Religion – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

Online journal: Urban Naturalist

Today I discovered a peer-reviewed journal, Urban Naturalist: Natural History Science of Urban Areas Worldwide (Eagle Hill Publications). This journal offers free and open access to all articles.

So far I’ve read two articles:

“Effect of the Edge on Eastern Cottontail Density: Urban Edges are Harder than Agricultural” studies Eastern Cottontail density in urban preserves in Mexico City, and concludes that this species of rabbit avoids the edges of urban preserves (perhaps due to noise, light, etc.). This effectively reduces the amount of land habitable by these rabbits in an urban preserve.

“The Bee (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) Fauna of a Transmission Right-of-Way in a
Highly Developed and Fragmented Landscape of Central New Jersey” sampled bee populations in a power line right-of-way. The authors conclude that power line rights-of-way probably offer habitat for bees that would otherwise be lacking in a highly developed landscape. Unfortunately, 13% of the species found by the researchers were introduced or invasive bees. I was also struck by the observation that highways result in high bee mortality: “Roads can be substantial barriers to the movement of bees, and can cause high mortality that increases as roadway speed and traffic volume rises….”

As urban areas increasingly dominate our landscapes, obviously this kind of research is increasingly important. Since most of you reading this live in an urban or suburban area, it’s worth dipping into this journal to learn about some of the unforeseen effects our urbanized lifestyle has on other organisms…if we’re gonna feel guilty about eating meat, maybe we should also feel guilty about contributing to worldwide bee decline every time we drive on a highway.

Cyanotype…notes to myself

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with cyanotype as a way to get people to look more closely at plants. This post is some notes to myself about cyanotype resources.

Cyanotype print of plant material. — Cyanotype of grasses and rushes (actual size 4 inches square)

Cyanotype in the classroom

Lawrence Hall of Science sells “Sunprint Kits” with 12 pieces of 4 inch square cyanotype paper and a clear acrylic overlay sheet. Cost buying direct from them is US$5.99 per kit (do not buy from Amazon where the price is higher).

Lawrence Hall of Science also sells refill packs of 12 sheets of cyanotype paper for US$3.99. The kits and refills are ideal for class use — inexpensive enough to allow people to experiment. You can also purchase kits and refills with 8-1/2 by 11 inch cyanotype paper from them. The larger sheets are more expensive (about US$1 per sheet), but if your class gets serious about cyanotypes the larger size allows for more possibilities.

Cyanotype for artists

Jacquard Products sells cyanotype sets — two plastic bottles with cyanotype chemicals that you fill with water, then mix the resulting solutions 1 to 1 when you’re ready to coat your paper. (I bought my set at an independent art supply store.)

I’ve purchased this, but haven’t yet used it. You have to coat the paper in a low light setting, and dry the paper in darkness. I haven’t yet figured out a place where I can dry the paper.

Cyanotype book

There are several self-published books on cyanotype processes available online, but I’ve found only one book by a reputable publisher — Cyanotype Toning: Using Botanicals To Tone Blueprints Naturally by Annette Golaz (Routledge, 2021), part of Routledge’s Contemporary Practices in Alternative Process Photography series.

This book is expensive — US$66.99. However, Routledge is currently having a summer sale, and I just purchased the book for 20% off with free shipping.

Cyanotype online

Some of the cyanotype websites appear to be “AI”-generated slime. Others are too basic (“Expose the cyanotype paper, put it water, look at the result!”). But I found a few websites worth visiting:

“How To Make Cyanotypes of Flowers” on the Nature TTL website includes very useful instructions on a specific form of wet cyanotype process.

A digitized version of Anna Atkins’s book of botanical cyanotypes is online at London’s Natural History Museum website. A scholarly article with an analysis of Atkins’s book from the point of view literary analysis can be found here. Atlas Obscura has samples of a 12 year old’s botanical cyanotypes here.

Jacquard has a good guide on toning cyanotypes to produce different colors here.

A quirky timeline of UU history

Because Yvonne asked me to, I put together a timeline of UU history. Instead of focusing on White male ministers from wealthy urban areas, my timeline includes people and events from outside the mainstream of UU history.

Unitarians and Universalists in the United States

1773 Caleb Rich (White) becomes minister of a new church in Warwick, Mass., that has a universalist theology.

1775 John Murray (White), Universalist minister, serves as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army.

1779 The Independent Christian Church (Universalist) organized in Gloucester, Mass., one of the earliest Universalist congregations in the U.S.

1785 King’s Chapel is the first Unitarian congregation in the U.S.

c. 1795 The scientist Joseph Priestley (White) holds Unitarian services in Northumberland, Penna.

c. 1795 Prince (no last name), a Black man, joins the church in New Bedford, Mass., as a full member.

1838 Nathan Johnson, a Black Universalist in New Bedford, Mass., shelters Frederick Douglass on the latter’s first night of freedom

1859 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a White Unitarian, opens the first kindergarten in the U.S.

1860 Samuel Jackson, a Black Baptist minister, asks to bring his entire congregation into the American Unitarian Association, but because he and his congregation are Black, he is ignored.

1863 Olympia Brown, a White woman, ordained by the Universalist General Conference. She was the first woman to be ordained by a denomination (rather than just a congregation) in the U.S.

1876-1878 The U.S. government invites Protestant denominations to manage American Indian reservations; the Unitarians take charge of Ute tribes in Colorado.

1883 Poet William Carlos Williams, a Hispanic Unitarian, is born.

1887 First Unitarian service is held in the Khasi Hills of India, led by Kissor Singh (South Asian).

1895 Eliza Tupper Wilkes, a White Universalist minister, is the first woman to preach in Stanford University’s nondenominational chapel

1917 Adeniran Adedeji Isola (Black) founds the Unitarian Brotherhood Church (Ijo Isokan Gbogbo Eda) in Lagos, Nigeria.

1918 Unitarian minister William Short Jr. is arrested for draft evasion, because he’s doing peace activism; when he appeals to the American Unitarian Association to confirm that he’s a minister, they throw him under the bus.

1922 Abigail Eliot (White), an LGBTQ Unitarian educator, brings the nursery school concept to the U.S.

1923 The first Flower Celebration is led by Norbert and Maja Capek, ministers at the Unitarian church in Prague, Czechoslovakia. This ritual is later wrongly called a “flower communion.”

1930s Probably a third of all Unitarian and Universalist churches close due to the Great Depression.

1932 Poet Sylvia Plath, a White Unitarian, is born.

1937 Unitarians and Universalists cooperate to create a new hymnal.

1937 The American Unitarian Association grows concerned that Leila Thompson, an ordained Unitarian minister, is running for city council in Berkeley, Calif., as a Socialist.

1942 Unitarian minister Norbert Capek dies in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

1947 Stephen Fritchman, a White minister, is forced out of his job editing the denominational magazine due to accusations that he is Communist.

1950s (date uncertain) UU ministers officiated at some of the earliest UU same sex weddings.

1956 Christopher Moore, a White minister at First Unitarian in Chicago, founds the Chicago Children’s Chorus, an interracial chorus which rapidly became one of the best children’s choruses in the U.S.

1950s Religious liberals in the Philippines affiliate with the Universalist Church of America.

1961 The UUA bylaws have six principles.

1961 Unitarians and Universalists consolidate into one denomination.

1965 Year with highest Unitarian Universalist membership in the U.S.

1965-1970 Unitarian Universalism loses half its Black members during the Black empowerment controversy.

1977 Ysaye Maria Barnwell founds the Jubilee Singers, a gospel choir, at All Souls UU church in Washington, D.C., the first Black-led UU gospel choir.

1977 First Unitarian of Los Angeles publishes the first Unitarian hymnal with Black and working class music in it.

1980 The first Water Ritual takes place at a feminist gathering of women. Later, it was wrongly called a “Water Communion.”

1985 The UUA adopts new non-sexist bylaws with seven principles.

2004 Unitarian Universalist Association of Uganda is formed.

2005 Last year of growth in U.S. Unitarian Universalism.

2008 Carleton Pearson, a Black Pentecostal minister who became a Universalist, brings his congregation to the Unitarian Universalist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Ecojustice education resource

A team at the University of California in Davis, headed by Tom Maiorana, has developed a game that models evacuations in the face of wildfires. (Apparently there was a story about this game on National Public Radio (NPR), but I don’t listen to NPR and read about this online somewhere.) They’ve set up “Prototyping Resilience,” a website for the game.

As someone who has been doing ecojustice education on the side for nearly two decades now, as soon as I heard about this game my gut response was: Wow, what a great teaching resource. Then I has to stop and think about why this would be such a great teaching resource. First, the game raises awareness of a new phenomenon, massive wildfires, which result from climate change and to a certain extent from land use change. Second, the game empowers people to know what to do in case of a wildfire (i.e., it’s akin to the tabletop exercises long used in emergency prep circles). Third, the game educates people about community cooperation. Raising awareness, empowering, building community — all key precepts for ecojustice education.

Detail of a sheet of game instructions showing game tokens representing a wildfire. — Detail of the visual instructions for the game.

The current iterations of the game are specific to actual communities in California. But the game developers plan to have a generic “Evacuation Boardgame” ready by October, 2024. I signed up for the generic game using the “Game Request Form” link at the bottom of this webpage.

Well, that was ugly

I ran into Mary P at the Sunday service here in Cohasset. She’s the other delegate from our congregation to General Assembly. She asked me if I’d been following General Assembly. I said that I had, but added that it was painful to watch at times. She agreed.

We both were repelled by speakers (on both sides of various issues) who were mean-spirited, unkind, willing to mistake opinion for facts, and so on. We both agreed that we were not seeing these kind of behaviors in our local Unitarian Universalist congregation.

I suspect the online format tended to encourage bad behavior. But whatever the cause, I felt frankly embarrassed by some of my co-religionists. Mind you, it was people on both sides of the issues being debated. For example, in the discussion of the bylaws revision, after legal counsel for the Unitarian Universalist Association gave her professional opinion that the bylaws revision would not reduce the freedom of individual congregations, at least one speaker said the bylaws revision would reduce congregational freedom. In another example, one speaker who supported the revision of the bylaws relied on what I considered to be ad hominem attacks; I wound up muting the audio.

This online General Assembly was one of the few times I felt embarrassed to be a Unitarian Universalist. To me, it felt like hyper-individualism had run amok. Sadly, the whole thing was livestreamed on Youtube, so anyone could watch it.

Oh well. Who am I trying to kid? We live in a horribly polarized society. Why should Unitarian Universalists be immune from polarization? And a huge driver of polarization is people doing way too much social interaction online, instead of in person. If we hold General Assembly online, I guess we have to expect the same bad behavior that has driven me from Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, and other social media platforms.

And the problem may well be my problem. These days, the only thing I use social media for is finding out about Sacred Harp singings; I’m no longer accustomed to a daily dose of mean-spiritedness, unkindness, and misinformation. Maybe if you use social media a lot, General Assembly seemed tame and well-behaved. But it’s not for me — and I’m not enthusiastic about ever attending another online General Assembly.

Two brief thoughts on online GA

I was finally able to retrieve my delegate credential for the online General Assembly (GA). Which prompted me to log in to the Whova event management portal for GA.

As I poked around, two things caught my eye.

(1) There’s a friendly prompt to answer an icebreaker question. Great idea for an online space, so I clicked through. The first icebreaker question that appeared was “What’s your favorite place of all the places you’ve travelled?” and you are given a list of countries around the world to choose from. This is a classic question used to establish your your socio-economic class: choosing, for example, Papua New Guinea places you in a higher socio-economic class than choosing, say, Canada or the United Kingdom. There are other icebreaker questions you can choose from, of course, but choosing this question is a good way to establish yourself as being part of the upper middle class.

Anyway, I decided to skip the icebreaker question.

(2) I noticed that there were quite a few online sessions aimed at teens. Given that increased screen time correlates with decreased mental health in teens, I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s great that GA organizers are trying to serve Generation Z. But it’s more screen time….

Actually, screen time has been associated with depression among adults, too. Depression is actually one of the biggest health risks for clergy (substance abuse is another). I check in periodically with a psychotherapist, so I don’t believe I am currently suffering from depression. However, I do find that the thought of spending much time with online GA leaves me feeling — well, depressed.

The sermon that split a congregation

Back in 1823, Rev. Jacob Flint was the minister of the one church that then existed in Cohasset, Mass. He had been ordained in Cohasset in 1798. He was fairly liberal to begin with, but over the quarter of a century he served the congregation he had become an outright Unitarian. So on December 7, Flint decided to preach a sermon on Unitarianism.

I can imagine the scene. He preached this sermon in the Meetinghouse that we still use today, but the old box pews were still in use in 1823. Wood stoves had been put in the Meetinghouse for the first time the previous year, in 1822, so at least people would have been relatively warm for the two lengthy sermons that were delivered each week. Flint would have climbed up into the high pulpit, suspended halfway between the main floor and the gallery. Sadly, he was not a good speaker — John Adams wrote that “his elocution is so languid and drawling that it does great injustice to his composition” (John Adams, Diary, 19 Sept. 1830).

Despite his poor elocution, at least some people in the congregation must have been paying close attention to this day-long Unitarian sermon. Within months the Trinitarians had left in a body to start building their own church just a hundred feet away across the town common. I can just imagine how angry the Trinitarians were after the morning service on December 7, 1823, and how little they looked forward to the second sermon in the afternoon when they would hear even more about how wrong the doctrine of the Trinity was. How they must have steamed and stewed as Flint preached, especially since his preaching seems specially designed to infuriate anyone with Trinitarian leanings.

But this was probably to be expected of Flint, who was an uncompromising man. Years later, Capt. Charles Tyng remembered a time from his boyhood when he had to live in Flint’s house:

“…I was then put under the charge of the Rev. Dr. Jacob Flint, the minister at Cohasset. I soon found that the change was from the frying pan to the fire. Doctor Flint was a large man with a forbidding countenance. He was morose & cross in his family, which consisted of his wife, three sons, and an infant daughter…. I dreaded Sunday, the Dr. was so very strict, made us boys sit in the house, reading our Bibles, or learning hymns…. Dr. Flint was a tyrannical man, and very severe, particularly with his own children. Hardly a day passed without his whipping them. Us Boston boys did not get it so often, although I often felt the effects of the rod. He probably was deterred from whipping those who boarded with him, as his disposition would have induced him, had he not thought our parents would take us away.” (Charles Tyng, Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain, 1808-1833, chapter 1.)

With that preface, here’s the first part of Flint’s divisive Unitarian sermon of December 7, 1823:

Connected to the whole

Brief excerpt from the opening paragraph of a sermon given by Rev. Jacob Flint here in Cohasset, Mass., on 19 October 1823:

“Nature has formed an infinite number of systems, which are parts only of the great whole, connected by a chain which can never be broken without injury to the parts and disorder to the whole…. Being connected, the parts are so constructed that … they are mutually dependent on each other for their support, general utility, beauty, and order. This is true of what is called the natural world, as well as of the moral.”

The text he chose for this sermon was Romans 12:5, “So we being many are one body in Christ, & every one members one of another.” Two months later, Flint precipitated a split in the Cohasset congregation by preaching a sermon in which he attacked the doctrine of the Trinity. I can’t help but wonder if he wrote the October sermon having already observed the beginnings of a split in the congregation, and hoping to persuade people that they were still part of a unity; then by December, he gave up preaching unity and went on attack.

Regardless of the historical background, I find the above passage to be still relevant. It is reminiscent of what 20th century theologian Bernard Loomer called the interdependent Web of Life.

Dead end

I plan to attend the online General Assembly as a delegate. I received an email with the subject line, “Retrieving Your Delegate Credentials for UUA General Assembly,” which directed me to a web page where I carefully followed the straightforward instructions. I then received an email with the subject line, “Your Delegate Credentials for GA,” which brought me to a web page titled “Welcome to the GA Delegate Participation Platform.” At that page, I once again carefully followed the straightforward instructions. Almost immediately, I received another email with the subject line, “GA Delegate Platform Access Link.”

Which sent me back to the web page titled “Welcome to the GA Delegate Participation Platform,” where I received the same instructions as before: “If you are a GA Delegate but have not received your link to the Delegate Platform, please enter the email address associated with your delegate credential. An email with your new login link will be sent immediately, but may take up to 10 minutes to be received (please also check your email’s spam or junk folder).” This is followed by a box where I can type in my email address again.

I typed in my email address (since there was no other possibility on that page). Nothing happened.

Oh well. Never mind.