Category: New media

Online tools for finding religious diversity

Yelp.com used to be my go-to online source for finding religious communities in a given area. In the San Francisco Bay area, I could type in my location, plus the search term “Religious organizations,” and I’d get a fairly complete list of religious communities, including communities that had no other web presence.

But here in southeastern Massachusetts, Yelp has been failing me. A Yelp search for “Religious organizations” seems to miss a good many religious communities, and has incorrect or outdated information for quite a few others. I won’t say it’s useless, but it’s almost not worth looking at. YP.com, the “real Yellow Pages,” turns out to be somewhat better than Yelp, though you have to use search terms for specific religious groups.

Not sure what the significance of this is. It may simply be that Yelp’s user community in this area simply doesn’t pay much attention to religion. But I also think Yelp pays little attention to religious organizations these days. I claimed the Yelp page for First Parish in Cohasset, and have tried a number of times to get Yelp to change the name of our congregation from “Unitarian Church” to “First Parish in Cohasset,” but they just ignore me. I’m guessing Yelp gets no revenue from hosting religious organizations, so they just ignore us.

Bring back blogging

Twitter is in meltdown. Ash and Ryan want to bring back blogging. So they created a site called Bring Back Blogging. They have a simple idea:

  • Create some longer-form content
  • Serve it up through an RSS feed (blog, Tumblr, Substack, whatever)
  • Commit to three posts inJanuary
  • Submit your blog to their site, and they put it in their directory.
  • Follow other people’s RSS feeds.

I’d add:

  • Comment on, or blog about, someone else’s blog. (In fact, you don’t have to have your own blog, you can comment on other people’s blogs)

Ash and Ryan aimed their pitch at artists, writers, etc., so I didn’t submit my blog to their directory. But the rest of us can do this, too. And if you start blogging (again), post a comment here.

(Thanks to Scott for this link.)

Songs and signs — Isaiah 13:15-16 and Genesis 19:6-8

Religion News Service reports:

“If you’re an exvangelical who has been scrolling through TikTok lately, you may have stumbled across a duo singing what sounds suspiciously like evangelical worship music. Until you hear the lyrics. ‘Anyone who is captured will be cut down and run through with a sword,’ they sing in harmony, guitar strums in sync. ‘Their little children will be dashed to death before their eyes.'” [They’re quoting Isaiah 13:15-16 from the Bible.]

I recommend watching the TikTok video. It’s quite well done. And it makes you think.

It reminds me of some Unitarian Universalist teens I knew twenty years ago, long before the days of TikTok. Their eyes had been caught by the fans at sports events who held up signs reading “John 3:16.” This Bible verse is the favorite of traditional Christians: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” It is supposed to entice nonbelievers into becoming Christians.

In response, these Unitarian Universalist teens decided that they were going to make a sign that read “Genesis 19:6-8” and hold it up during a Red Sox game. That’s the Bible passage where a mob besieges Lot’s house, because he’s hiding some angels from God. The mob demands that Lot throw the angels out to them, so they can lynch them. But instead Lots offers to throw his virgin daughters out to the mob to be raped by them. He’d rather sacrifice his daughters than betray the angels.

The Bible is a complex book. It contains some good ethical writing, it has some profound mystical moments, but it also contains passages that are difficult to interpret, and it has icky bits as well. You can’t just pick out the dozen verses you especially enjoy, and ignore the difficult parts and the icky bits.

Elon’s jet

You’ve probably heard about the website Elon’s Jet, which tracks one of Elon Musk’s private jets (he apparently has several; this just happens to be the one he uses most often).

Well, the person running that website just calculated the total carbon emissions of Elon’s jet in the year 2022 — 1,895 tons of CO² emissions. This has been posted on Mastodon, and as you’d expect people are having fun doing some additional math.

One Mastodonian pointed out that Musk’s CO² emissions from jet flight alone in 2022 are about 122 times the total carbon footprint of the average US resident; or about 370 times the total carbon footprint of the average person in the world. Yet another Mastodonian calculated that Musk’s jet produces more carbon emissions in a single day than the average US car produces in a year. And a particularly cynical Mastodonian noted: “I’m sure we can offset most of that CO² if we all collectively drink with cardboard straws.”

I will note in conclusion that Musk banned Elon’s Jet from Twitter, claiming that releasing this information could endanger his children, who sometimes fly on the jet. I would suggest that Musk is doing far more to endanger his children by flying his damn jet, and accelerating climate change.

Blogging

On Mastodon, a number of people have been commenting on John Scalzi’s recent blog post calling for an “Artisanal Web.” Blogger Amod Lele also comments on Scalzi’s post. Let’s go back to hosting our own websites, says Scalzi, and interacting with other people’s websites. In other words, he’s calling for a return to blogging.

(I note that back in 2005, Scalzi said it was pointless to start blogging. Anyone who started a blog in 2005, according to Scalzi, was too late to the party, and no one would read their blog. I didn’t listen to him, started my blog in 2005, and within five years had 50K unique visitors a month, a huge number for a very niche blog. Moral: Don’t listen to the advice of pundits.)

To be honest, I see no future in Scalzi’s call for a mass-movement “Artisanal Web.” Only a small minority of the world’s population is compulsive about reading and writing. And only a small minority of the world’s compulsive readers and writers enjoy setting up their own website to publish their works. Blogging requires compulsive readers and writers who love setting up their own websites and/or finding other people’s websites and leaving comments. Blogging never was a mass movement (back in the oughts, most blogs stumbled along for a few months, then got abandoned), and I don’t think blogging ever will be a mass movement.

So let’s just admire blogging for what it actually is. A few of us who are compulsive writers put our stuff out there, and a few of us who are compulsive readers read that stuff and sometimes comment on it. We have a heck of a lot of fun, and occasionally there’s some really good writing, both in blog posts and in comments. We don’t need an “Artisanal Web” — all we need is some really good writing once in a while.

Having said all this, I’m glad you sometimes stop by to read this blog. You’ll find a list of some other blogs that I enjoy on my blogroll. And if you feel so moved, write about some of your favorite blogs in a comment.

Alt text

“Alt tet”Alt text” is text that you add to images on your website, so that people who are blind or have impaired vision can use their screen reader to tell them what the image is. I’ve been very bad about adding alt text to images on this blog, partly because I was unsure how much detail I should go into.

Well, someone on Mastodon pointed out this guide to writing alt text on the UX Collective website: “How to write an image description.” The author, Alex Chen, suggests a model format he calls “object-action-context.”

Then Chen provides examples of alt text using his object-action-context model. He goes into details like how long alt text descriptions should be (it varies depending on the image). He also points out that any image description is better than none at all.

Chen has inspired me to add alt text to all images on my websites, and (more importantly) on our congregation’s website.

Marketing for congregations

When I arrived at First Parish in Cohasset in August, I started watching for newcomers. Of course, I didn’t know most of the people, but each Sunday I would ask the long-time members if there were any newcomers.

We had no newcomers in August. One in September. None in October. Then two so far in November.

As a former salesperson, when I see so few newcomers I immediately assume that there’s no marketing going on. That’s what marketing does — it reaches people who are new to your business (and a small nonprofit organization like a congregation is a business). The primary form of marketing for most Unitarian Universalist congregations is a website. So I decided to take a look at the First Parish website. I found that since the COVID pandemic had started, there had been very little new material added to the website (no surprise there, people were busy doing other things). The administrator and I started adding content to the website at least weekly, beginning in October. Sure enough, we got a couple of newcomers stopping by in November.

I’d like to believe the tiny uptick in newcomers is a result of our markting efforts. Of course I know this is the worst kind of evidence — it’s all anecdotal, there’s no way of proving a causal relationship, etc., etc. I know that I could simply be deluded by confirmation bias here — I see something that confirms what I already believe, and continue to believe what I believe.

But I still think marketing works. If your website is your only form of marketing, then paying attention to your website should yield dividends.

Recent web browsing

Some links from my recent web browsing:

Are We Allies?

Foluke Ifejola Adebisi has an excellent blog post on “the concept of allyship against injustice.” In other words, what does it mean to be a “white ally,” or any other kind of ally? Adebisi makes an intersting disctintion between allyship as being, and allyship as doing:

“I think what is important is that we move away from thinking of allyship as something we are, but instead think of it as something we do, each time we do something. Each time we want to contribute to a particular struggle for justice, we must decide what must be done in the moment, irrespective of what we have done before or what type of person we think we are.”

I came away from this blog post thinking that if I hear someone saying they are an ally, this may not mean much. I’m going to watch what they do instead of listen to what they say they are.

Jew or Judean?

Marginalia hosts a scholarly debate on how to translate ioudaioi in texts from the last centuries BCE and the first few centuries CE. Does it mean Jew or Judean? While this may seem like a big argument over a trivial detail, the scholars involved claim the stakes are higher than you’d think.

For example, if you translate ioudaioi in the Gospel of John as “Jew,” then that could reinforce one of the foundations of Christian anti-Semitism. The ioudaioi, the Jews, killed Jesus. Whereas if you translate ioudaioi as “Judean,” someone from the land of Judea, maybe you can undermine that foundation of anti-Semitism.

But other scholars argue that in some texts, ioudaioi is better translated into modern English as “Jew,” sometimes as “Judean.” It all depends on the context. And we don’t want to inject anachronisms into translations.

Another point comes up: Is it anachronistic to talk about Judaism as a religion in this era? Was Judaism more of an ethnic identity than a religion? (In a related story, Haaretz reports on archaelogist Yonatan Adler’s new book that advances the claim that the archaelogical record does not show evidence for Jusdaism as a religion before the 2nd century BCE.)

Dare You Fight?

Editor Neal caren is creating an online collection of W. E. B. DuBois’s articles for The Crisis. These articles were written between 1914 and 1934, and many have not been collected previously.

DuBois’s essays are fascinating to read. His articles for The Crisis sounds radical even by today’s standards.

Invasion

Australian librarian Hugh Rundle writes about the exodus of people from Twitter to Mastodon. He titles his blog post “Home invasion: Mastodon’s Eternal September begins.” As a Mastodon user of fairly long standing, he describes how he has experienced the influx of Twitterers:

“It’s not entirely the Twitter people’s fault. They’ve been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago…. To the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don’t know how to order room service.”

Although I’m most emphatically not a Twitter user (I left Twitter in 2014, not in 2022), I am a new Mastodon user. I hope the Mastodon users don’t see me as behaving badly….

Mastodon

I’ve been looking for a better social media outlet for a while now. I stopped using Twitter years ago because it got too nasty. I’ve stayed on Facebook mostly because I have a lot of friends from Sacred Harp singing there — but Facebook is mostly an ugly place, and I don’t like the way they steal all our data. Several years ago, I tried Diaspora, an open source decentralized social media project, and while I liked the software architecture, there wasn’t enough content to interest me.

Over the past few months, I’ve been hearing about Mastodon, another open source de-centralized social media project. I checked it out, but it felt like too much work, so I let it drop. Then yesterday I logged onto Facebook to check on a Sacred Harp singing, and the Facebook algorithm placed some unpleasant content where I had to see it. Time to take another look at Mastodon.

And yesterday, it turned out, was the day when there was a huge migration of academics and others from Twitter to Mastodon.

Screen grab from Mastodon showing graph of uptick of people joining Mastodon yesterday

Many local Mastodon servers (known as “instances”) were overwhelmed, and stopped accepting new accounts. But I finally found an instance I liked, which was open, and set up an account.

Wow.

So. Much. Better. Than. FB or Twitter.

Mastodon does not have some creepy opaque algorithm controlling what you get to see. If you want to see every post (called “toots” on Mastodon), you see them in chronological order. If you want to see every toot on your local instance, same thing. If you want to read just the toots from the people you’re following, you get to see them all, in chronological order.

There are lots of interesting people on Mastodon. I found quite a few academics. A robust community of amateur radio operators. Lots of science fiction fans. Tons of political junkies. Most major news outlets are now doing something on Mastodon.

Screen grab of my Mastodon home page, today at about 10:30 a.m.

It would be nice to see more Unitarian Universalists on Mastodon. I think it could be a better match for our values than the big commercial social media companies. If you set up an account, Mastodon relies heavily on hashtags, and the Unitarian Universalist hashtag appears to be #UU — include that in your profile so the rest of us can find you.

Admittedly, Mastodon is not for everyone. While it’s relatively easy to use, there is definitely more of a learning curve than with the commercial social media outlets. Nor is it a replacement for Twitter or Facebook — it is different from both. But for me (so far), it’s much better than the cesspools of Facebook or Twitter.

Robot tells the story of the Rich Young Man

A decade ago, a small software company called XtraNormal allowed you to make free animated videos online. You’d choose a character, input some text, pick a few gestures, and the software would do the rest, posting the final video on Youtube.

I thought this was a great idea. I started out with a video of a robot telling the story from the Gospel of Thomas, ch. 97, the parable of the empty jar. Then I did a video of a robot telling the story of the rich young man from the Gospel of Mark, ch. 10. By the time I thought about it again, XtraNormal had stopped giving away their services, and had converted everything to Windows-only software. I wouldn’t have minded buying their software, but I’d be damned if I’d buy a Windows machine just to run their software. So I only made those two videos.

I never posted the second video on my blog, so here it is, ten years late:

(Note that I moved this video, and the first video, from Youtube to Vimeo. During the move, I improved the audio a little, and tightened up the editing a bit.)