Asian art scavenger hunt

On Sunday, Tracey and I are taking the Coming of Age class for First Parish in Cohasset and First Parish in Norwell into the Harvard University Art Museum.

The point of the trip is to look at Asian art that depictions deities and sacred objects. This gets interesting because Asian religious/cultural traditions have different understandings of divinity than Christianity (or the other two Abrahamic traditions).

For example — is Buddha a deity, or not? The answer: It depends. In some art works, Buddha appears very human; in other art works, Buddha appears more than human. (Similarly with Jain tirthankaras.) And what about Hindu deities? They are clearly gods, but they also have human-like characteristics.

In Western culture, we tend to think all deities are like the Christian God, transcendent and far above humanity. But Asian art reminds us that there is a scale of divinity, from ordinary mortals through divine humans, and through human-like deities, all the way to transcendent unknowable deities.

So that’s the purpose of the scavenger hunt — look for works of art, then figure out how divine a being is portrayed in the art work. To show you better what I mean, here’s the first page of this year’s scavenger hunt:

If you’re near Cohasset and enjoy ukulele…

…I’m helping organize a free ukulele workshop. The online registration form is now live. Here are the details:

FREE Ukulele Workshop with Anne Ku

Sun., Feb. 9, 2025, 2-4 p.m.

What: Free ukulele workshop led by Anne Ku. Anne says: “I’ll teach you the 20% you need to know, to play 80% of what you want to play.”

Who: Anne Ku is a well-known Boston-area ukulele teacher and workshop leader.

Where: Location: 23 N. Main St., Cohasset, Mass. Parking map (PDF).

Downloadable flyer (PDF)

More info about the Cohasset ‘ukulele circle, who are hosting this event.

The workshop

2 p.m.: Fun with Ukulele — for all levels, but especially useful for beginners.
3 p.m.: Common Chord Progressions — what you need to know to play your favorite songs.

Doors open at 1:40 p.m. Be ready to start at 2 p.m. with a tuned ukulele. Need help tuning? Show up early and we’ll help!

Bring your ukulele, music stand (if you have one), and water bottle. Tea and snacks will be provided.

Registration

Please register at the link below. This workshop is customized to workshop participants, catering to all levels. The more you describe yourself, the better the fit.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Alternate definitions for “socialism”

Sometimes I wonder why the religious right, and the political conservatives, express so much disdain for “Marxism” and “socialism.” It kinda makes sense that the religious right might dislike “Marxism” and “socialism” so intensely, because Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and because many Marxist-Leninists promote a crusading atheism that wants to get rid of religion entirely.

But wait. The definitions for “socialism” and “Marxism” are not always the definitions you’ll find in the dictionary. For an example of what I mean, let’s go back in time to 1963.

Not long after Martin Luther King, Jr., was released from the Birmingham jail, White terrorists bombed the house of King’s brother. This violent act provoked a violent response from the Black community, which in turn prompted the infamously racist Governor George Wallace to respond with even more violence: he sent in state troopers who mercilessly beat Black people. Jonathan Riedler takes up the story in his book Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 124:

“The violence of the state [of Alabama] was the physical expression of an ideology of white supremacy…. George Wallace had sworn to the Alabama State Assembly that he would squelch ‘agitators’ and ‘integrationists’ who aimed to ‘destroy the freedom of Americans everywhere.’ Twenty-one times the legislators applauded him. Not long after the bombing, when President [John F.] Kennedy moved federal troops to Alabama bases, Birmingham’s lame-duck mayor, Art Hanes, fulminated against ‘bayonet brotherhood’: ‘They gonna tell the people of Birmingham, “You’ll love this nigger at the point of a bayonet, whether you want to or not” … This is Socialism of the rankest sort.’…”

Note that in the above example, Art Hanes is not using the dictionary definition of socialism. For him, “socialism” has an alternative definition: it is government action that prevents him from committing acts of racial violence. He perceives this as infringing on his rights as an American, and he defines anything that infringes on his rights as an American as “socialism.”

This helps me understand some of the visceral emotion I sense when people reference “Marxism” and “socialism” in today’s political debates. There are times when opponents of “socialism” and “Marxism” are not using the dictionary definitions for those words, but rather more emotionally-loaded meanings pertaining to race.

The wrong kind of atheism

Still reading Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). When Gutting interviews Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, he asks Ruse about Richard Dawkins’s arguments against the existence of God. Ruse has a good reply:

” Like every first-year undergraduate in philosophy, [Richard] Dawkins thinks he can put to rest the causal argument for God’s existence. If God caused the world, then what caused God? Of course, the great philosophers, Anselm and Aquinas particularly, are way ahead of him here….”

There actually are interesting arguments to be made about the various proofs for and against God, but Dawkins remains stuck at the level of a certain kind of college freshman who is both ignorant and arrogant.

Noted without comment

From an interview with Howard Wettstein, in the book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), pp. 58-59:

Gary Gutting: “You say you’re a [religious] naturalist and deny that there are any supernatural beings, yet you’re a practicing Jew and deny that you’re an atheist. What’s going on here? What’s a God that’s not a supernatural being?”

Howard Wettstein: “Let’s begin with a distinction between participation in a [religious] practice and the activity of theorizing, philosophically and otherwise, about the practice. Even an advanced and creative mathemetician need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status; he was highly skeptical about philosophers’ inquiries into such things. He had trouble, or so I imagine, understanding what was at stake in the question of whether the concept of existence had application to such abstractions. Feynman had no worries about whether he was really thinking about numbers. But ‘existence’ was another thing.

“It is this distinction between participation and theorizing that seems to me relevant to religious life.”

Another niche hobby

An entry under the category of Niche Hobbies: handbell change ringing.

If you’ve read Dorothy Sayers’s murder mystery Nine Tailors (or watched the TV version), you know what change ringing is. It’s very English: you have a tower with eight or so bells, and a bunch of people stand around and ring the bells in certain defined patterns. If you don’t have a tower full of bells? Then you can use handbells, and you get handbell change ringing.

One musician describes handbell change ringing like this: “A series of 4-12 bells are rung in a series of mathematical permutations. Remember work with 12-tone tone rows in 20th-century music theory class? This is similar in practice, but with diatonic notes.” Also, to my ears it sounds much better than most twelve-tone music.

Click on the image below to see a video of handbell change ringing in action.

Four people sitting in a circle, each ringing two handbells.
Screen grab from the video. Note the looks of intense concentration on the faces of the ringers.

This is the kind of niche hobby that’s going to appeal to a certain kind of person: someone who likes mathematical patterns, someone who likes cooperative efforts in small groups, someone who likes the meditative effect of intense concentration, and so on. OK, I admit it: that someone could probably be me. Since the last thing I need right now is yet another niche hobby, I’m fortunate that there’s no handbell change ringing group near me.

General info on handbell change ringing:
handbell change ringing blog — links to change ringing websites

Math and change ringing:
a bit about math and change ringing — Prof. Sarah Hart of Gresham College gets into group theory and change ringing

Instructional materials:
quick overview for conventional handbell ensembles — the cross-and-stretch technique — the ringing on bodies technique (ringers move, not bells) — instructional book — handbell change ringing for beginners (booklet) — change ringing for handbells (more advanced) — instructional website — handbell change ringing online simulator (for solo practice) — methods for three bell ringing (with a tenor behind, that would be 4 bells = 2 handbell ringers) — cross and stretch demonstrated (the video with stuffed animals is particularly clear, believe it or not)

Performance videos:
3 people (easy to follow the changes) — blindfold handbell change ringing — 4 person cross and stretch (watch closely) — 6 person cross and stretch

The year in music

I have to spend a lot of time thinking about music for my job. Honestly, though, much of what passes for sacred music in Unitarian Universalist circles these days is pretty dreary stuff. To avoid dreariness and boredom, this will not be a post about UU sacred music. Instead, here’s some of the more obscure music I’ve encountered this past year.

I’ll start with the ‘ukulele. This under-appreciated instrument still gets no respect, but there are some stunning players out there. Like jazz great Benny Chong, now in his eighties and still going strong. Here he is with bassist Byron Yasui on “Just the Way You Are.” Chong is also a fabulous solo player. Here he is playing “My Romance.”

Two men playing musical instruments
Benny Chong and Byron Yasui performing in Hawai’i (screen grab from video)

I’ve also been listening to Carmen Souza, who mixes traditional Cape Verdean music with contemporary styles. Here she is with “Amizadi” from her latest album. Souza writes: “For this song, I composed a Funaná [a traditional Cape Verdean genre] based on the story of Francisco Cruz, a.k.a B.Leza. This genre promotes fun and social interaction, so I called it Amizadi (Friendship).” Next, here she is solo, singing “Confiança & Bonança”, a video released on International Women’s Day 2024.

A woman singing
Carmen Souza, performing live in France (screen grab from video)

One of my musical obsessions this year has been handbells, because I started playing in our congregation’s handbell choir. Sadly, much of the handbell music you find online tends towards dreary Christian sacred music. Yawn. But if you look, you can find more interesting stuff. Like the Double Mallet Ringers, based in Hong Kong. Most of their ringers are professional music educators, they commission compositions, and they even have a resident composer. In addition to more serious music, they also do goofy covers like this.

Double Mallet Ringers, Hong Kong (screen grab from video)

Finally, So Percussion and Caroline Shaw released another new album together this year. What they do could be described as singer-songwriter meets avant-garde. Do their lyrics actually mean anything? Whatever, it’s incredibly refreshing music. Here’s the title track from their new album Rectangles and Circumstance.

There’s a lot of great musical creativity out there, from a variety of different cultures, in a variety of styles. Maybe the new year will bring some new creativity and variety to UU sacred music….

Addendum: I just have to throw in this piece I found today, by Kenyan sound artist Nyokabi Kariuki, “Raw Sugar” performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

Book worth looking at

In preparing for upcoming sermons, I’ve been reading some basic texts that I think provide the foundations for today’s lived religion for many Unitarian Universalists. I started with Nietzsche, because a great many Unitarian Universalists echo some of Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the death of God.

By the way, in Twilight of the Idols, the eighth of Nietzsche’s “Maxims and Missiles” is this: “From the military school of life. — That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Today this has become a much-repeated religious maxim. I wonder if people would repeat it so often if they knew that Nietzsche included it in one of his books.

In any case, although Nietzsche is actually quite a good writer, unlike many philosophers, the quality of his prose is inconsistent, and he can descend to bombast and even incoherence at times. Nor do I find him especially likable; perhaps the better word is, I don’t find that he is sociable; he doesn’t seem to like human society all that much. I can only take a few pages of Nietzsche before I need to read something else to clear my mind.

It occurred to me that Spinoza is another writer who must provide the foundations for much of today’s Unitarian Universalism — his insistence on reason and rationality, his advocacy for freedom of thought, and for democracy — we owe a great deal to Spinoza for being the first Western writer to articulate these values so well.

I had been introduced to Spinoza in an introductory philosophy class, and found him unreadable. A philosophy major who knew more than I told me that we were reading from a notoriously bad translation, but that it was the only English translation of Spinoza that was in print at that time. Whatever the reason, that class put me off Spinoza, and I never wanted to read him again.

But I discovered that Edwin Curley had published new translation of the Theological-Political Treatise in 2016. Curley is supposed to be a well-regarded expert on Spinoza. I thought I’d give his translation a try.

Curley’s translation turns out to be wonderfully readable, and relevant to today’s theological and political situation. Take, for example, this passage from Chapter XX, which has the chapter title, “It is shown that in a Free Republic, everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks”:

“These examples show, more clearly than by the noon light, that the real schismatics are those who condemn the writings of others and seditiously incite the unruly mob against the writers, not the writers themselves, who for the most part write only for the learned and call only reason to their aid. Again, the real troublemakers are those who want, in a Free Republic, to take away the freedom of judgment, even though it can’t be repressed.”

Today, those who call themselves conservatives and those who call themselves liberals have both descended to condemning the writings of others; and have both tried to take away freedom of judgment. Both the conservatives and the liberals have advanced good reasons for condemning the writings of others. But, as Spinoza points out: banning books in libraries, or banning speakers from college campuses, really amounts to taking away freedom of judgment, even though that judgment can’t be really repressed.

I’ll end this post with one more quote from this same chapter, that could have been written about the recent U.S. presidential election campaign (note that “liberal studies” here does not mean politically liberal in the U.S. sense, but rather in the sense of the liberal arts):

“Liberal studies and trust are corrupted, flatterers and traitors are encouraged, and the opponents of [liberal studies and trust] exult, because a concession has been made to their anger, and because they’ve made those who have sovereignty followers of the doctrine whose interpreters they are thought to be. That’s how it happens that they dare to usurp their authority and right, and don’t blush to boast that they’ve been chosen immediately by God, and their their own decrees are divine, whereas those of the supreme powers are human, and therefore should yeild to divine decrees, that is, to their own decrees. No on can fail to see that all these things are compmletely contrary to the well-being of the Republic.”

In his day, Spinoza’s books were banned and he had to fear persecution by the religious and political authorities. No doubt he would suffer the same fate if he lived in the U.S. today. This sad reality may help explain why colleges are cutting philosophy programs: God forbid that there should be a course of study that might include a thinker like Spinoza.

Searching for Godel

I was buying books online from Seminary Coop Bookstore when I stumbled across a 2021 biography of Kurt Godel. My one exposure to higher mathematics was an undergraduate course in mathematical logic where the professor took us through the proof of the first of Godel’s two incompleteness theorems. Although I got a mediocre grade in that class, it was one of the highlights of my undistinguished undergraduate career. Maybe it would be fun to read a biography of Godel.

The biography was Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Godel by Stephen Budiansky. I looked it up on Kirkus Reviews, which gave it a good review, calling it an “outstanding biography of a man of incomprehensible brilliance.” I ordered the book.

The biography opens with a kind of cheesy prologue telling of Godel’s conversations with a psychiatrist he was seeing towards the end of his life. The prologue ends on page 7 with Godel’s death. I didn’t think much of the proluge, but I wanted to know about Godel, so I decided to plow on with the rest of the book.

From page 7 to page 42, I learned nothing about Kurt Godel. Instead of telling us about Godel’s childhood, Budiansky gives a precis of the political and intellectual history of Austria and central Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. Then there are a few pages devoted to the ostensible subject subject of the biography — before the author turns away from Godel once again to write about early twentieth century central Europe. Thus, we learn almost nothing about Godel’s childhood.

Well, I thought, maybe there just aren’t that many sources about Godel’s childhood. That’s a common problem for biographers. Once Godel enters college, surely Budiansky will spend more time writing about Godel. But we actually get very little about what Godel was like in college, and a great deal about the people Godel met in college. I began to feel as though Budiansky either didn’t know anything about Godel, or maybe preferred not to write about Godel for some personal reason.

By page 97 — after a somewhat pointless digression about Ludwig Wittgenstein that went on for several pages, while again telling me nothing about Godel — I was growing bored. I skipped ahead to see what Budiansky had to say about Godel at the time he came up with his incompleteness theorem. Once again, it felt to me as though Budiansky wasn’t telling me about Godel himself, nor about Godel’s thought, but instead only about the milieu around Godel. It was also clear that Budiansky knew about as much as I did about Godel’s most famous theorem (i.e., not much), so I wasn’t even going to get an insight into the man’s intellectual achievements.

I’m giving up on the book, at least for now. Perhaps what I’m really looking for is more of an intellectual biography. Two of my favorite biographies are Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music by Judith Tick, and Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography by Jean Grondin; both these biographies were written by people who had expertise in their subject’s field, and could write intelligently about their subjects’ accomplishments. But additionally, both these biographies also center their focus on their subject. Budiansky doesn’t seem to know much about mathematical logic, nor does he seem to be able to keep his biography centered on Kurt Godel.

All this goes to show that you can’t always trust Kirkus Reviews.

Updated Greek Myths curriculum

I spent the last two days doing an update of the Greek Myths curriculum on my curriculum website.

Tessa Swartz, then 12 years old, and I developed this curriculum back in 2014. Teachers at the UU Church of Palo Alto did a field test in 2015, and I did a quick revision that year incorporating field test feedback. I was supposed to do a final edit the following year (2016), but that was the year my father died and I wound up dropping the project. Nevertheless, the curriculum continued in use at the Palo Alto church right up through the pandemic.

This final revision retains the same stories originally curated by Tessa and me in 2014. But the following changes were made: revised the lesson plans (some quite heavily); added more illustrations; upgraded existing illustrations; rewrote the introduction; and did an overall edit.

If you have any comments on the curriculum, please leave them here or email me.

A woman chained to a rack cliff, with a sea monster below her and a man hovering above her.
A new illustration just added to the Greek Myths curriculum: Andromeda chained to the rock. This is a detail from a Roman wall painting of the first century BCE, from the Boscotrecase, Italy (public domain image).