Category: Religion

Religious education staffer: administrator, educator, theological resource?

Based on a conversation with a friend, here’s a question about religious education and the role of the religious educator in a congregation:

Should that person spend any Sunday morning time teaching?

This is one of those simple questions that produces a long and interesting answer.

Years ago, religious education theorist Maria Harris suggested that the duties of people doing religious education in a congregation can be divided up into three main categories: theological resource, education, and administration (see her The DRE Book [Paulist Press, 1976], pp. 1-12). Harris further implied that full-time religious education professionals might be able to carry out all three duties, but part-time staff might be able to carry out only one or two of these duties, depending on how many hours they work. I have found this a useful framework in planning out the duties of a religious education professional, both as a religious education professional myself, and as someone who has supervised a DRE when I was a parish minister. Continue reading “Religious education staffer: administrator, educator, theological resource?”

Summer Sunday school: Blob Tag and Jataka tales

From my teaching diary; as usual, children’s names are fictitious.

We’ve been getting 8 to 12 children in grades K-6 in our summer Sunday school class — a nice group size that allows children of different ages to get to know each other. Such a small group size makes it easy to change your plans at the last minute, too. At 9:25, five minutes before heading in to the worship service, Edie, my co-teacher, and I revised our plan. We were supposed to take a walk to the nearby city park, but neither one of us felt like dealing with the hassle of getting permission slips signed.

“Let’s stay here,” said Edie. “We can play giant Jenga.” Last winter, the middle school group had made a game based on Jenga (a trademarked game invented by Leslie Scott), using two-by-fours for the blocks. The middle school kids had played this game on the patio during social hour, and the younger kids were fascinated by it.

“Do you want a story?” I said. I had just gotten an old story book, More Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbit (1923), and there was one story I wanted to tell to children. Continue reading “Summer Sunday school: Blob Tag and Jataka tales”

A mathematician’s theology

Paul Erdos (pronounced air’ dish), the Hungarian mathematician, had his own private slang. Women were “bosses,” men were “slaves,” children were “epsilons (for the smallest Greek letter), and God was the “Supreme Fascist” or “SF” for short. Erdos was born in Budapest to a nominally Jewish family in 1913, lived through various unstable and authoritarian governments in his home country following the First World War, got out of Hungary before the Nazis invaded, was banned from entering the United States during the McCarthy era because he had corresponded with a mathematician in Communist China, and had problems with Stalinist Russia — he had plenty of experience dealing with authoritarian and fascistic governments. He once laid out the rules for dealing with the SF:

The game of life is to keep the SF’s score low. If you do something bad in life, the SF gets two points. If you don’t do something good that you should have done, the SF gets one point. You never score, so the SF always wins. [Quoted in Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, New York: Hyperion, 1998.]

This prompts some interesting reflections. First, is it possible to determine my score in the game of life? (I think the answer is “no,” since some of the good things I should have done but didn’t do, I didn’t do because I wasn’t aware that I should do them; then too, part of the SF’s power is keeping us from knowing exactly how low our score is.) Second, what would constitute a low score? (All I’m looking for is a rough order of magnitude: 1,000? 1,000,000?) Third, is score in the game of life plotted against time? (If not, then early suicide would lead to the lowest possible score, since the worst it could do is add 2 to your score, while living even another day could potentially add dozens to your score.)

Whining and complaining post

I need to whine and complain about one of my professional associations, the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA). Not everyone likes to read whining, complaining posts; therefore I’m warning you right at the beginning so you can skip this post if you want.

Continue reading “Whining and complaining post”

UU kids and politics

I’m often impressed by Unitarian Universalist kids. They have this tendency to take our values seriously, and actually try to live out our values.

Here’s a video about the presidential election, from a second grader whose family is part of our church here in Palo Alto (her family gave me permission to share this on my blog). Whether or not you share her political opinions, she is articulate, personable, and fun — able to express her views politely and respectfully — just the way we want our UU kids to be. Nor is it surprising that a UU kid would get involved in politics at a young age — after all, we do encourage our kids to live out their values in the real world.

Three steps for getting rid of your rotten minister

Carol pointed me to a wonderful essay in The Lutheran e-newsletter titled “How to get rid of your rotten pastor.” The author gives six steps for getting rid of your rotten pastor.

For those of you who don’t have time to read the original article, I’ll condense it for you. Here are three steps for getting rid of your rotten minister:

(1) Make sure your rotten minister has two days off every week, a day for errands and a day for spiritual reflection and renewal. This will reduce the time your rotten minister is around to annoy you. Get them out of your hair even more by giving your rotten minister sabbatical time, and raising money to send your rotten minister to continuing education events and spiritual retreats. And make sure your rotten minister has a month of vacation and a month of study leave, and that they take it all. Oh, and if an emergency comes up on a day off or during vacation or study leave, make sure they make up the time off.

(2) Take over the tasks your rotten minister does badly. Of course ministers should excel at everything: administration, preaching, youth work, pastoral care, counseling, teaching, spiritual leadership, etc. But your rotten minister is probably rotten at one or more of these tasks. Organize volunteers to take over tasks your minister is rotten at: start a pastoral care team, find more adult religious education teachers, etc. Or if your congregation has enough money, hire staff to take over tasks your minister is rotten at: get a trained Director of Religious Education, hire a qualified business manager, etc. When your rotten minister can concentrate on the few things they actually do well, this will reduce your annoyance considerably.

(3) By now, your rotten minister should have free time to fill up. Encourage your rotten minister to spend more time reading theology, more time on reflection and spiritual practice. If they do more reading, reflection, and spiritual practice, maybe you might actually get a decent sermon out of your rotten minister once in a while, and maybe they might actually turn into a real spiritual leader. And your congregation will be getting great care from the pastoral care team, top-notch administration from the business manager, and so on.

This is how you, too, can get rid of your rotten minister. If you follow these steps, your annoyance will be reduced, you’ll soon be hearing better sermons, your congregation will be thriving, and best of all you won’t have to go through the time and expense of searching for a new minister.

Limits of reason

How far does reason serve to cure, or at least to palliate, the miseries of humankind? Not very far, according to Samuel Johnson:

The cure for the greater part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative. Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature and interwoven with our being. All attempts, therefore, to decline it wholly are useless and vain: the armies of pain send their arrows against us on every side, the choice is only between those which are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less malignity; and the strongest armor which reason can supply will only blunt their points, but cannot repel them. —Rambler, no. 32

Johnson wrote this partially in response to the Stoics, who professed to be able to ignore misery, and to maintain equipoise when faced with calamity. But he, as someone who valued reason, was also exploring the limits of reason. Reason cannot cure every ill:

The great remedy which heaven has put in our hands is patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind, and shall suffer only the natural and genuine force of an evil without heightening its acrimony or prolonging its effects. —Rambler, no. 32

Thus, says Johnson, patience and not reason serves to maintain our peace of mind when we are confronted with misery, torment, and suffering.

William R. Jones: a brief appreciation

While on vacation, I missed the death of Rev. Dr. William R. Jones, who died on July 17 at age 78; commenter Dan Gerson drew my attention to that fact today. Jones was the pre-eminent Unitarian Universalist humanist theologian of the past fifty years, one of the handful of truly important Unitarian Universalist theologians of any kind from the past half century, and arguably the best Unitarian Universalist thinker on anti-racism.

Jones is a major figure who deserves a full critical biography, which I am not competent to write. But here is an all-too-brief overview of his life and work:

Education and ministry

William Ronald Jones was born in 1933. He received his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Howard University. He earned his Master of Divinity at Harvard University in 1958, and was ordained and fellowshipped as a Unitarian Universalist minister in that year. He served from 1958-1960 at a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Providence, Rhode Island. Mark Morrison-Reed states that Jones served at First Unitarian as assistant minister (Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, p. 139), but the UUA Web site states that he served at Church of the Mediator as “minister”; I’m inclined to believe Mark’s book, as the UUA listings of ministers are prone to error.

After a two-year stint as a minister, Jones went on to do doctoral work in religious studies at Brown University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. His dissertation was titled “On Sartre’s Critical Methodology,” which discussed “Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical anthropology” (Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy [Cambridge University, 2008], p. 171).

As you can see, Jones quickly moved from the parish to the academy. Of course he was well suited to the academy because of his intellectual abilities, but also there is little doubt that there were few doors open for African American ministers looking for Unitarian Universalist pulpits in the 1960s.

The years at Yale

After receiving his Ph.D., Jones was an assistant professor at Yale Divinity School from 1969 to 1977. It was while he was at Yale that he gained renown as a Black theologian with a unique take on the issue of theodicy. Continue reading “William R. Jones: a brief appreciation”