Category: Religion

He’s dead?…

Osama bin Laden is dead. It feels strange to write that. I could wish he had been brought to trial — or brought to justice really — rather than killed in a firefight. But they’re reporting that he used another person as a human shield, which reveals a lack of courage and a moral depravity. So he’s dead. I can’t help but think that the world is a better place without him.

By sheer coincidence, today I’ve been thinking about the Cain and Abel story from the book of Genesis. You’ve heard the story: Adam and Eve are the first two humans. They have two sons, Cain and Abel. God favors Abel over Cain, and in a fit of pique Cain murders Abel. When God asks Cain where Abel has got to, Cain replies, How should I know, am I my brother’s keeper? But God, being God, knows that Cain has killed Abel, and tells him so. Cain is ashamed. God punishes Cain, saying: I’m cursing you, your life will be tough, you’re going to be a vagabond and a fugitive forever. Cain says, I’m gonna be a vagabond and a fugitive, and everyone who finds me out will try to kill me. But God says, Not so, anyone who kills you, vengeance will be taken upon him sevenfold. Then God set a mark upon Cain to let people know about that. There’s some kind of weird complex poetic truth to the Cain and Abel story that I can never quite wrap my head around. It is obviously not a literally true story, but like the best fiction it gets at deeper truths — what the deeper truths are is open for debate.

And although it’s an inexact and incomplete analogy, I can’t help thinking of Osama bin Laden as a Cain-like figure: someone who commits a heinous murder, and who, after his crime was committed, had to become a fugitive and vagabond. It’s an inexact analogy, and Osama bin Laden was not Cain, but I have to admit I do worry about the aftermath of his death. Osama bin Laden is dead, the world is a better place without him, but I would not call this a neat and tidy ending to his story.

I do feel an enormous sense of relief that he’s dead. He was both depraved and powerful. And now the question is: what next?

Poly Styrene: an appreciation

Various media sources are reporting that singer Marianne Elliot-Said has died of complications of breast cancer at age 53. Elliot-Said was better known under the stage name Poly Styrene, a name she used while singing with X-Ray Spex.

X-Ray Spex had a short career. In 1976, Elliot-Said was taking voice lessons, learning how to sing opera, and recording derivative reggae songs on the side, when she saw the Sex Pistols perform. This exposure to punk rock galvanized her, and she decided to form her own punk band, X-Ray Spex. The band performed together for about three years, recorded a handful of singles and one album, then disbanded in 1979.

Following the demise of X-Ray Spex, Elliot-Said joined the Hare Krishnas, or more properly, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a branch of Hinduism that worships Vishnu, and is devoted to bhakti yoga, or expressions of devotion to God. I had not known that Elliot-Said had joined the Hare Kishnas, but I guess I wasn’t entirely surprised. When she was singing with X-Ray Spex, her voice had a transcendent, joyful quality to it — even when she was singing about the horrors of genetic engineering, or screaming (in late 1970s punk vocal style) “Oh bondage! up yours!” Although the punk rock idiom of the late 1970s was fairly limited, as practiced by someone like Poly Styrene the vocal style could approach a raucous and ecstatic transcendence. There was often a hint of rapture in her voice, even a hint of a connection to something larger than herself.

Elliot-Said has been interpreted as an early exponent of what came to be called third-wave feminism; she had a clear influence on later feminist bands like The Slits, and it’s hard to imagine the riot-grrrl movement without her example. She allied herself with the anti-racist forces within punk rock and was bi-racial — a Somali father and a White English mother — and perhaps she will be claimed as an early adopter of multiracial identity. She also had a preference for day-glo colors and wore braces on her teeth, though it’s harder to know what to make of those attributes.

But I prefer to remember her simply for her full-throated, no-holds-barred singing, a kind of punk bhakti devotion that invited us all to transform and transcend. The hell with the anemic pablum of praise bands. If you’re gonna make me have amplified music in a worship service, I won’t settle for anything less the raw full-throated raucous singing of someone like Poly Styrene.

Notes from a fundraising workshop

Below are my notes from a fundraising workshop led by Kim Klein, author of Fundraising for Social Change, at Starr King School for the Ministry, Monday 25 April 2011. My notes are just a bare outline of the presentation. Perhaps the most important part of the presentation was Kim Klein’s straightforward, easygoing, no-nonsense, humor-filled approach to talking about money. She was not in the least uptight when she talked about money. In fact, perhaps the most important thing she told us was that it’s OK to talk about money, that we have to un-learn all the taboos and social constraints we have around money.

That being said, here are my notes:

Key questions

The key questions nonprofit organizations must ask themselves before beginning fundraising:

— What does your organization most believe? You want to have a short memorable sentence describing what you believe. Example: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
— What does your organization do? You want to be able to talk very coherently about what you do.
— How well have you done? — your track record
— How much? — sources of money: Who gives?

The purpose of fundraising is to build relations

“We don’t want a donation, we want a donor.” So you build relations with people who will be ongoing donors.

The hardest thing to do with a prospective contributor is to “get them to go from zero to one.” That first donation is hardest. Therefore, you have to be willing to start small. [My thought: perhaps this is one good reason to pass the collection basket in the Sunday service, because you’re getting that first donation early on.]

Another basic rule of fundraising is to ask for donations three or four times a year: you ask for the first donation, then you follow up three or four months later. Individual donations will increase over time, as people stay with your organization. If you’re willing to be more sophisticated, you start keeping track of how often different individuals can be asked to give; e.g., there will be some people who say, “This is all I’m giving this year, don’t call me again,” and so you don’t call them again; on the other hand, there may be people who prefer to be asked as many as six times a year.

For congregations, there is the annual canvass or pledge drive. But Klein recommends figuring out a way to ask for money two or three additional times in a year: a capital fund drive, a special project, etc. [My thought: I wonder about things like an annual church auction — even the people who don’t attend could be asked to give a cash donation to the auction.]

Strategies

The basic fundraising equation: time in for money out. When looking at the time we put in, we have to be sure exactly what we want to get back for our time: money of course, but perhaps also more people, more visibility, etc.

The most effective use of fundraising time is personal, face-to-face asking.

You should ask people for about how much you think they can give. It’s not enough to simply ask for a donation — that’s too vague. You should know about how much you’re going to ask from a specific person, then ask for it.

If you’re looking for larger gifts (say, $5,000), to get the size gift you want, the prospect-to-donor ratio is about 4 to 1. So if you need a $5,000 gift, you should ask four people: 50% of the people you ask are likely to say yes (that’s 2 in this example), and half of those are likely to give you the amount you need (that’s 1 in this example).

You have to welcome it when prospects say “no.” First of all, when someone says “no,” that means you’re that much closer to having someone say “yes”! Secondly, it is important to remember that “no” actually may mean many different things. Here are some different ways people say “no,” and appropriate follow-ups:

  • The prospect may give a “no” which really means “not now” — then ask: “How should I leave it? When can I call you back?”
  • The prospect may say, “I have to ask my spouse” — then ask: What will your spouse need to know to make his/her decision?”
  • The prospect may say, “I can’t go that high” — then ask: “What feels good to you?”

When talking to prospects, you should take what they say absolutely literally. Do not try to read anything into what they say, because you might misinterpret. So if someone says, “Not now,” take that literally — they aren’t rejecting you, they are literally saying, “not now.”

If you contact someone by phone to ask for a donation, you’ll get a positive response about 25% of the time. If you contact someone via email or a letter to ask for a donation, you’ll get a positive response about 10% of the time. If you contact someone in person, you’ll get a positive response about 50% of the time. Obvious conclusion: when fundraising, the best approach is to contact someone in person.

What do you do after you write a note thanking the prospect?

It’s important to remember that $1,000 is a lot of money to most people. Yet most nonprofits do not pay much attention to such donors: if you give them attention, they’re often amazed. This is because we often give the same amount of attention to a $35 donor that we give to a $1,000 donor.

What kind of attention can you give to them? You can invite them to see a project your nonprofit is working on. It can be very low-key and non-threatening: “I’m going to be in your neighborhood visiting a project that you gave money to support, would you like to come along and see?” [My thought: in congregations, I’ve seen dinners for large donors work fairly well — but we religious liberals seem to have an aversion to this kind of thing.]

The approach

Before approaching a prospective donor, you have to know that they already give money to some charitable cause. This is easy to find out, and most people give some money to something. [My thought: if someone comes to Sunday services, and you pass the collection plate, most people will have thrown something into it — so you know that they give money!]

An approach often begins with a letter or email message, the gist of which is: you tell the prospect that you are going to ask them for a donation, increase, etc., but that they shouldn’t make the decision based on this letter, because you will call them in a few days.

Next step is to make the phone call. This is the hardest part! Therefore:

  • Since you are most likely to get voice mail, prepare a message that you are going to leave on their voice mail: write up an actual script!
  • The script for a voice mail message goes something like this: (a) give your name; (b) give your phone number (so you don’t say it too fast, write it out yourself each time you say it); © say you’re following up on the initial letter/email; say that you’d like to talk in person; (d) give your phone number again
  • Leave three messages before you give up and write off that prospective donor
  • If you actually get to talk to the person, act like everything the person says is literally true; do not read between the lines. If they say, “I can’t talk right now,” that’s literally true, so you say, “When can I call?” And pray for a hard question so you have an excuse for a meeting!
  • “The assumption of yes” — assume that you are going to be able to meet with the person

During the actual meeting, there are three things that a prospective donor is likely to focus on:

(1) The history of the organization. Default to your own story about your history with the organization.
(2) The philosophy of the organization. Again, be able to talk coherently about what your organization does.
(3) Benefits. Ditto.

Sometime during the meeting, you come to the close. That’s when you ask for the donation.

Kim Klein likes what she calls “the double close.” This is when you start out by saying something like: “I’m going to ask you for X dollars, but first let’s get to know each other, and talk about the organization.” You put it on the table, and then you take it right off again. Then, at the end of the meeting, you close again, and ask for the donation. She likes this because it takes a lot of the tension out of the meeting (for her, probably for the prospective donor). She doesn’t insist on it, but she likes it quite a bit.

When you come to the close, ask for the money — THEN SHUT UP. Don’t say anything, even if the silence goes on for a very long time. If you say something, you could wind up talking yourself out of a donation.

Trivia

Before this year, the last time Easter fell on April 24 was in 1859.

If you want to plan ahead, the next time it will fall on April 24 will be in 2095. The latest possible date for Easter is April 25; Easter last fell on that date in 1943, and the next time it will fall on that date will be 2038. The next time Easter will fall on a date later than April 15 will be in 2017.

Sources: Michael P.; Frequency of the date of Easter 1875 to 2124; Oremus Almanac.

“Three Cups of Deceit”

Carol discovered John Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit,” put out by the new online publisher, Byliner Originals; it’s a 100,000 word non-fiction article about Greg Mortenson, the well-known author of Three Cups of Tea. As you might imagine from the title, Krakauer is critical of Mortenson, and concludes the following:

“In all fairness, Greg Mortenson has done much that is admirable since he began working in Baltistan sixteen and a half years ago. He’s been a tireless advocate for girls’ education. He’s established dozens of schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have benefited tens of thousands [of] children, a significant percentage of them girls. A huge number of people regard him as a hero, and he inspires tremendous trust. It is now evident, however, that Mortenson recklessly betrayed this trust, damaging his credibility beyond repair.” [pp. 67-68]

Krakauer alleges that Mortenson fabricated important parts of his two bestselling books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools. To prove these allegations, Krakauer identifies serious errors in chronology, he finds contradictions between the account in Three Cups of Tea and an earlier article by Mortenson, and he digs up lots of eyewitness testimony that does not agree with what Mortenson wrote.

Krakauer also alleges that Mortenson mismanaged Central Asia Institute (CAI), the nonprofit organization he established to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To prove these allegations, Krakauer interviewed former employees and associates of Mortenson, as well as former board members of CAI, who claim that Mortenson did not adequately document expenses (in some cases provided no documentation at all), used CAI funds for personal use, and bullied employees. Furthermore, according to Krakauer, Mortenson used CAI monies to promote Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, while keeping the book profits for himself; promotional expenses allegedly included buying copies of his first book to keep it on the bestseller list. While it’s always wise to have some doubt about the opinions of disgruntled former employees, Krakauer managed to find so many disgruntled former employees and board members for such a small, newly-founded organization, that I at least had to doubt Mortenson’s managerial ability.

Today’s New York Times carries an article by Edward Wong titled “Two Schools, One Complicated Situation” [p. 5, “Week in Review” section]. Wong traveled to Afghanistan to see some of CAI’s schools for himself. He found at least one of the schools, which was built by CAI in 2009, and which was featured in Stones into Schools, has never been used. It lies an hour’s walk from the winter campground of some Kyrgyz nomads — but children are not going to walk for an hour through harsh winter weather with subzero temperatures to go to school, and besides in 2008 the Afghan government began sending teachers in the summer time to teach the Kyrgyz nomad’s children in their yurts.

Wong also visited one of CAI’s schools which is a real success — in his article, Krakauer makes it clear that Mortenson and CAI have completed many successful projects — and in comparing the two schools, Wong concludes that “what the two schools, especially the empty one, may reflect most plainly is the complexity of any development work in a country like Afghanistan…. whether the local populace buys into a project is crucial for success.” Wong is a little too cautious here: any development work, whether it takes place in the United States or in a developing country, requires that the local populace buys into a project. Carol has seen this in her own work: she has seen projects that have been built in the developing world without local buy-in, which are then never used or quickly abandoned.

Local buy-in and local control over projects is also important for anyone who believes in the democratic process. If you go into another country, tell local populace that you’re going to build a project of some sort without giving them at least some control over the project, you’re in fact subverting the democratic process. What the local populace will learn is that it doesn’t matter what their priorities might be, foreign NGOs and nonprofits are going to act in an authoritarian way and simply tell them what the priorities are going to be, like it or not. Is your top priority to get a medical facility to lower the infant mortality rate? — too bad, we’re going to build you a school whether you want one or not.

For me, the deeper issue here is one of accountability. To whom are development agencies accountable? In real life, development agencies are really only ultimately accountable to their funding sources — to their big donors (foundations, billionaires, U.S. government grants, etc.) first of all, and to smaller donors only secondarily. Development agencies may be somewhat accountable to local governments, insofar as local government may be able to grant or deny permission to work in that country. But most development agencies have little or no real accountability to the local populaces whom they claim to serve. What are the local populaces going to do, vote them out of office? — no, because development work isn’t democratic. So local populaces depend on the sensitivity and the ethics of the development agencies. Both Krakauer and Wong assert that CAI lacks sensitivity to local needs, and Krakauer asserts that CAI has engaged in unethical practices. Which makes you feel sorry for the local populaces CAI claims to serve.

Humanism and liberationist theologies

In a recent comment on a post I wrote about Cornel West, Kim Hampton makes a statement that I quite agree with:

“I agree that the biggest reason that West is not talked about [among Unitarian Universalists] is the fact that he speaks from a liberationist standpoint … but I think you may be downplaying the fact part of the reason he is such a liberationist is that he is a forthright Christian. And Unitarian Universalism is still trying to figure out its relationship to Christianity.”

This raises another interesting issue for me. In the contemporary theological landscape, socialism is almost exclusively associated with either a Christian liberationist theology perspective (e.g., Cornel West), or a Neo-pagan liberationist theology perspective (e.g., Starhawk). Humanists, by contrast, tend to be associated with a more moderate political philosophy. So humanist William Schulz, former director of Amnesty International, sounds like pretty straightforward natural-law human rights advocate and political liberal; and humanist Sharon Welch, ethicist and theologian, sounds to me like a pretty straightforward second-wave feminist and political liberal. Or put it this way: while I can think of some prominent Christians and Neo-pagans whom I would call socialists or leftist councilists, all the prominent humanists I know of seem to accept late capitalism without making a serious challenge to it.

In addition, it seems to me that much of humanist dialogue in recent years — at least, among the humanists I know — has largely divorced theology and religion from social justice theories. This is not to say that humanists aren’t concerned with social justice; indeed, the opposite is true in my experience, as the humanists I know tend to be strongly committed to social justice and political action. But most of the humanists I know seem to remove ethics from religion, and their theology focuses on ontotheology almost exclusively. Sharon Welch is an excellent example of this: over the years, the trend she has followed has been to remove explicit religious concerns from her ethics, to the point where I would not longer call her a theologian and instead I’d call her simply an ethicist (without a qualifier).

Any thoughts on this from you, dear reader? I’m willing to hear counterexamples that disprove my hypothesis, but I’m far more interested in a broader analysis: are humanists tending to move to the political right of socialist Christians and Neo-pagans? and is there something inherent in the trend of humanist thought today that is moving humanism in that direction? and aside from William R. Jones, is there such a thing as a liberationist humanist thinker?

Update 1/30/26: Finally getting around to reading James Crofts’s comment. How could I have forgotten Anthony Pinn is another liberationist humanist? There are probably many more.

Visiting a Judean village, and “Act out the story!”

A couple of interesting things came up while I was teaching Sunday school yesterday.

1. At the 9:30 service, we’re doing a program based on the old Marketplace 29 A.D. curriculum by Betty Goetz; we’re calling our version “Judean Village 29 C.E.” The idea is that we have gone back in time to a Judean village in the year 29. The adult leaders are mostly “shopkeepers,” or artisans: we have a potter, a scribe, a candymaker, a baker, a musical instrument maker, a spice and herb shop, a maker of fishing nets, and a trainer of athletes. Not all shopkeepers are present each week; sometimes they’re off visiting another village, or visiting the nearby city of Jerusalem. There’s also a tax collector and a Roman soldier who roam around our village, shaking down the villagers for taxes. All the adults are in costume, which makes it a little easier to pretend we’re actually back in the year 29.

At the beginning of the class session, we gather in the market, and the adults exchange a little gossip — extemporaneous comments on the oppressive Roman empire, and rumors about the radical rabble-rousing rabbi named Jesus who may or may not be involved in some kind of resistance to Roman rule, although (so the story goes), the last time he was in our village he stayed with the hated tax collector. After about five minutes of this, the children choose which shopkeeper they would like to apprentice with this week. Then we go off to our “shops” — mostly tables in one big room, although the baker and candymaker have to go to the kitchen.

Each shopkeeper leads their group of 2-6 children in a craft that is mentioned in the Bible (e.g., the potter), or is appropriate to the year 29 (e.g., the musical instrument maker makes pan pipes for use by shepherds). Some of the shopkeepers are good about continuing to talk about life in the village as they work on the craft — some of us aren’t; I’m the musical instrument maker, and the project I’m doing is complicated enough that about all I have time to do is make sure the children get the project done in the 30-35 minutes we have to work on it.

So there I was sitting yesterday with a six year old and an eleven year old, working away at making pan pipes — trying to direct the six year old while not boring the eleven year old — and at some point I realized that not only was I having a blast, the two kids who were in my “shop” were both having a blast, and so were all the kids over at the scribe’s shop. The tax collector came around, and we told him we didn’t have any money, and then the Roman soldier came by — he’s just scary enough, which is to say nor really scary at all except when we indulge in make-believe — and both the tax collector and the Roman soldier were having a blast (they took the collection in the worship service a couple of weeks, in costume, which was even more fun for them).

Not only are we having fun, but the kids are probably learning more about what I want to teach them about Jesus than they learn in any conventional Sunday school session. They are learning that Jesus’ life and ministry had a strong component of justice-making; that Jesus liked and respected everybody, even the hated tax collectors; and that Jesus was Jewish. Equally importantly, the kids and adults get to hang out together in a structured learning environment that allows for lots of informal social interaction, thus helping strengthen cross-generational bonds (and about half our “shopkeepers” are non-parents).

I think we need more Sunday school programs that look like this. Teacher-proof curriculum guides with cookbook lessons plans — the standard approach we’ve been using since the 1970s — are still fine, and still work reasonably well, but it’s a good idea to mix in some other kinds of programs, too.

2. At the 11:00 service, we’re still working from the old From Long Ago and Many Lands curriculum book by Sophia Fahs. We don’t have lessons plans; instead, we do pretty much the same thing each week: take attendance, light a chalice and say the same opening words each week, have time when everyone can say a good thing and a bad thing that have happened in the past week, hear a story from our book, act out the story (or sometimes draw pictures of it, or make puppets, etc.), talk about the meaning of the story, then go into the front playground and play for ten or fifteen minutes.

I was tired this week. I read the story, and hesitated. “You know what I think we should do now,” I said. And one of our regulars said firmly, “Act out the story!” That was not what I had been thinking, but that’s exactly what we did: we acted out the story, just as we always do, then we talked it over, and then we went out and played in the playground.

Kids like having little rituals. They like doing the same thing every week in Sunday school — I think it feels comforting to them. They don’t need elaborate lesson plans that have several new and different activities every week. Light a candle, talk with friends, hear a story, act it out, talk about it, go play — from a kid’s point of view, that makes for a very satisfying Sunday school session week after week after week.

And the same old structure every week sometimes allows us adults to act more like we’re doing ministry. When we went out to play, I made a point of playing catch with the child who was having a hard time that day. I could give that child extra attention, while the other kids just played on their own; I didn’t have to discipline that child just to maintain order in the classroom, and instead could give that child what was needed that day — lots of my attention.

The oaks of Elkhorn Slough

A few days ago, I visited Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. I stopped at the visitor center to purchase a day use pass. The ranger who sold me the pass asked me to stop on my way into the reserve to bush off my shoes and dip them into a disinfectant bath. Seeing my surprised look, she said, “It’s to help control Sudden Oak Death Syndrome. You should do that whenever you go walking where there might be oaks. I know, it seems pointless, but I’m the kind of person who would still wash her hands during a cholera epidemic.”

When I was walking around the reserve, I didn’t even think about Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, although I did admire the many live oaks, with their long convoluted branches arching over the surrounding ground. Human beings are really good at ignoring and forgetting the huge problems which loom before us. I suspect this is the origin of apocalyptic literature, which is designed to force us into facing up to really big problems that are completely beyond our control: the book of Revelation was designed, with its striking and hallucinatory images, to get its original readers to face up to the overwhelming power and evil of the dominant Roman Empire. Apocalyptic literature is also designed to help us feel as though we can make meaningful moral judgments about overwhelming problems, and it is designed to give us hope that somehow things will turn out well, albeit in ways that we really can’t comprehend right now.

We still have political debate, writing, and other art forms cast in the apocalyptic genre today. Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” may be one example; and certainly some of the debate within the environmental movement tends towards the apocalyptic direction. Some of the debate about immigration into the United States and European countries vaguely resembles the apocalyptic genre, down to dire warnings and sometimes surreal logic. There is nothing wrong with apocalyptic literature — it can provide some needed comfort and hope — as long as we recognize that it is really a type of fiction or myth. You still have to wash your hands during the cholera epidemic, you probably should disinfect your shoes before walking among oaks, and when you get done reading an apocalypse you still have to deal with reality.

Cornel West and us

I’ve just been reading historian Gary Dorrien’s essay “Pragmatic Postmodern Prophecy,” which discusses Cornel West as an intellectual and as a religious leader. (This essay, from Dorrien’s 2010 book Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice, is an updated version of a chapter from his 2008 book Social Ethics in the Making.)

Dorrien tells the story of West’s intellectual evolution, and his evolution as a public intellectual. Dorrien also gives succinct reviews of major critiques of West. Towards the end of the essay, Dorrien summarizes West, casting him as primarily a religious thinker:

“He [West] never really changed, notwithstanding the Left critics who liked his early writings and claimed that he sold out later. From the beginning West was committed to a Christian liberationist vision of social justice and reconciliation, though some readers wrongly took his early writings to be Marxism dressed up as Christian though. West was not ‘really’ a Marxist who used Christianity; it was more the other way around. He began as a liberationist social critic committed to building progressive multiracial coalitions, and he remained one.” (p. 334)

I’ve never quite understood why Unitarian Universalists (and other religious liberals, for that matter) don’t spend much time thinking about West, but Dorrien’s summary helps me understand why so few of us seem to bother with West. It’s not his forthright Christianity; for although some Unitarian Universalists might be uncomfortable with West’s trinitarian Christianity, our own humanist theologian William R. Jones showed us back in 1974 how liberal “humanocentric” theists and liberal humanists have plenty in common, or at least enough to build alliances to fight oppression together.

Instead, I think it’s because West is firmly aligned with liberationist Christian theology, while we Unitarian Universalists mostly remain aligned with the old Social Gospel. West is a Christian socialist who’s not afraid of revolutionary ideas, not afraid of taking risks that don’t always work out, and he’s committed to rapid change. The Social Gospel, as it exists today, still uses liberal but not revolutionary ideas, plays down risk, and works towards slower evolutionary change. Unitarian Universalism (and many other liberal religious groups) are not going to be comfortable with West because his theology is further to the left than we are comfortable with. Unfortunately, this means we have cut ourselves off to some extent from one of the few religious progressives who is a public intellectual, someone who has engaged both the academics and the broader public in conversations about progressive religion.

I’ve long been interested in West because in my view he’s the most prominent intellectual still working in the long tradition of American pragmatism that stretches back to Emerson, Peirce, and Dewey. All of us who are American religious liberals really should have some understanding of the pragmatist tradition, since it has been so influential for our religious tradition. So I wonder if we could think about West as a sort of successor to Emerson: a public intellectual who writes essays that are both popular and deeply thoughtful — and on that basis, we might think of taking his theology seriously, even if we don’t quite agree with it.

An appreciation of Peter Gomes

In a recent appreication of Peter Gomes, William J. Willimon tells an anecdote with implications for ecclesiology:

One Sunday, as Peter say in the vestry and prepared for the morning service, a student usher entered and stammered, “There’s somebody preaching here this morning.”

Peter replied, “Of course, me.”

“I mean there’s somebody preaching in the pulpit. Now. Is that OK?”

“What?” Peter thrust his head into the sanctuary. Aghast, he saw an African-American woman in the pulpit ranting at the docile congregations, screaming over the organ prelude. Indignantly, Peter bustled over to her and hissed through gritted teeth. “You, come down here this instant. Yes, you.”

The intruder stared down at Peter.

“This instant!” he sneered.

Startled, she came down the steps and informed Peter that she had been commissioned to preach that day a word direct from the Lord.

“Look you,” said Peter, in love, “this is my pulpit. I have earned the right to preach in this place. No one is going to deliver any word from the Lord today except for the Reverend Doctor Peter J. Gomes. Now you go sit down on that pew and keep your mouth shut or I will call the campus police after I wring your head off.”

Peter reported that the woman sat there through the service — silent, with a beatific smile upon her face.

“As the prelude ended, I looked with scorn upon my congregation,” Peter confessed. “White, guilt-ridden liberals all, they would have sat there all morning, doing nothing while that woman continued her drivel unabated. They should thank God that their pastor is not some intellectual wimp.”

— “Harvard’s preacher” by William J. Willimon, The Christian Century, 5 April 2011, p. 11.

Would that all religious liberal congregations treated their pulpits with as much respect as Gomes treated the pulpit of Memorial Church.