Kavita Ramdas to speak at UU Church of Palo Alto

On Tuesday, August 28, Kavita Ramdas will speak on the topic “Women’s Rights and Culture: Social Entrepreneurship,” at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA). The talk will begin at 7:00 p.m.

Kavita Ramdas is the Executive Director of the Program on Social Entrepreneurship for the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the former CEO and President of the Global Fund for Women. She is an advocate for human rights, open and civil societies, and a respected advisor and commentator on issues of social entrepreneurship, global development, women’s leadership, education, health, and philanthropy. She spends her professional life shaping a world where gender equality can help ensure human rights and dignity for all. She was was born and raised in India and educated at Delhi University, Mount Holyoke College, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. And she’s been attending UUCPA!

I’ll be at this talk. I’m fascinated by the growth of social entrepreneurship, and I’m committed to women’s rights, so I’m looking forward to learning how these two things can be linked in powerful ways. And did I mention she’s part of UUCPA? Oh yeah, I already did.

Funeral etiquette

Bill “Spaceman” Lee, famed left-handed pitcher who played with the Boston Red Sox for many years, and now 65, was on the mound yesterday pitching for the minor league San Rafael Pacifics. He not only won, he pitched a complete game: 94 pitches, with 69 strikes and a fastball clocked at 70 m.p.h.

Daniel Brown, a sports writer for the San Jose Mercury-News, reported that Lee came to the Bay Area immediately after a trip to Boston. There Lee attended the funeral of Johnny Pesky, who played second base when Lee was with the Sox. This was back in the days when baseball players actually stayed with a team for more than half a season, so they got to know each other, and we got to know them, and they and we were all loyal to the local team.

Anyway, back to Johnny Pesky’s funeral service. I’ll let Daniel Brown tell the story from here:

Lee said that when his cab from Fenway Park pulled up curbside for services, he noticed a New York Yankees fan in the car behind him.

“So I flipped him off,” Lee said.

Wait. At a funeral?

“Johnny would have wanted it that way,” Lee explained.

[Daniel Brown, “‘Spaceman’ touches down in Marin,” San Mateo County Times, p. 1,3.]

So you can add this to your funeral etiquette book: when in Boston attending a funeral of a Red Sox player, can you give the bird to someone wearing Yankees paraphernalia? Heck, yeah. Bill Lee said so.

Motives

When Max Planck turned sixty, he was honored by the Physical Society of Berlin. Several scientists gave short talks in his honor, including Emil Gabriel Warburg, Max Von Laue, Arnold Sommerfeld, and Albert Einstein.

Einstein spoke about the motives for engaging in scientific research, “Motive de Forschung.” He said that some people take to science out of a sense of superior intellect, some as a kind of sport, some out of ambition, some for utilitarian purposes. But, said Einstein, some people — including Planck himself — engage in scientific research out of a very different motive:

I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

And there are many people like this in our liberal congregations: finely tempered natures who need to range through pure air and look into eternity.

In the next paragraph of the talk, Einstein went on to explain that this motive for doing scientific research is not simply a negative one of escapism:

With this negative emotion there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that best suits him a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. [Bibliographic information below.]

And again, there are many people in our liberal congregations who engage in religion for the same motive: like the poet and the painter, these are people who do religion the way an artist does art, to help make sense out the world. Among religious liberals, this motive does not impel people to replace science with religion, any more than religious liberals would try to replace painting with poetry. Religion, especially I think for those who are mystics, can be another way to make sense of the world, to look into eternity, to place oneself in the context of the cosmos.

Of course there are other motives for doing religion, just as there are other motives for doing science. Many religious liberals conceive of religion in utilitarian terms: religion is a way to promote justice, religion is way to build social capital, and so on. But there are also the poets and painters and scientists among us, who want to look into eternity and seek to understand our places in the cosmos.

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Bibliographic information: Albert Einstein, “Principles of Research,” 1918, address delivered at a celebration of Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday to the Physical Society, Berlin. Published in German in a collection of essays: Emil Gabriel Warburg. Max Von Laue, Arnold Sommerfeld, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck, “Zu Max Plancks Sechzegstem Geburtstag; Ansprachen, Gehalten Am 26. April 1918 in Der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft” (Karlsruhe; Müller, 1918). Reprinted in: ed. Carl Seelig, Mein Weltbild (1934, 1953). Published in English: ed. Carl Seelig, trans. Sonia Bargman, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954). The complete text of the English translation of this talk is available online, among other places, here.

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.)

Memoir

I’ve been leading a monthly memoir writing at church. I do the exercises, too, and recently I wrote about something that happened almost exactly thirty years ago this week. So here are my memories of that day. I’ve changed the names, because there’s no reason to give those names to intrusive search engines.

August —, 1982

During the summer, the lumberyard always hired someone extra to help out in the in the yard, and to help out stocking shelves in the store. Summers were busy, and there was always at least a truck driver, or one of the yardmen, or the stock clerk, on vacation. One summer they hired Bud, whose father worked in the building trades, and who lived in one of the streets back in behind the lumberyard. He was a few years younger than I, which means he must have been seventeen or eighteen. If you saw him, you’d describe him immediately as a good guy: he was always smiling and cheerful, he always worked hard and he was in great shape.

Continue reading “Memoir”