Category: Religion

Noted without comment

On The India Philosophy Blog back on Sept. 28, Amod Lee wrote a post titled “Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of [Elon] Musk and [Charles] Manson.” Here’s a brief excerpt (I’ve changed the paragraphing slightly):

“…the transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness [following a transcendent experience from e.g. psychedelic drugs] is a fundamentally ethical one: to be far enough along it is to be a saint, one who has had ‘a transcendence of the ego point of view and its replacement by devotion to or centred concentration upon some manifestation of the Real, response to which produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life’ (Interpretation of Religion 301). But I think we need to be very careful about that sort of claim. The point came up in my interview with Osheen Dayal of MAPS Canada, where I pointed to the example of tycoon Elon Musk.

“It is publicly documented that Musk has used psilocybin, LSD and more, and given his known involvement in psychedelic spaces like Burning Man, he’s probably done far more than the documents let on. He has almost certainly had multiple psychedelic experiences of self-transcendence in the face of a larger reality. And yet Musk is about as far as one could imagine from ‘compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.’ Rather, he is practically a caricature of a self-absorbed egoist, so confident in his own rightness that he used his brief time in government to destroy thousands of military veterans’ lifelong careers and end the lifelines of thousands of desperately poor people around the world in the name of saving a tiny fraction of money and sometimes nothing at all.

“Musk is to today’s generations what Charles Manson was to the baby boomers: a sobering reminder that psychedelic experiences can leave you a terrible person….”

Network religion for progressives?

Back in 2017, sociologists Brad Christerson and Richard Flory published a book titled “The Rise of Network Christianity: How Independent Leaders Are Changing the Religious Landscape.” In one of their central arguments, they said:

“We  argue that macrolevel social changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital revolution, have given competitive advantages to religious groups organized by networks rather than traditionally organized congregations and denominations.”

For Flory and Christerson, Independent Network Charismatic (INC) Christianity is the paradigm for this type of religious organization. INC Christianity is associated with a specific set of beliefs, including spiritual healing, confrontations with “demonic forces,” and social transformation on the far right side of the culture wars.

But why couldn’t other religious groups, with different sets of beliefs, organize themselves through networks? And I suspect that there are such religious groups, including those with sets of beliefs, and with political commitments, with which I’m somewhat more comfortable.

I suspect that it would be possible to identify what we might call Independent Network Westernized Buddhism. From what I’ve seen of Westernized Buddhist practitioners, there does appear to be a loose network that shares some of the attributes of INC Christianity, including “experimentation with controversial supernatural practices, innovative finance and marketing, and a highly participatory, unorthodox, experiential faith that is attractive in today’s pluralistic, unstable religious marketplace.” I’m sure many Westernized Buddhists would argue that they do not engage with “supernatural practices,” but the evolving science around meditation and mindfulness appear to downgrade some of the more extreme claims of that practice — a practice which, to my skeptical mind, is just as supernatural as prayer.

Another decentralized network that might qualify is Progressive Christianity. In a comment on a post I made earlier this week, Gabriele Simion drew my attention to this network, which features progressive Christian luminaries like Diana Butler Bass (thank you, Gabriele!). Progressive Christianity is not exactly a denomination — they don’t appear to ordain or credential clergy, they have minimal staff, they don’t plant new congregations, etc. — so maybe they’re a “network” in the sense that Christerson and Flory use the term?

I’ve begun to think that the Unitarian Universalist association might want to take on more attributes of networked religion. Funding for denominational work continues to plummet, congregations continue to fade away — the denomination is shrinking before our eyes. In spite of the shrinking of the denomination and the congregations, there are lots of individual Unitarian Universalists in the world who still want to connect with other Unitarian Universalists. My own tiny little congregation here in Cohasset has (we think) three regular viewers of our livestream who live far from Cohasset, have never been a part of the in-person congregation, yet who have been watching our livestreamed services most weeks, and donate money as well.

Yet I suspect that most Unitarian Universalist leaders would not be very receptive to the idea of moving away from the traditional organizational structures of denomination and congregation. Back in 2004, evangelical Christian Brian McLaren pointed out that “[religious] conservatives tend to be rigid theologically and promiscuous pragmatically and [religious] liberals tend to be rigid methodologically and a lot more free theologically.”

Well, that’s still going on — the religious conservatives are being “promiscuous pragmatically” and they are dramatically out-competing the religious liberals. There is one group among Unitarian Universalists that might have a hope of competing with the INC Christians: the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF). They deliver their religious services primarily online, and have the potential for adopting the best organizational practices of network Christianity. However, they are pretty well locked into the traditional denominational financial structure of the UUA, which hampers their ability to innovate financially.

I suspect a great many religious progressives have mostly given up on religion, and just assume that secularization will do away with religion entirely. But the secularization hypothesis is just that — a hypothesis — and in any case, right now the INC Christians have become extremely adept at winning elections and pushing their agenda of social transformation. I wish religious progressives could find it in themselves to be as innovative as the INC Christians.

UU congregations with other religious affiliations

Back in 2010, Scott Wells came up with a list of congregations that claimed an affiliation with both Unitarian Universalism and some other religious tradition. 15 years later, we’ve seen many small congregations close, so I decided to revisit Scott’s list and see how many of the congregations in his post were still in existence.

Below is my list, grouped together by U.S. state, and in alphabetical order within each state grouping. Except where noted, I’ve given religious affiliations as garnered from congregational websites.

Update, 13 Oct. 2025: Thanks to commenter Gabriele Simion, added several congregations; cleaned up some typos, and fixed names of denominations / religious groups. Update, 23 Oct.: Added Free Congregation of Sauk City, thanks to Gabriele again.

The list

The list has all multi-religious congregations I was able to find that are formally affiliated with the UUA. I determined formal affiliation based on the congregation’s appearance in the UUA’s online directory. (N.B.: I haven’t included affiliations with the new North American Unitarian Association, because they don’t publicize a list of their member congregations.) If you know of multi-religious congregations formally affiliated with the UUA that I’ve missed, please mention them in the comments.

Key to religious affiliations: ABC = American Baptist Churches USA; AEU = American Ethical Union; AHA = American Humanist Association; CUA = Christian Universalist Association; DOC = Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); ProgC = Progressive Christianity; UCC = United Church of Christ; UMC = United Methodist Church; UUA = Unitarian Universalist Association.

District of Columbia

Georgia

Illinois

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

New York

Michigan

Pennslyvania

Rhode Island

Vermont

Wisconsin

Others

There are other congregations that may have had a Unitarian or Universalist affiliation in the past, but no longer do. Trying to research such congregations seems incredibly difficult, so I haven’t included them. But here are three examples from Scott’s 2010 blog post:

The Community Church of Pepperell, in Pepperell, MA, is formally affiliated solely with the UCC. On their website they say that they formed as a merger between the Unitarian church and the Congregationalist church in Pepperell.

First Church in Belfast, Maine, was formerly affiliated with the Unitarians and the Congregationalists, but is now solely affiliated with the UCC. (The history section of their website states that “Congregationalists believed in the complete autonomy of the local church; Unitarians did not”; this is incorrect, as both Congregationalists and Unitarians share the same polity).

The Federated Church of Hyannis is an “independent” (i.e., nondenominational) congregation that claims both Universalist and Congregationalist roots. It would be interesting to learn more specifics of their history; there were other Universalist churches which left the Universalist General Convention and affiliated with the Congregationalists in the first half of the twentieth century.

If you know of other multi-religious congregations with a Unitarian or Universalist history, please mention them in the comments. If possible, provide a link to their website or social media presence.

Noted without comment: “performance of meanness”

From a story by Fiona Murphy titled “How ‘RaptureTok’ amplified an extreme corner of faith” (Religion New Service, 26 Sept. 2025). The story documents how minority religious views are often mocked and belittled on TikTok….

“Heidi Campbell, director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station, said that since 2016, online discourse has shifted toward what she calls a ‘performance of meanness.’

“‘The screen has allowed us to broadcast so much more diversity, which can be a positive thing,’ Campbell said. ‘But instead of bringing us closer together, which a lot of internet prophets and cyber philosophers kind of said in the 1990s, it’s actually brought more division.’”

Follow up to a clergy misconduct allegation

Back in 2022, I mentioned in a year-end blog post that Rev. Kathryn J. Rohde had been removed from fellowship by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). Now it turns out there’s a (publicly available) sequel.

The following year, 2023, Rohde sued the UUA for removing her from fellowship, and further for ending the retirement stipend she received from the “Unitarian Service Pension Society” (an organization I didn’t even know existed). You can read the basic court documents here, but I read about the case in a blog post by Daniel Dalton on the website of Dalton-Tomich, a law firm specializing in “religious properties” (a legal speciality I didn’t even know existed).

According to the court filings, and Daniel Dalton’s blog post, Rohde got in trouble because of a social media post made in 2020:

“In 2020, Rohde posted in a private Facebook group with about 1,200 members. Three individuals found her posts offensive and reported them to the UUA.  The UUA allegedly initiated a disciplinary process against Rohde, despite her being retired. Rohde claims the process was politically motivated, driven by a ‘woke’ faction within the UUA. She was stripped of her ministerial credentials and retirement stipend, with no clear violation of UUA policies cited.”

[Parenthetical note: “private Facebook group” is an oxymoron; social media is never private.]

[Another parenthetical note: Both the court filing and the Daniel Dalton blog post state that Rohde alleged she was the victim of sexual harassment early in her ministerial career — an allegation I would expect to be true, based on what older women ministers told me about the way they were treated by male ministers and denominational officials in the late twentieth century.]

Daniel Dalton goes on to reveal what the court decided; or rather, didn’t decide:

“In a ruling on July 11, 2025, Judge Mary Kay Costello issued a mixed ruling on the defendants’ motion to dismiss based on the ministerial exception to the First Amendment. Rev. Rohde’s claims of defamation, invasion of privacy (false light);  tortious interference with contract, and breach of contract (specifically regarding her removal from fellowship and alleged procedural failures) were dismissed without prejudice. However, her claims of breach of contract, related to her retirement benefits, breach of contract against the Unitarian Service Pension Society and promissory estoppel were allowed to continue. The court also granted Rohde the opportunity to file an amended complaint by July 25, 2025, consistent with the court’s decision.”

I have not been able to find out whether Rohde filed an amended complaint. I did find out that the usual vocal critics of the UUA — the Fifth Principle Project, the North American Unitarian Council, etc. — have been trumpeting Rohde’s case as another example of how “wokeness” has overtaken the UUA. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post also picked up the story, using it to castigate so-called cancel culture.

Daniel Dalton, however, draws different conclusions from this case. First, he points out that most of Rohde’s claims were dismissed, not necessarily on their merit (or lack of merit), but rather on the legal notion of “ministerial exception.” As I interpret this, the dismissal, then, does not necessarily represent a judicial judgement (for or against) on Rohde’s claims.

Second, he notes that the Rohde case “prompts questions” in the area of “governance and accountability” regarding disciplinary procedures. Such question could lead to “greater transparency in internal investigations.” While Dalton seems to direct this comment at the UUA, I would imagine that local congregations should also pay attention to this — disciplinary procedures should always be clear and transparent.

Among other conclusions, Dalton points out that this case highlights the need to balance freedom of expression over against “community values.” Dalton suggests: “UU congregants and leaders may need to find ways to balance inclusivity with respecting diverse viewpoints.”

Dalton also highlights “ideological splits within the denomination,” and he then speculates if this might prompt “wider discussions on political polarization, identity politics, and theological diversity” within Unitarian Universalism. I think we Unitarian Universalists try to ignore the divisions among us, but Dalton shows us just how visible those divisions are to outsiders.

So that’s the inconclusive sequel to the 2022 removal of Kate Rohde from ministerial fellowship. Yet even though this sequel is inconclusive, there’s one conclusion I’d like to draw. Expanding on what Daniel Dalton says, I think it would be good to have additional clarification on Unitarian Universalist disciplinary policies for ministers (at both the denominational and local levels), as well as “greater transparency in internal investigations” (again, at both the denominational and local levels). The problem is that I don’t know how to make that happen. Our individualism means we find it hard to work together. 25 years of budget cuts have left the UUA understaffed in some key areas. Wider American society has grown polarized, and people are tender and raw. All these factors are going to make it extremely hard to come together to talk openly about a difficult topic like how we discipline clergy.

12 Oct. 2025: Minor edit made that didn’t change basic content (added brackets and intro phrase to the second parenthetical note).

Quaker Checkers revisited

Back in 2012, I posted a game board and rules for playing “Quaker Checkers.” Photocopies of that game had been passed around for years between Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools. I decided to create a clean copy, and put it online where maybe more people could access it. And if you read the comments on that 2012 post, you’ll see that Quaker Checkers has been played with great success in Unitarian Universalists Sunday schools (and maybe in one or two Quaker First Day Schools as well).

This week, I received email from Sally Q Campbell, who invented the game. Sally said she’s currently talking with a friend of hers about developing an online version of Quaker Checkers. Actually, I would have loved to have an online version during the pandemic when Sunday school had to meet online.

It appears that Sally is one of those endlessly creative people. She is also a songwriter, with a number of songs about peace and spirituality to her credit. On her her Youtube channel, she writes: “I’m a Quaker Singer/songwriter. Many of my songs are given to me in the silence if I will S l o w D o w n.” In fact, I especially like her song “Go Down Low,” which is all about slowing down and centering down. She hadn’t come up with chords for it, so I did. Here’s the standard warning for online chord/lyrics sheets: this is my interpretation of someone else’s song, posted here for educational purposes only; the songwriter Sally Campbell retains the copyright.

Graphic with lyrics and chords

(N.B.: she sings “Go Down Low” in B flat.)

All the above is by way of digression. My real point in writing this blog post is to correct something Sally pointed out in her email. She said: “You did make one error when you tidied it up. My board does not have dark and light squares, it’s just a grid. Makes it more of a challenge.”

She’s absolutely right. To make amends, here’s a corrected version of the game board:

Graphic of the game board for Quaker Checkers.
Click on the image above for a printable PDF of the game.

Christian Socialism in 1935

I’ve been reading Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy. According to Cassidy, Karl Polanyi criticized capitalism as being essentially undemocratic. After watching the rise of fascism in Europe, in 1935 Polyani wrote:” The mutual incompatibility of Democracy and Capitalism is almost generally accepted today as the background of the social crisis of our time.” Why? Because “only an authoritative State can deal with the contradictions inherent in Capitalism.” (Quoted by Cassidy, p. 283, originally from Polyani’s “The Essence of Fascism.”)

There was a religious side to this. Polyani was a Christian Socialist. Today, Christian Socialism is a concept that would probably cause the heads of many U.S. Christians to explode. (It would also probably cause the heads of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America to explode, but I digress.) Yet Christian Socialism used to be a widely-known option that boasted adherents ranging from Dorothy Day (a Catholic) to Adin Ballou (a Universalist turned Unitarian).

From Polyani’s viewpoint as a Christian Socialist, the rise of fascism not only threatened socialism, it also threatened Christianity. In that same 1935 essay, Polyani wrote: “Victorious Fascism is not only the downfall of the Socialist Movement; it is the end of Christianity in all but its most debased forms.” As a theological point, I think this is true — when people allow a central political authority to make moral choices for them, you’re going to see an attenuation of their individual moral capacity, which will similarly attenuate their religious capabilities.

Another

Email piled up while I was on vacation. I missed the fact that the Ministerial Fellowship Committee sent out another notice back on July 16:

“With regret, I am writing to inform you that the Rev. Kaaren Anderson has resigned her fellowship during a full fellowship review with the UUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) for bullying and abusive behaviors in the workplace including in prior ministries. This fellowship review occurred after a full investigation by an independent investigator. The Executive Committee of the MFC met with the Rev. Anderson in early July and recommended removal from fellowship, necessitating a full fellowship review. It was during this process that the Rev. Anderson resigned.”

As I’ve said before, I do wonder who the independent investigator was. Does the UUA have enough money to pay for an outside law firm or consulting firm to carry out these reviews? If not, who is the independent investigator? In any case, Kaaren Anderson has her own website, where you can her employment history.

AI and UU sermons

Should Unitarian Universalists use so-called AI (Large Language Models, or LLM) to write sermons?

Since Unitarian Universalists don’t have a dogma to which we must adhere, there will be many answers to this question. Here are my answers:

I/ Adverse environmental impact of LLMs

Answer: No. The environmental cost of LLMs is too great.

First, we all know about the huge carbon footprint of LLMs. And the more complex the answer required from the LLM, the more carbon that is emitted. Deborah Prichner, in a June 19, 2025, Science News article on the Frontiers website, sums up the impact by quoting someone who researched energy use of LLMs:

“‘The environmental impact of questioning trained LLMs is strongly determined by their reasoning approach, with explicit reasoning processes significantly driving up energy consumption and carbon emissions,’ said … Maximilian Dauner, a researcher at Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences…. ‘We found that reasoning-enabled models produced up to 50 times more CO2 emissions than concise response models.’”

Thus, not only do LLMs have a big carbon footprint, but handling something as complex as a sermon could result in a carbon impact 50 times greater than the lowest LLM carbon footprint.

Second, the data centers running LLMs use a tremendous amount of fresh water. In their paper “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models,” Pengfei Li (UC Riverside), Dr. Jianyi Yang (U Houston), Dr. Mohammad Atiqul Islam (U Texas Arlington), and Dr. Shaolei Ren (UC Riverside) state:

“The growing carbon footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) has been undergoing public scrutiny. Nonetheless, the equally important water (withdrawal and consumption) footprint of AI has largely remained under the radar. For example, training the GPT-3 language model in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater, but such information has been kept a secret. More critically, the global AI demand is projected to account for 4.2 – 6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of … half of the United Kingdom.”

Third, on 1 May 2025, IEEE Spectrum reported that “AI data centers” cause serious air pollution. The article, titled “We Need to Talk About AI’s Impact on Public Health: Data-center pollution is linked to asthma, heart attacks, and more,” raises several concerns. The authors write:

“The power plants and backup generators needed to keep data centers working generate harmful air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides (NOx). These pollutants take an immediate toll on human health, triggering asthma symptoms, heart attacks, and even cognitive decline.”

In sum: Because my religious commitments call on me to aim for a lower ecological impact, the environmental impact of LLMs alone is enough to stop me from using them to write sermons.

II/ Sermons as human conversations

Answer: No. I feel that sermons should be the result of human interaction.

You see, for me, a sermon should arise from the spiritual and religious conversations that people are having in a specific congregation or community. As a minister, I try to listen hard to what people in the congregation are saying. Some of what I do in a sermon is to reflect back to the congregation what I’m hearing people talk about. At present, a LLM cannot access the conversations that are going on in my congregation — a LLM can’t know that P— made this profound observation about their experience of aging, that A— asked this deep question about the reality of the death of a family member, that C— made a breakthrough in finding a life direction, that J— took this remarkable photograph of a coastal wetland. Some or all of those things affect the direction of a sermon.

Mind you, this is not true for all religions. Deena Prichep, in a 21 July 2025 article on Religion News Service titled “Are AI sermons ethical? Clergy consider where to draw the line,” states that “The goal of a sermon is to tell a story that can break open the hearts of people to a holy message.” In other words, according to Prichep, for some religions the role of the preacher is to cause other people to accept their holy message. Prichep quotes Christian pastor Naomi Sease Carriker as saying: “Why not, why can’t, and why wouldn’t the Holy Spirit work through AI?” I can see how this would be consistent with certain strains of Christianity — and with certain strains of Unitarian Universalism, for that matter, where the important thing is some abstract message that somehow transcends human affairs.

But that’s not my religion. My religion centers on the community I’m a part of. Yes, there is a transcendent truth that we can access — but as a clergyperson, I don’t have some special access to that transcendent truth. Instead, truth is something that we, as a community of inquirers, gradually approach together. Any single individual is fallible, and won’t be able to see the whole truth — that’s why it’s important to understand this as a community conversation.

As a clergyperson, one thing I can do is to add other voices to the conversation, voices that we don’t have in our little local community. So in a sermon that’s trying to help us move towards truth, I might bring in William R. Jones, Imaoka Shinichiro, or Margaret Fuller (to name just a few Unitarian Universalist voices). Or I might quote from one of the sacred scriptures — i.e., from one of the sources of wisdom traditions — from around the world. Now it is true that maybe a LLM could save me a little time in coming up with some other voices; but given the huge environmental costs, it seems silly to save a small amount of time by using a LLM.

III/ Biases built into LLMs

Answer: No, because of hidden biases.

LLMs are algorithms trained on digitized data which has been input into them. For a LLM, the digitized data is mostly in the form of text. But we know that certain kinds of authors are going to be under-represented in that digitized data: women, non-Whites, working class people, LGBTQ people, etc. The resulting biases can be subtle, but are nonetheless real.

As a Universalist, I am convinced that all persons are equally worthy. I have plenty of biases of my own, biases that can keep me from seeing that all persons are equally worthy of love — but at least if my sermons are affected by my own biases, my community can successfully challenge me about my biases. If I use a LLM model to write a sermon, a model that’s riddled with biases that I’m not really aware of, that makes it harder for my community to help me rid my sermons of my biases.

IV/ Final answer: No

Would I use a LLM to write a sermon?

No. It goes against too many things I stand for.

Should you use a LLM to write your sermons?

I ‘m not going to answer that question for you. Nor should you ask a LLM model to answer that question for you. We all have to learn how to be ourselves, and to live our own lives. Once we start asking others — whether we’re asking LLMs or other authority figures — to answer big questions for us, then we’re well on the road to authoritarianism.

Come to think of it, that’s where we are right now — on the road to authoritarianism. And that’s a road I choose not to follow, thank you very much.

Hammer dyeing for nature journals

“Hammer dyeing” is a technique where you transfer the shape and color of leaves and flowers to cloth or paper by hammering. The process is fairly simple: you place plant material on cloth or heavy paper; cover with cloth, heavy paper, or plastic wrap; then hammer the plant material to release its juices which stain the cloth or paper. This article covers hammer dyeing projects that are intended for inclusion in nature journals.

The technique goes under several different names: “flower pounding,” “hammer printing,” “hammer staining,” “leaf hammering,” “tataki-zome,” “hapa-zome,” “Cherokee leaf pounding,” etc.; but I prefer to call it “hammer dyeing.”

Origins of hammer dyeing

I found no well-documented source giving the origins of hammer dyeing. I suspect the technique arose independently in several cultures.

Some online sources call this technique tataki-zome or hapa-zome, and claim it’s an “ancient Japanese art form,” but without citing any sources. A search on Google Books turns up many references to tataki-zome from 2000 on, but I could find only one reference prior to that date: Rita Buchanan, in Dyes from Nature (Brooklyn Botanical Garden Record, Plants and Gardens, vol. 46 no. 3, autumn 1990), p. 79, says that students learning how to dye in Japan practice tataki-zome: “Using their own plants, they learn dyeing techniques such as batik, itajime — a sort of variegated effect made with wood chips, and tataki-zome, a way of mashing plants on the cloth.” More research is needed to determine if tataki-zome is actually a traditional Japanese art form.

Alabama quilter Bettye Kimbrell (1936-2016), named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, used a hammer dyeing technique she called “Cherokee leaf pounding.” It’s not clear this technique was actually used by the Cherokee people, so it’s best to consider this an American folk art with uncertain historical roots. Kimbrell used this technique in her quilts: “Cherokee leaf pounding is a technique where a fresh green leaf is taped to the backside of muslin fabric with masking tape. Using a hammer, gently pounding the leaf allows the chlorophyll to stain the fabric. After transferring each leaf to the fabric, the stain is set with a vinegar and water solution. The fabric is then dried and entirely hand quilted.” (Kristin G. Congdon and Kara Kelley Hallmark, American Folk Art: A Regional Reference, vol. 1 [Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012], p. 226.) More about her process here.

Screenshot from a video about hammer dyeing.
Screenshot from a PBS video on Bettye Kimbrell, showing her hammer dyeing a quilt. Click on the image to watch the video on the PBS website.

Books and references on hammer dyeing

For a comprehensive reference book on this technique, see Laura C. Martin, The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers (Mt. Kisco, NY: QVC Publishing, 2001; Rodale Press, 2003). Martin covers which types of flowers, and which types of leaves, produce the best results; mordanting fabrics so the image is perhaps more light-fast; setting the image with a hot iron; etc. Unfortunately the book is now out of print. Used copies can be found on Thriftbooks (please do not buy from evil Amazon). The Internet Archive has a copy online that can be borrowed. The first 32 pages of the book are available on Google Books.

I’ve found references to two other books about the process: (1) Ann Frischkorn and Amy Sandrin, Flower Pounding: Quilt Projects for All Ages (Concord, Calif.: C & T Publishing, 2001); and (2) Linda Rudkin, Flower Pounding (London, U.K.: A & C Black Publishers, 2011). I haven’t seen either book, so can’t comment on them.

PBS has a video with Bettye Kimbrell demonstrating her leaf pounding technique. Sadly, the video does not show her technique for setting the image in vinegar (see below).

My curriculum website has instructions for doing flower pounding with children, using inexpensive watercolor paper. Scroll down to “V/Printmaking,” then go to project “D/Pounding flowers.” The technique I describe has been extensively field tested with children from grade 1-8, and produces reliable results. However, this technique is more focused on process than product (“process art”), and is not suitable for use in a nature journal curriculum.

Cloth with hammer-dyed impression of a fern on it.
Hammer-dyed fern on bleached cotton muslin, 36 inches wide. No mordant or scouring, but the image was set using a steam iron. The darker places are plant material deliberately left on the finished image. Image copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper.

Hammer dyeing process

Earlier this month, during a week-long family conference at a Unitarian Universalist summer camp, I was leading an ecology workshop that centered around participants recording thoughts, feelings, and observations about the nature in journals (i.e., nature journaling). My co-leader, Rebecca, who is a middle school teacher, contributed to the development of this activity (thanks, Rebecca!). During this workshop, we field-tested a procedure for hammer dyeing. The process, outline below, is easy to set up, and is designed to help participants become more aware of the details of leaves and flowers.

Tools needed

  • Hammer, at least 1 for every 2 participants (see discussion of hammer types below)
  • Disposable foam ear plugs
  • Table with a hard flat surface

Materials

  • Thin cotton muslin cloth, 36 or 45 inches wide
  • Leaves, flowers

A rule of thumb for collecting leaves and flowers: Collect just 1 out of 20 similar leaves/flowers.

A note about fabric: I used to go to Joann Fabric to buy cloth for class projects, but they went out of business this year. Michael’s purchased Joann Fabric intellectual property, and one of the local Michael’s stores does carry 45″ cotton muslin in stock. My preferred online source for fabric is Dharma Trading Post, but as of this writing their popular 45 inch cotton muslin is out of stock.

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