Category Archives: Arts & culture

Five years old

Five years old on Monday, I was taking a lunch break in my office in the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, a stone’s throw away from the little stone church building built by Unitarians in 1843, just a few years after the Illinois frontier had opened up after the conclusion of the Blackhawk Wars. I had spent the morning looking through old church records, to what end I no longer recall. On my lunch break, I decided to start a blog on AOL’s now-defunct blogging service. Being a peripheral participant in geek culture, of course I had to name it “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog,” although I soon dropped the last word. The only person I told about it was my partner Carol, yet within a couple of days several people in the congregation had discovered my new blog, and the blogger’s collective at the old Coffee Hour site had reviewed my first post. Something interesting was happening here: religion had expanded into the digital realm. And there I was, one of the people exploring this new landscape.

It’s been a wild ride since then. Here are some of my favorite moments from the past five years:

  1. I was asked by Peacebang to serve as an example of a poorly-dressed minister when she was interviewed by Mainstream Media about her “Beauty Tips for Ministers” blog. Alas, my photo didn’t make it into the published interview.
  2. I attended one of the Boston-area UU blogger’s picnics, where I got to meet a couple of blogger spouses. They were both very nice mild-mannered people.
  3. Upon being introduced to me at a denominational gathering, a woman said, “Are you really as mean as Mr. Crankypants?” She looked frightened. I was completely nonplussed, and made some halting reply that did nothing to reassure her.
  4. I have had several entertaining online arguments with my older sister, bouncing back and forth between our two blogs.
  5. Commenter, fellow-blogger, and friend E recently took me to task in a long phone conversation for willfully misunderstanding J. D. Salinger in a post (she was right, of course, not that I admitted that while we were talking).

I started out thinking that blogging was just another publishing medium, like letterpress or photocopying. Then I began to understand that social media like blogs are more than a technological means for getting my words and ideas out to a wider public; they are really a way to carry out a larger conversation than can happen face-to-face. Recently, I have begun to understand that really all writing and publishing are forms of social media: when Richard Steele published The Spectator, his letterpress-printed words opened up a broader conversation; when zines started using the new technology of photocopying, they too were opening up a broader conversation; blogs and other online publishing platforms use new technologies, but the ultimate goal of a broader conversation remains the same.

For those of us who use online technologies, the real challenge now is to raise the quality of our writing. We bloggers need our Steele and Addison — or better yet, the blog equivalents of Mark Twain — people who write good prose and who have something to say that’s worth saying. We bloggers need someone who will raise the standard for the rest of us. Maybe the blog equivalents of Richard Steele and Mark Twain are already publishing but I haven’t seen them. Most bloggers write prose that’s either precious, cute, tainted with the contemporary workshop aesthetic,1 confused, rushed, or just plain bad (I tend towards the latter three). Currently, we read blogs for the information, not for the quality of expression.

I plan to write this blog for at least another five years. I hope that five years from now I will be able to point to several blogs written by great English prose stylists. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be one of those writers.

———

1 See: David Dooley, “The Contemporary Workshop Aesthetic,” Hudson Review, Summer 1990, no. 259.

A blog is back

“Truth to Power,” a blog written by “a survivor of clergy misconduct” is back in action. The blog has left Google’s Blogger service (after the Google Buzz fiasco, would you trust Google with anything confidential?), and is now hosted on First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville’s “Safety Net” Web site.

You’ll find the “Truth to Power” blog here. The blog’s author has wisely turned off comments on that site, but I am happy to host comments about the February 20th post in the comments section here below.

Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

At last night’s Sacred Harp singing, Hal told us that as of February 19, the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has officially recognized the name “copernicium” for chemical element number 112, an element which was first synthesized in 1996 at the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. The song numbered 112 in the 1991 Denson edition of The Scared Harp is a song titled “The Last Words of Copernicus.”

Coincidence, or conspiracy? For those of you who think this is mere coincidence, IUPAC made this new name official on February 19, which was the 537th birthday of Copernicus. Now take 537, divide it by the atomic weight of the synthesized atom of copernicium (Cn-277), and you come up with 1.94. This is extraordinarily close to 1.87, which is the height of Barack Obama in meters. The difference between 1.94 and 1.87 is 0.07, and there is no Sacred Harp song numbered 7! (And the half-life of 277Cn is 0.7 ms!) Clearly, IUPAC is telling us that Barack Obama is not American, but instead is a Polish citizen, like Copernicus! No wonder no one can find Obama’s birth certificate — it was “lost” when the Soviets ruled Poland, because Obama is really a Soviet!

Mere coincidence? Or part of a world-wide conspiracy of scientists and politicians who want to do away with our American Christian democratic lifestyle by cramming global warming and same-sex marriage down our throats? You wimpy liberals probably think this is coincidence, but if this blog disappears in the next few days, you’ll know it’s really a conspiracy!

Art and the chant workshop

We hosted our third chant workshop tonight; Chandra Alexander of Sharanya led us in Hindu Goddess chants. She gave us a handout with the words of the chants (in Sanskrit, with transliterations), and asked us which chants we’d like to try.

I asked for a chant titled “God Is Mother and Father”; the title alone reminded me of the mid-19th C. prayers of Theodore Parker, in which he often referred to his God as both Mother and Father. (The 1862 edition of Parker’s prayers, edited by Rufus Leighton and Matilda Goddard, is now online at Google Books.) Not that there is a precise congruence between the two. The Hindu chant can be translated as: “You are Mother and Father, you alone are friend and relation. you are wisdom and prosperity, O God of Gods you are everything.” Parker does not tend this far towards pantheism; his God is personal, God as persona: “O Lord, our Father and our Mother too, we know that we need not ask any good thing from thee, nor in our prayer beseech thee to remember us, for thou lovest us more than we can love ourselves…” (July 25, 1858, p. 185).

Either way, while I can appreciate the beauty of both chant and prayer, I can’t say that I a parental god-image does much for me. But that’s the way art works, isn’t it? I don’t have to believe in the reality of a thunder-god to feel awe and reverence in the presence of a Greek sculpture of Zeus.

We hear about Abigail, and learn to make storyboards with a ringer

It’s been a month since I got to teach Sunday school, but finally today I was the lead teacher once again; Susie, who had been the lead teacher last week, was the assisatant. Three of our regulars came to class today — Heather, Zach, and Dorit. We sat down in a circle, and Dorit immediately said, “Can tell about a good and bad thing?” Zach and Heather both said, “Yeah!” I said that we would do check-in as usual, but we had to do attendance first, and light the chalice. Susie took attendance, and when it was time to light the chalice, both Heather and Zach put their hands up.

Susie pointed out that Heather had been lighting the chalice a lot lately. I proposed that Heather light the chalice first, then blow it out, then Zach would light it. Heather and Zach said that Dorit should get to blow it out. After a more discussion, that is what we decided to do. Heather lit the candle in the chalice. Dorit blew it out. Zach lit the candle, and we were ready to begin.

We were about halfway done with check-in when tow more people walked in: Bobby, and his father William. (Bobby usually attends the 9:30 Sunday school.) I explained what we were doing, and asked them to join us in the circle. We continued the check-in; I had to explain to Bobby that just one person talked at a time (I believe they don’t do check-ins in his regular Sunday school class). Heather had gone on a sleep-over; Zach had had a good football practice; I had seen a car accident on the way to church; William had gotten a good letter from a client; Bobby wasn’t ready to say anything yet. When we got done, Dorit had “two more things” she wanted to add to her check-in. At last check-in was done.

“Because we have some new people, let’s go around the circle and everyone say our names,” I said. By now, our regulars are used to doing this, so we went around the circle twice and said our names. I asked who could say everyone’s name, and Dorit said she could, and she did. Continue reading

Documenting multiple-partner marriages in America

In an earlier post, I mentioned the existence of multiple-partner marriages in America; commenter Ellen challenged me to find reputable sources to back up this assertion. Somewhere in my personal library I do have at least one book that documents the practice of multiple-partner marriages among lower-class white in colonial New England; but I cannot find that book right now; my books are still in a certain amount of chaos from moving.

Google Books came to my rescue. A quick search of Google Books turned up several reputable sources that back up my assertion. If this sort of thing interests you, I’ve included lengthy quotations from the relevant books below the fold — then you can go read those books yourself online. Continue reading

Reality TV and troubled teens

So I got a slimy email message today from a reality TV producer. It reads in part:

Let me take a moment to give you a brief rundown of exactly what we’re looking for and hoping to accomplish. First of all, I’m a Casting Producer for Shed Media. We are currently working on a great program that promotes family values by taking teens with relatable [sic] adolescent problems (smoking, drinking, defying authority, laziness, etc), and placing them with loving, welcoming, and structured families in another part of America for one week. The goal is to get to a ‘breakthrough point’ with the teens, help them turn around their attitudes, and maybe give them a new perspective on the relationship they have with their own parents.

All around the Bay Area we will be looking for those families with a big heart and an open home who would like to mentor two unruly teens for a week. Does this family have experience in dealing with teenagers? Do they have strict morals, guidelines, and expectations for teenagers already living in their home? If so, they may be just what we are looking for!

I wiped the slime off myself, and sent off this reply:

Dear Tyler Benton,

As someone who’s spent 16 years in youth ministry, a week-long placement isn’t going to solve any problems for a troubled teen. I can’t recommend using troubled teens for entertainment purposes, nor do I believe that a troubled teen who is a legal minor can give informed consent to appear on reality TV. The short answer is “No.”

Sincerely,
Dan Harper

My reply is brief because I’m quite sure he won’t read it. If I thought there were any chance he would read my reply, I would tell him that it sounds to me as though he needs a week-long televised placement with a family that would turn his unethical and exploitative attitudes around.

If you’d like to respond to him directly, I’d be happy to pass along his email address and work phone number.

Commitment and community

Carol, my life partner, pointed me to an excellent post on John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report. The post is titled The Costs of Commitment, and it’s not a post about money:

…I don’t mean money. Communities need regular inputs of time and effort from their members, or they collapse into mass societies of isolated individuals — roughly speaking, what we’ve got now [in U.S. society]. Communities also need subtler inputs: a sense of commitment, of shared purpose, of emotional connection, of trust. To gain the benefits of living in community, it’s necessary to sacrifice some part of the autonomy that so many Americans nowadays guard so jealously….

And in fact one of the great weaknesses of today’s Unitarian Universalist congregations is that so many of the people who think of themselves as Unitarian Universalists aren’t willing to sacrifice any of their autonomy to participate in the congregational community. But here, as in so many aspects of life, ya gotta pay to play. Rule number one of congregational community:– if you want a Unitarian Universalist community, you have to give up the much-loved American autonomy that says it’s better to sleep in or go for a walk or play video games on Sunday morning. Then add some volunteer hours on top of that. Otherwise, you’re not part of a community.

And, as Greer points out, many of the people who claim to love-love-love community don’t actually belong to a functional community, and in fact deliberately participate in “communities” that are bound to fail:

I know a fair number of people in activist circles who speak in glowing terms about community; most of them don’t belong to a single community organization. I also know a fair number of people who’ve tried to launch community projects of one kind or another; most of these projects foundered due to a fatal shortage of people willing to commit the time, effort, and emotional energy the project needed to survive. Most, but not all; some believers in community have taken an active role in trying to build or maintain it; some projects have managed to find an audience and build a community, or at least the first rough draft of one. One of the reasons I don’t dismiss the Transition Town movement, though I have serious doubts about some aspects of it, is precisely that many of the people involved in it have committed themselves to it in a meaningful sense, and the movement itself has succeeded in some places in building a critical mass of commitment and energy.

It’s important, I think, to assess the ventures toward community that are under way now or have been tried in the recent past, both the successful ones and the ones that have failed, and try to get some sense of the factors that tip the balance one way or the other. It’s also crucial, though, to recognize that there’s a difference between fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid for by a corresponding commitment. I suspect the common passion among some peak oil activists for lifeboat communities that just happen to be too expensive ever to get off the ground, which often goes hand in hand with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for participation in real communities of real people that exist right now, is simply one way of evading the difference.

The theoretical and theological grounding for this post will be very familiar to Unitarian Universalists who have studied James Luther Adams’s work on voluntary associations (see, e.g., his collections of essays Voluntary Associations, ed. Ronald Engels, 1986, and/or On Being Human Religiously, ed. Max Stackhouse, 1976). If you read much of Adams, you will discover that he believes voluntary associations — a.k.a. “communities” — are the major line of defense in preventing fascism. This point is also implicit in Greer’s post.

Yet while there’s nothing really new in this post, Greer sums the main point up nicely when he writes: “There’s a difference between fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid for by a corresponding commitment.” Go read the whole post — it’s worth it. Then come back here and ‘fess up — do you really invest your time, energy, enthusiasm, and yes money, into a real living organized community? (And let’s be honest, “my circle of friends” is not a community, it’s a circle of friends.)