Category: Religion

A day at Nature Camp: insects, process art, stories

The second day of Nature Camp started with opening circle, as always. Our kindergarteners and first graders sat in a circle, and we sang one of the songs we learned yesterday, “The Earth Is Our Mother,” and the children remembered it well enough that they told me when I sang one of the verses wrong. Abby read a short story about Wangari Maathai, one of our Nature Camp elders. Kris also showed us a slug that she had found that morning, and we spent some time watching it before we released it in a shady place.

Then Kris introduced the them for the day: insects. Kris read some excerpts from Simon & Schuster Children’s Guide to Insects and Spiders. We learned what an insect is, and we learned the three parts of an insect (head, thorax, and abdomen). Kris also read to us a little bit about butterflies and moths, or Lepidoptera.

Kris next told us that we were going to make some pitfall traps to catch some insects, by burying a plastic cup in the ground. We learned the ethics of pitfall traps: you have to empty them regularly (at least once a day) to be sure the insects don’t die, and they should not be placed in full sun (the hot sun can kill any insects that fall in them).

The children enjoyed finding shady places to put the traps, and then digging holes in the ground with trowels and placing the plastic cups in the holes. Each child got to put at least one insect trap in the ground. While we were doing this, we stopped at the plum tree and managed to find a few more ripe plums to eat, enough for every child who wanted one to have one.

The highlight of the morning for me was Abby’s “natural paintbrush” project. The children got sticks (the handle of the paintbrush) and then attached leaves or pine needles or some other natural object to the stick with masking tape or rubber bands.

We taped large sheets of paper on two tables, and provided red, yellow, and blue tempera paint. The children enjoyed mixing their own colors, then spreading the colors with the natural paintbrushes.

It was a great example of process art, since there was no “product”; instead the whole emphasis was on exploring the materials and colors.

After we painted for a while, it was time to walk over to Mitchell Park to play on the trees and eat some lunch. The children particularly enjoy climbing a tree that has a long branch that is almost horizontal the the ground, sloping gently upwards. It’s the perfect challenge for this age group. One or two of the children felt comfortable walking along the branch, but most of them moved along slowly, clasping it with legs and hands. Kris told them that they should only climb as far as they felt safe; at the same time she gently urged them to go a little beyond their comfort zones. One child was pleased to find that he could make it further along the branch than he thought he could.

While we were eating lunch, two California Gulls landed not far away and started fighting over some trash. We talked about how gulls like to eat trash, and I described the gull nesting colony near Charleston Slough. I also expressed my opinion that gulls are not particularly pleasant birds: they are loud, and messy, and kind of aggressive. While we were eating lunch, we also saw some butterflies flying by probably (Western Tiger Swallowtails), but it was breezy and the butterflies went by very quickly.

After lunch, Kris had a book that showed us how to draw slugs and butterflies. The children each drew some slugs and butterflies in their nature journals. One child drew a slug very carefully, trying to make it the same color as the one we had seen earlier in the morning. Another child drew a large number of slugs, and then dots all over them which he said was salt that was killing them. We talked a bit about why salt might kill slugs.

At last it was time to go back for closing circle. We sang “The Earth Is Our Mother” again, which the children knew really well by now, as well as “The Adaptation Song” which has a verse about how California Gulls adapt to their environment. To close the day, Kris read part of an Arnold Lobel book about a grasshopper.

All in all, a very satisfying day at Nature Camp. We worked on fine motor skills, gross motor skills, and knowledge about the natural world. Most importantly, we just spent time in nature, looking, touching, playing, being.

Note: We have media releases for all children depicted above. Nature Camp is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.

The Useless Tree

Another story in a series for liberal religious kids, this one from the Taoist tradition.

A certain carpenter named Zhih was traveling to the Province of Ch’i. On reaching Shady Circle, he saw a sacred tree in the Temple of the Earth God. It was so large that its shade could cover a herd of several thousand cattle. It was a hundred yards thick at the trunk, and its trunk went up eighty feet in the air before the first branch came out.

The carpenter’s apprentice looked longingly at the tree. What a huge tree! What an enormous amount of timber could be cut out of it! Why, there would be enough timber in that one tree to make a dozen good-sized boats, or three entire houses.

Crowds stood around the tree, gazing at it in awe, but the carpenter didn’t even bother to turn his head, and kept walking. The apprentice, however, stopped to take a good look, and then had to run to catch up with his master.

“Master, ever since I have handled an adze in your service,” said the apprentice, “I have never seen such a splendid piece of timber. How was it that you did not care to stop and look at it?”

“That tree?” said the Master, “It’s not worth talking about. It’s good for nothing. If you cut down that tree and made the wood it into a boat, it would sink. If you took the wood to build a house, the house would break apart and rot. See how crooked its branches are! and see how loose and twisted is its grain! This is wood that has no use at all. Not only that, if you try to taste one of its leaves, it is so bitter that it would have taken the skin off your lips, and the odor of its fruit is enough to make you sick for an hour. It is completely useless, and because it is so useless, the tree has attained a huge size and become very old.”

The carpenter told his apprentice to dismiss the tree from his thoughts, and they continued on their way. They arrived home late at night, and both of them went straight to bed.

———

While the carpenter was asleep, the spirit of the tree came and spoke to him.

“What did you mean when you spoke to your apprentice about me?” said the spirit of the tree. “Of course I am not like the fine-grained wood that you carpenters like best. You carpenters especially like the wood from fruit trees and nut trees — cherry, pear-wood, and walnut.

“But think what happens! As soon as the fruits or nuts of these trees have ripened, you humans treat the trees badly, stripping them of their fruits or nuts. You break their branches, twist and break their twigs. And then you humans cut down the trees in their prime so you can turn them into boards and make them into furniture.

“Those trees destroy themselves by bearing fruits and nuts, and producing beautiful wood,” said the spirit of the tree. “I, on the other hand, do not care if I am beautiful. I only care about being useless.

“Years ago, before I learned how to be useless, I was in constant danger of being cut down. Think! If I had been useful, your great-grandfather, who was also a carpenter, would have cut me down. But because I learned how to be useless, I have grown to a great size and attained a great age.

“Do not criticize me, and I shan’t criticize you,” the spirit of the tree said. “After all, a good-for-nothing fellow like yourself, who will die much sooner than I will — do you have any right to talk about a good-for-nothing tree?”

———

The next morning, the carpenter told his dream to his apprentice.

The apprentice asked, “But if the goal of the tree is to be useless, how did it become sacred tree living in the Temple to the Earth God?”

“Hush!” said the master carpenter. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And I should never have criticized the tree. The tree is a different kind of being than you and I, and we must judge it by different standards. That’s why it took refuge in the Temple — to escape the abuse of people who didn’t appreciate it.

“A spiritual person should follow the tree’s example, and learn how to be useless.”

 

Source: from Chuang-tzu 1.16, based on translations by Lin Yutang, Burton Watson, and James Legge.

My rant for the day: Patriarchy dies hard

Let me climb onto my soap box….

All these troubles in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA): yet another senior denominational positions is filled by a white man; the first Latino president of the UUA gets defensive about this fact and then resigns; people of color in the denomination call for a national teach-in about white supremacy; the president of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA), who is a white man, holds forth online at great length, and somewhat incoherently, on hiring practices in the UUA; 130 members of the UUMA sign a petition calling on ministers to refrain from bringing lawsuits against other ministers in the middle of UUMA grievance procedures (a petition that was responding to a legal action by a UUMA member against other UUMA members to prevent ministers from talking about a colleague who allegedly committed sexual misconduct); a Unitarian Universalist minister pleads guilty to child pornography charges.

In the course of all these troubles, many Unitarian Universalists are openly addressing the problem of racism and white supremacy. This is a good thing.

And in the course of all these troubles, far fewer Unitarian Universalists seem to be talking about sexism and patriarchy. Maybe because all the candidates for UUA president are women. In a couple of weeks, we are sure to elect a woman as the next UUA president and therefore we have conquered patriarchy. Right?

Patriarchy within the UUA has not died. Nor is it in its death throes, nor is it even in the process of dying. All these years I’ve been going to political rallies and hearing people assert that all oppressions are linked. So guess what: patriarchy and white supremacy are linked. We cannot talk about one without talking about the other.

As a minister of religious education — that is to say, as someone who is doing “women’s work,” because taking care of children is not “real ministry,” it’s just “women’s ministry” — I can tell you that patriarchy is alive and well in the UUA. Sunday school enrollment has been dropping since 2005, even though demographically there are more and more children out there. Why? Sunday school enrollment has been dropping because in the UUA as a whole, and in most individual congregations, when money gets tight we pull resources away from children and youth ministry so that we adequately pay the patriarchal positions — the president of the UUA, the senior denominational positions, the parish minister.

We do this both because of patriarchy, and also because of white supremacy. In much of the U.S., non-white children are now the majority. If we adequately fund children’s ministries, we might bring more kids into our congregations. If we do that, not only are we saying that “women’s work” is important, we are also opening the doors to a lot of non-white people. Both these things are equally threatening. Patriarchy and white supremacy die hard.

I know, you’re sick of hearing me rant. OK, I’m off my soap box now. And I promise to reduce my ranting in the future, because the last thing we need is another rant from yet another white man.

Obscure Unitarians: Annie Upton Lawrence Corbert

A schoolteacher and supporter of women’s suffrage, Ann Upton Lawrence was born on Nantucket Is., Mass., on Oct., 1840, to Frederic W. Lawrence and Susan Hussey. Since her birth is recorded in the Quaker manner as “10th month” (rather than “October”), perhaps her family were Quakers; a Quaker upbringing could help explain her lifelong support of equal rights for women.

Her life can be traced through the U.S. Census. In 1850, she was living on Nantucket Is. with her father and mother, and younger siblings Amelia and Everett; her father was working as an accountant. By 1860, she was living with her father in San Francisco, and working as a school teacher; her father was working as a clerk, and they shared a house with William H. Lawrence, a mariner, and his wife and child.

Annie married Edward W. Corbert before 1866. In 1870, she and Edward were living in San Francisco, where Edward worked as “Assessor, Int. Rev.”; they had two children, Louise (b. c. 1866, Calif.), and Sadie (b. c. 1869, Calif.). In 1880, she and Edward were living in Martinez with Louise, Sadie, and Anita Lawrence (b. June, 1874, Calif.). By 1900, Annie was widowed and living with Anita in Palo Alto; Anita was working as a teacher. And in 1910, Annie was still living with Anita, as well as with her son-in-law, John Byxbee; John was the Palo Alto city engineer for whom Byxbee Park is named.

Annie supported women’s suffrage. She was president of the Santa Clara County Equal Suffrage Assoc. in 1900, and said in her presidential address of that year, “We are simply waiting and watching, and working to strengthen our forces and our cause, so that at the golden moment we may be ready to spring into place.” She continued working for equal suffrage through the successful campaign in 1911 which gained California women the right to vote: “Mrs. John F. Byxbee, Mrs. George Rosebrook and Mrs. Annie L. Corbert entertained at a suffrage tea Thursday afternoon at the Byxbee home in Alma Street.”

Her civic activities were not limited to equal suffrage. She also found time to support the schools and the public library, and she belonged to the Palo Alto Woman’s Club, the Civic League, the Peace Society, and the Historical Society.

She was active in the early days of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and was one of the early members of the Women’s Alliance. She helped run the Unitarian “Post Office Mission” in Palo Alto. She sang in the church choir, and her “clear true alto” voice was “always a power in quartette singing, even to the time of her last illness.” She divided her time between San Francisco and Palo Alto, and was also an officer for the San Francisco branch of the Women’s Alliance.

Her obituary in the Pacific Unitarian gave three samples of her religious philosophy, things she said not long before she died:

“As a church we should ask ourselves, continually, What is the church for—are we doing something worthy, or are we marking time.”

“I have found that we must not judge people. Minds are different, and we must not condemn as unworthy that which does not suit our own ideas.”

“The human soul is a lonely thing. It must stand by itself at the last.”

Notes: 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910 U.S. Census; Vital Records of Nantucket, Massachusetts, to 1850, vol. II—Births (G-Z), Boston: New England Historical Genealogical Society, 1926, p. 235; Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880-1911, Univ. of Illinois Press, p. 109; San Francisco Call, Aug. 20, 1911; Pacific Unitarian, Aug., 1916, p. 262; Pacific Unitarian, March, 1915, p. 137.
N.B.: In the printed record, her married name is often spelled “Corbett,” but when she signed her name she wrote “Corbert”; furthermore, she signed her first name “Annie,” not “Ann.”

Obscure Unitarians: Effie June Scott and Edward Curtis Franklin

Effie June Scott Franklin — A professor of French and German, she was born Aug. 5, 1871, in on a farm in Carlyle Township, Kansas. Her father, Dr. John W. Scott, came to Kansas in 1857, and was active in the free state fight, serving in the first state legislature; Dr. Scott served in the Civil War as surgeon of the Tenth Kansas, and after that war was president of the company that laid out the town of Iola, Kansas.

Effie’s family family moved to the town of Iola, Kansas, in 1874. She graduated from high school in Iola, Kansas, in 1887. She had two older brothers: Angelo C., the eldest; and Charles F. Scott, ten years older than Effie, who represented Kansas for several years as a Republican in the U.S. Congress.

After graduating from high school, Effie taught in the Kansas City, Kansas, schools, and then taught high school in Leavenworth, Kansas. She then began studies at the University of Kansas, receiving her A.B. in 1891. Subsequently she pursued graduate study at Cornell and at the University of Berlin. She was assistant professor of French and German at the University of Kansas for two years until her marriage in 1897; William Carruth was at that time professor of German.

She married Edward Curtis Franklin on July 22, 1897, at Central Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado. She and Edward had three children: Anna Comstock (b. Sept., 1898), Charles Scott (b. c. 1902), and John Curtis (b. c. 1905).

Politically, she was a progressive who supported “woman suffrage.”

She was active in the Unitarian church in Lawrence, Kansas, and was a delegate from the Lawrence church to the National Conference of Unitarians in 1911 (the family lived in Washington, D.C., 1911-1913 while Edward worked for the government Hygenic Laboratory).. Prof. William Carruth was also a member of the Lawrence, Kansas, church before he moved to Palo Alto.

Effie moved to Palo Alto in 1903 when her husband accepted a position as professor at Stanford. She was an early member of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and was active in the Women’s Alliance.

When Maria Protsman Scott, Effie’s mother, died in 1907, she was staying with her daughter in Palo Alto; however, it doesn’t appear that Maria was living with the Franklins.

In 1914, a classmate from the University of Kansas visited the Franklins, as well as former Kansans Jennie and Helen Sutliff, and William and Katharine Carruth. She wrote: “At Stanford I spent several days with the Sutliffs and Franklins and had a pleasant visit with Dr. and Mrs. Carruth. … Dr. Franklin was soon to leave for New Zealand where he was going at the request of the British government, in company with fourteen other American scientists of note. Dr. and Mrs. Franklin have a very handsome big daughter Anna, a high school girl, and two younger boys, Charles and Jack.”

Effie was an accomplished pianist, and she was elected an honorary member of the Stanford Music Club in 1916.

She died at her home in Palo Alto on March 31, 1931.

Notes: 1900, 1910 U.S. Census; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, 1931, p. 14; William E. Connolley, History of Kansas Newspapers, Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1916, p. 47; William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, vol. 3, Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1919, p. 1360; Iola Register, May 30, 1902; Jan Onofrio, Kansas Biographical Dictionary, St. Clair Shores, Miss.: Somerset Pub., 2000, p. 142; The Arrow of Pi Beta Phi, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Chapter of Beta, October, 1893, p. 118; Iola Register, July 30, 1897, p. 8; John William Leonard, Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914-1915, New York: American Commonwealth Co., 1914, p. 305; Christian Register, Oct. 19, 1911, p. 1095; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, March, 1907, p. 224; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, Dec., 1914, p. 91; Stanford Daily, Jan. 25, 1916, p. 2.

 

Edward Curtis Franklin — A renowned chemist who grew up in Kansas while it was still part of the frontier, he was born in Geary City, Kansas, on March 1, 1862. He was raised in Doniphan, Kansas, where his father owned a saw mill and grist mill. At the time he was young, that part of Kansas still had the flavor of the frontier, to which some ascribed his later “noticeable impatience with convention.” As a boy, he enjoyed the outdoors, including hunting, fishing, swimming in the Missouri River, and collecting fossils; this love of the outdoors was to remain with him his whole life, and he was an active mountain climber who belonged to the Sierra Club, and summited a number of 14,000 foot peaks. He and his brother William, later a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made their own batteries, a two-mile long telegraph line, and their own telephone in 1877, only a year after A. G. Bell patented his tel-phone.

After he graduated from high school, he worked for a pharmacy in Severance, Kansas, from 1880-1884, then at age 22 entered the University of Kansas. He received his S.B. from the University of Kansas in 1888, studied at the University of Berlin 1890-1891, and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1894. He was a professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas from 1891 to 1903, and worked for a gold mining company in Costa Rica for a time in 1897. He was professor of chemistry at Stanford from 1903 to his retirement in 1929. As a chemist, he was best known for his work on ammonia and other nitrogen compounds. He was considered an excellent teacher who delivered exceptionally clear lectures.

He married Effie Scott on July 22, 1897, in Denver, Colorado, and they had three children: Anna Comstock (b. Sept., 1898), Charles Scott (b. c. 1902), and John Curtis (b. c. 1905).

He was an early member of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. He hosted the monthly social gathering of the Unitarian Church, entertaining “the company with some experiments with liquid air.” Theologically, Unitarianism was a good fit for Franklin: “Even as a youth…Franklin was inclined to be a ‘free thinker’ and agnostic.”

After his wife Effie died in 1931, he lived with his daughter, Anna Franklin Barnett, in Palo Alto. In the last three years of his life, he took long auto-mobile tours of the U.S. and Canada, and died just two months after returning from the last such trip. He died Feb. 13, 1937.

Notes: Alexander Findlay, Journal of the Chemical Society, 1938, p. 583; Howard Elsey, Biographical Memoirs, Nat. Academy of Sciences, 1991, pp. 67-75; Stanford Daily, Feb. 15, 1937, p. 1; Jan Onofrio, Kansas Biographical Dictionary, St. Clair Shores, Miss.: Somerset Pub., 2000, pp. 139 ff.; obituary, Stanford Daily, Feb. 15, 1937; John William Leonard, ed., Men of America: A Biographical Dictionary, New York: L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1908; Pacific Unitarian, April, 1909, p. 186. Photo of Edward from a U.S. Government Web site, ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B06647, accessed May 23, 2017.

 

Anna Comstock Franklin Barnett — A physician and graduate of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto Sunday school, she was born Sept. 12, 1898, in Lawrence, Kansas, daughter of Effie Scott (q.v.) and Edward Curtis Franklin (q.v.).

Her family moved to Palo Alto in 1903. In 1905, Anna was “one of the first pupils of the Sunday-school” of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto.

She received her A.B. from Stanford University in 1920, and her M.D. from Stanford in 1924. On July 12, 1924, she married Dr. George de Forest Barnett; he was a physician and professor of medicine at Stanford. They had two children, Margaret A. and Edward F. After the death of her mother in 1931, Anna’s father came to live with her.

Anna joined the faculty of Stanford School of Medicine. Her husband, who had also taught at Stanford School of Medicine, died in 1955. Anna continued to live on campus after her own retirement.

On Oct. 1, 1968, the Stanford Daily reported: “The badly decomposed body of Dr. Anna Barnett, a retired Medical School professor, was discovered in the hills behind Stanford Friday morning. The body was found near Stanford’s antenna farm at 7 a.m. by Eleanore Norris, a resident of Palo Alto, who was strolling in the area near Stanford’s antenna farm. Dr. Barnett, despondent over eye trouble and a scheduled eye operation, disappeared September 13. She left a note indicating she was contemplating suicide. A morphine overdose was determined as the cause of death.” The date of death on the death certificate was Sept. 27, 1968.

Notes: 1900 U.S. Census; Christian Register, Dec. 17, 1925, p. 1236; Stanford University Alumni Directory, 1921, 1931; Stanford Daily, April 30, 1924, p. 1; Stanford Daily, Oct. 1, 1968, p. 4; Carl T. Cox, “Anna Com-stock Franklin,” The Orville, Sutherland, Cox Web site: Ancestors, descendants, and Family Information, oscox.org/cgi-bin/igmget.cgi/n=jucox? I17378, accessed May 25, 2017. (N.B.: Anna’s biography was added an hour or so after Effie’s and Edward’s biographies were posted.)

Obscure Unitarians: Emily Sophia Elliot Pardee Karns Dixon

Emily Elliott was born March 3, 1853 in Kane County, Ill., daughter of Wilson and Maria J. Elliot Edmund and Sarah (Smith) Elliott [corrected per comment below], both born in New Hampshire. Her family left Illinois and moved to a farm in California’s Central Valley when Emily was six; it seems likely that the family traveled overland on the Oregon Trail or the California Trail. In 1860 she and her parents were living in Elkhorn Township, San Joaquin County; her father was working as a farmer, and the Elliot family shared their home with another farmer and three farm laborers.

Though not listed as a graduate, she studied at the California State Normal School c. 1870. In 1870, she was living in San Francisco and “attending school”; the State Normal School was then in San Francisco. Emily taught school in Oakland for seven years.

She married Dr. Enoch H. Pardee on July 19, 1879, when she was 26 and he was 52; Enoch’s 22 year old son George was not pleased when his father remarried. Enoch was mayor of Oakland and a co-founder of the Unitarian church in Oakland. Enoch and Emily had one child, a daughter Eleanor (“Nellie”), born in 1880. Enoch died in 1896, and four months Nellie, then age 15, also died. After a legal battle with Enoch’s son, Emily received a third of Enoch’s substantial estate. Enoch’s estate was valued at approx. $275,000, or roughly $8 million in 2016 dollars; so Emily received the equivalent of $2.6 million.

For the next few years, she traveled extensively. She married William A. Karns, a lawyer, in Baltimore on March 21, 1898. The couple moved to San Jose where William practiced law.

Emily settled in Palo Alto in 1903. In August, 1906, William filed suit for divorce on the grounds of desertion. A bitter legal battle ensued, during which Emily revealed that she had indeed left her husband, but had done so on advice of a physician. William was denied a decree of divorce. Then in 1913, Emily filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion and failure to provide. This time, William did not appear at the trial because he was a fugitive from justice, and Emily received a divorce decree under which she retained control of extensive property interests.

Emily supported woman suffrage, and in 1911 was the president of the Palo Alto Suffrage League. She was one of the early members of the Woman’s Club of Palo Alto. and served as president. She was active with the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the local chapter was organized at her house in 1924.

In 1916, she married a third time, to James Leroy Dixon, who was some twenty years younger than she (b. c. 1874). Leroy was a Stanford graduate, and in 1916 was principal of the high school in Lakeport, Calif.; by 1919 he was teaching at San Francisco Polytechnic High School. Their marriage lasted only three years.

She was an early member and later president of the Women’s Alliance of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and was active in the national Unitarian Women’s Alliance. In 1908, she hosted the Sunday school picnic on the ten-acre grounds of her Palo Alto house. She later gave the house grounds to the City of Palo Alto as a park to memorialize her daughter Nellie. In 1909, Emily was a delegate to the Pacific Unitarian Conference in Seattle.

She died on Feb. 5, 1940, in Palo Alto.

Notes: 1860, 1870, 1880, 1920 U.S. Census; John W. Leonard, Woman’s Who’s Who of America, New York: American Commonwealth Co., 1914; Historical Sketch of the State Normal School at San José, Sacramento: State Office, 1889; “How Palo Alto’s Pardee Park Came To Be,” Pardee Home Museum Newsletter, Nov., 1999, pp. 2-3; “The Pardee Home Histo-ry,” Pardee Home Museum, www.pardeehome.org/history.htm, accessed May 23, 2017; Emily Karns Dixon, Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, 1948, p. 758; San Francisco Call, July 9, 1913, p. 2; Stanford University Alumni Directory, 1921; Calif. State Board of Education, Directory of Secondary and Normal Schools, Sacramento: Calif. State Printing Office, 1916, p. 33; Calif. State Board of Education, Directory of Secondary and Normal Schools, Sacramento: Calif. State Printing Office, 1919, p. 117; Pacific Unitarian, Aug., 1909 p. 294. N.B.: In early records of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, she appears as Emily S. Karns, later as Emily Karns Dixon.

Noted with comment

From Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 45-46:

“The contemporary version of religion is sport. It is sport, with its sacred icons, revered traditions, symbolic solidarities, liturgical assemblies, and pantheon of heroes, which is the opium of the people. It is also the culture of the people, in both major senses of the word: a communal form of life, but also a chance to display or appreciate the kind of artistry from which the mass of citizens are otherwise largely excluded.”

And consumer capitalism favors sports over organized religion not least because sports can generate a large amount of consumer spending. Ordinary religion does not generate so much consumer spending: Scientology generates ongoing spending by adherents though one could argue that it’s not spending on consumer goods; Hiillsong Music and other producers of Christian pop music generate some significant consumer spending; and not much more. How can religion serve as the opiate of the masses when what the masses really want to do is spend money on consumer goods?

In a comment, Alyson writes: “I was wondering if you had any practical input on how to teach this subject without making the non-white children in the congregation feel uncomfortable or singled out in the process. Our RE class is actually fairly diverse, more so than the entirety of the congregation, and I do not know how to broach this topic with them.”

Alyson, I’m facing the same problem: how to teach a group of Unitarian Universalist children who are not all white about white supremacy. Here’s what I’ve been thinking so far….

For initial inspiration, I start with Dr. Marcia Chatelaine and her crowd-sourced #FergusonSyllabus. Although Chatelaine’s Ferguson syllabus was mostly aimed at public schools and post-secondary education, this is actually incredibly useful for those of us working in Sunday schools that are at least somewhat diverse — because Chatelaine’s syllabus has to deal with far greater diversity than exist in most Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools, it helped me see how to structure lessons that do not assume that everyone is white, that do not assume that everyone shares exactly the same opinions about race, etc. In other words, I feel that Chatelaine’s approach opens up a metaphorical space in which to explore the topic from diverse experiences and diverse points of views. This article by Chatelaine at The Atlantic has a good set of resources to explore, including links and children’s books; at least some of these resources could be useful in teaching a diverse Sunday school group about white supremacy.

As noted in an earlier post, Chatelaine recommends working in subject areas that you know something about. With that in mind, I’m working on some Unitarian Universalist-specific children’s stories from Unitarian Universalist history (based on serious historical research I did, including in primary sources). Two stories I’m working on right now are about nineteenth century African Americans, one a would-be Unitarian and one a short-term Universalist, that reveal how Unitarianism and Universalism were less-than welcoming places for non-white persons. One of these stories-to-be also touches on class bias in Unitarianism, so we can get into intersectionality at a kid-friendly level (one of the points Chatelaine made in a workshop that I attended is that intersectionality is a useful strategy in teaching this general topic). In the other story, the African American was a vital part of a local congregation, but only for a short time. Most importantly, the stories of these two people are complex, not simplistic, and inspirational: some white persons were moving away from white supremacist worldviews at the same time that some black persons were moving towards liberal religion, and all these persons had complex lives and motivations worth telling stories about.

If I manage to write these two stories, and I think they’re worth sharing, they’ll get posted here on my blog. But even if I don’t, maybe this can get you thinking about how you can take Chatelaine’s advice and use YOUR strengths as a Unitarian Universalist religious educator — what topic area do you know best, and how can you apply that to teaching about white supremacy? And then how can you use your expertise to open up a metaphorical space in which children with diverse experiences and diverse points of views can explore the topic?

I think it’s also important to acknowledge some of the resistance we will face when we try to create this open metaphorical space in which a diverse group of children can explore this topic. I think we religious educators will face strong and conflicting pressures: white parents who want to protect their children from this topic, non-white parents who don’t want their children to have to be in a white-dominated environment to learn about this topic, non-parent adults who want us to adhere to a strict party line, congregational leaders who want us to fit into what they’re doing (instead of asking us what we’re doing, and building something around the children) — and some of us may also have to deal with micro-managing parish ministers and clueless denominational leaders and busybody academics, all of whom think we religious educators are not competent to take on leadership in this area.

But acknowledging the potential sources of resistance helps me clarify three basic pedagogical challenges. First, we know there is always resistance to tackling tough moral and ethical issues; we have dealt with this before, in teaching comprehensive sexuality education, in teaching about death, in teaching children to think for themselves. Second, we know Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal religion devoted to open inquiry; we constantly challenge children to think deeply and openly about everything from the Bible and God, to masturbation and consent, and we constantly have to work to hold open that metaphorical space where children can enter the zone of proximal development in a learning community. Third, we know that race and racism are topics that make adult Unitarian Universalists very uncomfortable, which means they will tend to judge us harshly no matter what we teach; but we’ve been through this before, when we religious educators quietly taught about sexism and heteronormativity in Sunday school classes, even though those topics made many adults uncomfortable.

I think the thing that makes me most nervous about this white supremacy teach-in is that so many people will be watching me, ready to judge my teaching inadequate. And I wonder if your question stems in part from that same feeling. As an educator, I know these one-shot teach-ins never accomplish much, so I know already that whatever I do in a one-hour teach-in will be inadequate. Teaching and learning are long, slow, mysterious processes; we will not achieve miracles in an hour; we need to be in this for the long haul. And that means that the most important thing I can do in this teach-in is to respect each individual who participates, listen with openness to what they have to say, create a supportive learning community — so that they will keep coming back. It’s just like teaching OWL for grades 7-9 — many of the teens don’t want to come to the first few sessions, so you have to build a supportive community where any question is taken seriously and everyone feels a part of the community. For this white supremacy teach-in, then, our most important goal will be to make people want more.

That’s all I’ve got for you right now. Not sure if I’ll post my lesson plans and supporting material here — Unitarian Universalists are far too prone to savage and destructive criticism when it comes to teaching about white supremacy, and I just don’t have the energy for that right now. But feel free to contact me through email.

Teaching about white supremacy

How can we teach young people about “white supremacy” within the constraints of a typical Sunday school? What are some of the theoretical considerations, and what are some practical considerations?

One of my professional organizations, the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) has called on Unitarian Universalist religious educators to participate in a “white supremacy teach-in” in the coming weeks, to follow up on the denominational brouhaha which led to the resignation of Peter Morales from the presidency of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).

This is a great call to action, but where do we come up with pedagogical strategies to teach children and teens about white supremacy? I’ll get to practical suggestions after a brief review of theoretical resources; although if you’re a hands-on educator you may want to go straight to practical suggestions, skipping over theoretical considerations which may seem pretty remote from actual children and teens.

Theoretical resources
Practical suggestions

Theoretical resources

Let’s start with the obvious: with bell hooks and her book Teaching to Transgress, and with Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Both these books provide useful theoretical perspectives. However, in my experience these books are not very useful for children and young people since they focus on persons age 18 and up.

Lev Vygotsky is another obvious source of pedagogical insight. Vygotsky’s theories provide us with such well-known concepts of “scaffold-and-fade,” and the zone of proximal development. For a helpful summary of zone of proximal development, I like Seth Chaiklin, “The Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotky’s Analysis of Learning and Instruction,” in Kozulin et al., Vygotsky’s Educational Theory and Practice in Cultural Context [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003]). Chaiklin makes a number of points that might prove helpful. Chaiklin points out “the zone for a given age period is normative, in that it reflects the institutionalized demands and expectations that developed historically in a particular societal tradition of practice,” thus implying a strong connection between institutional demands and children’s development. Chaiklin also carefully defines the technical meaning of “imitation” in Vygotsky, and then points out that “the main focus for collaborative interventions is to find evidence for maturing psychological functions, with the assumption that the child could only take advantage of these interventions because the maturing function supports an ability to understand the significance of the support being offered”; thus, there are definite psychological and developmental limitations to the amount of learning that can take place within the child.

And in a Unitarian Universalist context, I believe it’s helpful to connect Vygotsky’s collectivist understanding of learning and development with James Luther Adam’s theological conception of the congregation as a voluntary association in mass democracy. Adams’s conception of congregations as voluntary associations helps us understand that face-to-face and personal encounters within a congregation help prevent the atomization of the individual, which in turn can prevent mass democracies from hurtling towards totalitarianism. So Vygotsky teaches us that “a person is able to perform a certain number of tasks alone, while in collaboration, it is possible to perform a greater number of tasks”; and Adams’s work suggests not only that the congregation is a place where we can collaborate together to support a liberative and liberal democracy, but also that the congregation as a whole can support the developmental growth of children and teens towards healthy maturity.

Another useful theological resources is William R. Jones’s essay Theism and Humanism: The Chasm Narrows. In this essay, Jones makes a very helpful connection between theism and the “left wing” of theism: both are humanocentric worldviews, in which it is up to humans to effect positive change. Jones help us see that we can’t wait around for some Daddy God to bail us out — for that matter, nor can we wait around for Big Daddy Science to bail us out — a humanocentric point of view acknowledges that it’s up to us humans to effect change. (Jones makes the same point in his book Is God a White Racist?)

For theoretical resources specific to religious education, I’d turn to my other professional organization, the interfaith and international Religious Education Association (REA), which includes both scholars and practitioners. Over the years, the REA has published or presented interesting scholarship on how to teach liberation and social justice; the most notable recent instance is REA’s 2012 conference “Let Freedom Ring”: Religious Education at the Intersection of Social Justice, Liberation, and Civil/Human Rights. So REA conference proceedings and the REA journal Religious Education have plenty of theoretical material that would help in teaching about white supremacy. The problem with the REA publications is that you have to read through a great deal of material to find relevant articles, and even then you often have to do some translation from another cultural contexts (e.g., figuring out how an article outlining teaching peace to Israeli and Palestinian youth might translate to a U.S. context).

Beyond REA publications, there are plenty of progressive religious educators who have written books that offer resources for this kind of endeavor. A couple of books that come immediately to mind are John Westerhof’s book Learning through Liturgy, and Robert Pazmino’s Foundational Issues in Christian Education; Westerhof’s book helps usnderstand how learning takes place in and through worship services; and I have found Bob’s book extremely helpful in confronting my own internal inclinations and biases. A few Unitarian Universalists with anti-Christian biases and prejudices might be repelled by these books; but I’d suggest that the exercise of tamping down anti-Christian biases long enough to find the good in those books could be a useful preparatory exercise for those who have a serious desire to teach against racial bias and prejudice.

As an educator, I have been greatly inspired by Marcia Chatelaine’s workshop “Talking to Students about Ferguson,” given at Ferry Beach Conference Center in July, 2015. Chatelaine, a professor of history at Georgetown University, helped me understand how intersectionality could be a useful pedagogical strategy. Her workshop also helped me to understand how to get past the strong emotions elicited by Ferguson; she suggested addressing Ferguson from within one’s own area of disciplinary expertise. Thus, as a historian, she could talk about the history of Ferguson as a white-flight suburb, using her are of disciplinary expertise to generate insight.

Finally, I would also turn to the works of educational philosopher Maxine Greene. In particular, I have found her short essay “Diversity and Inclusion: Towards a Curriculum for Human Beings” to be foundational for the kind of liberative religious education I hold us as an ideal. I’ll give one brief excerpt from this essay that might serve as an inspiration for a suitable pedagogic practice for teaching about white supremacy:

“[T]here has been a prevalent conception of the self (grand or humble, master or slave) as predefined, fixed, separate. Today we are far more likely, in the mode of John Dewey and existentialist thinkers, to think of selves as always in the making. We perceive them creating meanings, becoming in an intersubjective world by means of dialogue and narrative. We perceive them telling their stories, shaping their stories, discovering purposes and possibilities for themselves, reaching out to pursue them. We are moved to provoke such beings to keep speaking, to keep articulating, to devise metaphors and images, as they feel their bodies moving, their feet making imprints as they move towards others, as they try to see through other’s eyes. Thinking of beings like that, may of those writing today and painting and dancing and composing no longer have single-focused, one-dimensional creatures in mind as models or as audiences. Rather, they think of human beings in terms of open possibility, in terms of freedom and the power to choose.”

I wanted to end with that passage from Maxine Greene because it points the way to the kind of flexible, learner-focused teaching that I want to do.

Practical considerations

When I translate these (and other) theoretical resources into practical pedagogy for young people in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school setting, here are some of the things I think about:

1. My teaching will be centered on activities that allow learners to be “selves in the making.” And, given my own strengths as a teacher, this means I’m going to use the arts; and knowing my limitations as a teacher, I’m going to do best with telling stories (I could see other people using dance, drama, etc., but those are not in my skill set). [This point inspired by Maxine Greene.]

2. My learners are going to be at various points in their development. I would love to be able to do some kind of formal pre-assessment, but that’s not realixtic in the context of an hour-long Sunday school session. Therefore, I’ll have to be a flexible teacher, willing to adjust my lesson plan to accommodate those who turn out to know very little, as well as those those who already know a lot. [See Bob Pazmino’s chapters on “Sociological Foundations” and “Curricular Foundations.”]

3. The educational goal of teaching about white supremacy is a BIG task. Since I have to be realistic about what can be taught (and learned) in a given limited time, I’m going to set realistic — and probably modest modest — educational objectives for one teach-in session. But for the long term, I will also continue the liberative educational praxis I’m already using and committed to. [See bell hooks about the realities of teaching.]

4. Anybody who has taught knows that teachers have to regulate the emotional temperature of a class. The phrase “white supremacy” will obviously generate strong emotions in many people; in fact, that’s the whole point of using that phrase. But I don’t want to limit my educational objective to merely eliciting emotions of shame, anger, guilt, and/or hatred, because from experience I know that too much of those emotions can stop the learning process temporarily (e.g., white people can shut down due to shame, non-white people can shut down due to anger, etc.). So I’ll need to balance how these emotions are elicited in the short-term, against a long-term goal of liberative educational praxis.

5. Oversimplification is always a temptation in teaching, and I think it’s a particularly strong temptation when teaching about white supremacy. To avoid oversimplification, I’m going to take inspiration from Marcia Chatelaine’s advice on teaching about Ferguson: use intersectionality. Intersectionality asks: how are different oppressions linked? (I suspect this will be an especially useful approach for adult Unitarian Universalists, because so many of them are already doing significant work and learning in sexism, classism, ablism, homophobia, etc.; thus intersectionality can connect what they’ve already accomplished and learned about to the topic of white supremacy.) [This point inspired by Marcia Chatelaine.]

6. Chatelaine also suggests: focus on an intellectual discipline or subject area you know well, and delve into that. The intellectual disciplines where I have some level of professional knowledge and expertise — philosophy, liberal theology, religious education — aren’t particularly well suited to teaching children and teens about white supremacy. So I tried to think of a subject area where, although I don’t have professional expertise, I have enough knowledge that I could teach something to children — and I thought of environmental justice, a topic I have already taught to children and teens, and a topic that lies at the center of social justice concern in our congregation.

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The above are some preliminary considerations and practical ideas for implementing a one-shot “teach-in” on white supremacy. Note that what I am proposing does not necessarily conform to the teach-in called for by Black Lives of UUU. I’m specifically addressing the educational considerations of teaching young people in a Sunday school setting; Black Lives of UU has issued a broader call to include this topic in worship services, Sunday morning Forum, etc.

Furthermore, my practical ideas grow out my own congregation, here in the very specific cultural context of the Bay Area — a region where Cesar Chavez started his career, a region where Chinese immigrants at times lived in virtual slavery, a region where Japanese Americans were illegally (and immorally) interned during the Second World War, a region where one police force (Oakland P.D.) was under federal control because of racial prejudice. I could also mention Oscar Grant. I could also mention to overt sexism and racism of Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, etc., and of start-up culture, and of Silicon Valley venture capital firms. In terms of environmental justice, I might consider why it is that East Palo Alto, a historically black city, doesn’t have enough water supply to support the kind of development that could bring more jobs (and could also bring more gentrification that might drive out people of color). Bay Area racial history is complex, and your area will differ.