Category Archives: Pop culture

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 →

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.)

(sub)urban ag

Carol and I were talking tonight about urban agriculture. She has a friend who teaches landscape design, and this friend is trying to promote fanciful urban agriculture like hydroponically grown plants on the sides of sky scrapers. This seemed a waste of time to both of us; why not farm the many empty lots that exist in some cities? Carol went further than that, saying that we don’t need urban agriculture so much as we need suburban agriculture: farms, not in the city, but close to the city; farms which fill in the spaces left by suburban sprawl. She was trying to explain this to her friend, the landscape designer. She knows he likes catchy phrases, so she told him, “We need growscapes instead of sprawlscapes.” We both laughed at her catchphrase. Yet funny as it is, I’d like it if we replaced suburban lawns front yards with suburban farming.

And if you ever see “Growscapes, Not Sprawlscapes!” on a bumper sticker in the future, remember that Carol was the one who coined the phrase.

New Year’s resolutions

Mr. Crankypants is watching as people write about their resolutions for the new year on their blogs, and on Facebook. Mr. Crankypants says: Hah! half these resolutions will be forgotten within a month, and another third will be forgotten by next Wednesday. And the remaining sixth? — forgotten by tomorrow morning.

Despite that law of nature, Mr. C. will make his own resolution: he resolves to be even crankier in the new year. Especially when it comes to liberal religion and California state politics.

Wait, what was that new year’s resolution? Can’t remember now. Getting crankier and crankier because can’t remember. #@$%!

Garrison Keillor, righteous Christian, defender of Christmas

Dan is still down with a chest cold so Mr. Crankypants is ba-ack!

Mr. Crankypants finally decided to read the Garrison Keillor column in Salon that trashes “Unitarians.” It’s a mildly amusing little column; there are enough factual errors that one can’t help chuckling now and then.

For instance, Garry Keillor says that “You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit….” Except Emerson never preached at First Church. A simple Web search would have revealed that First Church in Cambridge is affiliated with the United Church of Christ. The Unitarian Universalist church in Camnbridge, where Emerson delivered the famous “Divinity School Address,” is called “First Parish.” (A more obscure point is whether Emerson in fact ever actually preached at First Parish.) It’s always amusing when a well-known writer does not know how to do simple online fact-checking.

Garry Keillor also says: “Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice…, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite ‘Silent Night.’  ” Except that Keillor’s favorite words are the rewrite, or more precisely a bad translation of the original German. The current Unitarian Universalist hymnal offers two translations of the German words written by Josef Mohr in 1816: there’s Keillor’s favorite (woefully inaccurate) translation; and on the facing page there’s pretty good translation along with the first verse in the original German. (If you want to be a real Christmas purist, be like Mr. Crankypants and sing the original German words, which are much prettier.) It’s always amusing when a well-known writer tries to be a pompous purist but winds up being an ignoramus.

And Garry Keillor says: “Christmas does not need any improvements. It is a common ordinary experience that resists brilliant innovation. Just… sing softly in dim light about the poor man gathering winter fu-u-el….” Except that the line about “gathering winter fuel” is from the song “Good King Wenceslas,” which is a song about St. Stephen’s feast day, which is December 26. Sure, most people sing it at Christmas time. But a Christmas purist like Keillor, who despises “all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys,” should know better. It’s definitely amusing when a self-declared “Christian” writer tries to be a Christmas purist, but lacks the requisite liturgical and theological knowledge.

The sad thing is that with people like Garrison Keillor advocating for Christmas, it’s no wonder the New Atheists dismiss Christians. Come to think of it, those who consider themselves Christians may prefer not to be associated with a bitter, ignorant, intolerant ass like Keillor.

German words to “Silent Night / Stille Nacht” below the fold: Continue reading →

“If my God hates those who hate him, I ought to do as my God does, and I will hate them too.”

I was driving to work this morning, listening to the local liberal talk radio program on KQED. One of the guests this morning was a conservative Christian of some kind, who was involved with some “Christian social group” on the campus of UC Hastings. The host, Michael Krasny, mentioned that this Christian social group did not allow gay and lesbian members.

The Christian fellow, whose name I did not catch, hastened to correct him. He said something like this: We do allow gays and lesbians; this is not about orientation, it is about behaviors. We do not allow our members to have sex outside of marriage, and we do not allow them to have homosexual sex; but if a gay or lesbian was willing to abide by our traditional Christian views of sex and marriage, then they are welcome to join our group. We want everyone to experience what it is to live in Christ, etc. etc.

I listened to this fellow’s tone of voice as he was talking, rather than the standard conservative-Christian content of what he was saying. His tone of voice was defensive, as was only natural, given that he was on a liberal talk radio program. But I also heard smugness, and complacency, and sanctimoniousness, and rigidity. I realized I have heard that exact same tone of voice hundreds of times, and when I hear that tone of voice it always makes me want to insist that I am not a Christian, that I do not believe in that God, and that while I am a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, my Jesus has nothing whatever to do with their Christ.

And then I remembered something written by Hosea Ballou in 1805 that applies to people like this Christian fellow on the radio. Ballou writes:

“Idolatry is the sin of worshipping that which is not, in reality, the true God…. An Almighty [God], omnipresent, infinitely wise and good, may be talked of; but his wisdom, power and goodness must be denied; and he must be a great many millions of miles off, fixed to a certain place, yet everywhere present; infinitely wise, and powerful, yet suffers an everlasting violation of his will;… loves some of his creatures, and hates others; is pleased and displeased with the conduct of his creatures; is perfectly unchangeable, yet loves at one time, and, at another, hates the same object. Such an idol will answer for thousands. Now what are the consequences? Answer, one nation supposes itself the only favorite of God; other people are haters of him, and hated by him. If my God hates those who hate him, I ought to do as my God does, and I will hate them too…. Reader, turn over the pages of history, calculate the rivers of blood which have been shed on account of religious disputes, and ask yourself the question, Is this religion worthy of a Supreme Being?”

[excerpted from A Treatise on Atonement, chapter 3.]

And, dear religious liberals, before you get too smug….

So we religious liberals have let the conservative Christians set up their idol here in America, their false God, a God who hates the majority of humanity, teaches his followers to hate, teaches his followers to start wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who condemns billions of people to eternal torture. And in response to this false idol, this false God, what do we religious liberals do? In our turn, too often we hate all gods, refuse to let anyone mention the word “God,” hate the conservative Christians, and when we talk about religion we use a tone of voice that is defensive, smug, complacent, sanctimonious, and rigid, all at the same time.

Hosea Ballou offers us another path: We can engage critically with the Bible and the Christian tradition that is so much a part of Western culture. We can use reason, humor, and good common sense to come to our own understanding of the Bible, one of the central books of our Western tradition. We can follow truth, instead of letting others impose their false idols on us.

Nonprofit Christmas shopping

For many nonprofit institutions, this is not going to be a very merry Christmas. Take Sing Out!, for example, a nonprofit devoted to supporting folk music, and to “making music a part of our everyday lives.” Over the years, Sing Out! has published songs from people like Woodie Guthrie, Pat Humphries, Emmylou Harris, Mississippi John Hurt, Cordelia’s Dad, Pete Seeger, etc., etc. Like Seeger, Sing Out! gives lots of emphasis to socially conscious songs and music. It’s a good organization. I want them to survive.

Well, I don’t have much money this year, but I always try to do some charitable giving at Christmas time — after I give money to Heifer Project, I’m thinking maybe I’ll give give some money to Sing Out!. I suppose if I were a Christmas-gift-giver, I could give subscriptions to Sing Out! magazine, or buy a few Rise Up Singing books to give as gifts.

I suppose the mall owners and the big box stores need us to shop there so they can pay their workers starvation wages. But I think maybe I’ll spend my small Christmas budget with nonprofit organizations instead.

Black Friday

Someone at church was telling me this morning about to the mall on Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. “We got to the mall at 6 a.m.,” Ms. X said enthusiastically, “and already there were no parking places left!” To me, this sounds horrible, but to Ms. X it was all a big adventure. I’m a cheap New England Yankee, I think of shopping as a pragmatic, thrifty venture:– you shop only when it is efficient to do so, and you shop as little as possible in order to spend as little money as possible. I never go shopping on Black Friday because I don’t want to waste time in traffic, and I don’t want to be tempted into buying things I neither want nor need.

But I forget that for many Americans, shopping is an adventure, a hobby, and a sport combined;– and Black Friday is the Olympics, the Everest, the ultimate moment for the serious shopper — the moment you’ve been training for all year long. Judge not someone else’s hobby unless you want your own hobbies judged by them.