Yet Another Unitarian Universalist – Page 2 – A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.

An unknown Unitarian minister

We hear a lot about the Unitarian and Universalist ministers who stayed in ministry for decades — people like Hosea Ballou and William Ellery Channing. But what about the people who served as Unitarian or Universalist ministers for just a short while, then moved on to something else?

Here is one such person.

William E. Short Jr.

William E. Short, Jr., served as a Unitarian minister for just two years, from 1915 to 1917, primarily at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. He left the ministry for radical politics, then became a building contractor and later a realtor.

He was born on September 6, 1888, in Jackson, Miss. Short’s father was an Episcopalian minister, who moved the family to St. Louis, Mo., in 1889. William Short, Sr., died on October 27, 1905, when William, Jr., was 17 years old. After his father’s death, William, Jr., completed high school at the University School, St. Louis, Mo., and went on to attend Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., his father’s alma mater, receiving his B.A. there in 1912.

As an Episcopalian lay reader, William had charge of a few “missions,” or what we now might call church plants or emerging congregations. He received his B.D. from the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass., in 1915. Beginning in the fall of 1914, he became interested in Unitarianism, and made contact with the American Unitarian Association (A.U.A.). In the summer of 1915, he served the Unitarian church in Walpole, Mass. At the end of the summer, he was accepted into Unitarian fellowship. The A.U.A. recommended him to the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and the congregation called him in November, 1915. It appears that the Palo Alto church never regularly ordained him, due to his feelings about ordination, though he was recognized as a minister by the congregation and denomination.

Initially, he was quite happy in Palo Alto, and wrote to the A.U.A.: “I am more pleased than ever over the fact that I left the Episcopal Church and became a Unitarian.” However, he avoided contact with the denomination, going so far as to resist meeting with other Unitarian ministers. Even though the A.U.A. paid much of his salary, Short consistently neglected to submit to them the monthly reports they required of him.

The afterlife, according to Socrates

Another in a series of stories for liberal religious kids.

The great philosopher Socrates, who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, once had a long conversation with another philosopher named Gorgias. And during that long conversation, he told a story about what happens to human beings after we die.

Listen, then (said Socrates), as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only. But I believe this is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.

The poet Homer tells us in his immortal poem The Iliad, how the gods Zeus and Poseidon and Pluto divided the empire which they inherited from their father. Poseidon ruled the oceans, Hades ruled the underworld, while Zeus ruled over everything, including over the other gods and goddesses.

Now in the days of Cronos there had existed a law about what happens to human beings after we die. This law has been in force since the beginning and remains so today. The law decrees that human beings who have lived their whole lives in justice and holiness shall go, after they die, to the Islands of the Blessed, where they will dwell in perfect happiness. On the other hand, human beings who have lived unjust and irreverent lives have to go to Tartaros, the house of vengeance and punishment.

In the time of Cronos, and even into the early days of Zeus’s reign, the judgement was given on the very day on which people were to die — the judges were alive, and the people were alive — and the consequence was that the judgements were not well given. So Hades and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus, and said that some of the people who had died had found their way to the wrong places.

“Well, first of all,” Zeus said, “we must put a stop to human beings knowing the time of their death; for this they at present do know. However, Prometheus, the god of foresight, has already been given the word to stop this in them.

“Next,” said Zeus, “human beings must be stripped of their clothing and indeed of their very bodies, and stripped of everything else before they are judged. In other words, the human beings must be fully dead when they are judged, and not alive as they currently are. Furthermore, whoever judges them also must be dead and covered over with no clothing nor a body, nor with their wealth and families or other fine array. In this way, the judge’s naked soul will be able to perceive the truth of the other naked souls. If the judgment is carried out in this way, then it will be just.”

Zeus then decreed that three of his own human children should become judges, once they died. These three were Minos and Rhadamanthus from Asia, and Aeacus from Europe. When they died, they were assigned to stay in the “meadow at the parting of the ways.” Two roads left this meadow: one road went to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other road went to Tartaros. Rhadamanthus judged all the humans who died in Asia. Aeacus judged all the humans who died in Europe. And Minos served as the final court of appeal, if either of the others had any doubt about a human being who came before them.

Brief commentary

[A couple of points you might want to mention if you talk about this story with actual children:] This “fable” was written nearly half a millennium before the Christian era. And it’s worth remembering that Socrates spoke a different language from us, and his word for truth — aletheia — meant something more like “revealing” or “disclosing.” Aletheia was not the opposite of falsehood, but rather the opposite of forgetfulness. Aletheia was also a goddess.

Source:

Plato, Gorgias 523a – 524a, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1871), with reference to the translation by W. R. M. Lamb (1925).

Obscure UUs: Leila Violet Lasley Thompson

Another in a long-running series of brief biographies of obscure Unitarian Universalists. This is a chapter from my long-delayed book on Unitarians in Palo Alto from 1895 to 1934.

Out of poverty

Assistant minister, then settled minister, of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1926-1927, she was born at Larned, Kansas, on October 18, 1888, the first child of Fred Newton Lasley and Leura Auretta Davis. Times were hard in Kansas, and not long after Leila was born, Fred scraped together enough money to take the train to Portland, Oregon, where his brother and half-sister lived, in hopes of finding work. He found work as a carpenter, and saved enough money to send to Leura so that she could join him in Portland. Leura was just twenty years old when she took that five day journey by rail, carrying a baby in diapers, and with no one to help her.

After a year in Portland, Fred found work managing a farm in Springdale, east of Portland. He and Leura felt financially secure enough to have more children, and Leila’s younger sisters Weltha Evadna Lasley, and Gladys Mable Lasley, were born in Springdale; a brother Clarence, born in 1890, died young. By 1896, when Leila was 8 years old, the family had saved enough money to purchase their own farm in what is now Corbett, Ore. On the side of a hill, Fred built a two room shack using rough lumber he purchased, with a root cellar underneath. Fred built a trough that ran from a nearby spring to the house, so that they would have running water in the house. Leila’s sister Clara Belle Lasley was born on the farm the next year, in 1897. Leila’s younger brother Walter was born there in 1905.

The Lasleys were “poor as church mice.” They had few toys, and their clothes were often faded and patched. But their mother kept them looking neat and tidy, and encouraged them with homey moral sayings. If the children felt discouraged and unable to do something, their mother would say, “Mr. Can’t just fell off the fence and broke his neck — now you girls get back to work.” If their mother heard something that sounded like gossip, she would say, “That doesn’t concern you, so don’t publish it.” What Leura lacked in schooling, she made up for in common sense. Leura also had pride: she wanted her daughters “to be brought up decent.”

Yipwon

This deity is a yipwon figure, from the Yimam people who live along the Karawari River in East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Since I know essentially nothing about the Yimam people and their deities, I’m going to quote from various authorities who claim to know something.

A human-sized wood sculpture with a stylized head over stylized hooks, standing on a single leg. — Yipwon figure in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, acc. no. 2014.306

Maia Nuku, in the recent book Oceania: The Shape of Time (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023), says this about yipwon figures.:

“Depicting ancestral spirits, yipwon figures have long played a central role in hunting and warfare for Yimam people along the Korewori [sic] River in the Middle Sepik. The figures served as vessels into which spirits were summoned before a hunt or raid. The carvings were either large-scale or small enough to be portable, to be carried and deployed by their owners as powerful amulets or charms. Large figures were owned by the group and kept in the ceremonial house, close to the back wall, the most sacred area of the house. Each yipwon bore a name and was paired with one of the senior male members of the clan. Before its assistance was required, the yipwon spirit was summoned into the sculpture by activating it with a mixture of betel nut, ginger root, and a small amount of the blood of the man who was activating it…. On entering the yipwon figure, the spirit could also possess its human counterpart, speaking through him to the assembled men…. Yipwon were not intended to be representative portraits of individuals, but, rather, an activated vision of the exceptional nonhumans with whom the community was in relation….”

Christian Kaufmann, Korewori: Magic Art from the Rain Forest (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), pp. 70-71, gives a version of the myth they say underlies the yipwon figures:

“In 1963 Eike Haberland and Sigfried Seyfarth made a detailed study of the Yimam on the upper Korewori and its tributary the Wogopmeri as well as the hills to the north of them. These people name their hunting helpers yipwon, which Seyfarth and Haberland translate as ‘hunting demon.’ … The yipwon hunting helpers and the somewhat different older hook figures of the Yimam owe their existence to a mythical event which has been described in detail. They were created from the wood chips that were left when Sun, a male being, cared the first slit-gong. They have a human-like life, and enrage Sun by committing a murder. When this deed is discovered by the moon-woman, their shame is such that they transform themselves on the spot into stiff, thin wood figures and press themselves in the dark against the wall of the men’s house. Sun appoints them as hunting helpers at the moment when he takes leave of humans forever.”

The Metropolitan Museu of Art has photographs of several yipwon figures on their web site. On the web page for one of those figures, they give a somewhat different summary of the same myth, probably from the same source (Seyfarth and Haberland):

“…Local oral tradition describes the origin of these distinctive images. When the spirit of the Sun, who formerly inhabited the earth, was carving the first slit gong (a large musical instrument), the pieces of wood chipped from the carving came to life as spirits who lived with the Sun in the men’s ceremonial house. One day these spirits killed one of the Sun’s male relatives and drank his blood, after which they stretched themselves out against the wall of the house and turned back into wood. Angered by their act, the Sun ascended into the sky while the yipwon remained on earth as patron spirits of warfare and hunting….”

I found very little information online about the Yimam people, who are also called the Alamblak people. The Joshua Project, a Christian group that aims to spread their religion to other peoples, claims that there are 3,100 Alamblak people today; they claim that currently 90% of the Alamblak are Christian, and they link to a translation of the Christian Bible into the Alamblak language. The only other references I could find to the Yimam or Alamblak people was in relation to their artworks. It seems that the only value the Alamblak / Yimam people have to the First World is either to provide artworks (which sell for quite high figures), or to provide converts to Christianity. And I wonder how much remains of their old religion and mythology: are the yipwon still active?

Noted without comment: White evangelical gun culture

Religion News Service reporter Kathryn Post has an interview with William J. Kole about his new book, “In Guns We Trust,” to report on White evangelical gun culture. In the interview, titled “‘In Guns We Trust’ challenges white evangelicals to rethink their alliance with firearms,” Kole says that he was a part of White evangelical churches, but has been “deconstructing” his Christian faith over his perception that gun culture (and its ally, Christian nationalism) has nothing to do with Christianity:

“…I feel like the historical Jesus is objectively nonviolent. I understand that evangelicals will cherry-pick Scripture to find a few verses to help them feel more comfortable with gun culture, but I find it completely unbiblical. The churches that are embracing gun culture now were almost entirely pacifist up until the late ’60s and early ’70s, when a shift began. Even the Assemblies of God, where I served as a lay missionary for three years in Europe, was officially pacifist in its constitution and bylaws. So, they’ve had to pivot, and it’s a perplexing pivot for me. I just don’t see how weapons have anything to do with a faith tradition that is rooted in nonviolence.”

Kole also says that he’s now “reconstructing” his Christian faith, adding: “I just can’t, in good conscience, continue in the evangelical tradition.”

Noted with too much comment: the price of ignoring economic inequality

A couple of weeks ago on the Patriotic Millionaires site, Emily McCloskey posted a rant — sorry, a well-reasoned essay — laying out why, when Trump has a national approval rating of just 43%, the Democratic party approval rating is just 27%:

“Trump and Republicans have offered a story to voters to explain their financial woes. They’ve blamed immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA people, government bureaucrats, and more. And while they are morally, historically, and economically wrong to do this, unfortunately, Democrats have not strongly pushed back on these assertions in a way that resonates and sticks with voters.

“If Democrats want to win back the affections of voters, particularly those of working people, the solution is simple: they need to start telling a story. More specifically, they need to tell the RIGHT story about why working people are struggling so much while a handful of millionaires like us are doing so ridiculously well. That story involves ruthless corporations, C-suite executives, Wall Street financiers, and compliant politicians from the past and present. It’s not as simple and straightforward as ‘Immigrants are stealing your jobs,’ but it’s also not that complicated to explain.

“But they can’t stop at telling a story to explain people’s economic problems. They also have to offer a solution to them. And that solution is so uncomplicated that it’s almost painful for us to write: adopt an economic populist platform for people to rally around. An economic populist platform will involve policies that are simple, straightforward, and effective at reducing inequality….”

These days, it can seem as though the leadership of the Unitarian Universalist Association has basically adopted the Democratic party line. I especially notice this as someone who is proudly registered as an independent voter, someone whose political views (such as they are) could be called something like “Jesus socialism.” Not Christian socialism — most Christians in the world would not recognize me as Christian; and for my part, given what Christianity has become here in the United States, I don’t want to be a US Christian. Yet while there’s no way you can call me a Christian, I’ve been deeply influenced by the teachings and philosophy of Jesus. I think Bernard Loomer got it right when he argued that Jesus should be recognized for a major contribution to Western thought, his conception of the universe which places the interdependent web of all existence at the center of everything. Sometimes Jesus called that interdependent web “the Kingdom of Heaven,” sometimes maybe he refers to it obliquely as “God,” sometimes he didn’t really give it a name. However you name it, once you acknowledge the centrality of the interdependent web of all existence, the first thing you’re going to notice is….

Quiz time: If the interdependent web of all existence is your central reality, as it was for Jesus, what’s the first thing you’re going to notice?

Nope, not environmentalism. The first thing Jesus noticed was human beings living in poverty.

Environmentalism is not a bad guess. It’s true that we’re connected to all living things, and Jesus did indeed speak about how his God would know when even a small insignificant animal like a sparrow dies. So we should be concerned with all living beings, and indeed with the non-living world (air, rocks, and so on) as well.

But mostly, it appears that Jesus focused on poor people. In the fragmentary records we have of Jesus’s teachings, sparrows are mentioned once, but he talks about poor people any number of times. Unfortunately, Jesus’s thinking and philosophy have been somewhat obscured by later religiosity, and even atheists tend to think of Jesus as somehow divine. When you think of Jesus as a human being, as a human animal (Homo sapiens), however, then it makes sense that in his widening circles of concern, he begins with human beings.

Then when Jesus looks at what damages human animals, he acknowledges the damage done by what we now call racism (this is the point of the story of the Good Samaritan, as Dr. King made clear), and sexism, and all the isms we like to talk about these days. But Jesus starts with people who are poor — people who don’t have enough to eat, people who struggle to find the basic necessities of shelter and physical safety. So reducing poverty is going to be the starting point for anyone who wants to follow Jesus’s moral example. (Both Pope Francis and now Pope Leo get this; Pope Leo’s first official “exhortation” calls on Catholics to care for the poor.)

Dr. William J. Barber II, one of the few public US Christians whom I respect, has pointed out that poverty cuts across the lines of race, sexual orientation, and all the other isms. Barber, who is Black, reminds us that while it’s true that a greater percentage of Black people than White people live in poverty in the US, in terms of absolute numbers there are more White people than Black people living in poverty. As a result, Barber says, we can’t fall into the trap of believing the myth that poverty in the US is a Black problem — poverty is a White problem, a Black problem, and a problem for every racial group.

This brings me back to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). On the national level, Unitarian Universalism does not spend much time worrying about poverty. When you look through the denominational magazine, UUWorld, you will find lots of articles about environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, anti-racism initiatives, feminism, and other worthy causes. I’m glad that the UUA promotes anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, environmentalism, and so on, and I’m proud to be associated with those causes. But I rarely see articles in UUWorld about poverty. Looking beyond the denominational magazine, here’s another example: at the most recent General Assembly, the annual meeting of the UUA, delegates chose between three Congregational Study Action Issues (CSAIs) to serve as a focus of our social justice efforts. Of the three, only one CSAI touched even remotely on poverty — the CSAI on housing justice — and, not surprisingly, it did not win. I’m glad housing justice made it on the ballot, but I’m not surprised that it did not win.

My take on all this is that the UUA has the same problem as the Democratic party. Like the Democratic party, the UUA supports many worthy causes and initiatives. But, like the Democratic party, the UUA does not spend much time or energy on addressing poverty. Yet William J. Barber II points out that by some measures, nearly half of all US residents are poor (where poor is defined as: a household for which one major expense, e.g. a $1000 car repair, would push that household over the economic edge). Nearly half the US is poor. That’s just astonishing in a so-called First World country. That’s an issue that deserves our full attention.

I’m one of the 73% of US residents who don’t give their full approval to the Democratic party. Unfortunately, I’m starting to feel that way about the UUA. I’m seeing poverty everywhere in the US. Even here in Cohasset, Mass., a supposedly wealthy town, I’m seeing people with their economic backs to the wall. They range from a few people who are homeless to quite a few people who are just one unexpected expense away from economic disaster.

So I’ll repeat that advice that Emily McCloskey of Patriotic Millionaires gave to the Democratic party — but I’m going to direct that advice to Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in the US. We US UUs need to “adopt an economic populist platform for people to rally around [with] policies that are simple, straightforward, and effective at reducing inequality.” Or to put it more bluntly: US UUs, we need to stop ignoring poor people.

Noted without comment: What an artist thinks about AI art

Artist Matt Inman has a long cartoon/blog post on his website The Oatmeal, in which he sets forth his feelings about AI-generated art. He is thoughtful, while at the same time he pulls no punches (including the use of some salty language). Here’s an excerpt:

“AI art is an interesting technology because despite its growing popularity, nobody seems to want it. Artists hate using it. Consumers hate consuming it. And yet it thrives, like an Arby’s built inside a protected forest.

“I know it’s bleak. But artists, remember this: Nobody worth giving a damn about wants this technology. No one with a modicum of taste, patience, or culture gives a shit about AI art.

“AI art might eventually have the right number of fingers, but it’ll never have a heart. (I know this is cheesy but fuck you I like it.)”

This was posted to MetaFilter, where one commenter noted:

“Maybe it [AI art[ will get better. I’ve said it before: I don’t know what we (humanity writ large) are capable of achieving with AI, but I know the people and corporations funding AI are in it for profit, not the betterment of culture or humanity.”

Screenshot of the blog post on The Oatmeal

Noted without comment

On The India Philosophy Blog back on Sept. 28, Amod Lee wrote a post titled “Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of [Elon] Musk and [Charles] Manson.” Here’s a brief excerpt (I’ve changed the paragraphing slightly):

“…the transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness [following a transcendent experience from e.g. psychedelic drugs] is a fundamentally ethical one: to be far enough along it is to be a saint, one who has had ‘a transcendence of the ego point of view and its replacement by devotion to or centred concentration upon some manifestation of the Real, response to which produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life’ (Interpretation of Religion 301). But I think we need to be very careful about that sort of claim. The point came up in my interview with Osheen Dayal of MAPS Canada, where I pointed to the example of tycoon Elon Musk.

“It is publicly documented that Musk has used psilocybin, LSD and more, and given his known involvement in psychedelic spaces like Burning Man, he’s probably done far more than the documents let on. He has almost certainly had multiple psychedelic experiences of self-transcendence in the face of a larger reality. And yet Musk is about as far as one could imagine from ‘compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.’ Rather, he is practically a caricature of a self-absorbed egoist, so confident in his own rightness that he used his brief time in government to destroy thousands of military veterans’ lifelong careers and end the lifelines of thousands of desperately poor people around the world in the name of saving a tiny fraction of money and sometimes nothing at all.

“Musk is to today’s generations what Charles Manson was to the baby boomers: a sobering reminder that psychedelic experiences can leave you a terrible person….”

Network religion for progressives?

Back in 2017, sociologists Brad Christerson and Richard Flory published a book titled “The Rise of Network Christianity: How Independent Leaders Are Changing the Religious Landscape.” In one of their central arguments, they said:

“We argue that macrolevel social changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital revolution, have given competitive advantages to religious groups organized by networks rather than traditionally organized congregations and denominations.”

For Flory and Christerson, Independent Network Charismatic (INC) Christianity is the paradigm for this type of religious organization. INC Christianity is associated with a specific set of beliefs, including spiritual healing, confrontations with “demonic forces,” and social transformation on the far right side of the culture wars.

But why couldn’t other religious groups, with different sets of beliefs, organize themselves through networks? And I suspect that there are such religious groups, including those with sets of beliefs, and with political commitments, with which I’m somewhat more comfortable.

I suspect that it would be possible to identify what we might call Independent Network Westernized Buddhism. From what I’ve seen of Westernized Buddhist practitioners, there does appear to be a loose network that shares some of the attributes of INC Christianity, including “experimentation with controversial supernatural practices, innovative finance and marketing, and a highly participatory, unorthodox, experiential faith that is attractive in today’s pluralistic, unstable religious marketplace.” I’m sure many Westernized Buddhists would argue that they do not engage with “supernatural practices,” but the evolving science around meditation and mindfulness appear to downgrade some of the more extreme claims of that practice — a practice which, to my skeptical mind, is just as supernatural as prayer.

Another decentralized network that might qualify is Progressive Christianity. In a comment on a post I made earlier this week, Gabriele Simion drew my attention to this network, which features progressive Christian luminaries like Diana Butler Bass (thank you, Gabriele!). Progressive Christianity is not exactly a denomination — they don’t appear to ordain or credential clergy, they have minimal staff, they don’t plant new congregations, etc. — so maybe they’re a “network” in the sense that Christerson and Flory use the term?

I’ve begun to think that the Unitarian Universalist association might want to take on more attributes of networked religion. Funding for denominational work continues to plummet, congregations continue to fade away — the denomination is shrinking before our eyes. In spite of the shrinking of the denomination and the congregations, there are lots of individual Unitarian Universalists in the world who still want to connect with other Unitarian Universalists. My own tiny little congregation here in Cohasset has (we think) three regular viewers of our livestream who live far from Cohasset, have never been a part of the in-person congregation, yet who have been watching our livestreamed services most weeks, and donate money as well.

Yet I suspect that most Unitarian Universalist leaders would not be very receptive to the idea of moving away from the traditional organizational structures of denomination and congregation. Back in 2004, evangelical Christian Brian McLaren pointed out that “[religious] conservatives tend to be rigid theologically and promiscuous pragmatically and [religious] liberals tend to be rigid methodologically and a lot more free theologically.”

Well, that’s still going on — the religious conservatives are being “promiscuous pragmatically” and they are dramatically out-competing the religious liberals. There is one group among Unitarian Universalists that might have a hope of competing with the INC Christians: the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF). They deliver their religious services primarily online, and have the potential for adopting the best organizational practices of network Christianity. However, they are pretty well locked into the traditional denominational financial structure of the UUA, which hampers their ability to innovate financially.

I suspect a great many religious progressives have mostly given up on religion, and just assume that secularization will do away with religion entirely. But the secularization hypothesis is just that — a hypothesis — and in any case, right now the INC Christians have become extremely adept at winning elections and pushing their agenda of social transformation. I wish religious progressives could find it in themselves to be as innovative as the INC Christians.

Salps

I went for a walk at Black Rock Beach late this afternoon. A large quantity of seaweed had been left behind by the ebbing tide, mostly Sugar Kelp (Saccharina latissima), but also some wrack (Fucus spp.), some Sea Lettuce (Ulva lattuca), and a few other odds and ends.

There were also hundreds of small (2-3 cm long), almost transparent jelly-like objects washed up above the line of seaweed. At first glance I thought they were Sea Gooseberries (Pleurobrachia pileus), a species of comb jellies. But when I put my photos on iNaturalist, user ja-fields corrected me — they were salps.

A small jelly-like object held in the palm of my hand.

What is a salp, you ask? It’s an organism in Family Salpidae. The Salpidae are in Subphylum Tunicata, which is a part of Phylum Chordata — animals with spinal cords. Human beings are also in Phylum Chordata, so this odd little animal is more closely related to us than are crabs, sea urchins, or starfish.

This made me curious — how does one identify Salpidae, if not to species level, then at least to genus? James L. Yount, “The Taxonomy of the Salpidae (Tunicata) of the Central Pacific Ocean,” Pacific Science, July, 1954, has a “Key to world species and reproductive forms of Salpidae,” pp. 280 ff. Identification requires looking at the internal structures, and Yount provides a “Schematic median section of a solitary salp (after Ihle, 1935).” I digitally enhanced his sketch, and identified the body parts in easy-to-read type:

Sketch of a schematic median section of a solitary salp — After Yount (1954).Click the image above for a PDF version.

At some point, perhaps I’ll type up Yount’s key. In the mean time, you can find it yourself here.