Category Archives: Arts & culture

A call for beauty tips for male ministers

Mr. Crankypants loooves Ms. Peacebang, who writes the blog Beauty Tips for Ministers — she is smart, snarky, funny, and calls people out for wearing those clunky hippy Birkenstock sandals in the pulpit. Anyone who can rid the world of even a few public displays of Birkenstocks gets Mr. Crankypants’ undying devotion.

However, Mr. Crankypants notes with sorrow that Beauty Tips for Ministers is basically a femme-blog. Those of us on the more masculine end of the gender spectrum worry about things like Windsor vs. four-in-hand, wingtips and Oxfords, three vs. two buttons, trouser breaks and cuffs, etc. Search Beauty Tips for Minister for any reference to “Windsor” and you will come up blank. Yet even slobs like Dan, Mr. C.’s stupid alter-ego, are forced to think about such matters when they go to get a new suit (which has happened twice in Dan’s whole life) and the tailor asks, “Cuffs or no cuffs?” Alas: there is no blog to which slobs like Dan can turn for answers to such questions.

The well-dressed gentleman actually does spend quite a bit of time thinking about such things, and he will make judgements about other men based on things like whether they have French cuffs or not. And the well-dressed gentleman sitting in the pews (a rare bird indeed in these dark days when so few men bother to dress well on Sunday morning) will look up at a male minister and say to himself, “Humph, a Windsor knot with a button-down collar. Good grief, cuffs on plain-front trousers! What’s up with this guy?!” By the end of the service, this well-dressed gentleman in the pews will have been so distracted by by the sad state of the minister’s attire, he will have heard not a word of the sermon.

Mr. Crankypants wishes that Peacebang would find a male collaborator to address such knotty problems as the perfectly-tied bow tie (and yes, the pun was deliberate, deal with it). The world desperately needs a blogger who can help those male ministers who grew up in the sad days of “business casual,” teach them whether the tie should touch the bottom or the top of the belt buckle, and let them know what to answer when the tailor asks, “Dress right or left?”

How to disestablish your congregation

If you’re part of any liberal religious community, your congregation is no longer a part of established power structure of the United States. We religious liberals are so far out of the establishment that the majority of U.S. residents don’t even know who we are. This is why so many people in the U.S. believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim — he’s actually a religious liberal (of the mainline Protestant variety), but more U.S. residents know what Islam is than know what liberal religion is, so since Obama is not a born-again Christian they assume he’s a Muslim. As for you, they probably think you belong to a cult.

Your liberal congregation has already been disestablished in pragmatic terms, so now it’s time to disestablish your congregation in terms of self-perception, and in terms of the way you organize. Here’s a handy checklist to help you accomplish this goal:

(1) Re-focus your energy on the core mission of liberal religious congregations: holding common worship services where we focus on that which is larger than our individual selves; raising our children in religious community; holding appropriate rites of passage when people are born, when they marry, and when they die.

(2) Recognize that what we stand for as religious liberals is extremely countercultural in today’s society: we distrust consumerism because it weakens and shrivels our best selves; we distrust the current economic system (which is supported by both liberals and conservatives) both because it is founded on consumerism, and because at present it is increasing the number of poor people in the U.S.; we reject the idea that born-again Christianity is the norm against which all other religion is judged; etc. These countercultural stands mean that we will never be fully accepted in the halls of established power. Continue reading →

Letters from UU ministers in SF Chronicle

Two letters from Unitarian Universalist ministers in today’s San Francisco Chronicle speak out against anti-Muslim acts, including the tiny-but-nasty Florida church which plans to burn copies of the Qu’ran on Saturday. Barbara and Bill Hamilton-Holway, ministers of the UU Church of Berkeley, call on non-Muslim congregations to include readings from the Qu’ran in their worship services this week. Amy Zucker Morgenstern, senior minister here in Palo Alto and writing for the Palo Alto Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, calls for tolerance and invites people to participate in an Interfaith Witness for Peace in Palo Alto on Sept. 19.

I’ll include the full text of both letters below, or read them at the Chronicle’s Web site. Continue reading →

Here come the Assyrians

When we last left them, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl were about to be burned to death by the evil King Manasseh [cue dramatic music]….

Batman somehow gets one hand free,
Reaches his utility belt, presses
The Assyrian army activation device.
Soldiers appear on the streets of Jerusalem,
Commandoes cut Batman and the others free.
It’s another fighting free-for-all!
Crash! Ka-blam! Manasseh goes down!

Batman swoops over and jumps on Manasseh;
Batgirl and Robin put Bat-manacles on him.
“Time for Plan B,” Manasseh says to himself.
The Assyrians and Batman take Manasseh to Babylon.
Manasseh looks up, and calls on Elohim.
“Elohim,” he says, “I repent! I’ll be good!”
So Elohim lets him go back to Jerusalem.

The Assyrians groan, “Not again! Every time
We think we’ve won, the Judeans repent.
Then the guys writing the Bible badmouth us again!”
Batman just grinned : he’s got Batgirl and Robin.
Manasseh grinned too : the idols are gone;
Elohim gets bribed with burnt sacrifices;
And Manasseh still sits on the throne of David.

2 Chron 33.10-20

Manasseh meets Batman

Manasseh became the king of Judah
When he was at the awkward age
Of twelve: neither child nor man.
He reared up altars to Asheroth,
And to Baal, and other idols.
What was worse was when he burned
His son. Old Elohim was pissed.

Gotham City, capital of Judah,
Is now corrupt. The Caped Crusader
Suddenly appears, out from his cave,
prowling the streets in his Bat-chariot,
Robin at his side, Batgirl offstage.
Manasseh doesn’t know what to make
Of Batman’s tights and weird mask.

So he hauls off and hits him. Pow!
Robin fights Manasseh’s wizards.
Wham! Batgirl swoops in next.
Bash! Ka-zam! Fists are flying!
But wait! Batman is tied to a stake!
So are Robin and Batgirl! They struggle.
Manasseh lights a fire around them….

2 Chron 33.1-9, with thanks to Erp and Jean.

Part II

Summer reading: Escape from Hell

Back in 1976, I read Inferno, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which tells the story of an atheistic science fiction author named Allen Carpenter who, much to his surprise, finds himself in a place that very much resembles Dante’s vision of hell in the first book of The Divine Comedy. Carpentier tries to find a rational explanation for what he experiences in his tour through hell, and spends much of the book convinced that he’s in a sort of bizarre amusement park (call it “Infernoland”) created by sadistic aliens with a very high technology. But by the end of the book, Carpenter is finally convinced that he is indeed in hell.

I read Inferno when I was a senior in high school, and I loved the book; I didn’t pay any attention to the theology, I was captured by thinking about what a twentieth century person would do upon finding himself in Dante’s version of hell. Allen Carpenter builds a glider to try to fly over some of the circles of hell, and this is not unlike the heroes of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island using their nineteenth century technology to address the problem of being stranded on a desert island. In my freshman year of college, I went out and bought a bilingual edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (trans. by John D. Sinclair), and started to read the Inferno; I got about three quarters of the way through, but got tired of Dante getting revenge on people he didn’t like by placing them into his vision of hell.

Last year, Niven and Pournelle came out with a sequel to their Inferno, another science fiction novel titled Escape from Hell. At the end of the earlier book, Allen Carpenter learned that you can get out of hell, so he goes back to try to help lots more people escape from eternal damnation. Niven and Pournelle come up with enough new ideas to make this second book worth reading — their depiction of Hell’s bureaucracy is funny and entertaining — but there are major problems with the book. One big problem is that Sylvia Plath is a major character in this book, but Niven and Pournelle’s characterization doesn’t convince me: their character named Sylvia Plath is just another interchangeable female character, and you simply don’t believe that character is capable of writing great poetry. A second big problem is that rather than actually resolving their plot, they end the book with the ridiculous plot device of having a hydrogen bomb explode in hell.

But the biggest problem I had with Escape from Hell is the theology behind the book. Allen Carpenter discovers that anyone can escape from hell, as long as they’re willing to go through a process of confronting the bad things they did in life — there’s a sort of pseudo-psychotherapeutic element in this process. Even though Niven and Pournelle don’t use the psychobabble jargon of “denial” and “acceptance” and so on, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from mediocre self-help books.

Niven and Pournelle’s understanding of God is about as interesting as their theological psychology. Their God is probably pleasant rather than definitely good, distant and unimaginable rather than immanent and present, and vague rather than awe-inspiring. Their God-concept feels like it’s straight out of the mid-twentieth century when people presented God as either nice or dead, but when God was rarely presented as something compelling enough to believe in. From a literary point of view, if a writer is going to talk about hell as a reality, I’d take the stern yet interesting God of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — or, for that matter, the God of Dante who invents such creative tortures for damned souls — over the the namby-pamby, wishy-washy, exceedingly boring God imagined by Niven and Pournelle. They make hell seem much more interesting and even attractive than God.

Then there’s the purpose of hell, as the authors understand it. When I think of Dante’s conception of hell, I think of a place of eternal torment; if you’re talking about punishment for sins over a limited time, then you’re talking about the subject of Dante’s second book, Purgatorio, purgatory. Niven and Pournelle borrow Dante’s hell, and turn it into purgatory. So then what’s the purpose of purgatory? I admit my bias: I’m a Universalist, and I know hell is a mistaken concept to begin with; nevertheless, within the limits of their theological logic, their conception of hell simply doesn’t make sense.

So I find Niven and Pournelle’s theology problematic. But that was actually part of the fun of the book: I not only enjoyed the adventure, I argued with their problematic theology the whole way through, and enjoyed every minute of the argument. Unlike the liberal Christian apologists who dodge the whole issue, Niven and Pournelle confront hell head on. In the end Allen Carpenter admits that he can’t really make complete sense out of hell; it’s beyond human understanding; but this didn’t feel like a cop-out to me so much as a literary excuse for a pretty good adventure story.

A public health PSA

Back in 2005, I became aware of bed bugs when a friend successfully fought off a bed bug invasion. That same year, I became more aware of bed bugs when I successfully fought off my own mini-invasion, when a few of the little buggers hitch-hiked back with me from the cheap hotel I stayed in at General Assembly. By 2007, when we were living in New Bedford, Mass., a doctor in the city told me that bed bugs were back in that city. More recently, various news media are reporting that as many as one in ten housing units in New York City may be infested with bed bugs, including expensive apartments in the Upper East Side. And it’s not just New York — there’s a nationwide epidemic of bed bugs.

In short, bed bugs have become a major public health concern. I suspect a significant part of the problem is that we no longer know how to deal with bed bugs, because they haven’t been a problem for the past half century. Ministers have often been involved in public health initiatives, and since education plays a big role in improving public health, I thought I’d pass on some of what I’ve learned about bed bugs.

First of all, we need to get over the social stigma involved with having bed bug infestations. These bugs don’t care whether you’re rich or poor, or whether you live in a shack or a palace. What the social stigma has been doing for us is preventing people from talking openly about having bed bugs, which is A Really Bad Thing. If you live in an apartment or condo, believe me, you want to know if one of your neighbors has a bed bug infestation so you can be on the alert, because they can migrate from one unit to another. If one of your co-workers finds bed bugs at work — and yes, bed bugs can infest workplaces from lawyer’s offices to movie theatres to libraries — again, you want to know so you don’t carry bed bugs home with you. Let’s get rid of the social stigma, because if the bed bug pandemic keeps growing at the rate it’s now growing, there’s a good chance that all of us will have to deal with the little buggers sooner or later, and sharing information will help us kill ’em.

Second, remember all those things your mother or your grandmother told you about keeping clean? — many of them will help keep you from bed bugs. So yes, wash your sheets in hot water — bed bugs are killed by very hot water. So yes: don’t ever take used mattresses; when you’re in public places don’t put your purse down on the floor or on a chair; don’t pick up used furniture from the curb — bed bugs are determined little hitchhikers, and can follow you home. So yes, reduce clutter throughout your house — bed bugs like to hide in clutter, and clutter makes it hard to get rid of them if you have an infestation.

Third, learn how to recognize bed bugs, and start paying attention. From all I’ve been reading, and from my own experience, the sooner you recognize that you have an infestation, and the sooner you start working to get rid of them, the less difficulty you will have in getting rid of them.

This is all pretty straight-forward stuff. We already deal with lice and fleas using this kind of approach: sharing information, following basic cleanliness practices, and paying attention. And now take the first step: take the time to learn more about bed bugs now. Look over the material on the EPA Web site to learn how to identify the little buggers, and find out about best practices for controlling them. Check out the Bedbugger blog, which is witty and has generally good information, as well as a forum section where you can share your war stories.

So ends this Public Service Announcement about public health. We will now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

P.S. Please don’t bore me by saying we can end this epidemic by making DDT legal again. Dr. James W. Austin, entomologist and Texas A&M research scientist, said in an interview with Bedbugger: “While screening multiple populations of bed bugs against various insecticides we have found virtually all populations were 100% resistant to DDT. This is not a surprise given that the first observances of DDT resistance [in bed bugs] were noted almost 50 years ago [i.e., c. 1960].”

Integrating Facebook and blogs

I finally reconnected my blog with my Facebook account. I had done this a couple of years ago, but decided the two formats didn’t mix particularly well: Facebook is really a micro-blogging format, while I write long blog posts. But what the hell — it doesn’t cost me anything to put my blog’s RSS feed on Facebook, and someone might actually read it once in a blue moon.

But who really cares about my personal blog. I’m going to try to get my church to put together a good RSS feed from the church Web site, so I can place that on the church’s Facebook page.

Later note — This post was supposed to carry a link to a related article on Peter Bowden’s blog: Here’s the link.

Update, 2021: Gosh, how the world has changed since 2010. Now people don’t have self-hosted blogs, they just post directly to Big-Tech-owned social media. And blogs that are predominantly text? — so very 2010.

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.