Welcome to Yet Another Unitarian Universalist, written by Dan Harper. Generally speaking, I post something six times a week.
About “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist”
About Dan Harper
Blog policies
About “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist”
When this blog began on February 25, 2005, I didn’t think anyone would bother to read yet another Unitarian Universalist (UU) blog; after all, there were more than forty UU blogs already. So I named my new blog “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog,” and figured I’d get maybe two readers — my dad, and my sweetheart. But within days of the first post, people in the congregation I was then serving in Geneva, Illinois, came up to me and said they liked reading my blog. A couple of the old established UU blogs noticed, and placed me on their blogrolls, and pretty soon I had readers from as far away as Alaska and Europe.
I started out hosting this blog on AOL’s old blogging site, but within six months ran into the limitations of what was becoming outdated blogging software. I learned about WordPress, and moved my blog to my own Web site. Somewhere along the line, I dropped the last word of the original title, and the blog became “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist.”
For the first few years I was writing this blog, religious liberals were fascinated by the blogging medium. I think some religious liberals thought blogging was going to reverse the decline of liberal religion. When that didn’t happen, they turned their fascination turned towards social networking tools like Facebook. Of course, what we really need to save liberal religion is face-to-face personal relationships along with a renewed and deepened theology. While my blog cannot help much with those face-to-face relationships (except to urge you to join a face-to-face religious community), I hope it provokes conversation about renewing and deepening our liberal theologies.
In my fifth year of blogging, I began to grow restive with the blog format I had been using since 2005. I wanted to change the style and content of what I was writing — not a big change, but a change towards challenging myself to think and feel more deeply about liberal religion. I began moving slowly in that direction, and although I thought my changes would drive readers away, what actually happened was that more and more people were reading this blog; at the beginning of 2010, I averaged about 4,500 unique visitors a month, and by the end of the year, I was averaging about 8,500 unique visitors a month. This is still a tiny number of readers by blogging standards, but it almost doubled my readership.
Then the day before the sixth anniversary, the blog froze up. Completely. All the usual fixes didn’t work. I don’t know what exactly happened, but a malicious intruder had taken over the blog earlier in the week, and I suspect s/he did some kind of damage that killed everything. After getting over a bit of shock and frustration, I realized I was pleased. This was exactly the excuse I needed to finally do a complete redesign of this blog.
And here I am, six years and counting: still writing about liberal religion and progressive spirituality, still deeply concerned with the details of doing face-to-face religion, still engaging in conversations with you, the readers.
About Dan Harper
Professionally, I’m the Assistant Minister of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California (UUCPA). Palo Alto is in the heart of Silicon Valley, and just a few miles away from Stanford University, so as you’d expect there are plenty of people in the congregation who work in hi-tech and/or academia. As a suburban church, we enjoy the advantages of suburbia, as well as face the problems of suburban life (the congregation has done a lot of work to support homeless people who live in and around Palo Alto). As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we are committed to social justice inititatives such as trying to make same-sex marriage legal once again in California.
I live with my partner of twenty years, Carol Steinfeld, who is a writer specializing in ecological pollution prevention issues, particularly water and wastewater. I took the picture below when Carol was at the Havusupai Indian reservation doing consulting work on composting toilets in the campground there (Carol is on the left with Havusu Falls just behind her, Jack and Sharon Erhardt are on the right). Carol’s books include The Composting Toilet System Book (with David del Porto — and scroll down a bit on this Web page to see two of my illustrations for this book), Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine To Grow Plants, and Reusing the Resource: Adventures in Ecological Wastewater Recycling (with David del Porto).
Carol and I live in San Mateo, California. We like living in an ethnically diverse city, and we can lower our carbon footprint by walking to stores, living in a multi-unit building, and taking trains and buses whenever we can.
Before I became a minister, I worked as sculptor’s apprentice, warehouse help, salesperson, carpenter, clerk in a health food store, and director of religious education.
Current professional interests include size transitions and change management in congregations, assessment and program evaluation, liberation theologies applied to organizational dynamics, church administration, general religious education. For professional qualifications and experience, please see my curriculum vitae. At present, I generally don’t have time to officiate at weddings or memorial services outside my current congregation, but I do have limited availability for consulting, outside preaching, and contract writing.
My non-professional interests include hiking and birding; I’m also interested in exploring urban ecosystems. I do quite a bit of recreational reading and writing, and maintain a blog on Sacred Harp singing. I sing nearly every week with the weekly Sacred Harp singing in Berkeley.
