Monthly Archives: April 2007

Blogger BioBlitz 2007

I just signed up to do the first annual Blogger BioBlitz. Jeremy, science blogger at The Voltage Gate, writes:

In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 – 29, I am inviting bloggers from all walks to participate in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz, where bloggers from across the world will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species — plant, animal, fungi and anything in between — live in a certain area within a certain time. Link

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be surveying the garden of First Unitarian in downtown New Bedford, which is a small green space in a highly urban environment, assisted by two teenagers from the church (thanks, Dylan and Tyler!). You may have noticed that on this blog I already maintain desultory lists of birds and molluscs I’ve seen in New Bedford Harbor. The Blogger BioBlitz is an oportunity for me to examine the even more human-dominated environment surrounding our church, ten blocks from the harbor. It’s also an opportunity to live out our liberal religion by doing some low-key citizen science. We expect to find many non-native and introduced species in this urban environment — I’ll post photos and lists later this week.

Want to participate in this blog swarm? Register here.
Thanks to Invasive Species Weblog for the link to the Blogger BioBlitz.

Next post on Blogger Bioblitz 2007: Link.

Thinking out loud about sermons…

The cover story for the latest issue of Christian Century, “Stolen goods: Tempted to plagiarize,” turns out to be an excellent article by Thomas G. Long on plagiarism in the pulpit — stolen sermons. I was planning to write something about this topic anyway, and then this afternoon our church music director told me that the Providence Journal printed a story this week alleging that the minister of First Unitarian in Providence has been engaging in plagiarism in his sermons over the past year. So here are some thoughts on plagiarized sermons.

Thomas Long’s Christian Century article notes that some prominent evangelical Christian preachers, like Rick Warren, market their sermons online. Long quotes Steve Sjogren, pastor as Cincinnati’s Vineyard community Church, as saying, “Don’t be original — be effective!” Long also quotes none other than Augustine as saying,

There are, indeed, some people who have a good delivery, but cannot compose anything to deliver. Now, if such people take what has been written with wisdom and eloquence by others, and commit it to memory, and deliver it to the people, they cannot be blamed, supposing them to do it without deception. [emphasis mine]

That last phrase is crucial: if you’re going to use someone else’s sermon — if you’re even going to reuse one of your own old sermons — you need to tell that to your congregation right up front. Long is careful to point out that “gray areas remain, of course, and judgment calls must be made.” Personally, I often worry about how should a preacher make attributions. Full footnotes just don’t work in a spoken sermon, but I think it’s usually OK for the preacher to refer to “Biblical scholars,” or to say something like “as Theodore Parker once said,” without having to give a full bibliographical citation.

Aside from the ethics of the matter, I feel Long’s most important point is that a good sermon should be written for a specific congregation. Using Christian language, Long writes:

In addition to the standard of truthfulness, the second factor to keep in mind is immediacy. While there is surely room in the pulpit for the “set piece” sermon and the oft-repeated illustration, finally preaching is a word from God for these people in this place at this moment. [emphasis in original]

I like to think about preaching as a conversation that takes place between the preacher and the congregation and the universe. The preacher is not really speaking for him- or herself:– the preacher has to try to give voice to those who have no voice; the preacher has to listen very closely to what people in the congregation say, and feed that back to the congregation; the preacher has to try to discern how the sacred lives and moves within the congregation, and draw the congregation’s attention to it. Those things are difficult enough as it is; using a sermon intended for another congregation will not make them any easier.

One important matter that Long does not cover in his otherwise excellent article is how congregations can become complicit in leading their ministers to plagiarize. If a congregations want their preacher to write high-quality, original sermons every week, are they willing to allow him or her a minimum of ten hours of study and writing time each week? — that’s at least one full day a week of uninterrupted study and writing time; and some preachers need more time than that. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many congregations that allow their preacher no more than an hour or two for study and writing. If a congregation is not insisting that their preacher spend ten hours a week on sermon preparation, and yet insists on an original sermon every week, that congregation is only leading that preacher into the temptation to plagiarize a sermon or two.

In the end, I’m less interested in reflecting on sermon plagiarism per se, and I’m more interested in what it is we expect from our sermons, and from our preachers. Some congregations will agree with Steve Sjogren, that we should worry less about being original or whether a particular sermon fits a particular congregation; and instead we should worry more about how effective a sermon is. Such a congregation may not even need a professional preacher — there are plenty of sermons on the Web, and anyone with a good voice could be drafted into reading sermons on Sunday morning, which would free up the paid minister for other roles in the congregation. On the other hand, there will be congregations who feel that sermons should be written for them, addressing their specific concerns and giving voice to their collective thoughts and yearnings. If that’s the case, those congregations will be sure their preacher carves out a substantial amount of time for sermon preparation — in which case the congregation will take care to hold that preacher accountable to create original sermons, written specifically for them and articulating both what they say and what they need to hear, each and every week.

Dream birds

Just before I awakened this morning, I had a particularly vivid dream. We were going somewhere in a car — my dad, my sisters, my aunt Martha and Uncle Bob. We went through a small New England seaside town; it was no more than a crossroads, really; then turned off the main road, and down a badly maintained road through abandoned farmland:– a stone wall on one side, rank field grass just starting to turn green again after winter. It was a gray April day, windy but warm enough that we only needed light jackets. We found ourselves on a flat promontory, long grass with puddles here and there, and at the edge dark granite bluffs dropped down into the heaving waves of the gray Atlantic.

There were quite a few other people around, and a few other cars. Dad and my sisters and aunt Martha went off somewhere in the car (to find a picnic site?). Uncle Bob and I walked around the field, picking our way through puddles, talking about something or other. We passed by some bushes, and there on the other side of the bushes was a little hollow, and half a dozen striking birds that I had never seen before except in field guides: gray birds waddling hurriedly away from us, with black heads and crests, and black mantle, the scapulars an iridescent green bordered top and bottom with black. Uncle Bob would keep talking, until I managed to draw his attention to the birds, and of course he knew exactly what they were. Off in the undergrowth I saw another bird I didn’t know, chicken-like, bold black and white pattern with some rusty touches on wings and head; but Uncle Bob didn’t see them, and I didn’t get a good look at them. The gray birds, though — I knew I could remember them well enough to identify them once I got my hands on a field guide, and I knew they would be a new bird for my life list.

Then I woke up.

Carol was talking on the phone somewhere. I went to the bathroom. The dream just wouldn’t go away. It was so convincing, so vivid, that I thought I must have seen those birds in a field guide somewhere, and managed to insert them into a dream. I went out into our sunny living room to get a couple of field guides — Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and the National Geographic Field Guide to North American Birds — and I leafed through them. The birds in my dream weren’t in either field guide. I thought, perhaps it was a Eurasian bird, one that I had seen in some European field guide. Slowly I realized that I was not going to find that bird in any field guide; except maybe in a field guide in my dreams, some other night when I am asleep.

I was vividly certain of the existence of these birds when I awoke. These birds do not exist in the world described by ornithology. In some sense, these two statements are equally “true” — in the sense that even though the birds weren’t real, they were an object of my consciousness:

For if we vary our factual world in free fantasy, carrying it over into random conceivable worlds, we are implicitly varying ourselves whose environment the world is: we each change ourselves into a possible subjectivity, whose environment would always have to be the world that was thought of, as a world of its [the subjectivity’s] possible experiences, possible theoretical evidences, possible practical life. [p. 28 of “Phenomenology” by Edmund Husserl, 1927]

As soon as I fully awakened, I gave up trying to find the dream birds in the waking-world field guides. But when I fall asleep tonight, my dreaming self won’t be surprised to find myself back on that rocky promontory next to the Atlantic Ocean, dream binoculars around my neck, dream-world field guides in hand, beating the bushes to find those gray and black dream birds with the iridescent green stripe running down their sides. And this time I will positively identify them.

Swing span bridge

A short video (3:54) of the swing span bridge along U.S. 6 in New Bedford in action. You’ll see boats, trucks, a moving bridge, everything a five year old could want. Woo hoo!

A couple of earlier posts about the bridge: here and here).

Quicktime video — Click link, and where it says “Select a format” choose “Source — Quicktime”. Wait until the file downloads to your computer, and then click play. This should work for dial-up connections, and offers higher-resolution for all connections.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

The club janitor

In “The Club Secretary,” a story by Lord Dunsany, the narrator finds himself in the afterlife, wandering the buildings and the grounds of an exclusive club, just for great poets who have died. It sounds like just the sort of club where you would like to be able to spend all eternity, listening to conversations between, say, Shakespeare and Keats; but of course, the only way to gain admittance is to have written great poetry.

The narrator strikes up a conversation with the club secretary. It’s an enviable post, and how did he become the club’s secretary? He had written just one line of great poetry — “A rose-red city, half old as time” — not enough for him to gain admittance as a full member, but enough to get him the post as secretary.

I read that story more than thirty years ago, and I still fantasize about such a club. Who would make it in as a full member? And who else would be on staff? I know I would never qualify, but I suspect Edwin Markham would be one of the janitors, because of one quatrain that he wrote:

They drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took them in.

Even though the rest of Markham’s poetry is unreadable, I think this short verse is actually pretty good; the sentiment is not as trite as it sounds at first, and it’s a poem that has stuck with me for some years now. Although I admit I’m biassed because Markham was a Universalist, and for me this quatrain sums up the best of the Universalist impulse towards radical love.

And if there’s a great poets club in the afterlife, do you think there might be a non-fiction writers club? I would never gain admittance as a full member, but if I’m lucky someday I might write one paragraph of non-fiction good enough to get me a job as one of the groundskeepers.

Happy Patriot’s Day

When you grow up in Concord, Massachusetts, you know that Patriot’s Day is the best holiday of the year. On April 19, 1775, the minutemen and colonial militia offered the first successful armed resistance to His Majesty’s Regular Troops at the North Bridge in Concord. So began the War for American Independence.

Sadly, Concord’s Patriot’s Day parade now takes place on the nearest Monday; and this year even the parade was cancelled due to the freak nor’easter that roared through Monday morning. But it’s still a day to commemorate. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose grandfather watched the battle from the old manse a dozen rods away from the bridge, commemorated this day with one of his most-quoted poems:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard ’round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free, —
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

Happy Patriot’s Day.

Daffodils

Of course I ordered flowers for Easter. Every year, people in our church put up six or seven dollars for a pot of daffodils, or an Easter lily, or a pot of tulips, and the order of service on Easter Sunday prints the dedications for the flowers: In memory of the wonder dog; In honor of family; For my sister who’s fighting cancer. I ordered three pots of daffodils in memory of Mom. Then on Palm Sunday, you get to see all the flowers: banks of daffodils and lilies and tulips at the front of the church. No hyacinths, though, because our minister is allergic to them and wouldn’t be able to preach.

After the Easter service, everyone takes their flowers home. My three pots of daffodils wound up on the kitchen counter behind the stove. Most of the flowers started to fade over the next few days, gradually fading to dull yellow. But I kept watering the plants, and three last buds burst into bloom right after Easter.

Now, a week and a half later, the daffodils are looking pretty sad. The tall green leaves have gone brown at the tips, the stalks are sagging and falling over, and most of the blossoms have shrunk and withered. I thought about trimming back the plants, letting the bulbs dry out and rest so I could plant them next fall.

But those three last blossoms are now if full bloom: three vividly yellow flowers in amongst a score of dull, withered flowers. I decided to let the daffodils alone, and to admire the last flowers until they, too, withered away to nothing.

Living your faith

My friends Jo is a teacher in the San Francisco Bay area, and she sent me a link to a video where she gets to describe the less-than-ideal conditions of her school. Link to video — Jo appears about halfway through, and again at the end. Boy, and I thought some of the churches I’ve served have had building problems. As the video tells us, children should not have to put up with such conditions. And you may notice that lots of the schools they show just happen to be in cities, not in the wealthy white suburbs….

Jo passed along this word from the American Federation of Teachers:

According to recent data, the cost to repair existing public schools or build new buildings exceeds $400 billion. To address this problem, the AFT is working to enact legislation that will provide $25 billion in interest-free bonding authority to school districts, with all decision-making about how to use that money remaining at the local level.

Jo is one of those classic idealistic Unitarian Universalists who lives out her faith in her daily life by teaching kids in the public schools. Historically, Unitarian Universalists have always had a high percentage of schoolteachers, and we have been committed to providing fair and equitable education for all children through public schooling. I’m proud of the fact that I’m related to Unitarian Universalists who lived their faith by teaching in the public schools:– my mother, her mother, and my aunt, all Unitarians, all schoolteachers. (I’m also proud of my older sister, who teaches non-traditional college students in the Indiana State University system, but I’m not sure she’d call herself a Unitarian Universalist any more.)

So here’s a shout-out to Jo, yet another Unitarian Universalist who’s living out her faith by working with and standing up for children.

Blogging against theocracy

Because I got delayed in the city of R’lyeh last weekend, I missed the “blogging against theocracy” blog swarm. But since it’s never too late to blog against theocracy, here’s my video on the topic. (3:51)

Thanks to ck for pointing me in the direction of Blogging against Theocracy.