Category: Arts & culture

Bragging

Carol, my sweetheart, has an article in the latest issue of Mother Earth News on recycling human waste. And before you ask, let me provide some answers: (1) Yes, Carol does use urine to fertilize our vegetable garden. (2) No, we don’t have a composting toilet of our own; we rent, and landlords generally don’t like renters to install a composting toilet. (3) Yes, we do celebrate Pee on Earth Day on June 21. (4) Yes, it’s easy to buy Carol’s books, thank you for asking.

Update: Please note that the phrase “Poo Pioneer” was not something Carol wrote; it was added by an editor. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone would put the phrase “poo pioneer” in print, but Mother Earth News is not the magazine it once was.

Another stupid UU joke

The Unitarian Universalist was out in his boat fishing when suddenly the Loch Ness Monster rose up out of the lake and attacked his boat. The Loch Ness Monster grabbed the bow of the boat in its huge mouth, flipped the Unitarian Universalist way up into the air, and opened its mouth wide, prepared to catch the guy in its mouth and eat him.

As the Unitarian Universalist fell towards that huge mouth filled with sharp teeth, without thinking he said, “Oh my God, help me!” Suddenly time froze. As the guy hung there in mid-air, a huge voice boomed out, “I thought you didn’t believe in a personal God on whom you could call in times of crisis!”

“Hey, give me a break, God,” said the Unitarian Universalist. “A minute ago I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, either.”

Because someone asked…

Yes, I sing Sacred Harp music every week in Berkeley. Yes, beginners are welcome. And a great place to check out this wild, raucous, loud, centuries-old genre of indigenous American music is the upcoming all-day singing on Saturday, April 23, in Berkeley — the 7th Annual Golden Gate All-Day-Singing. I know of several beginners who will be singing with us on April 23 — plus a former lead singer of a grunge-core band, a Grammy-award winning singer of medieval music, a K-6 music teacher, a church organist, a singer-songwriter, a couple of old folkies, two or three academics, and several dozen ordinary people.

Next up…

What is it with religious liberals and Garrison Keillor? So many religious liberals seem to believe he walks on water, even more than they believe that of Mary Oliver. They don’t like him because Keillor is a religious liberal himself, because he obviously isn’t. Is it because so many religious liberals have a strongly ambivalent attitude towards organized religion, and Keillor is notorious for his own ambivalent attitude towards religion? After all, when it comes to religion, Keillor is sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes nostalgic, and sometimes frankly affectionate, just like religious liberals.

Perhaps Keillor’s own ambivalence towards institutional religion makes so many religious liberals like him so much. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that I don’t care for him. Keillor strikes me as misanthropic, he has that weird affected accent, and his Lake Woebegone stories are such shameless rip-offs of Stephen Leacock’s wonderful early twentieth century stories of small-town life in the prairie provinces of Canada,— except Keillor’s stories are not as well-observed, nor as humane, nor are they nearly so funny.

Let me put it this way: the great Groucho Marx admired the comic genius of Stephen Leacock. Groucho Marx did not, however, admire the comic genius of Garrison Keillor. Nothing more need be said.

Noted with comment

In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, David Orr provides snide commentary on a special poetry issue of O: The Oprah Magazine. Along the way, he offers the following snarky assessment of Mary Oliver’s poetry:

Roughly a fifth of the coverage [in O magazine] is devoted to Mary Oliver, about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.

Now I know why my fellow religious liberals seem to like her poetry so much: it’s the equivalent of cage-free or free-range eggs.

Diana Wynne Jones: an appreciation

The Official Diana Wynne Jones Web site reports that the well-known fantasy author died yesterday. She was best known as a “young adult” author, meaning that her books were marketed to early teens, that many of her characters were teenagers, and that her books were actually driven by character and plot rather than literary experimentation. I think of Diana Wynne Jones as an author who was concerned with religion, and not just because of her fantasy series The Dalemark Quartet, which remains my favorite fictional creation story — richer than the thinly-disguised Christian creation story of Narnia, more morally complex than the bombast of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

Jones herself was confused by the contradictions of ordinary dogmatic Western Christianity. At the age of nine, she had a hard time making sense out of the Anglicanism in which she was raised:

“There I sat [in York Minister cathedral], wrestling with the notion that Heaven Is Within You (not in me, I thought, or I’d know) and of Christ dying for our sins. I stared at the crucifix, thinking how very much being crucified must hurt, and was perturbed that, even with this special treatment, religion was not, somehow, taking on me. (I put it this way to myself because I had baptism and vaccination muddled, like germs and Germans.) “Autobiography” on Official Diana Wynne Jones Web site.

By the age of about ten, she cut through the Gordian knot of mid-20th century Anglicanism in a straightforward way: “I settled my religious muddles by deciding that I had better be an atheist.” Yet for all her atheism, religious and moral questions are integral to her books. At the most superficial level, the Dalemark Quartet is filled with a richly-imagined ancient paganism. Others of her books include organized religion as little more than part of the social landscape, but at a deeper level a sense of awe and wonder at the universe, which is the most basic of religious responses, pervades her books. She also wrestles over and over again with yet another basic religious issue — why is there chaos, and why is there order in the universe?

Many religious liberals rave about the atheist fiction of another young adult author, Phillip Pullman. But Pullman has always struck me as heavy-handed and strident in his atheism. I’d much rather read Diana Wynne Jones. Her fictional universes explore what it’s like to live in a universe where there is no god or goddess who’s going to bail us out if we get in trouble. At the same time, in her universes human beings do not stand at the center of everything; that would make things far too simple. In her universes, there isn’t one correct answer to each moral question; moral choices are difficult and often painful; and in her fictional universes one’s moral choices can make a huge difference to oneself and to others. This is the kind of morality that I would like to present to young adults — or to adults, for that matter.

If Girl Scouts are doing it, will congregations be next?

200 Girl Scout troops in Ohio now take credit cards for cookies. One council reported a 20% increase in sales once they started using GoPayment, a little gadget that attaches to a smart phone, takes your money, and sends a receipt to your email address. Here’s a video from the Associated Press showing how they do it. And if you’re wondering how much it costs the Girl Scouts to take payment this way, here’s the scoop from a print version of this AP article:

Intuit, the Mountain View-based company that manufactures GoPayment, charges a small fee per transaction and offers various pricing plans to customers based on sale volume…. Intuit charges the Girl Scouts its lowest rate, at 1.6 percent plus 15 cents per transaction. Most customers pay 2.7 percent per transaction. [San Mateo County Times, 26 March 2011, p. A2]

As fewer and fewer people carry ready cash, this is an obvious way for the Girl Scouts to try to increase sales. But would it work for congregations who pass the collection plate in their services? If you watch the video, it’s obvious the transaction would take too long for the average offertory. It might possibly work for bake sales, rummage sales, ticket sales and the like, but my guess is that the cost is too high and the sales volume too low to make it worthwhile. If congregations want to fight their way out of the dark ages of cash transactions, my guess is that we’re going to have to change the way we do things — but I don’t know what that’s going to look like.

Sacred Harp at GA?

Scott Wells, at Boy in the Bands, poses an excellent question regarding the upcoming General Assembly (GA) of Unitarian Universalists: “What might we show or teach one another in the hallways and cafés of Charlotte?”

My answer: I really want to share some Sacred Harp singing at GA. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s “theologically incorrect,” but it’s rockin good music that draws in punk rockers — Grammy-winning performers of medieval music — avant-garde sound artists — young urbanites — folkies — and just ordinary people like you. This is whatreal hymn singing sounds like: loud, raucous, unrestrained, by turns mournful and ecstatic.

I kinda doubt there will be many Sacred Harp singers at GA, but if you’re one, let me know, and let’s see if we can set something up.

Limits of entrepreneurial endeavor

In the most recent issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, Johan van de Gronden, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands, says that markets are not capable of solving all the world’s problems:

As change agents, we’d do well to seek inspiration beyond the language of business and entrepreneurship…. Suggesting that sufficient entrepreneurial tools and practices will solve most of society’s ailments is a category mistake. It comes with the tacit assumption that society is better off when social entrepreneurs replace the many functions of government. This is the classic fallacy of development aid. When NGOs start delivering the services that many poor governments can’t deliver, they involuntarily aggravate the problem rather than build a solution. Governments spiral into a starvation cycle. If citizens cannot hold government accountable for basic services, for the proper spending of the collective revenue for the public good, then on what grounds would they favor one government over the other in the polls? And what reasons would citizens have to pursue a government career?

It seems to me that some of these characteristics are not alien to, say, the state of California. The world’s eight largest economy and home to some of the planet’s wealthiest individuals is barely capable of running a balanced state budget, while providing a minimum of basic and affordable services to its citizens, from health care to public schooling. There is tragic irony in this, as some of the world’s most generous foundations, finest NGOs, and best universities are part of the same societal fabric. And I think there is a correlation. When we place so much emphasis on the values of entrepreneurship to the extent that we start defining the poor quality of basic services as market failures, we may begin to think that the conception of a business plan in the mother of all solutions.

— Johan van de Gronden, “It takes three to tango: a European perspective on American civil society,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, spring, 2011, p. 23.

The peculiar American proclivity for insisting that markets provide solutions for all problems does interesting things to liberal religious congregations. This proclivity forces those of us in congregations to adopt entrepreneurial approaches in order to remain in existence, because we have to compete in the market with extraordinarily well-funded and well-supported alternatives, such as large market-driven conservative mega-churches that preach the gospel of prosperity, the entertainment industry, therapists, yoga studios, etc. In the same vein, this American proclivity also affects the expectations of those of us in congregations, such that we demand the constant innovation of products and services that is characteristic of American markets.

Those of us in liberal religious congregations have to carry an essentially impossible balancing act. We have to utilize the best resources of entrepreneurial endeavor, not just to thrive, but to survive; and as the years go by, we have to rely more and more on entrepreneurial endeavor. At the same time, we would be betraying our ethical and theological ideals if we go too far down the market-driven path of the prosperity gospel (“Come to church, build a purpose-driven life, and you will find financial success!”), or if we began to believe that the markets are more important than our historic ethical and theological ideals. This is a big part of the basic challenge facing liberal religion today.