UUA logo: our version

Carol and I have been playing around with the new UUA logo. Carol doesn’t like the way the flame in the new logo is disattached from the candle-chalice thingie. I don’t like the way the sides of the chalice-thingie act as walls which keep the flame from being seen from the sides.

Mind you, it’s way too easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. No logo can ever be perfect, and certainly the UUA logo is a pretty good design, and more than adequate. But it’s way too easy to play around with graphics on our laptops, and Carol and I had nothing better to do on a sleepy Saturday morning, so we spent half an hour revising the UUA’s logo. Here’s what I came up with:

UUA Logo Mash

Update: June 24, 2018: The above logo is now released under a Creative Commons license; please attribute to “A UU”.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Compare it to the official UUA logo below. See what I mean about the sides coming up around the flame in the official logo?

UUA Logo Official

(Now that I look at this again, I wish I had made the sides of my version even lower, but I’ve already wasted too much time playing with this.)

Jesus said something like (and I’m paraphrasing here): “Neither do people light a candle and put it inside a red and orange bushel basket, the walls of which extend halfway up the flame, so the people below us cannot see the flame.” Buddha supposedly said (another rough paraphrase): “Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened; but if your candle is inside a red and orange chalice thinige, others will burn their fingers trying to light their candle from your candle.” The new UUA logo is a pretty accurate graphic representation of what our denomination is actually like; my revision of the logo represents the way I wish our denomination were.

Update, 3 hours later: Ah, what the heck, I might as well make the things the way I like it — here’s a version with even lower walls, and now it looks like the “U” is kinda lying back and the candle is standing up inside it:

Continue reading “UUA logo: our version”

Progressive religious education in 1912

During an email exchange with a colleague regarding the history of early twentieth century Unitarian religious education, I came across a 1912 report from the Unitarian Sunday School Society.

This brief report gives an interesting look into the beginning of the Progressive era of religious education. Based on the insights of the new science of psychology, the Progressives were implementing closely graded classes, an improvement over older ungraded, or three-grade, classes. The Progressives felt that key outcomes of religious education included providing children with religious knowledge inculcating children with the ideals of social service, and teaching “religion itself.” And, although still focused on the Bible, the Unitarian Progressives were introducing non-Biblical and non-Christian topics to Unitarian children.

For me, the most interesting part of this essay is the penultimate paragraph. With some rewriting, this Progressive statement could serve as a pretty good summary of what we’re still trying to do in our Sunday schools today — something like this:

“We should teach our children about religion — they should know religious history, literature, and theology.

“We should teach our children how to apply religion — they should know that as a tree bears fruit, so religion should produce good works.

“Finally, we should teach our children religion itself. Knowledge about religion points towards religion itself; and religious service grows out of the high ideals of religion itself. But when we teach religion itself — as opposed to knowledge about it, or service based on it — we won’t teach it through classroom instruction. Like all our best knowledge, religion is transmitted by contagion and inspiration, not by instruction; it is caught, not taught. To reach and quicken the child’s religious nature is the highest task of religious education.”

The full text of the essay appears below.

  Continue reading “Progressive religious education in 1912”

New blog on Indian philosophy

There’s a new blog on Indian philosophy called, not surprisingly, The Indian Philosophy Blog. Some of the posts are technical, some of the posts are academic news. But some of the posts, and associated comments, are pretty interesting.

Take, for example, a post on Penguin India’s decision to recall and destroy all copies of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, in response to right-wing Hindu demands. But, says blogger Andrew Ollett, “India has long traditions of argumentation,” and he concludes that:

“The politics of outrage and offence, and the struggle to ban and silence competing viewpoints, are antithetical to this long tradition of reasoned debate. They impoverish public discourse and they endanger critique and the kind of truths that depend on critique.”

The comments get even more interesting. There’s a comment from someone in India, there’s discussion of the legacy of colonialism, and more.

Interesting stuff. Definitely a blog that I will be scanning on a regular basis.

What I did with my weekend

Sacred Harp singing convention

The view from the bass section as a singer from Bremen, Germany, (alas, I didn’t catch her name) named Eva led well over a hundred singers at a Sacred Harp singing convention this past weekend.

What was it like singing with all those people, you ask? I’ll limit myself to the physiological response. With something over thirty singers in the bass section, I could feel my whole body vibrating to the lower notes. And since this is highly rhythmic music, we could also spend time talking about entrainment from an ethnomusicological perspective.

This, by the way, is why you might want to improve congregational singing so that it’s good, rhythmic, and loud — because when you do that, it feels really good.

William R. Jones writing collective forming

In this comment, Hasshan Batts writes:

“Practitioners Research and Scholarship Institute (PRASI) www.prasi.org is gathering a collective of individuals that have been influenced by Dr. Jones’ oppression theory for an upcoming writing project. If interested please email me at justequality@yahoo.com”

What I did on my vacation, pt. 2

Ms. M and Mr. O, old friends of ours, are adopting two girls. I’m supposed to make two shelf units for them by this weekend. So far, one is completed and ready for finishing. Here’s the completed unit (the fish-eye lens makes it look out of square, but it’s not):

DIY shelves

I’m supposed to have both shelf units completed by this weekend. I don’t think I’m going to make the deadline. The sad truth is that it’s been something like eighteen or nineteen years since I worked for the cabinetmaker, and I’ve gotten out of shape — I can’t put in an eight hour day in the shop any more.

(The details: 28 x 33 inches, 9-1/4 inches deep. Adjustable middle shelf. Solid pine construction throughout.)

What I did on vacation

Some people take trips when they go on vacation. Some people catch up on their sleep. I’m taking a week of vacation, and I decided to finish up the collection of Christmas carols that I’ve been working on for several years, and finally turn it into a book. Here it is:

YuletideSongAndCarolBook“The Yuletide Song and Carol Book” — This is a collection of four dozen Yuletide songs, in easy arrangements for SATB voices. Songs include familiar classics such as “Joy to the World,” lesser-known favorites like “Sussex Mummers Carol” and “Los Posadas,” familiar songs such as “Go Tell It on the Mountains” that are hard to find in SATB arrangements, and a few little-known gems such as William Billings’ “Shiloh.” The texts mostly come from older Unitarian, Universalist, American Ethical Union, and Quaker hymnals and songbooks, and will appeal to most religious liberals. Suitable for carolers, choirs, and informal groups that enjoy singing four-part harmony. 8-1/2×11, 100 pp., $9.99.

Now available through Lulu.com

(Soon to be available for distribution through Ingram, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.)

One definition

This is from Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education:

“A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”

This strikes me as a pretty good definition of at least part of religious education.

We Unitarian Universalists are most likely to speak about duty in connection with our social justice work. However, we are also concerned about duty in terms of personal morality: whenever possible we aim to recognize that other beings are not mere means to our ends, but are ends in and of themselves. This means that we try to get beyond exploitation in our personal relationships; and beyond sexism, racism, and other destructive “isms”; and we try to honor and respect those who can’t stick up for themselves because they’re weaker than we are (e.g., children).

Many of us Unitarian Universalists have a hard time with the word “reverence.” But read over Whitehead’s definition carefully: the present moment holds within in itself eternity, and once we perceive this, we have the foundation of reverence. Notice that Whitehead is not making any claims about divinity, nor is he defining what existence he; he is talking about a kind of knowing. That’s the foundation of reverence: that you can know in the present moment in ways that open up all of time and space to you. Mathematicians and theologians would likely agree.

Going back to the original

In tomorrow’s service, we’re thinking about using a brief reading from Singing the Living Tradition, the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, that goes like this: “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

In the hymnal, this quotation is attributed to Albert Schweitzer. So I decided to look it up: which of Schweitzer’s works did it come from? I found that this quotation sometimes appears online in a different form — which you would expect, since Schweitzer was not a native speaker of English and the quotation would have been translated from his German original — and the alternative version goes like this: “Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.”

It turns out the quotation comes from Schweitzer’s Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1924). It is from a short essay titled “Influence” found in chapter five of the memoir. The complete short essay is richer and more interesting than the short quotation in the hymnal, and for the sake of reference I have included C. T. Campion’s standard 1924 translation of the passage at the end of this post.

I still don’t know who did the translation of the quotation that’s in the hymnal; it’s not from Campion’s translation; but at least I can confirm that Schweitzer wrote a German original of this quotation. And I can also say that I wish the compilers of the hymnal had included the next sentence from Schweitzer’s essay:— “If we had before us those who have thus been a blessing to us, and could tell them how it came about, they would be amazed to learn what passed over from their life into ours.”

Continue reading “Going back to the original”

How to feel comfortable, or not

Do you like your congregation because it feels so comfortable? Most of us do. We want to be able to go someplace each week where we can feel at home. But I came across the following statement by Bernice Johnson Reagon that makes me think maybe I shouldn’t want to feel so comfortable in my congregation:

“If you’re in a coalition and you feel comfortable it’s not a broad enough coalition.”