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REA: “Cross-cultural Analysis” and “Sabbath as Post-Christian Ed”

On Friday afternoon at the Religious Education Association 2014 conference, I attended a colloquium with two presenters: Courtney Goto ofBoston University presented “Troubling Cross-Cultural Analysis in Healing the Effects of Racism,” and Jonathan LeMaster-Smith, doctoral student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, presented on “Sabbath as Post-Christian Education: The (De)valuing of Rural Working-Class Persons as Liberation from Socio-Economic Disposability.”

Goto told us that she was presenting work in progress, and what she was going to present differed from the outline on the conference meeting Web site. She is working on two case studies, comparing the way two different cultural communities use aesthetic practices to form people theologically, aesthetically, and culturally.

Her first case study is of Lithuanian rituals on All Saints Day, during which families place candles and decorations at the grave sites of deceased family members. Her second case study is of an All Saints Day ritual at the Sacramento Japanese United Methodist Church.

Since Lithuanians and Japanese Americans are people on the margins, Goto’s research will use the concept of “social death” to explore these two case studies. Social death happens when a group of people is treated as nonpersons by the dominant culture. Examples of victims of social death include Jews during the Holocaust, native Americans in the U.S., etc. Both Japanese Americans and Lithuanians were victims of social death before and during the Second World War. Both communities use All Saints Day to hold rituals which serve as a response to trauma.

Of particular interest to me were the slides that Goto showed of an All Saints Day art installation in the Sacramento Japanese United Methodist Church. 26 yukata (a type of traditional Japanese clothing) were hung from from the ceiling of the sanctuary; another yukata clothed the usually plaint cross at the front of the church. The symbolism — how this art installation represents the way Japanese Americans were treated during the years of internment — was explained during services, in orders of services, etc. I felt this was a powerful example of all-ages religious education in a congregation.

Jonathan LeMaster-Smith spoke about another marginalized group, rural white working class persons. He is in the process of investigating ways to do religious education around the Sabbath in a post-Christian rural working class context. “One possible pedagogical practice is the observance of Sabbath,” LeMaster-Smith said — but not Sabbath in the traditional sense of a day of rest on Sunday (or Saturday).

Rather, LeMaster-Smith wants to ways the concept of Sabbath could be incorporated into popular culture rituals such as, for example, a Hallowe’en bonfire. (One of the participants later pointed out the obvious parallels between the Lithuanian popular culture ritual on All Saints Day described by Goto.) LeMaster-Smith said he saw potential in finding Sabbath-type observances in existing holiday celebrations.

A draft of Lemaster-Smith’s paper is online here. I saw a great deal of potential in this idea of translating the old observance of Sabbath into current post-Christian celebrations. Indeed, I believe some churches and faith communities are already on this path, e.g., many non-Hispanic congregations are incorporating Dias de los Muertos into Sunday services. LeMaster-Smith is simply asking faith communities to take this kind of thing outside the walls of the church building, out into the community. It seems to me that powerful things could happen at the intersection of pop culture and post-Christian religion.

Join the elite

Those of us who are religious progressives continue to try to understand conservative Christianity in the United States, and more specifically to understand how a religious option that asserts the leadership of Jesus of Nazareth also seems to advocate for consumerism, individualism, and intolerance.

I’ve spent some time learning about the theology of the prosperity gospel, so I feel that I have some sense of how conservative Christians can support consumerism and individualism — and honestly, conservative Christians aren’t very different from many religious moderates and progressives in the U.S. If you live in the U.S., it’s hard not to see consumer capitalism and individualism as normative.

But I have had a harder time understanding premillennial dispensationalism. That’s the theological position that there will be a Rapture, at which time a select few persons will be raptured away by Jesus Christ to be the Bride of Christ. The best known pop culture representations of remillennial dispensationalism is probably the “Left Behind” series of books and movies; a reboot of the movie series just came out, starring Nicholas Cage. And most of us religious progressives stop with the pop culture representations of premillennial dispeansationalism. But a closer look at premillennial dispensationalism is worth our time.

On recent post at the Sojourners Web site, Dr. LeAnn Snow Flesher points out that premillennial dispensationalism is “an elitist theology”: a few people get raptured, the rest of us don’t because the rest of us are disposable. This helps explain why premillennial dispensationalism is compatible with the prosperity gospel, that is, with theologies of economics that privilege the few at the expense of the many.

Flesher goes on to point out how premillennial dispensationalism is compatible with intolerance:

“The entire doctrinal belief system necessitates a separatist perspective and lifestyle, an emphasis on individual salvation, and adherence to a homogeneous set of doctrinal beliefs. It does not in any way foster tolerance for an interracial, intercultural, and interfaith context, and certainly has no tolerance for many of the social issues we struggle with in our nation and world today.”

It’s worth reading Flesher’s complete post here.

Link to Flesher’s post from @anglobaptist.

Adventures in solar cooking

Yesterday in Sunday school, two groups of kids started making solar ovens. While they were working, we had solar s’mores cooking in the solar oven I made on Saturday. However, it took a long time for the solar s’mores to cook. First problem: the morning clouds didn’t begin to clear until halfway through Sunday school. Second problem: thin clouds persisted most of the morning, and even the thinnest of clouds caused the temperature to drop at least ten degrees inside the oven. We started cooking the s’mores at about 10:00, and they weren’t really done until just before noon — after most of the kids had already gone home.

The clouds finally cleared away completely, and I left the solar oven outside my office for several hours in the early afternoon. The inside temperature rose to over 200 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees is as high as the meat thermometer goes), with outside air temperature in the high 70s. I heated up a mug of water, to over 170 degrees, and made a nice cup of tea. While I was making tea, Fred Z., from the Green Sanctuary Committee, stopped by and suggested trying cast iron cookware in the oven — it’s dark and absorbs heat well, plus it provides a good thermal mass to even out cooking temperature.

So this morning I dug out a small cast iron frying pan, and decided to try cooking a fried egg in the solar oven. The air temperature was about 65 degrees, but in spite of clear skies I couldn’t get the inside temperature over 190 degrees — which suggests I need better insulation in the oven. I cooked a fried egg, over easy:

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It took about twenty minutes, and was really more of an egg baked in butter than it was a fried egg (it tasted good, though); obviously there is a lot more to be done to improve the efficiency of the oven.

Solar oven prototype

Tomorrow, the middle school ecojustice class in Sunday school is going to make solar ovens. So of course I had to make a prototype:

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I started with a basic design made out of carboard boxes, a design that is sometimes called the “Minimum Solar Box Cooker.” But instead of just nesting one smaller box inside another box, I took the smaller box, cut out the ends, and turned it 45 degrees:

While this reduces the amount of cooking space inside the oven, it also reduces the amount of air that has to be heated. And then, too, it’s easy to run a couple of dowels through the inner box to make a support for a cooking pot.

In preliminary tests, the oven worked reasonably well. I set the oven out at 2:45 p.m., stuck a meat thermometer in one end of the oven, and within twenty minutes, the thermometer was reading between 190 and 200 degrees F. (the thermometer only goes up to 200). At about 3:10, I put in a cup of water in a glass container. By 3:40, the water temperature was 155 degrees F., and the glass container was more like 190 degrees F. (Air temperature is 75 degrees F. this afternoon.)

Tomorrow comes the real test: we’ll set the oven out at the beginning of Sunday school and see how quickly we can make solar s’mores.

Update, one year on: This solar oven prototype proved to be only marginally effective. After using it fairly extensively, it has one big problem: when you open the lid, much of the hot air escapes; there is very little thermal mass, aside from the heated air. At the very least, I need to provide a significant thermal mass (preferably black in color, to better absorb heat). In addition, it would make sense to place the door low on one side of the oven, to minimize the loss of heated air.

A sphinx puzzle

I’ve been researching a lesson plan for an upper elementary lesson on Oedipus and the Sphinx. This research led me to a mathematical game or puzzle involving sphinxes.

The “sphinx” of this puzzle is a five-sided figure, made up of six equilateral triangles:

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This pentagon is called a sphinx because it looks a little like the giant Egyptian Sphinx at Giza — see below. In the image below, you can see that unlike the Greek Sphinx, the Egyptian Sphinx did not have wings. However, in spite of this difference, the Greeks traced the origins of their Sphinx back to Egyptian Sphinxes.

The interesting thing about the sphinx shape is that you can make larger sphinxes using smaller sphinxes (alternatively, you can dissect a larger sphinx into smaller copies of itself, though from a practical puzzle standpoint that’s difficult). Here’s how to try this out yourself. Below is a printable sheet of sphinx shapes that you can print onto heavy paper to be cut out:

Click here for a PDF of sphinx shapes for cutting out

OK, print out at least two sheets of the above PDF. Now here are several sphinx puzzles for you:

(1) Cut out 4 sphinx shapes to start, and make 1 larger sphinx shape from those 4. When you complete this puzzle, you have made a Size 2 Sphinx.

(2) Cut out a total of 16 sphinx shapes, and now make Size 4 Sphinx. (If you think about it for a moment, you should see an easy way to do this.)

(3) Making a Size 4 Sphinx was pretty easy, right? Now make a Size 3 Sphinx.

OK, those are the basic Sphinx puzzles. You’ve seen how smaller sphinxes can be made into larger sphinxes (or, conversely, how a larger sphinx may be dissected into smaller copies of itself). But this is just the beginning. If you want to keep going, here are some more challenges:

(4) We already said that making a Size 4 Sphinx is easy. But supposedly there are a total of 16 ways to make a Size 4 Sphinx. Can you find all 16 ways? (I have not yet done this.) Hmm, is there a proof to show that there are only 16 ways? (I have no idea!)

(5) Oh, and by the way, there are 4 different ways to make a Size 3 Sphinx. Can you find all 4? (I found this relatively easy.) Hmm, what about a proof showing there are only 4 ways? (Again, no idea!)

(6) It takes 4 sphinx shapes to make a Size 2 Sphinx; it takes 9 sphinx shapes to make a Size 3 Sphinx; it takes 16 sphinx shapes to make a Size 4 Sphinx. Do you care to predict how many sphinx shapes it takes to make a Size 5 Sphinx? (Easy.) Now try to make a Size 5 Sphinx. (Warning: not easy!)

(7) While you are at it, how about making a Size 6 Sphinx? And then can you make a Size 7 Sphinx?

(8) It’s easy to make a Size 8 Sphinx. That’s a lot of pieces to cut out, though — you can cheat by drawing 4 smaller sphinx shapes onto each sphinx shape. Will this technique help you make a Size 5 Sphinx? (Not really, but…) If not, what about making other shapes that can be subdivided into sphinx shapes — will that help? (For what it’s worth, one mathematician used this approach to try to prove how many different solutions there are to the Size 5 Sphinx.)

(9) There is 1 way of making a Size 2 Sphinx. There are 4 ways to make a Size 3 Sphinx; there are 16 ways of making a Size 4 Sphinx. Can you figure out how many ways there are to make a Size 5 Sphinx? (Warning: this is a problem that has challenged professional mathematicians, and to the best of my knowledge no one has proved how many solutions there are to a Size 5 Sphinx.)

There are still more puzzles and challenges to be found in the sphinx. You can find lots of them at the Mathematics Centre of Australia — click here.

The sphinx is one example of a rep-tile (self-replicating tiling), a polygon that can be dissected into smaller copies of itself. In shape, a sphinx is a pentagonal hexiamond (i.e., it has 5 sides, and it is made up by sticking 6 triangles together); further, it is an asymmetric rep-tile, since it comes in both left-handed and right-handed varieties and you need both varieties to dissect a sphinx. Note that a sphinx can be dissected into 4, or 9, or 25, or … copies of itself. According to the too-brief and not-entirely-accurate article at Wikipedia, the sphinx is the only (known?) pentagonal rep-tile.

Beyond this, I am getting in over my head. I think if the Sphinx had asked Oedipus to solve all 150+ Size 5 Sphinxes, he would have failed, she would have gobbled him up, and she would still be sitting outside Thebes terrorizing the city. Having said that, I would love to hear from you if you are a mathematician who can correct any errors I may made.

Pee on Earth Day 2014

Pee on Earth Day is an annual holiday designed to remind us that we are an integral part of the water cycle. Pee on Earth Day is celebrated on the first day of summer (June 21 for the northern hemisphere), since it is likely to be warmest then, and we don’t want to freeze any delicate bits.

I just celebrated Pee on Earth Day. It is somewhat challenging to do so in an urban setting. Let’s just say I waited until dark, and now there is a very happy plum tree.

This is what chaos looks like

Today was the first day of Peace Camp at the San Jose UU Church. One of the things we did today was to play non-competitive games (of course). All kids who live here on the Peninsula seem to know a game they call Chaos Tag. This quickly became the favorite Peace Camp game. It’s fast, frenetic, it takes skill to play well but it can be played with pleasure by mixed age groups, from 5 to adults — a perfect game for a peace camp.

This is what Chaos Tag looks like:

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I’m interested in the fact that this game is such a big part of of kids’ folklore here on the Peninsula. Every kid I’ve met from San Jose to Atherton seems to know and and love this game, and they’ll play for hours. (However, when I worked at the Berkeley UU church a decade ago, I don’t remember kids ever playing Chaos Tag; and one of the young adults on Peace Camp staff who grew up in the East Bay knew the game with slightly different rules under the name “Everybody’s It.”) I’m fascinated with the way this non-competitive game has sunk so deeply into Peninsula kids’ culture — how much they enjoy it, how hard and how long they play.

Sometimes education is a matter of finding out that the kids are already doing the right thing, and then telling them to do more of it.

(Note on the photo above: We do have media releases for the kids in Peace Camp, but nevertheless I deliberately blurred facial features in the photo above to preserve anonymity.)

Questions for discussion

Driving home from the youth service trip yesterday, we were delayed by a major accident on I-5; what should have been a six-hour trip turned into a nine-hour trip. We spent a lot of time talking, and one of the more interesting conversations was a long discussion of the Harry Potter universe.

Here are some of the questions we discussed (spoiler alert: plot twists are revealed in these questions):

(1) J.K. Rowling has said she thought of Dumbledore as being gay, but when she started publishing the books it wouldn’t do to have GLBTQ characters in books aimed at young people. We speculated that other characters might actually be GLBT or Q. Question for discussion: Which characters did you picture as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning, and why?

(2) At the end of the series, we learn that Harry marries Ginny. There has been, of course, lots of online discussion about whether Harry should have married Hermione. But Harry could also have married one of the minor characters, instead of one of the central characters. Question for discussion: If Harry had to marry one of the minor characters, which one would he marry, and why?

(3) Final question for discussion: If you could be any character or creature in the Harry Potter universe, which one would you be?

D-Day

Today is the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Nazi-controlled Normandy by Allied forces.

My dad was a ground-based radio operator in the 437th Troop Carrier Group. An article on the U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command Web site — “437th Airlift Wing honors its history,” written on the occasion of the last reunion of the 437th TCG in 2012 — tells a little about what the 437th did on D-Day:

“The 437th TCG, flying C-47 Skytrain transport units, played a vital role during the early morning hours of D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the remainder of World War II. During the Normandy campaign, the group towed and released glider planes, as well as carried troops, weapons, ammunition, rations and other supplies for the 82nd Airborne Division.” (More history of the 437th is available on this military history Web page.)

Radio operators like Dad provided a communication link to the C-47s flying missions, including high-frequency (HF) radio direction finding assistance. Although strict radio silence was observed at the beginning of each of the four missions flown during the D-Day actions, on the return trip, planes that were in trouble could radio in and ask for a bearing to help them return to the airbase.

Dad said the 437th TCG began flying before midnight on D-Day, dropping paratroopers at Sainte-Mère-Église. Later during the invasion, the 437th TCG also towed gliders full of troops. Something on the order of a hundred planes flew each mission on D-Day. When he wasn’t on duty as a radio operator, Dad said he stood out on the flight line, counting the planes that were in formation waiting to land, seeing how many made it back. The 437th TCG only lost a few planes; by contrast, the 434th TCG lost something like half its planes.

According to the “Friends of the WW2 437th Troop Carrier Group” Facebook page, a couple of former members of that unit are in England right now for the 70th anniversary of D-Day — you can see pictures on the Friends of 437th TCG Facebook page.

The other May Day

Around the world, except in the United States, May Day is International Workers Day. This is odd, because May Day commemorates something that happened in the United States.

On May 1, 1886, some 350,000 workers went out on strike across the U.S., although the strike was centered in Chicago, where 80,000 workers marched along Michigan Avenue. This May Day strike was the culmination of a movement to obtain an eight-hour day for workers. All the railroads that went into Chicago, the major rail center in the country, stopped running. Many industries through the U.S. were paralyzed.

Generally speaking, the May 1 strike was peaceful. But on May 3, there was violence at the McCormick Harvester plant in Chicago. The workers there had been shut out of the plant, and scabs brought in. The workers were holding a rally outside the plant when police charged them, shooting into the crowd and killing six.

The violence escalated the next day, May 4, at rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago, that was called to protest the violence at the McCormick plant. The mayor of Chicago attended the rally, and there were hours of peaceful speeches by labor leaders. Late in the evening, the police decided to march into Haymarket Square and order the crowd to peaceably disperse. The leaders of the rally pointed out that were already peaceful. At this point, someone threw a bomb. Later, the newspapers and the city government, all of whom had an anti-labor bias, claimed that the rally’s organizers must must be held responsible for the bombing, though there was no evidence linking them to it.

Eight organizers of the labor rally, although seven of them weren’t even present at the time of the riot, were arrested on charges of murder. Civic leaders and the newspapers whipped up public sentiment against the eight organizers. Since many of the workers involved were immigrants, much of the media’s ire was directed at “foreigners.” No one seems to have mentioned the fact that the police marched on a peaceful political assembly, something that is supposedly protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

All eight organizers of the rally were convicted, and seven of them were condemned to death. One of these last committed suicide in his cell, and three more were hanged. Almost a decade later, then-governor of Illinois John Peter Altgeld issued pardons for the four dead organizers and the three still living, saying “The proceedings lost all semblance of a fair trial.”

In the years after the 1886 events, May Day came to be celebrated internationally as a day to celebrate workers’ rights. We still don’t celebrate International Worker’s Day in the United States, but as you dance around the Maypole dances, or sing your Beltane carols, or as you attend the occasional May 1st rally for immigrants’ rights — it’s worth remembering the other May Day.

(N.B.: In the image of the poster announcing the rally in Haymarket Square, notice that it is bilingual, in German and English, reflecting the fact that many workers were immigrants.)