Month: September 2024

The meaning of life

Still recovering from a mild concussion. As the brain fog clears, I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett, one of the great philosophical novelists of the early twentieth century. In an introduction to a collection of Hammett’s stories, Steven Marcus discusses the famous “Flitcraft parable,” contained in The Maltese Falcon, in which a man named Flitcraft is almost killed by a falling beam. His narrow escape from death causes Flitcraft to completely abandon his old life, but within five years he has settled down to almost exactly the same life, just in another city with another wife. Marcus writes:

[The parable] is about among other things is the ethical irrationality of existence, the ethical unintelligibility of the world. For Flitcraft the falling beam ‘had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.’ The works are that life is inscrutable, opaque, irresponsible, and arbitrary — that human existence does not correspond in its actuality to the way we live it. For most of us live as if existence itself were ordered, ethical, and rational. As a direct result of his realization in experience that it is not, Flitcraft leaves his wife4 and children and goes off. He acts irrationally and at random, in accordance with the nature of existence. When after a couple of years of wandering aimlessly about he decides to establish a new life, he simply reproduces the old one he had supposedly repudiated and abandoned; that is, he behaves again as if life were orderly, meaningful, and rational, and ‘adjusts’ to it…. Here we come upon the unfathomable and most mysteriously irrational part of it all — how despite everything we have learned and everything we know, [humans] will persist in behaving and trying to behave sanely, rationally, sensibly, and responsibly. And we will continue to persist even when we know that there is no logical or metaphysical, no discoverable or demonstrable reason for doing so…. The contradiction is not ethical alone; it is metaphysical as well….”

So, what’s the meaning of life according to Hammett? There isn’t any, except what you make.

What they’re doing now…

Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations bemoaning the long slow decline of UU World magazine, the denominational magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Ongoing budget cuts at the UUA have cut many departments, and UU World is no exception. In the past two decades, staff has been cut, print publication has dropped from six times a year to twice a year, and online publication is less frequent.

UU World may have hit its peak as a glossy publication in the 2000s. Chris Walton, one of the sharpest commentators on the UU scene, was on the editorial staff (Chris later became editor of the publication), while the editor-in-chief was Tom Stites, a long-time journalist who had been part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. Chris started his own design business. But what happened to Tom Stites?

I happened to run across Tom Stites when I was researching an upcoming series of sermons on challenges to democracy. It turns out that Stites is now the president of the Banyan Project, a nonprofit organization working to create community new outlets based on a coop-ownership model. It’s an ambitious project — they’ve even designed a new software platform for community news outlets based on a coop model.

This is a super interesting project. The demise of local newspapers remains one of the biggest challenges to democracy in the United States today — just as the echo chambers of social media remain one of the biggest threats to democracy today. If you live in a local news desert, it’s very hard to learn what’s going on in local government, and very hard to make informed decisions as a voter and as a citizen. A coop model may not work for every news desert, but at this point we need as many options as possible — anything that can help to eradicate news deserts is A Good Thing.

Definitely worth taking a look at the Banyan Project website.

The sermon that split a congregation, part two

In an earlier post, I published the first of a series of two sermons preached by Rev. Jacob Flint here in Cohasset in December, 1823. In these sermons, Flint proclaimed publicly that he supported the Unitarian side of the Unitarian / Trinitarian controversy then raging through eastern Massachusetts churches of the Standing Order. Not surprisingly, once their minister openly espoused Unitarianism, the Trinitarian sympathizers in the congregation left to form their own Trinitarian church.

I’m finally getting around to publishing the second sermon, the one that Flint preached in the afternoon. I can’t help wondering how the Trinitarian sympathizers responded after hearing the first sermon, the one in the morning. Did they gather together during the lunch break to talk? Did some of them refuse to return for the afternoon sermon? If they did return, were they angry as they sat there listening to their minister tell them that their cherished theological beliefs were irrational, non-Biblical, and even unchristian? And how did the Unitarian sympathizers in the congregation feel? — were they perhaps relieved that at last their minister came out and stated openly the beliefs that probably everyone in the small town of Cohasset knew he held?

It turns out to be a fairly well written sermon. Today’s Unitarian Christians might even find it to be of mild theological interest.

But I suspect most of the interest this sermon holds today is its historical interest. It’s a sermon that cause an open rupture between Unitarians and Trinitarians in one small town. It is in a sense a microcosm of the larger theological and institutional battle raging through organized religion in eastern Massachusetts. Flint was not arguing about abstract theological issues; he was arguing with people that he knew well, people he saw every day. His sermon might even cause us to reflect on the power of words and the power of thought, and how words and thought can lead to open conflict and (according to tradition) acrimony as well.

Original page breaks are noted in square brackets, like this: [p. 14]. Footnotes from the original have been numbered and placed as endnotes. A few editorial notes have been included, always enclosed in square brackets.

Read Part I.

Discourse in which the Doctrine of the Trinity is examined…

by Jacob Flint (Christian Register: Boston, 1824).

Image of the original title page

[p. 11] PART II

[1] Thes[salonians] v. 21. — “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

The Scriptures, given by inspiration of God, contain, as I attempted to show you in the morning, a system of doctrines and morals admirable for their simplicity and truth, and a most necessary guide for men to faith, duty, and happiness. They are in the highest degree profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. But I had to remark, that unhappily for the peace of society, and good will of christians towards each other, these sacred writings had not long been in the hands of fallible and and erring mortals, before they were made to teach, for doctrines, the inventions and commandments of men. These inventions, or spurious doctrines, became the source of almost endless dispute, animosity and persecution among christians. For these dreadful effects, however, there is no blame that can justly be attached to the gospel, because that every where inculcates forbearance, charity, and good will in all men.

Continue reading “The sermon that split a congregation, part two”