Category Archives: Theology

Heaven or hell?

The writer Eileen Chang (also known as Zhang Ailing, birth name Zhang Ying) was born in Shanghai, and emigrated to the United States in 1955. At some point after she left China, she wrote an essay to explain Chinese religion to English-speaking foreigners. David Pollard translated portions of this essay in his book The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University, 2000) under the English title “The Religion of the Chinese.” I offer the following excerpts from Pollard’s somehwat clumsy translation:

The Chinese have a Taoist heaven and a Buddhist hell. On death all souls go to hell to receive judgement, so in contrast to the Christian subterranean fiery pits, where only bad people go to suffer for their sins, our underworld is a comparatively well ventilated place. By rights ‘The Shades’ ought to be in everlasting twilight, but sometimes they are like a perfectly normal city, the focus of interest for tourists being the eighteen levels of dungeons. When living souls escape through an aperture and drift down to hell, it is quite routine for deceased relatives and friends whom they meet there to take them around sight-seeing.

…

Actually the Chinese heaven is superfluous. Hell is good enough for most people. Provided their conduct is not too bad, they can look forward to a limitless succession of similar lives, in which they work out predestiny and unknowingly sow the seeds of future relationships, conclude old feuds and incur new enmities — cause and effect are woven closely together, like a mat made of thin bamboo strips; you get dizzy trying to pick out the pattern.

…

…the greatest obstacle to Chinese people being converted to Christianity is rather that the life to come that it depicts does not appeal to Chinese tastes. We can leave aside the old-style Christian heaven, where there is perpetual playing of golden harps and singing to the glory of God. The more progressive view of the earth as a kind of moral gymnasium where we limber up in order to go on to display our prowess in a nebulous other world, is also unacceptable to the self-satisfied and conservative Chinese, who regard human life as the center of the universe. As for the saying that a human life is but an ephemeral bubble in the tidal flow of the Great Self, such a promise of eternal life without individuality is not very meaningful either. Christianity gives us very little comfort, so our native folklore can still stand up to the high-pressure proselytizing of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity, though it has not counter-attacked, though is hasn’t the support of big capital, has no propaganda literature, no splendid peaceful sets, not even a bible — for since almost nobody understands the Buddhist sutras, it is as if they do not exist.

Actually, Chang’s description of the Chinese hell does sound better than the perpetual playing of golden harps.

Teaching kids how to be religious, part eight: The limits of psychology

Part one: Link

So far, we’ve been using insights drawn from the science of psychology to help us understand how to teach kids to be religious. But psychology only goes so far when it some to religion. Its insights are useful, but we also have to consider theological anthropology, that is, our deeply-felt religious understandings of who persons are and how persons relate to the divine, and/or to something larger than themselves.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I’m going to speak from within my own theological tradition. Specifically, I’ll speak as a Transcendentalist and as a Universalist.

As a Transcendentalist, I know that human beings have the potential to experience something larger than themselves. As a mystical tradition, Transcendentalism isn’t quite sure what to call that something larger than ourselves. You could call it “God,” but for many mystics and Transcendentalists, even that word is too limiting for the overwhelming experiences that can burst in on us unannounced. You could call it “the collective unconscious,” and there would be some truth to that name, but here again the name is far too limited. You might want to say it is that which is highest and best in humanity, but many of us find our transcendent experiences lead us far outside what might comfortably called human. Maybe it’s best just to leave it nameless.

Whatever you call it, that experience of the nameless something that is larger than you are cannot be adequately explained by psychology. Developmental psychology falls short because transcendent experiences can come to anyone of any age or developmental stage. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs falls short because transcendent experiences can come when you are starving to death. The theory of distributed cognition falls short because transcendent experiences can come to people who live in communities that do not value or accept transcendent experiences. From this theological viewpoint, in other words, there is more to human beings than that which is summed up in psychological models.

As a Universalist, I believe that all human beings will ultimately be saved; the corollary to that is that all human beings are of equal value, theologically speaking. Universalism offers a very strong critique of developmental psychology. Developmental psychology says that human beings have to develop over time, which implies that human beings who aren’t yet fully developed somehow aren’t fully human. Defenders of developmental psychology squirm when I say that, and try to deny it — but in order for their denials to be at all effective, they have to acknowledge that developmental psychology presents a very limited understanding of human beings, an understanding which cannot encompass the full range of what it means to be human.

Universalism as I understand it tends to be neutral when it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or the theory of distributed cognition. These models are clearly valid — as far as they go — but they don’t go as far as the Universalist wants to go. The Universalist always winds up with the basic fact that all human beings contain that which is of equal value; the Universalist is likely to agree with George Fox when he said, “There is that of God in every person.”

If you come from another religious community, you’ll likely have your own theological understanding of human beings. I wager that if you think about it, you too will find that the insights of psychology are useful but not sufficient.

To be continued…

Religious Naturalism

One of the papers that’s on my summer reading list is “Religious Naturalism in a Unitarian Universalist Context,” a paper presented at General Assembly under the auspices of Collegium, June 23, 2006, by Jerome A. Stone [full text]. Here’s a short critical summary of my reading:–

“Naturalism,” according to Jerry Stone, is a “set of beliefs and attitudes that focuses on this world.” Stone says that naturalism rules out an “ontologically distinct and superior realm.” Religious naturalism, of course, concerns the religious aspects of this world “which can be appreciated within a naturalistic framework.” [p. 2]

Religious naturalism is of particular interest to Unitarian Universalists for two reasons. First, there are many people associated with Unitarianism or Unitarian Universalism who can be considered religious naturalists, including: Henry David Thoreau (raised Unitarian), Henry Nelson Weiman (theologian who joined a UU fellowship), Frederick May Eliot (president of the AUA), Stone himself, and others.

Secondly, religious naturalism is a theological position that encompasses both those who include the concept of God, and those who don’t, in their theologies. Many people think that if you believe in God you can’t find common theological ground with those who don’t spend time thinking about God, but religious naturalism proves this need not be so.

Stone identifies three basic types of religious naturalists, and his typology has to do with how different religious naturalists deal with the concept of God.

(1) The first type includes people like Henry Nelson Weiman, and they conceive of God as creative process within the world. Weiman was committed to common sense empirical inquiry and to scientific method. In the context of this kind of inquiry, Weiman wondered what allowed human beings to escape form evil (which we occasionally do manage to do). Weimen felt that individual human beings were not always capable of extricating themselves from evil, but that there was a transformative principle that could and did pull us out of evil. This he called “creative interchange” in his book The Source of Human Good; this he was willing to call by the name “God.”

(2) The second type of religious naturalist considers God to be the totality of the world, considered religiously. Stone gives Bernard Loomer as an example of this type of religious naturalist. In a 1987 essay, Loomer wrote: “If the one world, the experienceable world with its possibilities, is all the reality accessible to us, …then it follows that the being of God must be identified in some sense with the being of the world and its creatures.” Loomer, too, is committed to empirical inquiry as opposed to metaphysical speculation.

Stone believes Loomer coined the phrases “power with” and “power over” (the second phrase implies a relationship wherein one party has the power and uses it to dominate another party; the first phrase implies a relationship where the party with the power shares it with others, thus avoiding domination). Loomer also refers to an inter-connected or interdependent web of existence, and Loomer identifies this interdependent web with the concept of God. Thus, Loomer appears to be somewhat interested in creating a liberative theology.

(3) A third type of religious naturalism sees no need to use the concept or terminology of God. Stone himself is an example of this third type. He writes:

I hold that many events have what could be called a sacred aspect. I am not talking about a being, a separate mind or spirit. I am saying that some things, like justice and human dignity, and the creativity of the natural world, are sacred. This vision is very pluralistic. What degree of unity there is to this plurality I am reverently reluctant to say.

Stone is willing to allow for transcendence, but only relative transcendence. In other words, there isn’t anything that is absolutely transcendent, but in certain situations there are things that surely do feel transcendent. Stone says that if he were forced to choose between humanism and theism, he’d reluctantly choose humanism; but really he’s somewhere in between the two positions. Indeed, he has what he calls a “minimal definition of God” which he uses in ordinary conversation, when leading worship (he’s in fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist minister), and when talking with other “religious voices.” His minimal definition is as follows: “God is the sum total of the ecosystem, community and person empowering and demanding interactions in the universe.”

In order for me to be interested in a new theological position, I have to be able to understand how it will contribute to liberation. In this short paper, Stone does not adequately go into how religious naturalism might be applied to liberation (perhaps that will be a part of his book-in-process). But Bernard Loomer’s religious naturalism has definite implications for liberation; and Stone’s own religious naturalism could have as well. As attractive as I find religious naturalism to be, I can’t call myself a religious naturalist until I know more about how it will contribute to liberation.

Questions, and responses

After the question and response sermon here on June 4, a member of the congregation sent me one more series of related questions. I liked his questions so much, that I have his permission to reprint it. I’ll also include my responses to his questions, but as always my responses are provisional, subject to further thought, reflection, and modification.

Dear —–,

You ask a series of excellent questions, starting with…

In many ways, the 20th C was the worst in the history of the world, in human behavior: the Holocaust, the Stalinist gulags, the Sino-Japanese wars and associated atrocities, WWI and its 700,000 dead per week during certain attrition, and then–often not included in this–our own A-bombs and fire bombs on Dresden. Isn’t the UU “soft on evil”?…

This is a key question for all religious liberals in our time. I do agree that such a critique may be valid when applied to certain Unitarian Universalists. For example, the bitter and long-standing feuds within our denominantion between the theists and the humanists are little more than quaint theological diversions when considered in light of the massive evil of the 20th C. (evil which shows every sign of continuing into the 21st C.). When you are confronting things like genocide and totalitarianism, such 19th C. arguments about belief vs. unbelief seem utterly insignificant, and indeed morally bankrupt. Instead of participating in abstract theological debate, the situation calls for direct confrontation of evil.

But some of our most persuasive theologians and some of our most influential lay leaders have been quite aware of the presence of evil, and they have devoted themselves to articulating theologies that will help us confront and overcome evil. Some examples:

William R. Jones, UU minister and theologian, is best know for his book Is God a White Racist? Jones is an African American who is all too aware of the presence of evil in the world. His contribution to theology has been to work on a black theology of liberation that was not dependent on God.

James Luther Adams, a Unitarian (later Unitarian Universalist) minister and theologian visited Nazi Germany just prior to the outbreak of the second world war. He got to know the members of the Confessing Church quite well, and was himself active in struggles against totalitarianism. His theology aimed to develop liberal religion in part as a way to fight totalitarianism through supporting democratic ideals (you could say he saw democracy as a theological concept).

The Women and Religion movement within Unitarian Unviersalism took on the evils of sexism in our denomination, in the 1970’s and later. I would argue that their movement did more to shape who we are as a religion today than any other theological force in the past half century. Currently, ethicist and theologian Sharon Welch is the most prominent UU scholar doing work in the area of feminism.

Is our theology, derived partly from a civilized 18C deism and 19C Concord, out of step with our horrid experience of the modern world?

That’s an argument that has been made, but I don’t find it persuasive. I feel that the theology which continues to be most influential for us today is not deism or Transcendentalism, but the theology of the social gospel. The Social Gospelers understood sin to be more than a personal matter — it was equally sinful (or even more so!) to allow social injustice to be perpetrated against the poor and the weak of society. Therefore, redemption had to be more than personal — it also had to be communal — you can’t just “get right with God” on your own, you have to consider the sinfulness and redemption of the surrounding social matrix as well.

The Social Gospel movement made social justice activity an essential part of church life — it was no longer enough to engage in simple charity, churches also had to fight to change the root causes of social evil. I’m something of a modern-day Social Gospeler, and I would articulate the theological implications of this theology something like this: Evil is present in us and in the world; it is our repsonsibility to overcome evil, especially where such evil arises from human actions; if you want to call on God for strength and guidance while you work to overcome evil that’s fine, but don’t expect God to bail us out.

Isn’t, for instance, Calvinism — and its “Born Damned” — easier to credit — and to understand?!

Well, that’s certainly the answer promoted by the fundamentalist Christians who are creating a reductive and conservative version of Calvinism in our time. But it strikes me that such a Calvinism is merely a cop out — it’s throwing up your hands and saying, We’re all horrible so why bother to change anything. William R. Jones’s work helps us understand that such an attitude allows us to dodge responsibility, because evil is just all “God’s will” — which means that, sure, you have to wrestle with the intellectual problem of theodicy, but you don’t have to take any responsibility for confronting evil yourself.

In summary, I find liberal religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism in particular, to be quite aware of the massive evils in society, and in our own hearts. I am not proud of the way Unitarian Universalists get sidetracked into petty concerns like whether or not God exists (especially when half the time the people who argue about these things don’t adequately define their terms). Nor am I proud of the way we all too often engage in social action without engaging in the necessary theological reflection. Yet I am proud of the fact that we continue to challenge evil in the world (and inside ourselves). And I am proud that, rather than just managing the symptoms of evil, we do make progress in rooting out deeper social evils when and where we find them.

That’s my response to your questions — as always, it’s a response, not a definitive answer! — Dan

Mencius says…

I’ve been reading the ancient Chinese sage, Mencius, in a 1998 translation by David Hinton. I like Mencius because he begins with the axiom that human nature is essentially good; which fits into my Universalist theology. Somehow, as I was reading this morning, this passage struck me:

Emperor Hsuan of Ch’i asked [Mencius] about ministers [i.e., ministers in government service], and Mencius asked, “What kind of minister are you asking about?”

“Is there more than one kind?” asked the emperor.

“Yes,” replied Mencius. “There are ministers from royal families and there are ministers from common families.”

“May I ask about ministers from royal families?”

“If the sovereign is making grave mistakes, they admonish him. If they have to admonish him over and over, and he still refuses to listen — they replace him.”

The emperor blanched at this, so Mencius continued:

“Why so surprised? You asked, and I wouldn’t dare be less than honest and forthright with you.”

After he’d recovered his color, the emperor asked about ministers from common families, and Mencius said: “If the sovereign is making mistakes, they admonish him. If they have to admonish him over and over, and he still refueses to listen — they resign and leave his country behind.” [Wan Chang, Book Two, section 9; pp. 193-194]

That’s an interesting distinction that Mencius makes. It makes you ask yourself: which kind of the two types would I be?

Dominion

In preparing for this Sunday’s sermon, I’ve been reading up on dominion theology. In a new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg traces the theological roots of Christian nationalism back to dominion theology, and from thence back to Christian Reconstructionism.

Christian Reconstructionism, according to Goldberg, is a “theocratic sect… which advocates replacing American civil law with Old Testament biblical law.” This theocratic sect is based on a theological position that is, in essence, the darkest hue of American Calvinism:

Most Christian Reconstructionist theology — a very strict Calvinism that mandates the death penalty for a long list of moral crimes, including homosexuality and apostasy — has little appeal to outsiders and is controversial even among Christian conservatives. But dominionism, its political theory, has been hugely influential in the broader evangelical movement…. [p. 13]

In other words, dominionism grew out of Christian Reconstructionism. Goldberg later calls dominionism a theology, rather than a political theory, but she’s not contradicting herself: dominionism is a theology with definite political implications. Goldberg cites a book by Francis Schaeffer called A Christian Manifesto:

A Christian Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying, “These two world views stand in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results — including sociological and government results, and specifically including law.” [p. 38]

What does “dominion” mean? It’s a familiar Biblical word from the story of Genesis, where God tells Adam and Eve that they have “dominion” over everything else. But dominionist theology means something more than that, and Goldberg quotes from a book titled The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action by Christian nationalist George Grant:

It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel…. Thus Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men [sic], families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. [quoted in Goldberg, p. 41]

Two interesting points from my own religious liberal perspective:

First, theology can have political implications, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. Within religious liberalism, feminist theology certainly has had dramatic political implications; and my own religious community of Unitarian Universalism has an explicit commitment to democratic principles. Curiously, many Unitarian Universalists would say that their religion is merely a private matter. It’s time for us to get over that misconception.

Second, with its Calvinist overtones, dominionist theology represents a kind of theology that my religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, knows how to tackle. After all, historically both Unitarianism and Universalism grew out of serious and effective theological critiques of American Calvinism. We thought the battle against that kind of Calvinism had been won; I think it’s time for us to face up to the fact that we’re going to have to fight that battle all over again.

This Sunday, I’ll be exchanging pulpits with Ellen Spero of the Chelmsford, Mass., Unitarian Universalist church. If you’re in New Bedford this weekend, come hear Ellen preach — she’s one of my favorite Unitarian Universalist preachers.

Hijacking Jesus

Just went to hear Dan Wakefield talk on his new book, The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate. I had to arrive late to the talk because I was meeting with a wedding couple, but what I heard was fascinating. One small sample: Dan Wakefield attended a worship service at one of the big evangelical mega-churches. He said he found “nothing offensive” about the sermon or most of the worship service — until it came to be time for communion. Then the minister said, “Normally we like everyone to participate in every part of the worship service, but not when it comes to communion.” Only those who had been “born-again” were allowed to participate, and then the minister told a story about someone who had not been born again but had taken communion, and then (drumroll please) died. Dan Wakefield reported that the minister finished the story by adding, “Graveyards are filled with those who took communion without being born again.”

Another small excerpt from the talk: the religious right group who call themselves “dispensationalists” believe in different “dispensations” during different historical eras. In practice, this means that in certain historical eras, parts of the Bible may be (should be) ignored. In the current historical era, they tell us to ignore the “Sermon on the Mount” — you know, where Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Dan Wakefield also told us about the progressive evangelicals, and he told us that just recently progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis have split from the main body of evangelical Christians in the United States, the National Evangelical Association, to form a new evangelical group called “Red Letter Christians.” They call themselves “Red Letter Christians” because in many Bibles, the words of Jesus are printed in red. They say they would like to get back to those teachings of Jesus — you know, teachings like “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

During the question and answer period, I asked Dan Wakefield if his research for this book had changed his own religious or devotional life. Yes, he said. He found himself going back to re-read parts of the Bible that he hadn’t looked at in years, particularly the words of Jesus. And he also found himself attracted to the passion of evangelical Christianity. Although he himself is a liberal Christian (who has belonged to both Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ churches), he said that much of mainline Protestant Christianity is not longer exactly passionate about religion. He also mentioned his attraction to the emergent church — and since he must be getting close to 70 now, this shows that the emergent church is not just for twenty-somethings.

He pointed out that during the Civil Rights era, white northern mainline Prostestants could go down South and participate in passionate worship services led by Martin Luther King and others, worship where you sang and prayed filled with emotion — but, says Dan Wakefield with dry sarcasm, this was somehow acceptable because these worship services were in the South and led by this charismatic African American man; and once they got back north, it was back to the usual.

Once I read the book, perhaps I’ll have some more to say about it. In the mean time, it’s worth buying the book just for the title alone. It will be displayed prominently in my office at church, I can assure you.

Dan Wakefield will be speaking on his new book on April 27, 7 p.m. at First and Second Church, Boston. For the rest of his schedule: link.

The Telling

I didn’t post anything to this blog yesterday because I started reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000). It was so compelling that I stayed up late reading, and that left me no time to write….

The Telling begins with a vision of a future when a theocracy controls all of Earth. It’s a fundamentalist theocracy of a kind that sounds all too possible:

In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God [the theocratic political party] flew from Colorado to the District of Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of bombing that turned centuries of history and millions of books into dirt. …The beautiful old building had never been attacked [before]; it had endured through all the times of trouble and war, breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks, back the the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out! [p. 5]

Earth under the Host of God is a horrendous place for anyone who doesn’t fit into the theocratic mold — including the heroine of the story, one Sutty. But Sutty manages to get a job away from Earth, serving as a representative for the Ekumen, a kind of interstellar government. She thinks she has escaped the kind of authoritarianism represented by the Host of God, only to find herself as an emissary to a planet with an equally authoritarian government, the Corporation. Ironically, while reminiscent of the Host of God, the Corporation has outlawed all religion as a part of their policy.

Sutty winds up traveling to a remote province of this planet where she encounters the religion that flourished before the Corporation took power. It is not a religion like the Host of God, and Sutty spends a great deal of time trying to figure out what kind of religion it is:

It did not deal in belief. All its books were sacred. It could not be defined by symbols and ideas, now matter how beautiful, rich, and interesting it symbols and ideas. And [this religion] was not called the Forest, though sometimes it was, or the Mountain, though sometimes it was, but was mostly, as far as she could see, called the Telling.[pp. 111-112]

They [the religious leaders] performed, enacted, or did, the Telling. They told.

The religious leaders of this religion know books, and commentary on books, and stories that come out of books. Before the Corporation government took over, the religious centers were much like libraries — places filled with books, and religious leaders, resident experts, who Told what was in the books. (Need I add that the Corporation destroyed the libraries in just the same spirit that the Host of God bombed libraries on Earth?) But while religious, the Telling is not a dogmatic telling; “all its books were sacred”:

The incoherence of it all was staggering. During the weeks that Sutty has laboriously learned about the Two and the One, the Tree and the Foliage, she had gone every week to hear… a long mythico-historical saga about the explorations of Rumay among the Eastern Isles six or seven thousand years ago, and also gone several mornings a week to hear… the origins and history of the cosmos [and] the stars and constellations… from beautiful, accurate, ancient charts of the sky. How did it all hang together? Was there any relation at all among these disparate things?

Of course, you’ve already figured out by now that The Telling is partly a parable about the excesses of our own world — the excesses of creedal belief-based religion on the one hand, and of the free-market mythos that glorifies corporate dominance on the other hand. But in the midst of the parable are tantalizing visions of what religion could be, if we could only steer clear of absolutism — even though even this tantalizing religion winds up having its own blind spots and rigidities.

I like Le Guin’s vision of a religion that emphasizes books, not the Book; a religion that is willing to encompass all aspects of human knowing including bodily wellness and meditation and practical knowledge. I even like the vision of an incoherent religion, that gains its coherence from the simple act of telling, of speaking aloud.

Heck, I’d join a religion like that.

What do you believe? — part two

In an earlier post [link], I quoted from an old Unitarian Universalist pamphlet by Duncan Howlett, titled “What Do YOU Believe?” In the portion I quoted, Howlett wrote that Unitarian Universalism is not concerned with traditional belief systems. Indeed, Howlett explicitly rejects traditional belief systems (I’ve silently updated gender-specific language):

What then do we tell our friend who asks us what the Unitarian Universalists believe? We tell our friend in the first place that we reject all doctrines and creeds and theologies if they pretend to any finality. We think the fabrication of such systems valuable, but we do not believe one or another of them.

For me, that statement sums up the core of Unitarian Universalism. If you have the so-called “seven principles” posted in your church building, maybe you should take them down and replace them with a poster bearing the above quote. But you might want to add a positive statement about what we stand for (again, language silently updated):

A Unitarian Universalist is not an unbeliever. In fact, a Unitarian Universalist believes a great deal. Our beliefs are of a different order, but they are nonetheless real. The first of them is belief in humanity…. When we say that we believe in humanity we mean that we believe that human beings are endowed with the power to move toward truth. We believe that human beings are endowed with the discrimination by which to tell the difference between truth and falsehood and error. Yet we know human beings are fallible. We know that individuals make mistakes. Thus when we speak of humankind or humanity we mean the interaction of mind upon mind, experience upon experience….

We believe humanity is to be trusted — not each human being, but humankind taken together, with the testimony of each checked against each. We believe that humankind can find truth, know the right, and do good — again, not each individual, but taken together, with each checked against all the rest. We believe human life has meaning, that the high purposes of humanity may be achieved and the spiritual nature of humanity indicates something about humankind and the cosmos as well. In this faith we live, by it we labor, and through it we find the courage to carry on amidst all the tragedy, misery, and stupidity of life.

You could make all that into a poster — or into an “elevator speech,” a short spiel about our faith you could give to someone with whom you happen to be sharing a ten-second elevator ride. Either way, I find Howlett’s statement to be a far more satisfying (and accurate) summation of Unitarian Universalist “beliefs” than the “seven principles.”