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.
Thunder Mountain Monument, off Interstate 80, near Imlay, Nevada. This monument, created by Frank Dean van Zant, is a five-acre site filled with outsider art. Van Zant built the monument to honor Native American peoples.
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.
At dinner time yesterday, Carol and I were in San Francisco near Chinatown. We started looking for a restaurant. We did not go into the one that had the touts out on the street corner passing out coupons. We did not go into the expensive one on the main tourist street, the one filled with obvious tourists. We had to dodge out of the way as a block-long cavalcade of German tourists came down the sidewalk photographing everything in sight. We ducked down a side street. “Let’s go to that bakery place with a restaurant in the back,” I said. Carol was willing, and we circled around. The tables had formica tops. The prices were reasonable, and our waitress was pleasant. They had congee for me and pea sprouts for Carol. There was a dad with a toddler and a little girl dressed in pink, a man in a coat and tie sitting alone, a big table surrounded by people in their twenties, some other middle aged couples. It was pleasantly noisy from people talking, mostly not in English. It was not fancy food. What more could I want from a restaurant? .
Probably not what you’re thinking: the Fringe concerts associated with the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition of early music. You know, things like Evensong by William Byrd, a medieval vespers with music by Hildegard de Bingen, a Baroque lute recital, a musical marathon of music by Marais on the viola da gamba (“until the cake runs out”), etc. And before you say it, why yes I am a geek.
This evening, Carol and I attended a Baycon presentation on the Cassini mission to Saturn given by Bridget Landry, deputy systems uplink engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Not only was Landry an excellent presenter, she also gave away Saturn moon trading cards and Saturn stickers (I took the cards, Carol took the stickers). Landry recommended the Cassini Equinox Mission Web site — as she said, your tax dollars paid for these fabulous photographs, you might as well use them in your Christmas cards next year.
3 moments from Bruce Nauman’s 1968 video “Wall/Floor Positions,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, April, 2010.
Note to Jean: Nauman is a Hoosier, born in Fort Wayne.
It’s my day off, the day I take as a sabbath. I head over to Moe’s bookstore in Berkeley. OK, so I go over to bookstores in Berkeley and north Oakland maybe once or twice a month, and I never see anyone I know. But this time I recognize a guy standing there looking through the poetry books. Of course he’s another Unitarian Universalist minister. He’s looking for an obscure Ferlenghetti book, I’m looking for an interlinear translation of The Canterbury Tales. Unitarian Universalist ministers are such geeks, which is one of the reasons I love my line of work.
Before you ask: While many Berkeley bookstores have gone under, a fair number remain including Moe’s, Pegasus, Pendragon, Shakespeare & Co., Eastwind, Half Price Books, Dark Carnival, Diesel — it’s still worth a trip.
Thomas M. Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Laura Sullivan of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (affiliated with the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University) have released a new Research and Policy Brief, “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold”. Shapiro et al. summarize their findings in the opening paragraph of the brief:
“New evidence reveals that the wealth gap between white and African American families has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation. Using economic data collected from the same set of families over 23 years (1984 2007), we find that the real wealth gains and losses of families over that time period demonstrate the stampede toward an escalating racial wealth gap.”
In their coverage of this, the BBC quote Shapiro as saying, “There continues to be a persistence of racial segregation.” Later, they quote him as saying, “I was shocked by how large the number was…. I’ve been in this research business, and looking at similar kinds of issues, for a long period of time, but even in my cynical and jaded moments I didn’t expect that outcome over one generation.”
I was going to offer some theological commentary, but I’m too pissed off by this news. This is about the only time I’ve wished I were a hellfire and brimstone preacher.