The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) of the Library of Congress includes some photos and drawings of historic churches. The Historic American Buildings Survey produced many drawings and some photos of churches, and I found some rarities, e.g., drawings of the Marion, Mass., Universalist church. There are also many glass negatives from the Detroit Publishing Co., c.1900-1910, including quite a few churches. Great search engine allows easy searching; hi-res digital files for downloading.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
PodCamp Boston 3 announced
PodCamp Boston 3 will take place July 19-20, 2008 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. From the email announcement: “PodCamp Boston 3 will be two days of great conversations, knowledge sharing, and insights into the leading edge of new media.” No lie.
You can register at www.podcampboston.org/register — I’ve already registered. I was at PodCamp Boston 2, and it was a great opportunity to extend my knowledge about new media. Hope to see some of my Boston-area readers at PodCamp this summer — do let me know if you plan to attend.
More on “Spirit of Life”
Today I dug out my copy of Songs for Congregational Singing by Carolyn McDade (1991), with harmonizations by McDade and Marian Shatto. After writing a post earlier this week on the popular hymn “Spirit of Life” which appears in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal with a harmonization by Grace Lewis-McLaren, I decided to look at another harmonization.
McDade’s and Shatto’s harmonization of “Spirit of Life” for piano uses a chord progression that can be interpreted as follows (one chord per measure):
C Dm G7 C Am Dm G7 Cadd9
C Dm G7 C Am Dm G7 Csus4
Cadd9 Dm G13 Cadd9 Am Dm G7 Cadd9 C5
(N.B.: the last note is held for an extra measure.)
The harmonies are somewhat more complex than this — for example, you could read a CM7 for the fourth, ninth, and twelfth measures; and a Dm9 for the twenty-second measure.
And the rhythm is somewhat more complex than the version in the hymnal — the left hand on the piano part plays arpeggio-like figures that vary from straight eighths to syncopated figures like this: | 1 & 2 & & & |.
Also of interest in this little book is the song “Spirit of Justice,” with words that include:
Your people call, in faith we call — Be with us now
that we may make of this pained and captive land
a city just, a people free, strong with hope
and cast our lot with those who face the storm
and don’t turn back but dare go on….
Personally, I’d have more interest in singing these words than the words to “Spirit of Life.”
Spring watch
A poem by Frances Watkins Harper:
Dandelions.
Welcome children of the Spring,
In your garbs of green and gold,
Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
On the verdant plain and wold.
As a bright and joyous troop
From the breast of earth ye came
Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
With sun-kisses all aflame.
In the dusty streets and lanes,
Where the lowly children play,
There as gentle friends ye smile,
Making brighter life’s highway
Dewdrops and the morning sun,
Weave your garments fair and bright,
And we welcome you to-day
As the children of the light.
Children of the earth and sun.
We are slow to understand
All the richness of the gifts
Flowing from our Father’s hand.
Published in Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 1895. Complete book at Project Gutenberg.
While searching for poetry by Unitarians and Universalists, I came across “Dandelions.” Even though Frances Harper uses late 19th C. American poetic conventions which may sound dated to our ears, her images and her thinking captured my attention. I liked the image of “Where the lowly children play/ There as gentle friends ye smile”; which is both profoundly egalitarian, while also in the context of the poem perhaps offering an exegesis of Mark 10.13-16 where Jesus befriends children.
And I particularly liked the image of humanity she offers in the fifth and sixth stanzas, when she calls us human beings “the children of the light. / Children of the earth and sun.” Those two lines alone make the poem for me.
This being the week when dandelions are beginning to appear widely in New Bedford, I thought I’d post the poem here as a sort of meditation on the season.
Church Web sites
Nice article on administering church Web sites on the Alban Institute Web site: Link. The article identifies three main audiences for church Web sites, and discusses how to avoid the extremes of selling your church on the one hand, and ignoring the Web site on the other hand. Worth reading. (Via Bob Kelley, BCD Webmaster.)
UU professorship announced
Harvard Divinity School has announced the appointment of the first scholar to the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Chair of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Daniel Patrick McKanan, author of the forthcoming Prophetic Encounters: The Religious Left in American History (to be published by Beacon Press), will leave the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, to go to Harvard Divinity School. It’s nice to have an endowed chair in UU studies at a theological school that produces lots of UU ministers. Link to press release. Via.
Spring watch
Standing on Pope’s Island this afternoon, I saw both a few last winter residents and one of the first summer residents. A pair of Buffleheads, perhaps the last of the ducks who wintered on the harbor, swam and dove in the water around the city marina, not far from the first of the recreational boats that appeared in the slips this week. Further out in the middle of the harbor, a Cormorant, one of the first summer residents to arrive in the harbor, flapped heavily and rose from the water where it had been holding its wings up to dry.
Late last week, the harbor was still full of wintering waterfowl. On Thursday, when the temperatures went up into the seventies, I walked over to the boat landing in Fairhaven. There I stood and counted more than thirty Brant, two dozen Buffleheads, and perhaps a dozen Red-Breasted Mergansers; and all the while, a Mockingbird sang lustily from a nearby tree. The waterfowl must have taken that warm day as a warning call for spring migration, because since then I haven’t seen more than a dozen waterfowl on any one day; and today I only saw those two Bufflehead.
Jazzing it up
During the workshop I was co-leading on Friday and Saturday, someone asked if I knew guitar chords to play along with “Spirit of Life,” the Carolyn McDade song that so many Unitarian Universalists are in love with. After ranting about how much I dislike that song because of its boring harmonic structure and banal melody, I finally admitted that I did not know of any good chords to play along with the song.
But that question kept bothering the back of my mind, and so tonight I went up to the church to borrow a piano and see if I could come up with pleasing chords. I looked at the piano arrangement in the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, but it’s the kind of arrangement that begets a dirge-like tempo and breathy-voiced singing. So I looked just at the melody, which consists of three eight-measure sections, and I decided each eight-measure section could take the same basic chord progression: C Dm G7 Am C Dm G7 C (or I IIm V7 VIm I IIm V7 I) — a pleasantly folk-y but still boring harmonic structure.
But then I got to thinking: Maybe if you jazzed up those chords a little, you could create a little more movement in the song. Like this —
C9 Dm7 G7 CM7 Am7 Dm9 Gm9 FM7
C7 Dm7 G7 C7b9 Am7 Dm9 Gm9 FM7
C9 Dm7 G7 C7b9 A7 Dm7 Gm7 CM7
— played with a Charleston rhythm (1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &) [progression modified slightly 4/17].
Well, it’s better, but I haven’t got it quite right (although it does fall nicely on the guitar fingerboard). Maybe someone who is a much better musician than I can come up with a chord progression that makes this song sound good. Or maybe it’s a fatally flawed song that can will always sound dreary. Your comments and ideas, as always, are appreciated.
Sleepy
For the past two days, I’ve been co-leading a workshop on Unitarian Universalist history to a baker’s dozen of religious educators. They were a talented group — several people with master’s degrees in education or related fields, someone who worked part-time as curriculum developer for Educators for Social Responsibility, an ordained minister who finds herself being called to religious education, a former evangelical Christian with lots of experience in church planting, quite a few religious educators who have grown children/youth programs from nothing to substantial — not just talented but almost intimidatingly talented.
Most of these religious educators are part-time (some less than ten hours a week, one a volunteer), probably all of them put in more hours than they get paid for, many are getting paid less than the denominational guidelines. All of them are doing extraordinary work with limited resources. All of them are passionate about religious education.
All of which raises the perennial question: How long will they last before they get burned out and leave to do other work? Or let me reframe the question in a way that doesn’t place the blame on them: Will their congregations see fit to pay them a wage commensurate with their talents and contributions to the congregation? Will their congregations pay them enough to retain them longer than 2-1/2 years, which is the average tenure for a paid religious educator? Will their congregations retain them longer than the seven years which human resources experts tell us is the approximate minimum time it takes to make it cost-effective to hire, train, and build skills in an employee?
I didn’t get quite enough sleep during this workshop, so I’m too sleepy to answer these questions right now. Instead, here’s a shout out to all these amazingly talented religious educators who do amazing work in our congregations, often for not enough money.