Regionalization news

The staff of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are slowly developing what has come to be known as “regionalization.” Although as I understand it regionalization originally came out of initiatives by districts to share and pool scarce resources, now the UUA is being driven towards regionalization by economic necessity. In a recent presentation to district staff, made available on YouTube, Teresa Cooley, Director of Congregational Life, says this:

“We have reduced resources, we have an obligation to steward our resources better, and one of the recognitions we have is: to have administrative structures for nineteen different districts is not necessarily the most cost effective way of doing things.”

I’ll embed the video below. Continue reading “Regionalization news”

Occupy SF

We stopped by City Lights Bookstore, the leftist poetry bookstore, this evening so I could buy a copy of Margaret Atwood’s new book of poems. On the way back, we stopped by Occupy SF to see how they’re doing.

I estimated that there were only three or four dozen people there at 10:30, certainly fewer people than were there a week ago. But the mood seemed good and upbeat.

Carol took some photographs (I put four of them on Flickr), and while she was doing so I talked to these two occupiers. I asked the man on the left if they lost people after the police raid earlier this week, when the police came in and confiscated all the occupiers’ belongings (sleeping bags, food, etc.) in the middle of the night. He said that he thought that was so, but that actually he had arrived after the police raid. The man on the right said that he had driven six hours to get there, coming down from far northern California. Both men were in good spirits, and seemed committed to a long stay.

I was pleased that it wasn’t the usual hippie scene. yes, the occupiers looked a little bedraggled, but that is to be expected if you’ve been spending a few nights on the street. Yes, there was drumming, but it was actually really good drumming, quite a bit more skilled than I’d expected. And the occupiers were friendly, willing to talk, and they made eye contact regularly with passers-by.

It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco, and we saw a lot of sailors and marines out in dress uniforms. While we were there, four sailors walked through the occupiers. They sped up a little and their body language said that they were a little wary, but the occupiers were relaxed: they lived up to their stated commitment that most people, including servicemen and servicewomen, are part of the 99% that they aim to represent.

I don’t feel any calling or leading to join the occupiers myself. While direct action might be important, there is still room for poets and writers and preachers and teachers to effect change through touching hearts and minds. The goal is the same: to challenge the consumer culture that threatens to send more people into poverty, and lower the standard of living for most of us, while increasing the wealth of a tiny minority.

An item of concern

For the past decade or so, I’ve been most concerned with the institutional health of liberal religion: there are human values which are carried best by human institutions, and without a strong institutional structure those values seem likely to wither like a plant without water and adequate soil.

But recently I have become increasingly concerned about the spiritual health of liberal religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism in particular. We religious liberals spend so much time on social justice — and there is indeed an overwhelming amount of social justice work to be done — and we spend so much time on the health of our institutions — and again, there is indeed an overwhelming amount of institutional work to be done — that it has come to seem to me that we are slighting our spiritual well-being.

Along with that, we have come to understand “spiritual well-being” in such individualistic terms that the phrase has almost no meaning within the context of institutional Unitarian Universalism. In the past month or so, I have heard the following mentioned, and even glorified, as activities that foster spiritual well-being: yoga; Zen retreats; shamanic training; dream work; walking the labyrinth; meditation that is rooted in non-Western practices. These are either highly individualistic practices, or practices rooted in another spiritual community; or both.

Yet I rarely hear religious liberals speak lovingly of the core practices that lie at the center of our own liberal religious tradition. Those core liberal religious practices include the following: Continue reading “An item of concern”

Morning fog in the Coastal Range

When I first started looking at classical Chinese landscape painting seriously, I never thought of it as realism: those steep fantastical hills, the mists that so conveniently provide a sense of distance and perspective, none of that looked real to me. But when you live on the Pacific Rim, you see that much of classical Chinese landscape painting is realism.

For the past couple of days, I have been staying at a retreat center on a steep hillside in a redwood grove in the Coastal Range of northern California. This morning the mist drifted in the valley below us, and this is what I saw when I looked out my window at about eight o’clock:

A definition

This morning, Robert Latham, our interim district executive is meeting with the district’s ministers. One of the things he said is sticking with me:

“One way to define dysfunctionality is: to dream big and act small. Then one way to define funtionality is: to dream big and act big.”

The first rain

Camp Meeker, California

As I drove up here to where the ministers meeting would take place, it started to rain. By the time I arrived, it was raining steadily. I got out of the car, and it smelled like rain and wet ground. It was the first rain I had seen and felt and smelled since last spring. I took a deep breath.

This evening, Carol texted me: “Where do we have tarp for rowing machine?” This summer, Carol bought a rowing machine for ten dollars, and we had set it out on our little second floor deck so we could sit outdoors while we were using it. But now it was getting wet. I texted back: “Crap. Look in basement.” I hope she managed to find the tarp and protect the rowing machine from the rain.

The top 0.1 percent

Sociology professor G. William Dumhoff recently posted an article by an investment manager about the wealthiest people in the United States. This investment manager (who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) concludes:

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.

For those of us who are concerned about people who are poor, the implication is that we will be able to make no real progress on eliminating poverty.

A parable told by robots, signifying…

A robot tells the parable of the Gospel of Thomas, ch. 97. Here’s the text of the video:

The kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of flour. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the flour spilled out behind her along the road. She did not know it. She had not noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.

A slightly different version of Thomas 97 will be the reading in the Sunday services tomorrow.

(Update, 11/22: video moved to Vimeo, audio improved a bit, and editing tightened up a bit.)

Silicon Valley wins again

A Silicon Valleyite has gotten another distinguished award. Yesterday, John Perry of Stanford University was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which states: “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.”

Perry’s original research was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February, 1996. Perry did not go in person to receive his award, which is no surprise since the awards were given out at Harvard University.