Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
“…In large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.”
— James Weldon Johnson in his autobiography Along This Way, 1933. Although Johnson was discussing his work at the NAACP fighting lynching, in large part this observation still holds true today (and, by the way, provides a self-interested reason for some of us white people to be involved in anti-racism work).
Marco Rubio is an ass. I say this both as a philosophy major, and as someone who has worked with his hands for a living.
In Tuesday’s Republican debate, Rubio stated, “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” Let’s take that first pronouncement first. Forbes.com researched the statement, and when the compared teachers of philosophy with welders, they found that philosophers earn more than welders. So Rubio is wrong.
But let’s assume that Rubio is talking about anyone with a philosophy degree. My graduating class in college had about 50 philosophy majors. The majority of them went to to law school; an undergraduate degree in philosophy was then a well-respected pre-law degree because philosophy gave you experience in debate, critical thinking, reading lengthy and mind-numbingly boring texts, and putting up with incredible amounts of bullshit — all valuable skills for lawyers. Note that Rubio is in fact a lawyer, and probably is professionally close to more than one well-to-do philosophy major; he must know the value of philosophy training to lawyers. So it’s hard to know why he puts down philosophy majors, unless perhaps he is jealous of the superior legal skills of those with degrees in philosophy.
Now let’s look at this from the point of view of people who have actually worked with their hands for a living. Which, by the way, Rubio himself has never done. Welding is a great job, and recent jobs posted on the Jobs in Welding Web site include positions ranging from really creative jobs, e.g., welder to work on experimental and production welding — to straightforward production jobs, e.g., working as a boilermaker welder in a railroad maintenance facility. Yes, these are great jobs, but as with any job where you work with your hands, you have to worry about getting hurt, and you have to worry whether your body will physically hold up until retirement. Speaking as someone who spent five years working as a carpenter, I can tell you that these are non-trivial worries, and that because of this many manual labor jobs are far more stressful than white collar jobs. Furthermore, manual labor jobs are constantly in danger of being off-shored, out-sourced, or made obsolete by new technology (e.g., robots now perform many welding tasks; so-called manufactured homes are cheaper than stick-built homes; etc.) — and these dangers just add to the stress.
At this point, we could get into an interesting argument about whether Rubio’s economic priorities are more likely to help or hurt manual laborers, but let’s hold off for a moment. Let’s just say that I’d feel better about Rubio’s pronouncement if he knew what it was like to work with your hands, the constant worry about getting hurt, the seasonal lay-offs. Given that he is a soft-handed law school graduate who has always had cushy, white-collar jobs, his comment about philosophy majors and welders makes him come across as an ass.
I’m using “ass” in a philosophically precise sense, as a shorthand version of the more offensive word “asshole,” a word that has been precisely defined by philosopher Aaron James as someone who “is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people” (Assholes: A Theory, New York : Doubleday, 2013). While James’s book may be problematic in some areas, his definition of “asshole” is a good one. Since Marco Rubio comes across as having a great sense of entitlement, with no awareness of how other people perceive him, he fits James’s definition of an asshole, and it is in this sense that I call Rubio an ass.
So at this point, let’s look at Rubio’s second pronouncement: “We need more welders and less philosophers.” Sad to say, too many of our politicians are persons who, like Rubio, have become immunized to their sense of entitlement. As a philosophy and moral theologian, I would say that what the American political scene needs as much as anything is a healthy dose of humility and moral reflection — something that we philosophers are well-trained to supply. No wonder Rubio wants fewer philosophers: we are the ones who can point out that he’s being an ass, and tell him how to stop.
In summary, although we could use fewer people like Marco Rubio, we actually could use more of both welders and philosophers.
In the United States, all too often the phrase “religion in the public square” means someone accosting you and telling you that you should join their religion; so the meaning of the phrase becomes, “our religion is right and yours is wrong.” Or that same phrase can be used pejoratively to imply that all religious practice shouldb e kept out of public view; so the meaning of the phrase becomes, “all religion is wrong.” Either way, someone is imposing their own views on the rest of a democratic society.
But if ours is a truly multicultural democracy, we should allow space in the public square for a variety of worldviews, without letting any one worldview dominance over the others. This becomes a delicate balancing act. Literal or metaphorical shouting matches between religious worldviews don’t promote tolerance; mind you, sometimes you have to get into shouting matches to preserve the openness of the public square, as when we have to fight to limit Christmas displays on public property, but no one imagines that these shouting matches increase tolerance. So given that public religious expression is a delicate balancing act, what does it look like when you have an appropriate expression of a religious worldview in the public square?
Today I saw such an expression of a religious worldview in the public square, and it looked like a rented flatbed trailer with a sukkah built on top of it. The trailer was parked in front of the Jewish Learning Institute of San Francisco (JLISF), on Lombard Ave. right off busy Columbus Ave in the North Beach neighborhood. Carol and I walked by just as some people from JLISF were cleaning up from lunch. They were polite and friendly, and ready to explain that they were celebrating Sukkot, and what a sukkah was, and so on.
This is a good display of religion in the public square: present, but not intrusive; with friendly people who are ready to explain, but not berate.
(Posted the next day, and backdated.)
Think you know a lot about religion? Well, the Pew Research Center has developed a “U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz” where you can find out. The fifteen questions on the quiz test your knowledge of the Bible and of world religions. The online quiz is here.
After you take the online quiz (and find out how much you really do know), you’ll want to go on to read about the survey from which this quiz was extracted, the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.” Pew Research Center did a telephone survey in which they asked 32 religious knowledge questions of a random sample of U.S. residents. The average number of correct responses was 16 out of 32. Jews, atheists/agnostics, and Mormons scored best on this longer quiz. Scoring below average were white mainline Protestants, black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and “nothing in particular.”
There were so few Unitarian Universalists included in the sample that they are not included in the statistical analysis. How well would we perform? Sometime I’d like to administer either the shorter quiz, or the longer set of survey questions, to young people who have gone through a UU religious education program. How well have we done at teaching our children basic religious literacy? Since religious literacy is not the goal of most UU religious education programs, my guess is that our kids would only do well if their day school taught them this information. And how about us professional religious educators, how would we do on this quiz? I scored 100% on the quiz, but I’ve been working in UU congregations for two decades, during which time I earned my M.Div. degree — back in 1994, when I started working as a religious educator, my guess is that I would have scored between 50-75%. Finally, how about our ministers?
Do we care? — that is, should religious literacy be a goal of Unitarian Universalist religious education (and should it be a goal for our ministers and religious educators)? I’d argue that in order to be good U.S. and world citizens, we do need a basic level of religious literacy, and that Unitarian Universalists have always aimed to produce good citizens; yet there are very good reasons to disagree with making religious literacy an educational goal.
What do you think?
Here’s today’s lesson plan, as taught in the summer Sunday school program at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA), Calif. We had about a dozen children in gr. K-8. The lesson plan was written to engage the older children (gr. 5-8), in the expectation that the younger kids would do their best to follow the lead of the older kids; this worked quite well, so even though the conversation was over the heads of the kindergarteners, they followed along as best they could, and at least understood that we were talking about something very important.
One unexpected benefit of this lesson plan: While most of the children knew what “Ferguson” was, they were pretty hazy on the details of the events of August 9, 2014. Going over the story three different times helped reinforce details of that day in their memory.
Lesson plan
Credits
Goals and objectives
Theological background
Notes and resources
Thoughts for teachers
Why isn’t —— in this lesson plan?
During the Supreme Court argument session on Obergefell v. Hodges, according to the transcription, Justice Alito had the following exchange with Mary Bonauto, Esq., representing the petitioners:
JUSTICE ALITO: But there have been cultures that did not frown on homosexuality. That is not a universal opinion throughout history and across all cultures. Ancient Greece is an example. It was – it was well accepted within certain bounds. But did they have same-sex marriage in ancient Greece?
MS. BONAUTO: Yeah. They don’t – I don’t believe they had anything comparable to what we have, Your Honor. You know, and we’re talking about —
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, they had marriage, didn’t they?
MS. BONAUTO: Yeah, they had – yes. They had some sort of marriage.
[p. 14 of the official transcript]
I have some interest in ancient Greek thought, and so I’d like to stop right there for a moment. What sort of concept of marriage did the ancient Greeks have, and is it something we would look to as analogous to our present-day concept of marriage? Continue reading “Ancient Greek marriage laws and same-sex marriage”
I lose consciousness of ugly bestial raid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don’t
you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and
scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a “justifiable accident” again
(again)
That’s from June Jordan’s “Poem about Police Violence,” from way back in 1980. The poets have been telling about this for at least thirty five years, longer than a lot of you have been alive. And if we forgot (because who reads poetry any more), there was Oscar Grant. And Eric Garner. And now Freddie Gray.
June Jordan said:
People have been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I’m saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won
Didn’t Malcolm X say that back around 1960? And — OK, I hear you, violence is not the answer, and I agree with you on that one. But then what is the answer? Because we seem to be hearing the same old news again.
In the second breakout session of the Religious Education Association 2014 conference, I attended a combined colloquium. Wing Yu Alice Chan, a doctoral student at McGill University, presented work in progress under the title of “Can Religious Literacy Deter Religious Bullying?” Andrea Haith of Canterbury Christ Church University presented her work in progress under the title of “An Exploration of Religious Education Teachers’ Understandings of Religiously Inspired Violence and the Worldviews of Children in the Classroom.”
Chan presented a definition of religious literacy based on a definition by Diane Moore (2007), the ability to discuss and analyze the intersections o religion with society.
She next defined religious bullying as bullying on the basis of religious difference, including physical and psychological bullying, online bullying, etc. In a review of literature on religious bullying, she found research that indicates that religious bullying gets transmitted across generations. Furthermore, she found research that the aftereffects of religious bullying can lead to religious extremism.
At the moment, her research is focusing on two North American religious literacy programs in public schools: Quebec’s “Ethics and Religious Culture” program, and the “World Geography and World Religions” programs in modesto, California. These are the only two mandatory courses in religious literacy that she found in North America. In her research so far what is most prominent is the role of dialogue.
Her research methodology is outlined in her online prospectus here.
Andrea Haith is a teacher of religious education in the United Kingdom (U.K.). She began by saying that teaching religious education is extremely challenging, as the young people taking the courses “don’t see the point.” It is also challenging because “any discussion of Islam does evoke stereotypes.”
Haith said that the U.K. has complex legislation that implements religious education in the public schools. The challenge then is how to discuss religiously inspired violence within this framework. Her research focuses on the teaching of religiously inspired violence as it relates to religious education teaching more generally.
Her hypothesis is that religious education has become “sanitized,” in part because examination-focused learning outcomes may serve to distort the subject matter of religious education. Her research questions include:
— What is the nature of RE teacher’s understandings of religiously inspired violence?
— How are these understandings translated into teaching practice in the classrooms?
— Is there a relationship between teachers concepts of religiously inspired violence and their pedagogy?
Haith’s research project is outlined online here.
At the end of the two presentations, a questioner pointed out that a key issue is how we train teachers. Haith and Chan both agreed.
Another questioner pointed out that it is problematic to consider religious literacy out of any other context, and that religious literacy must be placed in a values-based context. Haith and Chan seemed less interested in this idea.
I asked a somewhat inarticulate question about the importance of students recognizing their own religious identity. Interestingly, in a later colloquium, I learned about the “worldview framework approach” in Mualla Selçuk and John Valk’s presentation “Journeying into Islam” (more on their research here); Selçuk and Valk’s worldview framework explicitly names religious identity as important.
I would say that I found both Haith and Chan’s research to be of great interest and importance. Chan’s research into the relationship between religious literacy and religious bullying could be especially valuable.
Yesterday, before I voted, I spent at least an hour doing some final research into the various candidates and ballot initiatives. The San Jose Mercury news and the San Francisco Chronicle had offered a reasonable amount of coverage of California ballot initiatives, and of the more prominent statewide elections. I already had most of the information I needed to cast my vote. Nevertheless, I went to the League of Women Voters (LWV) Web site to review information about those initiatives and candidates.
News media had offered very little coverage of county elections, like the contentious San Mateo Harbor District Commission elections, and very little coverage of minor state elections, like the elections for Board of Equalization Members. Again, the LWV Web site was invaluable — e.g., it pointed me to an online video of a LWV forum with most of the Harbor District Commission candidates.
In the end, I was able to make what I felt were reasonably informed decisions on most of the candidates and initiatives. But I also realized that I had not spent enough time really learning about the issues and candidates. I should have attended candidate forums for local elections. I should have spent more time learning about statewide elections. Democracy takes time, and I did not put in enough time. And these days, I think political advertisements are so full of lies and innuendo that each time you see or hear one should count as negative time spent on learning the issues — which means spending even more time actually learning about issues and candidates.
Today, I was reading Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and came across this quotation from Thomas Jefferson: “If once [our people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves.”
Is that howling I hear in the distance?
P. G. Wodehouse, a novelist of ideas? How absurd!
And it is true that most of his dozens of novels are bits of fluff, with no more intellectual content than the brain of Bertie Wooster, one of his most famous characters. But in some of his earlier novels, Wodehouse occasionally gets philosophical — as in this passage from the 1918 novel Picadilly Jim, where Jimmy, the wealthy twenty-something protagonist, comes to the sudden and unpleasant realization that he has been pretty self-centered for much of his adult life:
“…Life had suddenly taken on a less simple aspect. Dimly, for he was not accustomed to thinking along these lines, he perceived the numbing truth that we human beings are merely as many pieces in a jig-saw puzzle, and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of a civic spirit have come to prehistoric man. We are all individualists till we wake up.” [chapter 6]
Of course, Wodehouse was writing nearly a century ago. We have progressed further in the development of civic spirit since then: the jig-saw puzzles of the wealthy and the rest of the world are no longer connected to one another. If he were alive today, Jimmy could enjoy his wealth without having ever to wake up.
