Category: Theology

Defining religious liberals

Recently, I was trying to explain to another person (this is someone who belongs to a liberal denomination) that some evangelical Christians are impossible to distinguish from religious liberals. This other person found my assertion difficult to believe. I realized that most of us tend to define religious liberalism by denominational boundaries: if you are in a United Church of Christ congregation, or a Reform Jewish congregation, you are a religious liberal; if you’re part of an evangelical congregation, you can’t possibly be a religious liberal. But denominational boundaries began eroding a long time ago, and that old definition no longer works particularly well.

Here’s another possible definition for religious liberal: A religious liberal is someone who is flexible about theological or ideological matters, who instead is more concerned with living out his or her values in the wider world, and who is willing to make adjustments to his or her theology in order to make the world a better place. By contrast, a religious conservative is someone who is most concerned with theological purity or purity of religious ideology, and not social justice.

By this definition, evangelical Christian Richard Ciszik, former staffer for the National Association of Evangelicals, is a religious liberal because he is more committed to “creation care” or environmentalism than he is to religious ideology. Richard Dawkins, by contrast, comes across as a religious conservative, a humanist who demands ideological purity even if he alienates other religious groups to the extent that he greatly reduces his chances of working with them to solve real-world problems.

Or to put it another way: I’d much rather work with Richard Cisik on social justice issues than with Richard Dawkins; actually, I suspect Richard Dawkins would never condescend to work with someone like me on anything because I wouldn’t pass his test of ideological purity.

“Religion Is Not About God”

Dick said I should read the book Religion Is Not About God by Loyal Rue (Rutgers University, 2005). Dick is right, I do need to read this book: Rue manages to link two of my primary concerns, religious naturalism and the growing crisis of overpopulation. I’m slowly working my way through the book — slowly, because periodically I have to stop and think about what Rue is saying.

To tempt you into reading the book, I found a 5 minute online video in which Rue presents one of the key concepts of the book. Come on, you have five minutes — sit for a moment and watch this video:

By the way, Jerome Stone, a recognized authority on religious naturalism, passes this positive judgment on Rue: “One of the best treatments of religion by a religious naturalist is Loyal Rue’s Religion Is Not About God” (in Religious Naturalism Today [SUNY Press, 2008], p. 4).

Creatures of habit

I’ve been thinking about the nature of human beings recently — “theological anthropology” in theology jargon. Unitarian Universalists have this myth that we are rational human beings. Neuroscience increasingly confirms that this is a myth, not fact, and that we humans are not particularly rational beings.

If we were rational in the way Unitarian Universalist myth seems to assume, all of us would floss our teeth regularly — of course many of us don’t floss regularly, because we are not as rational as we’d like to believe. But you can use your rational mind to change your behavior by making use of the power of habits — tiny habits, that is. Jenny told me about a technique being developed by BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford, called “Tiny Habits.” Back in January, KQED summarized the difference between Fogg’s approach and classic behavior models:

“The strength of a habit is defined, at least the way I see it, is how much of a decision was that behavior. So if you’re deciding ‘yeah, I’m going to go to the gym today,’ it’s a pretty good indication it’s not a habit. Habits are things you do without deciding,” says Fogg.

Classic behavior models focus on decision-making as a key component of behavior. Fogg is trying to get away from that by working on a new model of habit formation that’s built on baby steps.

Read more at Fogg’s Web site, TinyHabits.com. (And thanks, Jenny, for the tip!)

Service of the Living Tradition

I attended the annual Service of the Living Tradition yesterday, and was struck by both the sermon, and the new way that religious professionals were recognized during the service. You can find a video recording and a script of the service are online here, and my post on the uuworld.org blog here.

Here on my own blog, I’m going to take the time to reflect at greater length on this service:

The Rev. Sarah Lammert, Director of Ministries for the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) welcomed the congregation to the large hall at the Phoenix Convention Center in which the service was held. “Ministers are called forth from the lay people they serve,” said Lammert, and the purpose of the Service of the Living Tradition is to honor professional ministry. She added that as those being honored went up onto the stage, the congregation was invited to “raise a glad noise.”

This represented a change from recent Services of the Living Tradition, when the ministers and other religious professionals being honored did not go up onto the stage, but merely stood up where they were sitting. Also in recent years, worship leaders discouraged the congregation from cheering those being honored.

Another change was that the ministers and other religious professionals did not process in to the service together while the congregation sang the familiar hymn “Rank by Rank Again We Stand.” Instead, they were seated throughout the congregation, with their family and supporters. Each group — ministers achieving preliminary fellowship, ministers in final fellowship, credentialed religious educators, credentialed musicians, etc. — was introduced with the words, “I call forth from among you these persons….” The symbolism was clear: religious professionals gain their power and authority from the people they serve. Continue reading “Service of the Living Tradition”

“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.

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.

More on Thoreau

Lecturette from the second and final session of a adult RE class on Thoreau — typos and all.

At the end of last week’s session, you asked me to address a number of points about Henry David Thoreau. In no particular order, you asked me to talk about the following:

(1) Thoreau’s notion of civil disobedience
(2) How Thoreau was affected by Eastern religions
(3) The circle of writers and thinkers who came and went in the town of Concord during Thoreau’s life
(4) Why Thoreau left his Unitarian church, and place his departure in the context of wider trends in Unitarianism
(5) Thoreau’s later influence on Unitarianism, and then on Unitarian Universalism Continue reading “More on Thoreau”

A heretical introduction to Henry Thoreau, pt. 1

Opening talk from a class on Henry David Thoreau, given at the UU Church of Palo Alto on 18 April 2012.

Henry Thoreau is one of those literary figures that everyone likes to think they know. But having read him (and even studied him in a desultory way), and having read a good deal about him, and having lived the first forty years of my life in the very landscape of Concord, Massachusetts, in which he lived, and having been licensed as a tour guide in Concord, and having preached about him, and having in short devoted rather too much attention to Thoreau — the more I know about him, the more I feel that we tend to impose our sense of what we want Thoreau to be onto who he actually was.

What I would like us to do is to try to understand Thoreau as he really was, not as we would like him to be. That means that we cannot understand him as an environmentalist, because that is not a term he would have known, nor am I convinced that he would have been comfortable with that term. That means that we cannot claim Thoreau as a Buddhist, or a Unitarian, or an atheist or humanist, as various people have done over the years, for as an adult he would not have accepted any of those labels. That means that we should not think of him as one of the key figures in nineteenth century American literature, for in his own lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century he was spectacularly unsuccessful as a writer, especially as compared with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson; and while Thoreau may today be considered a key figure in American literature, arguably he remains misunderstood primarily because his gifts in broad humor and the telling of tall tales are rarely acknowledged.

So who was Thoreau? Continue reading “A heretical introduction to Henry Thoreau, pt. 1”