Author: Daniel Harper

Turkeys on the Common

The Parish House of First Parish in Cohasset is directly opposite Cohasset Common. I’ve seen small groups of two or three Wild Turkeys skulking around in the bushes at the edges of the Parish House grounds. But today I saw about fourteen Wild Turkeys making their way across the common, out in the open, as bold as brass.

At least one male was gobbling. They were definitely aware of me, but they seemed to have little or no fear. Breeding season does that to many animals: reduces their level of fear, so they do stupid things.

Come to think of it, male humans are always in breeding season. Which explains so much about Homo spaiens.

Ten of the Wild Turkeys I saw on Cohasset Common, one with its tail erect and spread.

Another Unitarian group in the U.S.

Todd Eklof — a former Unitarian Universalist minister who was removed from fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) over disagreements on approaches to anti-racism and other matters — is the new president pro tem of the recently-organized North American Unitarian Association (NAUA).

The NAUA joins the American Unitarian Conference (AUC) as a group that has broken away from the UUA over political and theological disagreements. Here’s an introduction to a few U.S. Unitarian groups, including the NAUA and the AUC…

North American Unitarian Association

The North American Unitarian Association (NAUA) website states that the group is “dedicated to courageously fostering and protecting the principles and practices of liberal religion: reason, tolerance, democratic process, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and expression, and the inherent worth and dignity of all people.” Membership is open to congregations and to individuals. They provide the following services: monthly online worship; an online newsletter; online courses; monthly support sessions for NAUA-affiliated ministers; a “ministerial clearinghouse”; and a few other odds and ends. Congregations may affiliate with the NAUA while retaining their membership with the UUA.

The NAUA program strikes me as quite ambitious for a new organization. They do seem to have a fairly full leadership roster, mostly drawn from Todd Eklof’s hometown of Spokane, Wash. So they might be able to keep up all these new initiatives.

American Unitarian Conference

The American Unitarian Conference (AUC) formed in 2000. The founders decided to break away from the UUA for reasons I can no longer remember, nor can I remember the people who were involved in the founding of the group. The Wikipedia article on the AUC says it “was founded in 2000 by several Unitarian Universalists who felt that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) had become too theologically liberal and too political.”

The AUC seems to have morphed into the Unitarian Christian Church of America (see below), or has been absorbed by them. The old URL, americanunitarian.org, now returns an error message saying the hosting account has expired. I checked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and the last version of the AUC website they have is from August 20, 2022.

Unitarian Christian Church of America

The Unitarian Christian Church of America (UCCA) appears to be a small group, based on their website. It may be that they’re the successor group to the American Unitarian Conference (AUC; see above). In any case, Shannon Rogers, head of the UCCA, is now the admin of the AUC Facebook page.

Assuming the UCCA and the old AUC are somehow linked, we might look at the the AUC Facebook page to get a sense of both organizations. This Facebook page has gotten recent comments critical of the UUA — “Unfortunately, my experiences with the UUs seemed to always have a thread of Progressivism in them” — and supportive of political conservative positions — “You can NOT be protected if guns are banned!” At the same time, the UCCA now provides children’s Christian education curriculums from ProgressiveChristianity.org. Some of their materials sound cautiously supportive of Black Lives Matter.

In short, it sounds like the UCCA is trying to become a “purple” denomination, welcoming to all political persuasions. Given that the UUA has pretty much given up trying to welcome Republicans (except for a few individual congregations), and is fairly unwelcoming to Christian Unitarians, I’m glad the UCCA provides a spiritual home for Christian Unitarians across the political spectrum.

Unitarian Christian Alliance

The Unitarian Christian Alliance (UCA) is a group of Biblical Unitarian Christians. On their website, they describe themselves as follows: “While holding to various beliefs in other areas, UCA members all agree that the God of the Bible is the Father alone, and that Jesus is his human Messiah. The mission of the UCA and its growing membership is two-fold: to promote unitarian theology and to connect like-minded believers across the globe.

The UCA claims both individual members, and nearly a hundred affiliated churches and groups. While most of the affiliated groups are in the U.S., they have affiliated groups on nearly every continent, including the countries of Brazil, Greece, Singapore, Kenya, and Australia. Interestingly, looking at the web page showing their Board of Directors, their leadership team consists of four middle-aged white men and one woman who does not have a photo.

As far as I can tell, the UCA has never had any connection to the UUA.

Spirit and Truth Fellowship International

Spirit and Truth Fellowship International (STFI) is a “non-denominational ministry” that engages in many activities. STFI issued a Unitarian version of the Revised English Version translation of the Bible. They have an active Youtube channel where they post recordings of their Sunday Morning Gatherings and their Tuesday Night Fellowship. They have a STFI app for iPhones. They also maintain a website called “Biblical Unitarian.”

As far as I can tell, STFI has never had any connection to the UUA.

Other Unitarian (Small “U”) groups

There are other denominations and groups that reject the Christian doctrine of the Trinity on various grounds. These include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, Oneness Pentecostals, Christadelphians, etc. Note that these denominations do not have “Unitarian” as part of their name, and they might not identify as Unitarian per se.

Historical American Unitarian Groups

1. The most notable American Unitarian group from the past is, of course, the Free Religious Association (FRA). Though the FRA is sometimes classified as a “freethought” group, most of its members were either former Unitarians, or people who maintained dual membership with the FRA and the American Unitarian Association (the predecessor to the UUA). For most of its history, the guiding spirit behind the FRA was William Potter, the minister of the Unitarian church of New Bedford. When Potter left the FRA, it quickly died, which makes me wonder if the FRA was really just a one-man project.

(I have to admit my bias against the FRA. I’m a former minister of the New Bedford church, and while there I did some research into Potter. I felt that Potter got too wrapped up in the FRA, and perhaps neglected his own congregation. On the other hand, I was so put off by his writing that I didn’t want to spend much time researching him. After learning something about Potter, I lost all interest in the FRA.)

2. In the early nineteenth century, the Christian Connexion (variously spelled) was unitarian in theology, and even cooperated with the American Unitarian Association. A few Unitarian ministers served Christian Connexion churches. But by the second half of the century, the two groups had gone their separate ways.

3. The Swedenborgians were vaguely unitarian (small “u”) in theology. However, as I understand it, their unitarianism made Jesus Christ into a god, with God-the-Father and the Holy Spirit as aspects of Jesus Christ. There are still Swedenborgians around (with at least one Unitarian minister serving a Swedenborgian congregation) but I know nothing about their theology in the twenty-first century, so can’t comment on whether they still can be considered theologically unitarian.

Visit to another congregation

Written on Sunday, March 25, but not posted right away due to press of events.

Carol and I went to the Sunday service this morning at the Open Circle Unitarian Universalist (UU) Fellowship in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Carol’s dad went to services there before he died, and was warmly welcomed, so it seemed like a good place to go.

I was impressed by the congregation, and by some of the innovative things they’re doing. So here’s a quick summary of my impressions.

Open Circle share a minister with the UU fellowships in Green Bay and Stevens Point. The minister was present in person in Fond du Lac this week, while the Stevens Point and Green Bay folks watched him via livestream. In addition, several Fond du Lac members joined the service via Zoom. (Presumably some Green Bay and Stevens Point folks joined their congregations via Zoom as well, but I only happened to notice what happened in Fond du Lac.) Thus there were six groups of people joining in: in-person and Zoom participants from each of three congregations. I believe there were three people managing the tech in Fond du Lac: someone to operate the camera and sound board; someone to manage the Zoom meeting; and the minister managed the PowerPoint slides.

I noticed a few other technical points. Only the sermon was recorded, thus doing away with copyright problems for the music and readings. Both announcements, and joys and concerns, were done at the end of the service, after the Zoom session had split into three breakout rooms (one for each congregation), so no one had to worry about making announcements, or stating joys and concerns, that didn’t apply to the other two congregations. The children’s story was a video of a reading of a children’s book taken from the internet — this was probably the low point of the service for me, since the audio quality of that video was poor (needed EQ), and the background “music” was more repetitious than a video game. However, using such a video did away with possible copyright conflicts. All in all, I felt the video and audio technology was handled extremely well.

The whole service was very well done: smooth and competent, without going too far in the direction of the overly polished feel of glitzy mega-church worship services.

I wondered if coffee hour would live up to the high standards of the worship service. It did. People started talking with us from the moment we stood up at the end of the service. There was good conversation, fair trade coffee, and good snacks. Before we knew it, an hour had gone by. You learn a lot about a congregation from coffee hour, and clearly this was a congregation where people liked each other, and cared for one another.

In short, we both felt welcomed, both service and social hour were good, and I learned a lot watching how Fond du Lac handled multiplatform multicongregation worship services.

Ed

Ed died this morning, peacefully in his sleep. Here’s a picture of him when he was 32, sitting next to his four year old daughter:

Man sitting at a picnic table looking at a young girl next to him.

His daughter doesn’t like this photo. She said: no one should be allowed to give little girls hair cuts like that. But since she never looks at this blog, I can get away with posting this. I think it’s a nice father-daughter photo.

One reason why young adults are leaving religion

According to Religion News Service, a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) finds that young adults who are LGBTQ+ are likely to have no religious affiliation: “According to the report, LGBTQ Americans are more likely to have no religious affiliation (50%) than Americans in general (26%).”

No surprise there, given how hostile many religious groups still are to LGBTQ+ people. But what did surprise me is that nearly a quarter of young adults in the U.S. report that they are LGBTQ+ — way up from previous generations:

“PRRI’s researchers found that about 10% of Americans overall — almost half (46%) of them under the age of 30 — identify as LGBTQ: 3% as gay or lesbian, 4% as bisexual and 2% as something else. Nearly one-quarter of Americans under 30 identify as LGBTQ (23%).”

So of course young adults are going to stay away from organizations that signal fear, loathing, and hostility towards LGBTQ+ people. Why go someplace where either you or your friends are not welcome?

Mapping sea level rise

Back in 1970s, while still in high school, I was really into topographic maps. I tried making topo maps of parts of Concord, Massachusetts, where I then lived. This was back in the days of drawing with pen and ink on paper, so making maps was challenging and fun.

I remember reading somewhere about what was then called the “greenhouse effect,” which would prompt the melting of the polar ice caps. I forget the amount of sea level rise predicted. But when I looked at a topo map of Concord, most of the town would be underwater, with just a few of the tallest hills was islands.

Yep, we knew back then about what is now called global climate change. Then, as Michael Mann has documented in his book The New Climate War, the oil companies conducted a massive disinformation campaign. The oil companies basically hijacked our elected officials while we weren’t paying attention. And here we are today, even more worried about sea level rise.

With all that in mind, I was glad to find the Conspiracy of Cartographers website. They make maps showing what things will look like if the sea level rises 66 meters — the current best estimate assuming all the polar ice melts. Here’s a link to their map of the Boston area. I love their place names: Concord Bay, Lexington Archipelago, Flint Island — this last represents what is now high ground to the east of Walden Pond. Here’s a screen grab of part of their Boston map:

Screen grab of part of a fictional map showing sea level rise west of Boston.
Screen grab of a small part of the Conspiracy of Cartographers map of Boston

Beautiful maps. And depressing. And a very good corrective to the decades of lies and misinformation emanating from the oil companies.

Spring chorus

On Friday when I went for a walk in Whitney Woods here in Cohasset, the marshes were silent. On Saturday, I heard a chorus of frogs calling from a couple of marshes and one vernal pool. When I returned on Sunday, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, from about 54 degrees to the mid-30s. There were a lot fewer frogs calling on Sunday, but some were still singing away. They sounded like a bunch of ducks gabbling together.

Whenever I tried to get close enough to see them, all I ever saw was a circular ripple where a frog slipped underwater. Nevertheless, identification was relatively easy. Here’s the description of the voice of the Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica) in the Peterson Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians: “A hoarse clacking sound suggesting the quack of a duck.” Another source says: “from a distance, a chorus [of Wood Frogs] sounds like a gathering of miniature ducks quacking.”

I’ll let you decide if they sound like ducks or not. Here’s my lo-fi audio recording: