Category Archives: Theology

Hubris

Finally, Roger Clemens has been indicted for perjury. When testifying before Congress on steroid use in professional baseball, Clemens said, “I couldn’t tell you the first thing about it. I never used steroids. Never performance-enhancing steroids.” His trainer, however, told a different story, saying that he had injected Clemens with steroids more than a dozen times. Clemens’s friend and teammate on the New York Yankees, Andy Pettite, said that Clemens had admitted to using steroids — to which Clemens artfully responded that Petitte must have misheard him.

What makes this all the more delicious is that when Clemens testified before Congress, he was not under subpoena — he volunteered to testify. Tom Davis, a former Republican member of the House of Representatives, said, “[Clemens] wanted to come to the committee and clear his name. And I sat there in the office with Henry Waxman and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t lie.’ … He could have just let it go, but he denied it vociferously before Congress. Several times, we gave him the opportunity to back down, and he didn’t.”

In a statement issued after his indictment, Clemens asked the public not to rush to judgment. But because of his hubris — υβρις, that form of extreme pride that leads to arrogance, insolence, and haughtiness — I sure find myself rushing to judgment. Clemens was considered by many to be one of the best pitchers who ever played baseball, but he always exuded arrogance, and it always seemed that he thought himself to be better than anyone else. If he really is guilty of using steroids, I can’t believe he could ever admit it, not even to himself. And if he really is innocent, I will never completely believe his innocence precisely because of his extreme arrogance.

Clemens has offended the gods of baseball — not by using steroids, but by making himself seem more powerful than the game itself. For this act of hubris, he is being publicly humiliated.

And I want Aeschylus to come back to life, and write a play about it.

A family story

I’ve been trying to write up the story of Demeter and Persephone for a Sunday school class. It has a very dark side to it, as do so many religious stories; the dark side is one of the things children like best about these stories. They are like Grimm’s fairy tales, filled with all the horrible things that children know exist in the real world but can’t talk about: Hansel and Gretel’s parents deliberately lose them in the woods; Siddartha Gautama abandons his wife and young child; Lot throws his daughters out to the crowd to be ravaged; Jesus is sentenced to a bloody death on trumped-up political charges; Persephone is abducted by the god of death, and in retribution her mother makes innocent human beings die in a massive famine. Sometimes I think that even though we adults try to put some kind of moral gloss on them, what children learn from these stories is that life is essentially amoral.

In any case, as I sat here today sorting through the details of the Persephone story, as presented in the Homeric hymns and in Ovid’s Metapmorphoses, I realized that many of the main characters in the story are closely related. Persephone is the child of Zeus and Demeter; Hades, Demeter, and Zeus are all children of Cronos and Rhea, and grandchildren of Gaia, mother earth. Not only that, but the Homeric hymn makes it clear that Zeus and Gaia (Persephone’s father and grandmother) set up the situation where Hades can abduct Persephone. Talk about a dysfunctional family!

I don’t want to emphasize this aspect of the story in the version for children, and the only way I can get it out of my head is to inflict it on you. So below you will find the dysfunctional family version of the Persephone story….

Continue reading →

Farewell, Isaac Bonewits

Isaac Bonewits died yesterday. He was not only an influential Neopagan thinker and organizer, and a key figure in the North American Druid community, but was also affiliated with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS). At The Wild Hunt blog, Jason Pitzl-Waters has links to tributes and obituaries, and his commenters have added other links.

To me, Bonewits was most important as a thinker. Back in the 1970s, he coined the term “thealogy” as an alternative to the term “theology,” which latter term may imply certain beliefs and biases; most importantly, linguistically speaking “theology” has a definite masculine gender (from its root “theos”), and forming a complementary word of feminine gender was a brilliant move in the ongoing feminist critique of religion. His writing and thinking deserves wider consideration, beyond the Neopagan circles to which it seems to have been largely restricted.

A slight theological difference this week

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix has some photos up of a civil disobedience action in Phoenix to protest Arizona SB 1070. Here’s to the brave Unitarian Universalists who are taking on the evil of Arizona SB 1070 — many of us are thinking of you, and sending you moral support from afar.

And at the same time, I have to admit that all the energy that Unitarian Universalists are pouring into the protest of Arizona SB 1070 makes me feel a little lonely. As a religious pacifist, I view the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq and Pakistan) as being of far greater moral importance than immigration reform. Yet I’m afraid my view is not shared by the majority of Unitarian Universalists; our denomination has made it clear that immigration reform is of far greater importance to us than antiwar efforts. I think maybe I need to hang out with some Quakers in the near future, and get a big dose of religious pacifism to tide me over for a while.

Preaching on July 4

This morning, I got to preach in First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, the church of the Minutemen. Imagine preaching to that historic congregation on Independence Day! It was great fun, and I feel lucky to be invited to preach there on July 4th.

I wrote a kind of historical sermon on evolving notions of liberty, and since it’s Independence Day, I thought I’d share it with you — the sermon’s posted over on my sermon blog.

Welcoming a new blog

In her first post at the new blog yUU’re a what?, blogger cUrioUs gUUrl talks about how she was a humanist until she had an experience of God a year ago. Speaking from personal experience, those transcendental experiences do have a way of breaking in on you and throwing into doubt long-held assumptions and beliefs. I look forward to seeing how this new blog develops.

Where do you go for your Universalism fix?

I just talked with someone around here who wants to explore current Universalism within the Unitarian Universalist Association. I told this person that I thought of myself as a Universalist, but that I have to get outside the Palo Alto church (which has a decidedly Unitarian orientation) to get my Universalism fix. And how exactly do I get my “Universalism fix”? this person wanted to know. Well, by hearing good kick-butt Universalist preaching, and by talking to some real Universalists. And who are the preachers who still deliver kick-butt Universalist sermons? –and who are the “real Universalists”? this person wanted to know. Well, I had to admit that many of the “real Universalists” who have kept me going me are either dead (like Bob Needham), or on the East Coast (like Richard Trudeau). As for kick-butt Universalist preachers, there’s Gordon McKeeman, but he’s not preaching regularly any more, and sometimes I hear some real Universalist preaching at Ferry Beach, the Universalist conference center in Saco, Maine.

These were not very satisfactory answers, I’m afraid. Therefore, I’m going to plug into my online Universalist hivemind. If you’re a Universalist, how and where and from whom do you get your regular Universalism fix? Be specific and name names: Universalist preachers, congregations, persons, places.

Associationism, part four

Part One of this four-part series

Present-day alternatives

To better set the associational rigidity of today’s Unitarian Universalism into relief, it is worth considering other forms of associationism currently in existence which do not match this ideal. By considering these alternative forms of associationism, we can better understand that associationism is not restricted to certain received forms or ideals. In recent years, we have seen existing congregations supporting new start-up congregations with administrative and financial support, without going through traditional district or denominational structures: that is, associationism allows direct contact between local organizations without being mediated by a regional or national associational structure. In recent years, we have seen a few ministers experimenting with more entrepreneurial approaches to starting up new congregations aimed at reaching young urbanites, including store-front churches and house churches: this harks back to the itinerant Universalist preachers who adapted their religion to regional differences and to rapid changes in society. We have seen individuals or congregations developing innovative new resources on their own and providing them directly to other congregations (e.g., small group ministry resources): this recalls the efforts of groups like the Unitarian Sunday school Society before its functions were effectively taken over by the AUA.

Associationism is (or should be) a flexible, highly participatory organizational structure that allows both local autonomy and effective cooperation between local organizations. Associationism is grounded in the principles of voluntary association that involves, among many characteristics: free association within and protected from societal and governmental structures; civic engagement (i.e., participants in a voluntary association run the association themselves, rather than the state or ecclesiastical authority); the creation of metaphorical spaces within society where individual voices can be heard; combining individual voices together to make a broader impact on mass democracy or other government. Associationism is structured by written documents (minutes of business meetings, bylaws, communications between local organizations, etc.). Associationism is also structured by behavioral norms that allow voluntary association. Associationism does not require theological rigidity, or another other kind of rigidity for that matter, including the current rigidities of Policy Governance (TM) and Wesley-style covenants; at the same time, associationism can easily accommodate Policy Governance and Wesley-style covenants, if those prove to be effective organizational structures for local organizations. Continue reading →

Associationism, part three

Part One of this four-part series

Merger and its aftermath

Upon the merger (the legal term was “consolidation”) of the Unitarians and Universalists in 1961, two different forms of associationism had to merge. I find it significant that some of the old Universalist state conventions determinedly maintained their separate corporate identity; such a thing was not practically possible in more centralized Unitarian form of associationism. This also reveals something of the associational rigidity that the Universalists had fallen into; they could not let go of old associational structures; and this does not compare well with the associational innovation of the Unitarians at that time.

The merger of the two forms of associationism proved awkward at best. The Universalists felt like they were being taken over, and from an asosciational point of view that was true. The Unitarians, for their part, forgot to keep on innovating. Dana Greeley, the Unitarian who took over the presidency of the new Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), acted as if the 1950s were never going to end: he ignored signs that economic growth in the United States was slowing, and he was unable to deal effectively with the changes in society that confronted him, most notably when the Black Power movement came to the UUA. The 1970s were a period of serious decline in the UUA, as the 1950s associational models proved incapable of handling the new society that was emerging: it was not longer enough to start more fellowships and centralize curriculum development; something else had to change.

The first great innovation in the newly-formed Unitarian Universalist Association was second-wave feminism. Continue reading →