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What is it with religious liberals and Garrison Keillor? So many religious liberals seem to believe he walks on water, even more than they believe that of Mary Oliver. They don’t like him because Keillor is a religious liberal himself, because he obviously isn’t. Is it because so many religious liberals have a strongly ambivalent attitude towards organized religion, and Keillor is notorious for his own ambivalent attitude towards religion? After all, when it comes to religion, Keillor is sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes nostalgic, and sometimes frankly affectionate, just like religious liberals.

Perhaps Keillor’s own ambivalence towards institutional religion makes so many religious liberals like him so much. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that I don’t care for him. Keillor strikes me as misanthropic, he has that weird affected accent, and his Lake Woebegone stories are such shameless rip-offs of Stephen Leacock’s wonderful early twentieth century stories of small-town life in the prairie provinces of Canada,— except Keillor’s stories are not as well-observed, nor as humane, nor are they nearly so funny.

Let me put it this way: the great Groucho Marx admired the comic genius of Stephen Leacock. Groucho Marx did not, however, admire the comic genius of Garrison Keillor. Nothing more need be said.

Good news from PCD

The Pacific Central District and the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) have a process for finding a replacement for the recently terminated district executive — first, find an interim:

The UUA and the PCD Board have decided to hire an interim District Executive for at least a year in order to assist with transitional issues until a settled District Executive is hired.

The hiring process for an interim is more streamlined than it will be when we hire the settled employee. The general plan is to post the job before April 15. Ideally, the job will start on July 1, 2011.

Questions, comments, or suggestions? Please contact us at: PCD-UUA-InterimDE AT pobox DOT com

from the March 30 district newsletter

This is welcome news from my perspective. With an interim, we all have a chance to improve the working relationship between the district and the UUA, to revise policies on performance reviews, etc. This will also give the district a chance to have at least two annual meetings before a permanent replacement has been hired, allowing (I hope) for greater participation by congregations in the district.

 

Late winter:
for Roger’s
fiftieth
birthday I
bought two books,
put them on
the kitchen
table. There

they sat, next
to the bills
waiting to
be paid, the
candlesticks,
the tea pot,
and Carol’s
laptop. There

they still sit.
The sun is
higher, the
trees across
the street have
leaves, the bills
have mostly
been paid. The

days flow past
every one
demanding
attention:
eat, sleep, shit,
wash dishes,
water the
garden, and

early spring:
the two books
are still on
the kitchen
table, next to
the tea pot,
and the sun-
light, and us.

for Roger’s birthday, since we didn’t give him the books

Disaster preparedness for congregations

Recently, I’ve been thinking about disaster preparedness for our congregation here in Palo Alto. Fortunately, here in the Bay Area the odds are extremely low for blizzards, ice storms, typhoons or hurricanes; and tornadoes are rare (although we did have one tornado watch this part year). So I don’t have to worry about whether the steeple is going to blow down in a hurricane, as we had to in Massachusetts; nor do I have to know where the storm cellar is, as we had to in Illinois. But we do have to prepare for some potential disaster scenarios.

Two of the more common Bay area disasters shouldn’t worry us much in Palo Alto: we’re on the flats so we don’t have to worry about landslides, and we are far enough from the Bay that tsunami risks are low. However, our buildings are at some risk for flooding: we are in Flood Zone X, which is defined as “an area of moderate risk of flooding (roughly speaking, outside the 100-year flood but inside the 500-year flood limits).” Thus, while we should be paying attention to flooding, it’s not of the highest priority.

Our highest priority for disaster preparedness is, not surprisingly, earthquakes. The USGS “Shaking Map for Future Earthquake Scenarios” (click on the map for Mountain View) shows that our location, because of underlying soils, etc., could be expected to experience very strong to violent shaking (Mercalli Instensity VIII-IX) in an earthquake like the magnitude 7.9 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In other words, it could be bad, and we should be paying attention to preparing for this kind of disaster. So at the moment, I’m reading through the USGS publication “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country”.

I’d be curious to know if your congregation has disaster plans in place, and what preparations you have made. Feel free to hold forth in the comments.

No April fool from me

I thought about posting some kind of April fool post today. But how could I write anything that would be sillier than reality? How could I could invent anything as silly as the alleged discovery of two thousand year old lead codices with pictures of crosses and menorahs? How could I invent anything as silly as Muammar Gaddafi’s continued assertions that the Libyan people love him? For that matter, how could I invent anything as silly as liberal religion, which seems so proud of its liberal theology and so blind to its conservative methodology?

The Book of Lead

The Christian Science Monitor and other news sources are carrying stories about the alleged discovery of ancient Christian texts recently in Jordan. The Monitor seems to want to believe, but goes for journalistic balance:

Written on lead in Hebrew and Aramaic, the secretly coded books — or codices — were hidden for centuries in a remote Jordanian cave until a traveling Bedouin found them some five years ago, according to a statement released last week by British Egyptologist David Elkington. Depictions of crosses on the lead-bound leaves, coupled with metallurgical analysis, suggest to Mr. Elkington that these might be early Christian texts that pre-date even some letters in the New Testament.

Others aren’t so sure. All evidence to date suggests Christians didn’t use the cross as a symbol until the 4th century, according to Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review. The use of codices also dates to a later period, he said, and metal analysis has yielded no precise dating in this case.

Oh, by the way, reputable scholars can’t study the codices, because they are allegedly in the possession of an Israeli Bedouin, oh and they’re written in a code that no one can understand — but they must be Christian because of the illustrations, which are of menorahs and crosses (and no, I’m not making this up).

One reputable scholar, April DeConick, offers lots of reasons for doubt on her blog (along with links to lots of other scholarly blogs). Wikipedia, on the other hand, appears even less skeptical than the Monitor, with a brand-spanking-new, gosh-wow entry on “Jordan Lead Codices” that sounds as though Elkington himself wrote it.

I’m just trying to avoid the obvious jokes about weighty reading.

Noted with comment

In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, David Orr provides snide commentary on a special poetry issue of O: The Oprah Magazine. Along the way, he offers the following snarky assessment of Mary Oliver’s poetry:

Roughly a fifth of the coverage [in O magazine] is devoted to Mary Oliver, about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.

Now I know why my fellow religious liberals seem to like her poetry so much: it’s the equivalent of cage-free or free-range eggs.

Spring

I was walking across the patio at the church this morning. Suddenly, smoke swept across the far side of the patio. Was someone burning brush? No, it wasn’t smoke — it didn’t smell like smoke, and it wasn’t blue — it must be dust. But the only way you’d get a dust cloud like that would be if it were very windy, and there was nothing more than a gentle breeze blowing.

Then I looked up. One of the trees in the patio, a non-native tree, some kind of European conifer, was releasing huge clouds of pollen, so much pollen that it looked like smoke.