Category Archives: Liberal religion

Written work by three remarkable sisters

Some of my regular readers are quite interested in Transcendentalism. There’s been some interesting research into the Transcendentalists recently, and of particular interest has been the attention that scholars have finally been paying to Transcendentalist women. The publication of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism in 2005 has renewed my interest in these three gifted women — Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, an educator who was in the absolute center of the Transcendentalist movement; Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne), who was one of the first American women to make her living as a visual artist; and Mary Peabody (Mann), who was an educator and a writer.

In the past, I have found it difficult to locate writings by these women, but now you can find quite a bit of their work on the Web here’s what I’ve found so far:

Five letters from Sophia to Elizabeth.

Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide, a book co-written by Elizabeth and Mary.

Christianity in the Kitchen, an interesting cookbook by Mary.

Record of a School, a book about education by Elizabeth.

If you’re new to the Peabody sisters, you’ll find a good summary of their lives here.

Question for readers

I wound up having an interesting conversation at coffee hour today with several parents of Sunday school children. We were standing out in the church garden, watching children run around like wild things. As such things go, we have a pretty good garden for children to play in: there are some safe trees to climb (with low branches overhanging soft grass), and a small grassy lawn to run around on. But….

But it’s a small garden, a fairly formal garden, and we don’t really have room for active games. I mentioned that I’ve been thinking that we could install a couple of tetherball posts — tetherball is good because is doesn’t take much room, and you can take the whole thing inside when you’re done (even though we have a fence around our garden, it is a city garden, and things do get stolen). One of the parents suggested one of those moveable basketball hoops — there’s not enough room for a real game of basketball, but you could play shooting games like “Horse.” And what about Frisbee golf? — we don’t have enough room for a real Frisbee golf course, but we do have enough room for a child-sized course (if you’re willing to lose the occasional Frisbee over the fence).

I would be very curious to know if any of my readers might have suggestions based on their own experience in churches that have very little space. How have you integrated sports and/or active games into your church grounds?

Frederick Douglass, religious liberal?

I found a wonderful reading from an article written by William L. Van Deburg, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Van DeBurg claims that Frederick Douglass became more and more religiously liberal the older he got:

It would be a mistake to portray [Frederick] Douglass as a piously conservative Christian. His biographers have correctly noted that he was not orthodox in his doctrine. His belief that religion should be used as an instrument for social reconstruction led him to despise the passive attitude shown by many Negro ministers.

As he progressed in his abolitionist career, Douglass was influenced by those champions of Reason, Transcendentalism, and Unitarianism whose doctrines he had [once] condemned. In an 1848 essay, he noted that the destiny of the Negro race was committed to human hands. God was not wholly responsible for freeing those in bondage. By 1853, he was willing to criticize Henry Ward Beecher’s reliance on God to end slavery. If Beecher had been a slave, Douglass noted, he would have been “whipped … out of his willingness” to wait for the power of Christian faith to break his chains.

Increasingly, enlightenment terminology crept into Douglass’s writings and speeches. Negroes were adjudged to be ‘free by the laws of nature.”

The slaves’ claim to freedom was “backed up by all the ties of nature, and nature’s God.” Man’s [sic] right to liberty was self-evident since “the voices of nature, of conscience, of reason, and of revelation, proclaim it as the right of all rights.”…

Douglass was also affected by the words of transcendentalist preacher Theodore Parker. The [Unitarian] minister’s ideas on the perfectibility of man [sic] and the sufficiency of natural religion were eventually incorporated in the abolitionist’s epistemology. In 1854, Douglass noted, “I heard Theodore Parker last Sabbath. No man preaches more truth than this eloquent man, this astute philosopher.”

The article is titled, “Frederick Douglass: Maryland Slave to Religious Liberal,” and it comes from By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, edited by Anthony Pinn (NYU Press, 2001). If you’re a Unitarian Universalist, this whole book is worth reading, if for no other reason than to help you counter the people who say, “Oh, we’ll never get many African Americans in our Unitarian Universalist churches, they’re all Christians.” Pinn demonstrates that there is an important strand of African American humanist thought extending back at least into the 19th C. — if we Unitarian Universalists were more aware of that fact, we might discover that our churches are a lot whiter than they need to be.

Then we could go on to recognize the existence of Latino/a, Lusophone, and Francophone humanists and free thinkers….

Neither moral nor managerial

Mr. Crankypants here, and as usual he has something on his mind, which is this: Why is it that people in the United States assume that everything a minister says has to do with morality? — actually, morality and guilt. As if ministers are predominantly supreme moral and ethical arbiters. Speaking as someone whose alter ego happens to be a minister, Mr. Crankypants is uniquely placed to assure you that, on average, ministers are not that much better at moral and ethical distinctions than are non-ministers. It is true that ones would like a minister who is not going to molest one’s children nor rob one blind, but having an honest minister does not mean one should feel guilty every time one sees one’s minister.

Nor, despite what the acolytes of John Carver will try to tell you, are ministers essentially supermanagers and/or superadministrators. Trust Mr. Crankypants, most ministers have little formal training in management and administration, and even less skill. The effort to equate ministers with Chief Executive Officers is a lost cause, unless your congregation plans to pay your minister a salary equivalent to a CEO salary (we’re talking six figures for a chump CEO, and seven figures for a competent CEO for a nonprofit organization, just so you have no illusions about this). It is true that there are a few ministers with MBAs, but if your minister gave up a well-compensated position in the business world, you would be wise to be a little bit suspicious about why he or she decided to drop that seven-figure salary in favor of the pittance your congregation pays.

No,– in Mr. Crankypants’s experience, it is unwise to expect a minister to be either particularly moral or ethical (thus no need to feel guilty when you see your minister), nor to expect your minister to be particularly adept as a manager. At best, we can hope for minister who approximates to a holy person. But we’ll probably have to settle for someone who actually does maintain a daily spiritual practice, and who might be occasionally inspired (a word which literally means, O best beloved, infused with spirit, or Spirit). Ha! –too bad my stupid alter ego, Dan, is none of the above; except that he does maintain a daily spiritual practice.

Now that that is settled, Mr. Crankypants will head off to bed.

Wintry thoughts

It’s one of those winter nights: blowing snow, freezing fog, not a fit night for any creature to be out. It’s a good night to sit at home and think somber thoughts….

I had lunch today with another minister; she’s in her twenties, and like me has times when she despairs of Unitarian Universalism — the churches that go into complete denial when faced with the stark choice between changing and dying; the worship services that lack meaning and spiritual depth but which cannot be changed because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”; this denomination that continues to shrink relative to the growing population of the United States. Perhaps worst of all, she pointed out that Unitarian Universalists, for all our blather about social justice, give less money per person in charitable donations than any other denomination.

We talked about how you can accomplish “culture change” within the institution of the local church. Can change occur from within Unitarian Universalist churches? Or is there too much inertia within the system to allow for meaningful change? We didn’t come to any conclusions, but we agreed on the need for change:– it’s change or die, change or lose most of Generation X and the generations after them. I don’t care what you call that change — the term “UU Emergence” is useful only because it points people to the rich conversations that have already happened in evangelical and Jewish circles — but whatever you decide to call it, change has to happen.

How to do emergent theology

while there are still those people who want to do systematic theology, those people typically live in the world of academia, or wish they were living in the world of academia. Systematic theology has become theology for other theologians and scholars. From where I stand, it is theology that has lost its connection with the reality of my world.

So where do I stand?

  • In the Buzzard’s Bay watershed in southeastern Massachusetts. (Systematic theology ignores watersheds and bioregions because it grows out of assumptions that theology applies in the same way to every watershed.) We are a postindustrial landscape where parts of the landscape contain intense concentrations of toxic wastes. We are in a postagricultural landscape where sprawl eats up farms and cranberry bogs. All this shapes the theological tasks of healing and redemption.
  • In a diverse community of human beings who don’t always fit neatly into the binary American categories of race. (American systematic theology, when it recognizes race at all, has a tendency to divide human beings into black and white binaries.) The Native and African American communities blend together. The Cape Verdean community may be Black, or it may be Portuguese, depending on who’s doing the looking and the talking. A White person could be an Anglophone or a Lusophone or a “Hispanophone.” All this shapes practical theological anthropology in ways seemingly foreign to the academic theologians.
  • In a place where religious discourse is divided between by conservative Catholic rhetoric on the one hand, and conservative atheist rhetoric on the other hand. (Systematic theology never seems to touch on the realities of the religious discourse in which we engage in the workplace and the wider community.) Our few liberal religious groups have silenced themselves by morphing into social groups who do not talk about religion. All this shapes theological discourse — talking openly about liberal religion is a radical act because doing so is a refusal to accept the generally accepted rules of religious discourse.

So how do you do theology when you’re so far away from systematic theology? A few academic theologians give us ways to do theology that matters. I have found Anthony Pinn particularly useful. Pinn writes as an African American humanist theologian who sees through the usual stereotype that “all African American religion is Christian.” In his essay “Rethinking the nature and tasks of African American theology: A pragmatic perspective ” (American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, May, 1998) Pinn writes:

…[M]y effort [is] to move beyond a strictly polemical discussion of Black Theology toward a more constructive and pragmatic posture that is based on three pragmatic moves. The first movement entails my rethinking conceptions of religious experience in ways that recognize the multiplicity of religious experiences. Thus, theology is done with a knowledge of and acquaintance with the variety of religious expressions. In this regard, the reader will recognize the intellectual shadow of both William James and Charles Long within this first move. The second move seeks to think through theology as empirical and historical discipline. Understood in this way, theology becomes a way of seeing, interpreting, and taking hold of African American experience. This thesis is expressed through an examination of theology’s objective and goals, using in large part Victor Anderson’s notion of “cultural fulfillment.” The third move entails reflections on methodology within African American theology. I argue for a critical, pragmatic commitment that gives priority to experience (and the objective of fulfillment) over “tradition.” William R. Jones and Gordon Kaufman provide the framework for this third movement in my pragmatic critique of African American theology.

Recognize multiplicity of religious experience: know how religion is actually done in the world around you. Understand theology as empirical and historical: observe, then interpret, before you theorize. Give priority to experience: leave the academy behind and get out into the world.

I think all this feeds into “UU Emergence,” that is, getting religious communities to deal directly with postmodern realities. There is no grand narrative any more. Instead of timeless systematic theology, tell stories about who and where you are now. There is no one religious movement that will take over the whole world. Instead of universal religious forms, let locality shape liturgy. There is no single genius who can speak for all humanity. Instead of trying to find a top-down authority that knows all and sees all, observe and feel and describe and build networks of mutuality with others. There is no one book of theology that will solve everyone’s theological problems. Instead of trying to write universal systematic theology, write ephemeral blogs.

Maybe it all comes down to getting out and walking around the place you live (I do mean walk, and not drive). I think I’ll do just that, right now.

Socialist sermons

Since 1992, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Standford University has slowly been issuing The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., a multi-volume series of King’s writings; new volumes come out as they get the funding for research, editing, and publication. The most recent volume, published in January, 2007, collects King’s sermons. In an article titled “The Prophet Reconsidered: 40 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., new studies emphasize his economic and social philosophy,” Christopher Phelps reports that King’s sermons are far more leftist than you might think:

The most recent volume [Vol. VI of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.] comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

This is a very different MLK than we get in the popular media these days! More about the book, including how to purchase for approx. US$40. Thanks to Fred for sending me the January 18, 2008, article on King.

More about UU blogs

Aaron Sawyer has put together DiscoverUU, an attractive Web site aimed at newcomers, that aggregates a wide range of Unitarian Universalist (UU) blogs (full disclosure: I’m one of the included sites.) Unlike UUpdates, which aggregates every UU blog in existence for those of us who are already Unitarian Universalists, Aaron aims to attract newcomers by picking out a wide range of representative UU blogs and podcasts and arranging them in an online magazine format.

The site went live today — check it out so you can show it to your friends who you know are really Unitarian Universalists but who don’t yet know it themselves: www.DiscoverUU.com