Category: Religion

The power of habit

Increasingly, I’ve come to be convinced that one of the chief reasons many people stay with a congregation is habit. Human beings really are creatures of habit. This is why weekly services, and annual holidays, are so important:— If you are in the habit of attending a weekly service, you will be more likely to stay with a congregation in spite of dissatisfaction and annoyance. If you are in the habit of attending an annual holiday observance (e.g., Christmas eve candlelight service, etc.), you will likely attend year after year in spite of the quality of the service or theology of the congregation.

This implies that anything that might cause people to break their habits will lead to some people drifting away from a congregation. If you have no Sunday services during the summer, at least a few people will get out of the habit of showing up, and they will drift away from the congregation. If you have two worship services during most of the year, but only one during the summer, you will lose at least a few people over the summer (I watched that happen at the Palo Alto church over the past summer — we lost at least a couple of newcomers). If your minister disappears for two months during the summer, and instead you have guest preachers or lay leaders, I would be willing to bet that at least a few people will drift away from your congregation, for you have broken their habit.

It seems to me that if we are looking for ways to get newcomers to stick with our congregations, one of the main things to do is not to get people to think about theology, but rather it’s to get people to develop the habit of congregational life.

Down with Rome!

I’ve been reading apocalypses recently: Revelation, an ancient Christian apocalypse, and Joel, an ancient Hebrew apocalypse, to be specific. As a Transcendentalist, I have a soft spot in my heart for Joel’s insistence that everyone is going to have transcendent visions: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.” (Joel 2.28-29)

Politically, however, I’m more interested in Revelation, which rails against the oppression of the Romans, and longs for the destruction of the Roman Empire. It’s the vivid expression of an oppressed people’s longing for the destruction of their foreign oppressors, filled with extravagant imagery. I know conventional Christians see Revelation as the coming of the End Times when they all will get raptured up to heaven; but to me it reads more like political hate mail for the Roman overlords.

To better understand Revelation, I’ve been reading bits of a non-canonical apocalyptic book, the Sibylline Oracles, written somewhere around the same time as Revelation, give or take a century or two. This passage from Book VIII makes the political content quite clear:

God’s declarations of great wrath to come
In the last age upon the faithless world
I make known, prophesying to all men
According to their cities. From the time
When the great tower fell and the tongues of men
Were parted into many languages
Of mortals, first was Egypt’s royal power
Established, that of Persians and of Medes
And also of the Ethiopians
And of Assyria and Babylon,
Then the great pride of boasting Macedon,
Then, fifth, the famous lawless kingdom last
Of the Italians shall show many evils
Unto all mortals and shall spend the toils
Of men of every land….
There shall come to thee sometime from above
A heavenly stroke deserved, O haughty Rome.
And thou shalt be the first to bend thy neck
And be razed to the ground, and thee shall fire
Destructive utterly consume, cast down
Upon thy pavements, and thy wealth shall perish,
And wolves and foxes dwell in thy foundations.
And then shalt thou be wholly desolate,
As if not born….
The Sibylline Oracles, trans. Milton S. Terry, 1899, Book VIII, ll. 1-15, 47-55; pp. 161-163.

Nothing about the Rapture here, just straightforward hate mail for Rome. In my reading, Revelation is also hate mail for Rome; it makes more sense that way. Yes, it is a lot less straightforward than the above passage from the Sibylline Oracles; yes, it is filled with bizarre imagery; but it makes a lot more sense as an ancient religio-political tract predicting the downfall of Rome than as a onto-theological text predicting — um, from a theological point of view, I’m not sure exactly what Revelation is supposed to predict.

What kind of online religion do you do?

I’ll be spending the coming week exploring Web-based religious participation, and I’m hoping that you, my readers, will be willing to help me out by answering one or more of the questions below.

(A) Which of the following do you consider yourself:

  1. Digital Native (you don’t remember a time before the Internet)
  2. Digital Immigrant (you feel fully at home in the Internet)
  3. Digital Alien (you have your green card, but you don’t feel fluent in the language and customs)
  4. Digital Tourist (the Internet is a place you visit, but you don’t live here)

(B) Aside from reading (this blog)(my Facebook feed), which of the following ways do you access religious content online online? (I also ask for specific examples of each kind of content, but if you don’t have the time to get specific, I’d still love to know which types of content, if any, you access.)

  1. Looking at a congregation’s Web site, or a denomination’s Web site (please list one or more)
  2. Reading sacred texts (Bible, Qu’ran, etc.) online (please specify which ones)
  3. Reading religious blogs online (please name some)
  4. Watching videos with religious content online (please describe one you remember)
  5. Listening to sermon podcasts online (please say who was preaching)
  6. Listening to religious music, broadly defined, online (please name some performers, composers, and/or songs/works)
  7. Taking classes in religion or religious topics online (please describe one or more)
  8. Looking at religious content online with your children (please specify)
  9. Other (please specify)

(C) Any general comments about online religious content?

If you’ve never commented before, I’d really love to hear your answers to one or more of the above questions. Even if you don’t access any other online religious content, I’d still love to know that. Thanks in advance for your assistance!

Peter J. Gomes is dead

Peter J. Gomes, minister at Memorial Church of Harvard University, died Monday, February 28. New York Times obituary here, and Harvard Gazette obituary here.

Gomes is probably best known in popular culture for coming as gay in 1991. It was much more difficult to come out as a gay man twenty years ago; and Gomes was then identified with conservative politics (he gave the benediction at one of Ronald Reagan’s inaugurations) which in those days must have made it even more difficult to come out.

But when I think of Gomes, I think of someone who had the reputation of being one of our living American preachers. I never heard him preach in person, but I heard him on the radio, and he really was fabulous — a gorgeous voice under perfect control, backed up by a sharp intellect.

When I think of Gomes, I also think of his Cape Verdean background. His father was born in the tiny African nation of Cape Verde, and came to the United States to work in the cranberry bogs of southeastern Massachusetts. This is an unusual family history for an African American: a family that chose to emigrate, rather than being enslaved and forced to go America.

And finally, when I think of Gomes, I think of someone who can be considered a religious liberal. In his books, Gomes presented contemporary Biblical scholarship to a popular audience, and sometimes it feels as though he takes great joy in puncturing the pretensions of Biblical literalists:

“Jesus came preaching — we are told this in all the Gospels — but nowhere in the Gospels is there a claim that he came preaching the New Testament, or even Christianity. It still shocks some Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not know ‘our’ Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well.” [The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, 2007, p. 14.]

I get the distinct impression that Gomes took just a little bit of pleasure in shocking “some Christians” who weren’t smart enough to know that Jesus was not a Christian. Even though I felt Gomes could be a little bit pompous in his writing, I like him for taking that little bit of pleasure in shocking the literalists.

Online summary of distributed cognition

Joe sent me a link to an excellent online summary of distributed cognition some time ago, and I have been meaning to post the link on my blog. Here it is:

“Distributed Cognition” by Edwin Hutchins of the University of California, San Diego

In this ten page paper, Hutchins gives a good concise introduction to distributed cognition. He points out the close relation between Vygotksy’s theories and distributed cognition. Hutchins provides a nice division of distributed cognition into three types: cognition “may be distributed across the members of a social group,” cognition may involve an interaction between internal processes and the material environment, and cognition may be distributed through time.

I’ve been finding that the concepts of distributed cognition are extremely useful in understanding how congregations work. I’ve found this paper to be very helpful as I continue to deepen my understanding of distributed cognition, so I thought I’d share it here.

Reluctantly re-examining personal sin

I have never thought all that much about personal sin. After all, I’m a product of Social Gospel Unitarianism. Sin, for many of those of us who were raised within the Social Gospel world view, is located outside the individual, in society. This is why people like me don’t spend much time worrying about our personal sinfulness, nor do we spend much time trying to achieve personal salvation. Instead, we spend a great deal of time worrying about the sin that is out there in the world, and we spend lots of time working for the salvation of the world. Prayer on bended knee admitting what nasty individuals we are? Nope, we don’t do much of that. Saving the earth from climate change, saving the whales, saving land from being strip malled? Oh yeah, we do lots of things like that.

Recently, I was talking to a friend, another religious liberal, who has been beset by small-minded people intent on doing damage to this friend of mine. My friend, in a moment of anguish, said something about the sinfulness of these small-minded people. This assessment contained the truth of my friend’s personal experience: these small-minded people were full of sin. The sin lay in two things: they did not treat my friend like a full human being, and when they had a choice about the way they could act, they chose to act hurtfully.

As a Social Gospeler who doesn’t think much about personal sin, I am tempted to explain away the actions of these small-minded people using the concepts of popular psychology: they must have something bad going on elsewhere in their lives to make them act this way, or perhaps they had troubled childhoods. As a twenty-first century Social Gospeler, I am especially prone to use the psychology of family systems theory: the problem lies, not in the individual, but in the social system that allows such behavior. But psychology is designed to explain why persons behave the way they behave; psychology does not make moral judgments, it does not say when something is good and right, or bad and wrong; psychology is not a substitute for morals and ethics.

I’m extremely reluctant to re-introduce the concept of personal sin into my religious life. I’m quite comfortable talking about the sins of society. I’m quite comfortable talking about evil, which I think of as those dark forces outside of us, and in some sense outside our control, that can force us to do things that are bad. Besides, the word “sin” has been so badly misused by so many people in our society that it’s almost unusable in ordinary conversation. Yet my friend really was sinned against; I was perfectly willing to agree that those small-minded people sinned when they made my friend’s life miserable.

What do you think? As a religious liberal, do you think about personal sin, or not? How do you define personal sin? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

“Stencil-style writing” and zone of proximal development

Notes from my teaching diary, dated Sunday 20 February:

Paul was the lead teacher in the 11:00 a.m. Sunday school class this morning. Paul brought in a lovely picture book that a friend of his had given him. It was very attractive, and a couple of the children looked at it curiously. After everyone checked in, and the two new children got more comfortable, Paul started the lesson proper. “I brought in this picture book,” he said, “and I also have a story from our regular book [From Long Ago and Many Lands by Sophia Fahs]. I thought you could choose which story you wanted to hear.” I was sure the children would want to hear the story in the attractive picture book, but they wanted to hear the story from the regular book — it was obvious that they really like the regular book.

After Paul read the story to us (it was the story of “The Wee, Wise Bird” on p. 146), we talked a little about the story, and then Paul asked us to draw scenes from the story. Billy* was having a hard time settling down, so as the assistant teacher I asked him to come sit beside me; he enjoys himself more when an adult can help keep him focused. We talked about what he might want to draw, and he said he didn’t really want to draw, but he might like to write down the three lessons the wee, wise bird tried to teach the dim-witted gardener. He began to write the first one, very neatly and carefully. I told him that he had very neat handwriting, and admired the special way he was writing. “That’s stencil-style writing,” he said with pride.

Across the table, Jack* drew very quickly: first a giant bulldozer, then a plane about to drop a bomb. Paul suggested that Jack might want to draw a picture of what the wee, wise bird might look like if it really could have had a pearl bigger than itself inside its body. Jack took great pleasure in dashing off another drawing showing exactly that.

When it came time for everyone to show their drawings, Isaac,* who was the youngest child there at age 6, showed his drawing. “I drew what he drew,” he said a little shyly, pointing to the 8 year old next to him. He had done a good copy of his neighbor’s drawing. I couldn’t help thinking to myself that this was a very visual example of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, and a good reminder of how much the children are learning from each other, and from us adults, not through the explicit lesson but simply by watching each other and us. Along those lines, the class always seems to go well when Paul is teaching: the children come away from class feeling they have learned something concrete and memorable, we have all had time to chat (there was a lot of informal chatting while we were drawing).

At noon I checked the Main Hall and found that the main worship service was running a little late, as usual. So Paul asked if the children wanted to hear the story from the picture book he had brought with him, and they did. A couple of parents came in in the middle of this story, but none of the children took this as a cue to get up and scramble out of class: they all stayed and listened to the whole of Paul’s picture book. In another testimonial to the approach we are taking, about a half hour after class had let out, one of Billy’s parents came up to me and said that Billy didn’t really want to leave the house to go to Sunday school this morning, but once he was in the car he remembered that he really liked the 11:00 Sunday school class.

* Pseudonyms, of course.

Just to state the obvious

When confronted with a twelve year old girl who had just died, the story about that radical rabble-rouser and rabbi Jesus of Nazareth does not have him saying: “Your daughter is in heaven now because God needed another angel”; nor is he reported as saying, “I know just how you feel, but your daughter is in a better place now.” Nope, the way the story runs is that Jesus walks into where the girl is lying, takes her hand, and says, “Girl, get up!” and she does. (For you Bible geeks, this is in Mark 5.35-43.)

Mind you, I’m not someone who believes in the literal factual truth of the stories in the Bible, nor do I believe in the literal truth of the stories told by Shakespeare, and in fact I have a limited amount of trust in the literal factual truth of stories in the New York Times or on Fox News. Stories have their own narrative logic that is different from, but no less true than, literal factual truth.

So reading this story is not going to make me go out and try to do some faith healing — no more than reading King Lear is going to make me say to my sweetheart, “I love you according to my bond; no more nor less.” (For you Shakespeare geeks, that’s act 1, scene 1, lines 94-95.) However, reading this story in the Jesus saga is going to make me think twice before uttering platitudes to the parents of a dead child. Jesus did not try to placate them by saying, “Your twelve year old is one of God’s angels now.” Instead, he showed up. He didn’t weep and wail. He was matter-of-fact. He paid attention to the parents, and paid attention to what they really wanted.

Just to state the obvious, this story is not a literal story about a dead girl that came back to life, but it is about a different kind of miracle: showing up, not freaking out, and paying attention to someone who needs it.

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Repost: letter on PCD politics

The letter below was sent out by the executive committee of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association of the Pacific Central District (PCD-UUMA). The letter gives the “understanding” of the PCD-UUMA regarding the recent termination of Cilla Raughley as District Executives of the Pacific Central District. N.B.: This letter came with explicit permission to “post it on your blog, FaceBook page, tweet a link….”

I don’t really run a news blog, but there has been a dearth of official communication on this issue, and for that reason only I’m willing to repost this here. Please note that while I have received an apparently official statement via email from both the Pacific Central District Board and staff at the Unitarian Universalist Association, those email messages did not come with explicit permission to post them on a blog, and I’ve always had a policy of not posting email messages to this blog without explicit permission (see About this blog).

If you want to reply to this letter, please communicate directly with one of the signers. I have zero interest in moderating comments on someone else’s letter, so I’m going to shut off comments on this post. And before you complain that I’ve turned off comments, please remember that this blog is my hobby: I do it for fun, I do it in my spare time, and I get to choose to not moderate comments on something I didn’t write.

February 18, 2011

To our fellow Unitarian Universalists of the Pacific Central District,

As the members of the Executive Committee of the Pacific Central District (PCD) chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association, we write to share our understanding of Cilla Raughley’s departure from the position of District Executive.

Personnel practices require discretion and a respect for privacy; our response, therefore, probably will not satisfy everyone’s desire to be fully informed, but we believe it important to acknowledge our own influence on this action by the UUA. While we gratefully acknowledge the many long hours Cilla Raughley devoted to Unitarian Universalism in general and our district in particular, from the beginning of Cilla’s tenure there have been some strains in her relationships with some congregations and some ministers, as well as with the UUMA chapter specifically. We responded to these concerns, in part, by devoting numerous meetings, holding a day-long workshop, and creating a standing subcommittee to engage in mutual conversations with her to build on strengths and sort out difficulties.

At our Fall 2010 minister’s meeting and retreat in October, it became apparent to those attending that Cilla’s relationship with many ministers and congregations had become strained to the point that, from our perspective, she was no longer serving the whole effectively. In a congregation, if a minister is no longer effective with a large percentage of the congregation, the minister is no longer in good ministry with the whole congregation. Similarly, when the District Executive is no longer in right relationship with a large percentage of the congregations, something vital is no longer working. In our business meeting, we expressed with a 40-0 vote (5 abstaining) our lack of trust and confidence in Cilla’s leadership as District Executive, and we requested new leadership for our district.

We realize that many people have not been aware of our on-going efforts over the years to work these things out — it is the nature of such conversations that their content be confidential. But we want you to know that we have been working diligently and in good faith to reconcile these difficulties. Please understand that our decision to write this letter of non-support — a decision which did not come easily — came only after we had exhausted many other alternatives.

We first conveyed the results of our October 2010 vote to Cilla via a face-to-face meeting, and then via a letter to Cilla’s joint employers, the PCD Board and the UUA’s Congregational Life Department. We sent another letter a few days later, giving the names of 19 ministers who affirmed their support of the vote and were willing to relate their experiences and their reasons for voting as they did. The PCD Board’s Personnel Committee invited seven of these ministers to a meeting a few weeks later, to ask further questions and hear their concerns. The meeting lasted three and a half hours and was both frank and respectful.

The contracted employment agreement with the District Executive stipulates that if any of the three parties to the contract (the UUA, the PCD Board or the DE) withdraw their consent, the contract is ended. As we ministers are not one of the three parties to this contract, we have not been privy to the negotiations between the UUA and the PCD Board that resulted in the Feb. 11th end of Cilla’s employment. We have been in regular communication with the UUA and believe they have acted in good faith and in the best interests of the congregations in our district.

In a personnel matter of this nature, there will always be unanswered questions and often painful feelings. Many of the details must necessarily remain private, by law and out of respect for privacy. While we are not Cilla’s employers, you are welcome to contact those of us named below to discuss this matter further. The Rev. Dr. Terasa Cooley, Director of Congregational Life at the UUA and Cilla’s former UUA supervisor, is not legally permitted to comment on the details of Cilla’s departure but is glad to address your concerns about the systemic issues of this situation.

Our Pacific Central District has abundant strengths and enormous potential. The ministers in this district are completely committed to healing the strained and broken relationships that hinder this potential and to participating in the creation of a system of accountability and support that will bring renewed health and strength to our district.

We have confidence in our congregational leaders, in the PCD Board, in the UUA leadership, in our fellow ministers and religious educators. We believe we can and will move ahead together, and we pledge ourselves fully to that work. We look forward to continuing to serve in partnership with our district lay leaders on the PCD Growth Committee, the PCD Board, the planning committee for our District Assembly, at the Starr King School, and in our congregations.

Rev. Meghan Conrad Cefalu
President, PCD UUMA
Minister, Grass Valley

Rev. Christopher Bell
Vice-President, PCD-UUMA
Minister, Santa Rosa

Rev. Neal Anderson
Secretary, PCD UUMA
Minister, Reno

Rev. Roger Jones
Treasurer, PCD UUMA
Family Minister, Sacramento Society

Rev. Elizabeth Banks
Minister, Davis

Rev. Julia Older
Minister, Redwood City

Rev. Doug Kraft
Senior Minister, Sacramento Society

Rev. Grace Simons
Minister, Modesto

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 11:52 am

To make you feel humble

NASA is celebrating the one year anniversary of its Solar Dynamics Observatory, and they’ve been featuring this photo on their Web site: a photo of a March 30, 2010, solar eruptive prominence, taken in the extreme ultraviolet range. NASA has superimposed a photo of the Earth to provide a sense of scale.

Dang, we are tiny:

This reminds me of the extended monologue by Yhwh in the book of Job (ch. 38 ff.). Though framed in the cultural referents of the Ancient Near East, Yhwh’s monologue has the same effect on me as does this photo — both make me realize that we humans are insignificant when considered in terms of the vastness of the universe. Our essential insignificance seems to bother some people, but to be honest I find it comforting — I’m often not very impressed with humans, and it’s good to know that there is something out there which is much bigger and grander, and more permanent, than we are.