There was just enough rain for Carol to keep her umbrella up. It was dark and cool and quiet as we walked along, the only sound coming from the occasional car hissing by along the wet pavement. We walked through a place where some plants hung low and dark over the sidewalk, and suddenly we were enveloped in the heavy perfume of some unseen blossoms. In two steps we were past it, and in another step it was gone and I couldn’t smell it any more.
What kind of online religion do you do?
I’ll be spending the coming week exploring Web-based religious participation, and I’m hoping that you, my readers, will be willing to help me out by answering one or more of the questions below.
(A) Which of the following do you consider yourself:
- Digital Native (you don’t remember a time before the Internet)
- Digital Immigrant (you feel fully at home in the Internet)
- Digital Alien (you have your green card, but you don’t feel fluent in the language and customs)
- Digital Tourist (the Internet is a place you visit, but you don’t live here)
(B) Aside from reading (this blog)(my Facebook feed), which of the following ways do you access religious content online online? (I also ask for specific examples of each kind of content, but if you don’t have the time to get specific, I’d still love to know which types of content, if any, you access.)
- Looking at a congregation’s Web site, or a denomination’s Web site (please list one or more)
- Reading sacred texts (Bible, Qu’ran, etc.) online (please specify which ones)
- Reading religious blogs online (please name some)
- Watching videos with religious content online (please describe one you remember)
- Listening to sermon podcasts online (please say who was preaching)
- Listening to religious music, broadly defined, online (please name some performers, composers, and/or songs/works)
- Taking classes in religion or religious topics online (please describe one or more)
- Looking at religious content online with your children (please specify)
- Other (please specify)
(C) Any general comments about online religious content?
If you’ve never commented before, I’d really love to hear your answers to one or more of the above questions. Even if you don’t access any other online religious content, I’d still love to know that. Thanks in advance for your assistance!
Peter J. Gomes is dead
Peter J. Gomes, minister at Memorial Church of Harvard University, died Monday, February 28. New York Times obituary here, and Harvard Gazette obituary here.
Gomes is probably best known in popular culture for coming as gay in 1991. It was much more difficult to come out as a gay man twenty years ago; and Gomes was then identified with conservative politics (he gave the benediction at one of Ronald Reagan’s inaugurations) which in those days must have made it even more difficult to come out.
But when I think of Gomes, I think of someone who had the reputation of being one of our living American preachers. I never heard him preach in person, but I heard him on the radio, and he really was fabulous — a gorgeous voice under perfect control, backed up by a sharp intellect.
When I think of Gomes, I also think of his Cape Verdean background. His father was born in the tiny African nation of Cape Verde, and came to the United States to work in the cranberry bogs of southeastern Massachusetts. This is an unusual family history for an African American: a family that chose to emigrate, rather than being enslaved and forced to go America.
And finally, when I think of Gomes, I think of someone who can be considered a religious liberal. In his books, Gomes presented contemporary Biblical scholarship to a popular audience, and sometimes it feels as though he takes great joy in puncturing the pretensions of Biblical literalists:
Jesus came preaching — we are told this in all the Gospels — but nowhere in the Gospels is there a claim that he came preaching the New Testament, or even Christianity. It still shocks some Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not know “our” Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well. The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, 2007, p. 14.
I get the distinct impression that Gomes took just a little bit of pleasure in shocking “some Christians” who weren’t smart enough to know that Jesus was not a Christian. Even though I felt Gomes could be a little bit pompous in his writing, I like him for taking that little bit of pleasure in shocking the literalists.
If I asked
If I asked
what you thought
about God,
would you try
to tell me
there’s no God?
would you try
to save me
from some hell?
Probably,
like most: an
axe to grind.
All I want
is to talk,
just to talk,
nothing more.
Online summary of distributed cognition
Joe sent me a link to an excellent online summary of distributed cognition some time ago, and I have been meaning to post the link on my blog. Here it is:
“Distributed Cognition” by Edwin Hutchins of the University of California, San Diego
In this ten page paper, Hutchins gives a good concise introduction to distributed cognition. He points out the close relation between Vygotksy’s theories and distributed cognition. Hutchins provides a nice division of distributed cognition into three types: cognition “may be distributed across the members of a social group,” cognition may involve an interaction between internal processes and the material environment, and cognition may be distributed through time.
I’ve been finding that the concepts of distributed cognition are extremely useful in understanding how congregations work. I’ve found this paper to be very helpful as I continue to deepen my understanding of distributed cognition, so I thought I’d share it here.
Reluctantly re-examining personal sin
I have never thought all that much about personal sin. After all, I’m a product of Social Gospel Unitarianism. Sin, for many of those of us who were raised within the Social Gospel world view, is located outside the individual, in society. This is why people like me don’t spend much time worrying about our personal sinfulness, nor do we spend much time trying to achieve personal salvation. Instead, we spend a great deal of time worrying about the sin that is out there in the world, and we spend lots of time working for the salvation of the world. Prayer on bended knee admitting what nasty individuals we are? Nope, we don’t do much of that. Saving the earth from climate change, saving the whales, saving land from being strip malled? Oh yeah, we do lots of things like that.
Recently, I was talking to a friend, another religious liberal, who has been beset by small-minded people intent on doing damage to this friend of mine. My friend, in a moment of anguish, said something about the sinfulness of these small-minded people. This assessment contained the truth of my friend’s personal experience: these small-minded people were full of sin. The sin lay in two things: they did not treat my friend like a full human being, and when they had a choice about the way they could act, they chose to act hurtfully.
As a Social Gospeler who doesn’t think much about personal sin, I am tempted to explain away the actions of these small-minded people using the concepts of popular psychology: they must have something bad going on elsewhere in their lives to make them act this way, or perhaps they had troubled childhoods. As a twenty-first century Social Gospeler, I am especially prone to use the psychology of family systems theory: the problem lies, not in the individual, but in the social system that allows such behavior. But psychology is designed to explain why persons behave the way they behave; psychology does not make moral judgments, it does not say when something is good and right, or bad and wrong; psychology is not a substitute for morals and ethics.
I’m extremely reluctant to re-introduce the concept of personal sin into my religious life. I’m quite comfortable talking about the sins of society. I’m quite comfortable talking about evil, which I think of as those dark forces outside of us, and in some sense outside our control, that can force us to do things that are bad. Besides, the word “sin” has been so badly misused by so many people in our society that it’s almost unusable in ordinary conversation. Yet my friend really was sinned against; I was perfectly willing to agree that those small-minded people sinned when they made my friend’s life miserable.
What do you think? As a religious liberal, do you think about personal sin, or not? How do you define personal sin? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Sixth anniversary
Six years ago, I posted my first entry on this blog, using AOL’s old blogging service. Within a year, I had moved the blog to my own Web site. And now that I’ve just had a complete meltdown of that blog installation, I’m rebuilding the whole blog once again. I was planning a complete rebuild anyway, so this has been a great way to force me to buckle down and actually do it.
You’ll notice that I’ve changed the look of this blog, with a new design. The header photo is a photograph I took from a steep hillside in redwood country, in Camp Meeker, California. Over the next few days, I’ll be moving posts from the past two months into this blog, reinstalling the blogroll, and refining the internal navigation. As I fine-tune this rebuild, your comments and ideas, as always, will be gratefully accepted.
Some things won’t change — I’ll still be writing six or seven times a week, I’ll still be focusing on liberal religion and all the topics I’ve always focused on. But I hope you enjoy this sixth anniversary blog makeover.
Welcome aboard
Sometime on 24 February 2011, my blog located at danielharper.org/blog melted down; cause remains unknown, but it may have been due to files that were damaged by a malicious hacker earlier in the week. Long story short: I had to create a whole new blog, which is what you’re now reading.
I placed a redirect on the old blog’s address, so your old bookmarks will still work. If you subscribed to the old blog via RSS feed, you may have to resubscribe. And if you ever linked to a post within this blog, that link will no longer work.
At some point, I will restore most of the old blog posts and comments somewhere on this Web site; but my first priority will be to get this new blog up and running.
Snow on the mountains
On the drive down to Palo Alto, there’s an overpass from which you can see the range of mountains south of San Jose. The highest peaks were still white today from the snow that fell early in the week. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reported that up to eight inches fell on Mount Diablo (elev. 3,864 ft.), eastwards across the bay from us.
And the Chronicle reports that meteorologists say there’s a possibility that the Alaskan storm now heading southward could possibly deliver snow at sea level over the weekend. It probably won’t happen, but what if it does? — If it does snow, I’ll try to get a photo of snow on the orange tree in our back yard, which still has ripe oranges on it.
“Stencil-style writing” and zone of proximal development
Notes from my teaching diary, dated Sunday 20 February:
Paul was the lead teacher in the 11:00 a.m. Sunday school class this morning. Paul brought in a lovely picture book that a friend of his had given him. It was very attractive, and a couple of the children looked at it curiously. After everyone checked in, and the two new children got more comfortable, Paul started the lesson proper. “I brought in this picture book,” he said, “and I also have a story from our regular book [From Long Ago and Many Lands by Sophia Fahs]. I thought you could choose which story you wanted to hear.” I was sure the children would want to hear the story in the attractive picture book, but they wanted to hear the story from the regular book — it was obvious that they really like the regular book.
After Paul read the story to us (it was the story of “The Wee, Wise Bird” on p. 146), we talked a little about the story, and then Paul asked us to draw scenes from the story. Billy* was having a hard time settling down, so as the assistant teacher I asked him to come sit beside me; he enjoys himself more when an adult can help keep him focused. We talked about what he might want to draw, and he said he didn’t really want to draw, but he might like to write down the three lessons the wee, wise bird tried to teach the dim-witted gardener. He began to write the first one, very neatly and carefully. I told him that he had very neat handwriting, and admired the special way he was writing. “That’s stencil-style writing,” he said with pride.
Across the table, Jack* drew very quickly: first a giant bulldozer, then a plane about to drop a bomb. Paul suggested that Jack might want to draw a picture of what the wee, wise bird might look like if it really could have had a pearl bigger than itself inside its body. Jack took great pleasure in dashing off another drawing showing exactly that.
When it came time for everyone to show their drawings, Isaac,* who was the youngest child there at age 6, showed his drawing. “I drew what he drew,” he said a little shyly, pointing to the 8 year old next to him. He had done a good copy of his neighbor’s drawing. I couldn’t help thinking to myself that this was a very visual example of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, and a good reminder of how much the children are learning from each other, and from us adults, not through the explicit lesson but simply by watching each other and us. Along those lines, the class always seems to go well when Paul is teaching: the children come away from class feeling they have learned something concrete and memorable, we have all had time to chat (there was a lot of informal chatting while we were drawing).
At noon I checked the Main Hall and found that the main worship service was running a little late, as usual. So Paul asked if the children wanted to hear the story from the picture book he had brought with him, and they did. A couple of parents came in in the middle of this story, but none of the children took this as a cue to get up and scramble out of class: they all stayed and listened to the whole of Paul’s picture book. In another testimonial to the approach we are taking, about a half hour after class had let out, one of Billy’s parents came up to me and said that Billy didn’t really want to leave the house to go to Sunday school this morning, but once he was in the car he remembered that he really liked the 11:00 Sunday school class.
* Pseudonyms, of course.