a delegate this year, and I find extended arguments incredibly frustrating. On the other hand, I dislike it even more when honest conversation gets cut short. Either way, I have a feeling this is going to be a testy and tiresome General Assembly.
