{"id":1439,"date":"2011-12-23T23:12:50","date_gmt":"2011-12-24T07:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielharper.org\/yauu\/?p=1439"},"modified":"2012-08-23T14:49:28","modified_gmt":"2012-08-23T21:49:28","slug":"top-ten-best-things-about-liberal-religion-in-2011-pt-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2011\/12\/top-ten-best-things-about-liberal-religion-in-2011-pt-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>7.<\/strong> This year, for the first time, I feel as though Unitarian Universalism has made some real progress towards figuring out how to be a religion that&#8217;s not totally dominated by white folks. (Notice how I&#8217;ve qualified that statement: the <em>progress<\/em> we&#8217;re making is towards <em>figuring out<\/em> how to be less white.)<\/p>\n<p>What progress have we made?<\/p>\n<p>First of all, we&#8217;ve begun talking as though racism within Unitarian Universalism means more than just the white folks dominating the few black folks. After a couple of years of having a president of the denomination who is Latino, we&#8217;ve finally figured out that there are Unitarian Universalist Latinos, too. We have gotten to a point where we finally seem to understand that our efforts at eradicating racism have to go beyond the binary white\/black racial divide.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, our collective anxiety seems to have gone down somewhat. It used to be that as soon as you started talking about race within a group of Unitarian Universalists, everyone would get so anxious that everyone would freeze up, and the conversation would either end or devolve into ideology and blame games. But this year, I&#8217;ve been at several public meeting where white Unitarian Universalists could talk openly about race and racism. (I credit Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed for much of this progress: he has an amazing pastoral ability to get people to talk openly and genuinely about race and racism without freezing up or getting strident.)<\/p>\n<p>Those two things may not seem like much, but they represent some progress. And that&#8217;s both amazing, and worth celebrating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>7. This year, for the first time, I feel as though Unitarian Universalism has made some real progress towards figuring out how to be a religion that&#8217;s not totally dominated by white folks. (Notice how I&#8217;ve qualified that statement: the progress we&#8217;re making is towards figuring out how to be less white.) What progress have &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2011\/12\/top-ten-best-things-about-liberal-religion-in-2011-pt-4\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 4&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,102],"tags":[326,236,143],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religious-institutions","category-social-justice","tag-mark-morrison-reed","tag-racism","tag-top-ten-in-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2187,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions\/2187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}