Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best organized series of Unitarian Universalist religious education curriculum, and certainly the series which maintains the highest quality overall, was the New Beacon Series in Religious Education, produced from 1937 to c. 1957 under the editorship of Sophia Lyon Fahs by the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. Ask someone who went to a Unitarian or Universalist Sunday school in the 1950s, and they’re almost certain to remember Beginnings and How Miracles Abound and The Church across the Street. Ask someone whose children went through a Unitarian or Universalist Sunday school in those days, and they would probably add the Martin and Judy books for preschoolers.
In the Palo Alto church’s Sunday school this year, we used the book From Long Ago and Many Lands from the New Beacon Series. It has been so successful that I’m thinking of continuing on with the next book in the series. I searched the Web for a complete listing of the New Beacon series arranged in order of the age of the students, but could find nothing. Below find just such a listing. Please leave corrections in the comments.
Continue reading “A list of curriculum books in the New Beacon Series”
I’ve been reading Jerome Stone’s Religious Naturalism Today, and through it I’ve gotten even more interested in theologian Bernard Loomer. Loomer is the theologian who probably introduced Unitarian Universalists to the web of life as a theological concept. But Jerry also points out that Loomer helped originate another concept that has proved invaluable in liberal religious social justice work:
[In 1976] Loomer also wrote a seminal article on the distinction between unilateral and relational power, which may be the first statement of the distinction between power-over and power-with…. [Religious Naturalism Today, p. 96.]
Jerry’s referring to “Two Conceptions of Power” by Loomer, published in Process Studies 6:5-32, 1976. I’m going to have to add that to my Loomer reading list, which already includes Unfoldings, two booklets of transcriptions of talks Loomer gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, and The Size of God, the long essay that revived religious naturalism when it was published in 1987.
By working through these relatively short works by Loomer, it looks like I can (1) gain a richer understanding of “web of life” as a theological and ethical concept; (2) take another look at a key ethical distinction around use of power; and (3) work through a key statement of religious naturalism that uses the concept of God without going beyond the world of nature. All this for less that 200 pages of reading!
Some scholars of religion criticize the very category of religion. There are several possible critiques, including:
So here’s a thought experiment. Let’s jettison, just for the moment, the usual definition of religion as something separate from the rest of culture, something that requires belief in a perhaps unbelievable deity, and something the must be associated with a hierarchical or otherwise organized institutional structure.
Once we jettison that definition, we can understand religion as something that is akin to art and politics: it is something that is integral to culture, something that cannot easily be separated out from culture. Using this model of reality, we can make more sense of some otherwise baffling phenomena. Celebrity culture in the West, for example, may be considered as a religious phenomenon: Oprah and Princess Diana are saintly figures in just the same way as the Dalai Lama and the Pope are, which makes it more understandable why they receive the kind of religious veneration as the Dalai Lama and the Pope. Sports may also be considered as a religious phenomenon, right down to the orgiastic frenzies, reminiscent of Bacchic rituals, in which those who are not followers of one’s own sect are physically assaulted. Art and music may also be understood as religious phenomena: we’re all familiar with analogies between rock concerts and religious rites; and, speaking for myself, I get as much religious inspiration by going to an art museum as I get in a worship service.
If religion must be understood more broadly in this way, how then are we to characterize Western-style organized religion? It is a subset of religion, a specific manifestation of the way our broader culture does religion. We might consider it a discipline; early Christians sometimes referred to what they did as a disciplina, and it is Christianity more than anything else which has narrowed our Western understanding of what constitutes religion. However, “discipline” is somewhat problematic because it implies that this kind of religion can perhaps be done by oneself, which is clearly not the case. We could also speak of institutional religion, as opposed to other religious activities such as art, politics, etc.; organized religion is a less accurate way of saying much the same thing, for to say “organized” doesn’t tell us that this is religion organized into institutions.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten with this thought experiment. What do you think?