Category: Religion

“Ministry Days,” day one

This was advertised as a “Justice General Assembly,” and it is clear from what’s been going on at the “Ministry Days” which precede General Assembly that many people feel the center of our religious community is social justice work.

But I’m not convinced that religious organizations are particularly effective at doing social justice work. Religious communities can supply moral and ethical frameworks to motivate and support social justice work. And as the Social Gospel movement pointed out over a century ago, religious communities cannot be solely focused on individual and personal salvation; we also have to be focused on social salvation. Thus it is clear that religious communities should be concerned with social justice issues. The question is how religious communities can be most effective at pursuing social justice. Continue reading ““Ministry Days,” day one”

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, the theologian who was central in developing Mujerista — which can be translated as womanist — theology, died May 13 in New York City. Her obituary in the New York Times notes that Isasi-Diaz preferred the term “Mujerism” to the term “feminist” because, she said, many women in the Hispanic community considered feminism to be “a preoccupation of white Anglo women.”

Many of us are Unitarian Universalists are about to head off to General Assembly in Phoenix, where we will be concentrating a good deal of our attention on the immigration issues facing the Hispanic community. Feminism and feminist theology has been at the center of our identity as a religious community. As we continue to look into issues facing the Hispanic community, it seems to me worth out while to look more closely at Mujerism as it applies to North America. So I’m putting Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz on my reading list for the coming year.

Long live the Enlightenment

Jeremy, someone who sings in the same group I do, passed along a photocopy of an article, “The Enlightenment, Naturalism, and the Secularization of Values,” from the magazine Free Inquiry. It’s a historical overview of the Enlightenment by historian Alan Charles Kors of the University of Pennsylvania. During the break in singing tonight, I told him that I finally read the article.

“What did you think?” he said.

“I liked it,” I said. I told him I had been expecting the article to come down on one side or the other of the argument going on right now about whether the Enlightenment is a good thing, or something we have to move past; that is, I had been expecting a modernist/postmodernist argument. Instead, Kors gives a pretty straightforward overview of the Enlightenment from his perspective as a historian.

We both agreed that we’re of the party who would like to continue the values of the Enlightenment. “But we can’t go back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment,” I said.

Jeremy wondered aloud: “Why not?”

I argued that the insights we have gotten in the twentieth century from psychology, particularly developmental psychology, pose a major challenge to at least one eighteenth century Enlightenment assumption: we now know that children think differently than do adults; they are not rational in the way that adults may be said to be rational. Furthermore, beginning in the lat twentieth century we began to learn from neuroscience and cognitive science that human beings may not be as rational as we’d like to think they are, or perhaps not rational in the same way that we have imagined them to be.

Jeremy argued that the insights of developmental psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science do not fundamentally contradict the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophers. But I said we can’t yet be sure of that. The field of neuroscience, for example, is changing so rapidly that we really only have preliminary hypotheses of how the brain works; new experiments could change our ideas even further. And developmental psychology is still trying to reconcile the two very different approaches of Piagetian and Vygotskian (more individualistic and more communal) developmental psychology.

The only conclusion we came to was that we both were happy to have moved beyond the excesses of Romanticism. Although Jeremy loves that quintessential Romantic composer, Beethoven, while I don’t; and I still remain at heart an Transcendentalist. So maybe we haven’t escaped Romanticism as much as we thought we have.

War and peace

This is mostly for my dad, because he and I talk a lot about the war in Afghanistan. I happened to preach two Sundays in a row, once on war, and once on peace, and I’ve now put those sermons online:
On May 20, a sermon about a program we did with kids called “Peace Experiments.”
On May 27, a sermon about how we might memorialize the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I find the ongoing war in Afghanistan to be very difficult to talk about, and consider both these sermons to be inadequate. At the same time, it’s one of the top three moral problems facing us in the United States today; we have to talk about the war, we have to try to sort through the moral issues it raises.

The first world religion

Quick, what was the first world religion? — that is, the first religion that expanded well beyond its origins within a given culture and/or political unit.

April DeConick, an expert on Gnostic religion, asserts that Manichaeism was the first world religion. “Who gets taught that in World Religions courses?” DeConick adds. After its start in Persia in the third century, it had expanded to the Atlantic ocean by the fourth century, and along the Silk Road to the Pacific ocean in China by the eighth century or so.

Man is not the measure of all things

Dad and I have been talking for some time about our discomfort with the term “humanist” (a term which, by the way, can be applied to both Christians and atheists). Neither one of us seems to have much interest in putting humanity at the center of the universe; we’re both more willing to call ourselves religious naturalists.

My fever came back this afternoon, and I slept through the time I usually talk with dad. But late in the evening, I came across the following in a book of critical essays on science fiction; it begins to express some of the feelings I have about the position of humanity in the universe:

It isn’t that mankind is all that important. I don’t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don’t think that Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not now, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, perhaps, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objets. That is essential. We are subjects, and whoever among us treats us as objects is acting inhumanly, wrongly, against nature. And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh….

Ursula K. LeGuin, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” [1975] in The Language of the Night (Ultramarine Publishing, 1980), p. 116.

An online tool I’d actually use

Anne, who sits on our congregation’s board, pointed out a really useful online tool: SignUpGenius.com. Their tagline reads: “Organize volunteers online for free.” It was started by church people; the founder writes:

We were having a party for our church small group one time and told people with last names starting with A-M to bring drinks and those with N-Z to bring snacks. We all showed up and were shocked to find that every snack family brought chips and salsa and every drinks family brought Diet Coke! It was the most disgusting party meal ever!

Anne says she has used this successfully. I’m going to be trying it out, and thought you’d want to know about it, too.

The implications of living in a multiethnic neighborhood

Carol and I live in a multiethnic neighborhood. Based on income, class, and cultural attitude, the people in our neighborhood are just the kind of people who would come to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I’ll give a brief description of our neighborhood, and then based on our experience of living in our neighborhood I’ll tell you why I think they wouldn’t be welcome in most Unitarian Universalist congregations.

The people across the street are white, and the family has been living in the same house since it was built in the 1890s. The house next to us on one side was recently purchased by an immigrant Russian couple, and we often hear them speaking Russian to their Pug dog. Down the street are several houses and apartments with Latino families; the ones we know about are Mexican. There used to be a couple of African Americans living down the block, but I ahven’t seen them for a while. We see east Asian people walking down our street, and based on their looks (an unreliable way of determining ethnicity), I’d guess some of them are probably Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese.

The people in our neighborhood have a variety of professions. We know there are several gardeners in the neighborhood not just because our landlord hires one of them to take care of the yard, but also because they park their pickup trucks on the street. We know of an architect, an artist, a college student, and a test driver who tries out new cars. We all learned there was a child pornographer, but he’s in jail now. There’s a stay-at-home mom, a school bus driver who parks his bus on the street when he comes home for lunch, and several people who walk to the Caltrain station dressed in business casual. Continue reading “The implications of living in a multiethnic neighborhood”

What to avoid when talking about your religion

The January/February, 2012, issue of The Humanist contains an article by Jennifer Hancock titled “Seven Things To Avoid When Talking to Strangers about Humanism” (pp. 39, 41). Here’s her list:

“1. Don’t expect a negative reaction….
“2. Don’t begin a debate….
“3. Keep your definition of humanism simple….
“4. Don’t talk about God….
“5. Don’t make it about them….
“6. Don’t denigrate religion — any religion….
“7. Don’t forget to talk about morality….”

While Unitarian Universalism is not equivalent to humanism, despite a few assertions to the contrary, nevertheless these little suggestions work reasonably well for us Unitarian Universalists as well. Here are seven things to avoid talking about when talking about Unitarian Universalism.

“Don’t expect a negative reaction.” — I might word this a little differently: “Assume the other person is merely curious.” Maybe for some Unitarian Universalists, the default reaction to a discussion of religion would be negative, but in our increasingly secular society more and more people have no default reaction, positive or negative, towards religion. They’re just curious.

“Don’t begin a debate.” — This could be stated less politely as: “Don’t be so damned defensive.” Turning innocent questions about religion into debates is just going to alienate others.

“Keep your definition of Unitarian Universalism simple.” Lots of us have been practicing our “elevator speeches” describing Unitarian Universalism in a ten-second sound bite. Elevator speeches actually do work; if you don’t have one yet, maybe now’s the time to develop one.

“Don’t talk about God.” It turns out that most people aren’t that interested in having theological discussions about whether or not God exists, and if God does exist what is the nature of God. When we asked our Mormon friend about her church, she told us about the people and programs, not about theology. When someone asks me about my Unitarian Universalist congregation, I tell them about the amazing Sunday services, the great people who are part of the congregation, the fun that the kids have in Sunday school, the social justice work that we do; there’s never time to even get to God.

“Don’t make it about them.” If someone wants to ask us about Unitarian Universalism, they don’t really want us to tell them how much their religion (or lack of religion) sucks. After we’re done talking about your religion, if they want to talk about their religious affiliation (or lack thereof), we can politely listen. But if they ask us about Unitarian Universalism, it is wise to take their question quite literally, assume they actually want us to tell them about Unitarian Universalism, and then simply tell them.

“Don’t denigrate religion — any religion.” Denigrating religion either makes us look like schmucks, or it makes us look weird, or possibly both. Denigrating someone else’s religion? — that makes me look like the kind of schmuck who can’t tell you about the positive aspects of their religion so their only option is to badmouth all other religions. And if I claim to be Unitarian Universalist, which means I’m by definition religious, but I’m denigrating religion? — that’s just plain weird.

“Don’t forget to talk about ethics and morality.” In my experience, most people who ask about my religion are really quite interested in what sort of ethics and morality goes along with my religion. When I tell people that Unitarian Universalists aren’t particularly worried about what you believe, but we are concerned with what you do with your life, that we are always trying to make this world a better place, particularly for those who are poor or powerless — this kind of thing is of great interest to people.

So there you have it, modified from Jennifer Hancock’s original article: seven things to avoid when talking about Unitarian Universalism.

Transform and grow your RE program, questions

Below are the questions asked by participants in the workshop “Transform and Grow Your RE Program,” a workshop I led at the Pacific Central District annual meeting on April 28, 2012. (First post in this series.)

Questions about tracking attendance

(1) Under “policy governance,” should religious education [RE] attendance numbers be shared with the Board? (every month?) — the congregation? — or just the executive team?

I don’t think it matters whether you’re using “policy governance” or any other kind of governance, I believe we should share attendance figures as widely as possible. In my congregation, I report RE attendance every month to the Board, key staffers, the RE committee, and the Committee on Ministry. Attendance figures for the year always go in the annual report, which goes to all congregational members. I also sometimes report attendance to parents/guardians and volunteers.

One key strategy for transforming a congregational system is building in as many positive feedback loops as possible. Positive feedback loops are those ways that people learn how things are going, and that they receive good feelings when things are going well (negative feedback loops are destructive communications like malicious gossip, triangulation, scolding, meanness, etc.). So as a general principle, I say we should be building lots of positive feedback loops all the time, especially with crucial metrics as attendance figures.

(2) Can we see a sample of the spreadsheet you use to track enrollment and average attendance?

Here’s a PDF of our Excel attendance spreadsheet for April, 2012, at the UU Church of Palo Alto: REAttendSample.xls

Unfortunately, I cannot share the spreadsheet we use to track enrollment, as it contains the names and birthdates of legal minors. Continue reading “Transform and grow your RE program, questions”