Month: April 2022

Post-pandemic singing

Dr. Anthony Fauci has declared that we are now “out of the full-blown explosive pandemic phase” of COVID. This doesn’t mean that COVID is gone. It just means that “we’ve now decelerated and transitioned into more of a controlled phase,” according to Fauci.

This tallies with my own observations. COVID is still a threat, but not as dire a threat as it was a few months ago. So over the weekend, I decided to go to a group singing event that would require proof of vaccination for entry.

There were perhaps forty people at this Sacred Harp singing. I found it a little bit scary to be with so many people. (Though I was far more scared walking through airports when we flew to visit Carol’s father back in March — there were many more people in the airports, and anyone who was eating or drinking had their masks off.)

While I did find it to be a little bit scary, I also found it to be exhilarating. I’ve been too isolated during the pandemic. And I’ve done almost no in-person singing — no singing in choirs, no folk music jam sessions, no singing with a quartet, very little Sacred Harp singing. I’m not a particularly good singer, but before the pandemic, singing was my primary social outlet. Saturday’s singing event was definitely good for my mental health.

In this phase of the pandemic — this “more controlled phase,” to use Fauci’s words — we’re going to be balancing the threats from COVID against the threat that isolation poses to our mental health. It’s going to be a difficult balance to strike.

I’ll put a photo of the singing below the fold. But if you get triggered by seeing a bunch of people singing indoors at this point in the pandemic, don’t click through.

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Emerson on reparations

On January 1, 1863, in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, Ralph Waldo Emerson read a poem to a Boston audience. In that poem, Emerson considered the then-current idea that slave-owners should be compensated for having their slaves taken away from them. To this ethically bankrupt notion, he replied:

Pay ransom to the owner,
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.

This seems to me to be a good concise summary of the case for reparations.

And no wonder many present-day political leaders reject the notion of reparations to the descendants of slavery. If we compensate the descendants of slaves for their stolen labor, by a logical progression we might then have to compensate the offshore workers for the full value of their labor. Or compensate the underpaid warehouse workers and retail employees in this country for the full value of their labor. There’s even an implication that today’s billionaires did not in fact earn their fabulous wealth through their own efforts. In other words, the assummptions underlying reparations contradict the assumptions of economic libertarianism.

Possum tells the old story of Easter

Possum decides he’s going to tell the old story of Easter this year. His friends Rolf, Birago, Nicky, and Dr. Sharpie help him out.

Click on the image above to view the video on Vimeo

As usual, the script is below the fold. (The script has not been corrected against the actual video, and may vary in minor details.)

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Is your identity set in stone?

If you’re reaching sexual maturity today, you have a wide array of sexual orientations with which you might identify. There are the old categories of straight, bisexual, gay, and lesbian. There is a continuum from asexual through graysexual to allosexual, though it’s not a linear continuum since it also includes demisexual and aspec and other identities. The old continuum of gay/lesbian to straight (where if asked “how gay are you?” you might reply “a Kinsey 6”) now must include more than two binary genders. Thus, in addition to gay or straight, we now have pansexual, omni sexual, polysexual, etc.

In my observation as a sexuality educator, this plethora of sexual orientations can be both freeing and confusing for young adolescents. Some young adolescents, including the ones who have felt they are somehow different than the norms shown in popular culture, are relieved to find that there are other people out there like them. Other young adolescents, including those who may feel that they don’t fit into pop culture norms, may not see themselves reflected in any of the existing categories, or may see themselves reflected in more than one category. Even young adolescents who fit into one of the old categories (one they don’t have to explain to their parents) find the need to understand the new plethora of sexual orientations, as friends and acquaintances identify with other sexual orientations.

I think it’s helpful to introduce young adolescents to the concept of sexual fluidity. Back in 2014, social psychologist Justin Lehmiller wrote:

“Over the last decade [i.e., prior to 2014], the concept of sexual fluidity has drawn great attention from both scientists and the general public alike. In case you aren’t familiar with it, the basic idea behind sexual fluidity is that some of us have the capacity for a ‘flexible’ erotic response, which can lead to significant variability in one’s pattern of sexual attraction, behavior, and identity over time. In other words, someone who is sexually fluid may experience fluctuations in who they are attracted to, who they sleep with, and what labels they identify with multiple times over the lifespan.”

In other words, your sexual orientation can change over time. I feel this is a useful corrective to a culture that seems to want to put us into a limited number of essentialist categories — we are gay or straight (but not something in between), black or white (but not biracial), Democrat or Republican (but not socialist or communist).

There’s a theological point here. Existentialist theology suggests that humans don’t have a pre-existing essence. We define our essences ourselves, through our actions in the world. By contrast, essentialist theologies insist that humans have defined essences from their beginnings. Essentialist theologies include both conservative Christian theologies (“man is sinful”) on the one hand, and atheist theologies (“humans are programmed by their biology”) on the other hand.

While some Unitarian Universalists do espouse essentialist theologies, mostly essentialist atheist theologies, I’d like to think that most of us do not fall into the essentialist trap. Instead, we assert that humans can change over time. Where others try to place humans into little boxes of essentialist identities, as existentialists we know that we have the ultimate freedom to define our own essence through our actions.

Revised Coming of Age curriculum now online

A fairly major revision of a gr. 8-9 Coming of Age program is now online. From the course description: “The goal of our Coming of Age program is to help young people sort out their ethical and religious identity (recognizing that some young people do not feel religious at all), so that they may make rational decisions about the kind of person they want to become.”

This Coming of Age program assumes that Unitarian Universalist religious identity is primarily concerned with what we do in the world. Second, the program does not take Christianity as the paradigm of all religion, which means that belief and doctrine are de-emphasized, while ethics is emphasized. Third, the course includes many hands-on activities, as well as discussions, to reach different learning styles. Fourth, the course is outcome-driven, with everything in the course designed to prepare participants to write and deliver statements of religious identity in a culminating worship service.

I wrote the curriculum, but it’s based on the real-world course we’ve offered at the UU Church of Palo Alto for the past decade. Many other teachers, and many participants, have contributed to the program.

There are still known issues with the curriculum. The session plan for Session Seven, “Western Religious Practices,” is teachable, but needs revision. Session Ten, “Football Is Religion,” was taught for the first time in 2021, and the session plan is still rough. Session Eight is designed as a field trip to a specific art museum in San Francisco, but could be adapted to other museums in other locales. The social justice project is very specific to the Palo Alto congregation, but with careful attention to the criteria for what constitutes a good social justice project, other congregations can find suitable projects.

The curriculum does make use of copyrighted material. However, the online curriculum provides to online sources for all copyrighted material.

Overall, the curriculum is quite sound and produces excellent outcomes. While written for the Palo Alto congregation, it should be fairly easy to adapt to most UU congregations.

Coming of Age program at Yet Another UU Curriculum Site.

Behind the scenes

Since 2020, I’ve been filming stories-for-all-ages in a puppet studio I put together in the nursery at the Palo Alto church. We’re about to resume infant and toddler care, so it’s only a matter of time before I have to remove the puppet studio from the nursery. But I managed to take some behind-the-scenes photos of puppets and puppeteers in action while filming a few last videos.

When we’re filming, the puppeteers mostly watch the action on the computer screen. Sometimes looking at the screen is disorienting and we have to look up at the puppets. We tape the script to the back of the puppet stage at our eye level. Puppets who are not in the current scene lie on the table next to us (you can see Possum in the lower left corner of the photo.)

Puppeteer view

This is what the camera sees when the zoom is set to the widest angle:

Camera view

A wider view, from behind the camera. We sometimes have up to seven lights aimed at the stage. Props are laid out on the table to the left of the puppet stage. When not needed in the current scene, the puppets stay in cloth bags, and you can see Rolf’s head poking out of the dark blue bag in the lower right corner of the photo.

View from behind the camera

I’ll miss the puppeteer studio when it’s gone. But I won’t miss sweating in that small room on hot days, with the doors closed to keep outside sound out. I won’t miss having to reshoot a scene because a helicopter went overhead, or someone started talking on their phone right outside the door, or the cello class started up unexpectedly, ruining the sound. I won’t miss having a carefully-constructed set suddenly decide to fall over in the middle of filming. I won’t miss spending fifteen minutes trying to level the camera, only to find that somehow, mysteriously, the stage has gone out of level. I won’t miss shooting video on a tight deadline with little margin for error. But… I will miss bringing Sharpie and Possum and the other characters to life.

Webpage with links to all videos, plus “Meet the Stuffies”

News

It’s public now. I’ll be resigning from the UU Church of Palo Alto as of July 31. I’ll post my resignation letter below the fold. The congregation that hired me hasn’t posted this on its website yet — when they do, I’ll post that info here.

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Ecojustice Class curriculum now online (finally)

We’ve been teaching Ecojustice Class — a hands-on environmental justice curriculum for gr. 6-8 — since 2014. But much to the frustration of the teachers, there has never been a written curriculum for the class — until now.

Here’s the general curriculum plan for Ecojustice Class. There should be enough material there to fill approximately two dozen sessions over the course of a school year.

However, you won’t find a completely scripted curriculum, because that’s just not possible due to the nature of the program. This is a hands-on curriculum that gets the participants outdoors as much as possible. That means you have to have back-up plans in case weather doesn’t allow you outdoors. And you have to adjust the program to your specific climate and seasons.

I still have a few more successful lesson plans that I haven’t had time to put online yet. So expect minor upgrades to the curriculum over the next few months.

(And thanks to the many talented Ecojustice Class teachers who contributed to the class over the years, including Carol Steinfeld, Francesca Finch, Emma Grant-Bier, Ed Vail, Lorraine Kostka, Buzz Frahn, Mark Erickson, and others. I’m especially grateful to Francesca and Emma, who grew up taking the class and then went on to teach it.)