Religion – Page 10 – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

Endangered

Earlier this week, Carol and I walked on a beach in Maine where we saw two endangered bird species, Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) and Least Terns (Sternula antillarum).

Small sand-colored bird, standing in the sand, covering a chick with its wing. — Piping Plover with a nestling

Small gray and white bird nestled in the sand, perhaps sitting on a nest. — Least Tern — this bird remained stationary while we watched it, and may have been on a nest

Both these species nest on the beach above the high water mark. Nesting in the sand was a useful evolutionary adaptation for most of these birds’ existence. However, in the last hundred years as humans have used beaches more and more heavily. Many former nesting sites have either been eradicated. Other nesting sites see such heavy human use that nesting success has dropped precipitously.

Take the Piping Plover. The main strategy they use to evade predators is their cryptic coloration — when threatened, they squat down in the sand and are almost invisible. But this adaptation is counterproductive when the birds encounter over-sand vehicles (the birds and their nests get smushed), or off-leash dogs (the birds are found by smell, not sight) or oblivious humans playing on the beach (again, the birds get smushed). Then when some humans try to enact regulations to protect the birds — like restricting dog-walkers’ access to nesting areas, or prohibiting over-sand vehicles near nesting areas — many humans don’t comply with the regulations. So at another location in Maine this week, I saw a human with an unleashed dog standing right next to a marked nesting area where a few hours I had earlier seen a Piping Plover.

This is an example of how land use change and human overpopulation have caused rapid species decline over the past several decades. Now we can add another threat to these two species. Global climate change is already causing rising sea levels. If sea level rise continues, the preferred nesting locations for these birds is going to disappear.

It’s easy to sink into despair and imagine that these two species will be extinct in the next couple of decades. But while I’m not optimistic, there is still hope. Because even though humans are pushing these species to extinction, it’s also possible that they can be saved from extinction by careful human management. For that reason, I’ve decided that “management” is my new synonym for “hope.”

Reading list: Search

Bev loaned me the book Search: A Novel (Penguin, 2022), by Michelle Huneven. Search is the story of a ministerial search committee in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in southern California during their year-long process to find someone to replace their retiring minister. Michelle Huneven actually served on a ministerial search committee, and the book is a fictionalized account of her experiences. Bev, who loaned me the book, is a long-time lay leader who has lived through six different ministerial searches in the past quarter century. She told me that I really need to read this book. So I did.

(Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal key elements of the book’s plot. Continue at your own risk.)

Photo of the book lying on a wood tabletop.

What the Southern Baptist vote means

A few days ago, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to expel some local churches that had women as pastors. They kicked Rick Warren’s huge Saddleback Church, and they also kicked out a small church where as woman has been serving as pastor for three decades. If they’re suddenly kicking out a church where there’s been a woman as pastor for three decades, that makes it clear that this is not a situation where suddenly women are becoming Southern Baptist pastors. It’s the denomination that has changed its opinion.

Rabbi Jeffery Salkin, who writes an opinion column for Religion News Service, makes this observation:

“This is a war the right wing is waging: roll back women’s rights…. If you are looking for the symptoms of incipient fascism in this country, pay attention to the signs: the growth of antisemitism, a parallel growth of misogyny and a powerful growth of anti-LGBTQ hatred.” Salkin adds that this new rise of fascism doesn’t look like 1920s Germany so much as it looks like 1950s United States of America.. That was the decade, according to Salkin, of “women who did not work outside the home … queer folks in the closet … an America where Blacks were still in the back of the bus and where Jews and other ethnic and religious outsiders faced serious restrictions.”

I’m inclined to agree with him. The fascism of Trump, DeSantis, and others should not be compared to Nazi Germany. They are not trying to impose a new type of fascism on the U.S. Instead, they want to go back to a time when conservative White men were firmly in control of U.S. society. We don’t like to think of the 1950s as a time of fascism, but it was — not Nazi Germany fascism, but a distinctly American kind of fascism. Nor was it only Blacks, LGBTQ+ people, and women who were targets of this uniquely American fascism — Joe McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Affairs Committee also targeted White men whose politics happened to be anywhere to the left of the John Birch Society, destroying their careers and sometimes sending them to jail.

And this week’s Southern Baptist vote shows just one of the ways conservative White men (and the women who ~~submit to~~ love them) are trying to make 1950s U.S. fascism return. Get those doggone women out of the pulpit before they mention that Phoebe, a woman, was one of the leaders of the early Christian church — i.e., get rid of the women before they reveal that 1950s U.S. fascism was not rooted in Christianity at all, but instead springs entirely from the fevered imaginations of conservative White men who want to retain their ill-gotten power.

I’ve been researching the race riot that happened at the high school in my hometown in 1978 (I hope to have a blog post about it on the 45th anniversary of the actual event). Part of my research led me to a 2002 oral history interview with Phil Benicasa, for many years an elementary school principal in Concord. I never knew him, but my younger sister worked as a reading tutor in his school for a few years, and always had good things to say about him as an educator.

So here’s what Phil Benicasa said about parents and education back in 2002, not long before he retired:

“[S]omething is going on with the youngster who comes to our door in kindergarten [in 2002] as opposed to the youngster that came to our door 20 or 25 years ago. They are nowhere near as well prepared for the conventions of learning as kids were some time ago. I think parents are confused about parenting. I think kids therefore are confused about their role as children. In 1975 if you took the chunk of time out of my week that I spent doing discipline, 80% or 90% of that would have been at the fourth and fifth grade level, and more often than not it was mischievous sort of stuff. It was the kind of stuff that you could chew out a kid for and send him out of the office and chuckle about what it was that the kid had done. Today 80 to 90% of my time in discipline is spent in kindergarten, first, and second grade. That’s astonishing. And it’s not mischief. There are really a tragic number of kids with social and emotional baggage that they are having great difficulty casting off….

“I think parents have bought into the business about, the sooner my kid learns to read, the better they’re going to be. If my kid learns to read by age 3, that’s a direct line to Harvard. That’s absolutely nonsense. There are so many more important things that need to be learned before they get to us [in elementary school]. You know that business, ‘everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten’? — to clean up after myself, to share, to listen to others, to wait my turn, not cut ahead — all that’s true. Generally speaking kids had much of that in place before they arrived in the door.… [K]ids are not coming to school in kindergarten as well prepared to take advantage of what it is we are offering than they have been in the past. That means we have to modify what we are offering.”

Three obvious caveats — (1) This statement represents the observations and opinion of just one educator. (2) Phil Benicasa’s observations were limited to Concord, a predominantly White town in New England. (3) The demographics of Concord’s schools changed from 1975 to 2002, from an economically diverse cohort of children, to a nearly homogenous upper-upper middle class cohort.

Yet even with these caveats, what Phil Benicasa said back in 2002 resonates with what I saw in a different educational setting, religious education in Unitarian Universalists, back in the late 1990s. But I was working with the same upper middle class predominantly White children that Benicasa worked with. To use a current catchphrase, I felt children in the late 1990s were often deficient in social-emotional learning. I don’t know why that was true, but it was.

Things have changed since 2002. I’m no longer in religious education, but I still see the same upper middle class predominantly White children that I’ve been working with since 1994. Up until the COVID pandemic, I felt that children became more able to fit in to structured social situations. Some of that change came from a bit more social-emotional learning, and some of it came from children simply becoming more compliant with authority.

I also felt that some of that change came at the cost of children’s mental and spiritual well-being. In the years leading up to 2020, I felt that I saw increasing amounts of depression and anxiety in children; at least, in the populations I worked with. Children had internalized the message that they need to do everything they can to gain (as Phil Benicasa put it) “a direct line to Harvard.” And, to quote him again: “That’s absolutely nonsense.” What you do in elementary school or middle school is not going to get you into Harvard.

Then the pandemic hit. The pandemic accelerated some of these trends. To succeed at online school, kids had to become even more compliant. And the rates of depression and anxiety went up even faster, as near as I could tell. But the pandemic also meant that children lost a lot of ground in social-emotional learning. We’re barely out of the pandemic, so it’s too early to know if children will regain that lost ground or not. The pandemic also meant that children stopped participating in extra-curricular activities that promoted social-emotional learning, programs like Sunday school. Participation in sports keeps rising, but while sports does tend to make children more compliant, in my observation it doesn’t do much to improve social-emotional learning.

The pandemic also accelerated a trend I’ve been watching when it comes to the spiritual development of upper middle class children. The upper middle class consists of the “cultured despisers of religion,” so spiritual development tends to be low on their list of priorities (spiritual development won’t get you into Harvard). The upper classes limit spiritual development to meditation, mindfulness, and yoga — which are considered worth doing because they allegedly help children tolerate stress better. Unfortunately, what I’ve seen is that meditation, mindfulness, and yoga mostly seem to work to make children more compliant. Nor do they address the root causes of children’s anxiety and depression; instead, they simply cover them over.

I’d like to say that Unitarian Universalist (UU) religious education would help advance children’s social-emotional learning, improve their mental health, and (instead of making them more compliant) help them discover who they are and what their purpose is. But I’m less than impressed with the way most UU congregations implement their religious education programs. Most of these programs today seem to be run for the convenience of the staff and the child-free lay leaders. As an example, think of the many UU congregations that set monthly themes for worship services, then force children’s religious education curriculum to follow those themes regardless of the developmental and educational needs of the children. The adults come first; the children are supposed to be quiet and comply with the needs of the adults. No wonder UU religious education enrollment has been plummeting in recent years.

I don’t have a happy little conclusion for this blog post, except to say I’m worried. I’m worried that the selfishness of Unitarian Universalist adults is driving children away. I’m worried about children’s mental health, and limited social-emotional learning. I’m especially worried about the way children are being make more and more compliant — this in a time when fascism is on the rise.

(See also this post on why Sunday schools are declining.}

An 18th century covenant

A copy of the original covenant of Second Parish in Hingham — since 1770 called the First Parish in Cohasset — appears in the ministry record book used from about 1741 to about 1796 by ministers of the congregation. Those ministers were Rev. John Fowle (minister from 1741-1747), Rev. John Brown (minister from 1747-1791), and Rev. Josiah Shaw (minister from 1792-1796). That original covenant was adopted in 1721.

Given the current interest in covenant among Unitarian Universalists, I thought I’d post a transcript of this covenant, along with some supplementary historical information from this book. If we’re going to claim that covenant is a key part of our history, we need to understand that history — and what better way to understand that history than to look at some early covenants.

Some extracts of diverse matters, extracted from the records made by Rev’d Nehemiah Hobart [probably copied out of that earlier book by Rev. Josiah Shaw c. 1792]. …

July 13th 1721. I, Nehemiah Hobart, came into this parish, & preached a fast, & continued constantly preaching here, until Decem. 13th 1721, when I was ordained pastor of the Second Parish in Hingham.

Here follows some account of the Church of Christ in Cohasset, or rather as it then was Second-Parish in Hingham — extracted from the Manuscript-Record kept by Rev’d Nehemiah Hobart, first Pastor.

A Church gathered at Hingham Second Parish Decem. 12th 1721. — The Covenenant as followeth viz.:— We whose names are subscribed, apprehending ourselves called of God do unite & joyous together in bands of Gospel Communion & fellowship, for our mutual support & edification, in our Lord Jesus Christ: Under a Soul Humbling sense of our unworthiness of being in Covenant with God, our own insufficiency in, and of ourselves yo keep covenant with him. Humbly relying on free Grace for assistance, & with humble confidence of Acceptance We do in the name of our ord Jesus Christ, in the presence of God & his holy angels explicitly [?] & expressly covenant and bind ourselves in manner & form following — viz — We do give up ourselves unto God, whose name alone is Jehovah — Father, Son, & holy Ghost — To God the Father, as our chief and only good, & as our Lord Jesus Christ, as our Prophet, Priest, and King& only Mediator of the covenant of Grace — & unto the Spirit of God as our only Sanctifier & Comforter. And we do give up ourselves to one another, in the Lord, covenanting and promising to walk together as a Church of Christ, in all ways of his [illegible], according to the prescriptions of his holy word, promising with all tenderness and brotherly love we will with all faithfulness watch over one another’s souls, & that we will freely yield up to the discipline & power of Christ in his Church, & attend those seals & [illegible], & whatever ordinances Christ hath appointed & declared in his word; & wherein we fail & come short of duty, to wait upon him for pardon & remission, beseeching him to make our spirits steadfast in his covenant & to own us for his Church and covenant, people forever. Amen. — Nehemiah Hobart. …

1721/22 Febry 18th. … The persons who signed the Covenant were the following. Nehemiah Hobart — John Orcutt — Stephen Stoddard — Thomas James — John Jacobs — Ebenezer Kent — Jospeh Bates — Elijah Vinal [?].

[A later note in different handwriting states:] The males only, 8 in number, signed the covenant, at the gathering of the church — but about 21 females were immediately admitted [to full communion] — making the church to consist of 29 members.

I notice several things about this covenant:

— The covenant was drafted and signed only after several months of weekly preaching. No doubt there were many conversations between Nehemiah Hobart and the people of Second Parish.

— It appears that the covenant was not written out and signed until a couple of months after the church was gathered.

— The covenant is with their God first, and after that with other humans who follow that God. In other words, the vertical dimension comes first; the horizontal or human dimension comes second.

— Their understanding of their God included a conception of a trinity.

— The covenant does not explicitly state any relationship to other churches. However, there were implicit obligations assumed between the new church and other churches, e.g., the council that examined and ordained Hobart was made up of ministers from nearby churches.

— Women did not sign the original covenant.

Killer

Beech leaf disease (BLD) has arrived in Cohasset. I’m seeing leaves on American Beeches withering and dropping off both in Wheelwright Park and in the Whitney Thayer Woods. In some places, stands of beeches have lost so many leaves that it no longer feels like you’re walking in the forest.

Withered leaves on an American Beech sapling. — American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer woods with BLD

A scientific article from two and a half years ago — Sharon E. Reed, et al., “The distribution of beech leaf disease…,” Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 503, January, 2022 — found that BLD is a worse threat to American Beech stands than two previous invasive pathologies, beech scale (Cryptococcus fagisuga), and beech bark disease (C. fagisuga and Neonectria spp. complex).

An invasive nematode from east Asia, Litylenchus crenatae, is always present when BLD is present. But a scientific article from Sept., 2021 — Carrie J. Ewing et al., The Foliar Microbiome Suggests that Fungal and Bacterial Agents May be Involved in the Beech Leaf Disease Pathosystem, Phytobiomes Journal, pub. online 29 Sep 2021 — also found that organisms from four bacterial genera — Wolbachia, Erwinia, Paenibacillus, and Pseudomonas — and one fungal genus, Paraphaeosphaeria — are always present with the nematode when BLD is present.

A few withred leaves among healthy leaves in an American Beech sapling — American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer Woods with BLD

From what I can gather, our understanding of BLD is still incomplete. However, a few things are quite clear. The University of Rhode Island suggests a couple of strategies to try to save trees from BLD: heavy applications of phosphite fetilizer twice a year, and/or application of pesticide to kill the nematodes. If trees with BLD are left untreated, they will die within 6 to 10 years. Since we cannot treat most trees in our forests, we can expect most infected American Beeches to die within a decade.

Yet another reason for eco-grief.

And this is another reminder that as dire as the situation might be with climate change, invasive species are also devastating our New England forest ecosystems. A hundred years ago, we lost our American Chestnuts to invasive Chestnut Blight. Fifty years ago, we lost most of our American Elms to invasive Dutch Elm Disease. We’re in the process of losing all our Eastern Hemlocks to an invasive insect, the Woolly Adelgid, and all our ash trees to another invasive insect, the Emerald Ash Borer. Now we’re losing all our American Beech trees to yet another invasive organism.

Yes we need to stop climate change, but that’s only a part of the threat to Earth’s life-supporting systems. There’s a lot of work for us to do….

Ordination

Someone left a comment asking me to ordain them as a minister in their own made-up religion. Uh, yeah, no. An easy web search would have revealed that only Unitarian Universalist congregations (not individuals) can ordain. Another easy web search would have revealed lots of websites that will ordain you upon request. So I deleted the comment, because I’m guessing it’s one of the spammers and scammers who attack this blog on a daily basis.

But this does raise the interesting question of the meaning of ordination. There is not a universal understanding of what it means to be ordained.

Unitarian Universalists in the United States have our own understandings of what ordination means. Not only that, our understandings may differ from congregation to congregation. And U.S. Unitarian Universalist understandings of ordination differ substantially from Unitarian Universalists in, say, Romania or the Philippines.

That’s just within one religious tradition. Beyond that, Unitarian Universalist understandings of ordination may differ greatly from other religious traditions. For example, Roman Catholics understand ordination as a “sacrament” (honestly, I’m not quite sure what a sacrament is). In another example, some Buddhist groups ordain people into monastic orders, which is a different thing than ordaining someone to be a leader of a congregation consisting mostly of lay people. Then there are all those religious traditions that do not have ordination rituals.

This brings us to the interesting point about ordination. In a multicultural, multi-religious society like the United States today, ordination can only be understood in relation to a specific religious tradition — or even only in relation to a specific local religious community. What you mean by ordination might not be what I mean by ordination. This is not to say that ordination is meaningless. Ordination does have meaning, but only in relation to a specific religious tradition.

“Rethinking Weeds”

The spring/summer issue of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin features a number of essays on ecological spiritualities. I turned first to the essay by Vanessa Chakour titled “Rethinking Weeds.” As someone deeply interested in urban and suburban ecology, I was curious to see how someone might reassess the presence of weeds.

Unfortunately, the article starts off badly. In the very first paragraph, Chakour writes:

“With the combined increases of deforestation for agricultural purposes, suburban sprawl, and mass consumption of unsustainable food sources, the presence of invasive species and so-called weeds simultaneously increases. However, negative perceptions of these plants and the ‘war on invasive species’ contribute to greater ecological damage and exacerbate an adversarial relationship with the living earth by ignoring the needs of a diverse, functioning, and abundant ecosystem.”

Well… no.

Chakour claims that the “war on invasive species” (not a phrase I’ve heard widely used by field biologists and land managers) somehow contributes to “greater ecological damage.” In my experience, this simply isn’t true. As an example, consider the invasive species Yellow Star-thistle (Centaurea solstitialis). In Edgewood Natural Preserve, San Mateo County, California, Yellow Star-thistle began to dominate several grassland areas in the preserve, crowding out endangered endemic species. Biologists and land managers developed a control protocol that involves mowing at specified times of the year, then hand-pulling remaining plants to keep them from re-seeding. The end result has been to greatly reduce the numbers of Yellow Star-thistle and to help repair a highly damaged ecosystem, leading to a rebound not just in endangered native plant species but also native insect pollinator species. If Chakour considers this to be part of the “war on invasive species,” then far from contributing to “greater ecological damage” it has led to repair and regeneration of a unique grassland ecosystem. I know some of the people who have worked for years to control invasive Yellow Star-thistle at Edgewood Preserve, and for Chakour to claim that these people “contribute to greater ecological damage and exacerbate an adversarial relationship with the living earth by ignoring the needs of a diverse, functioning, and abundant ecosystem” is both ignorant and insensitive.

Part of the problem is that Chakour does not adequately define what she means by “invasive species,” “introduced species,” or “weed.” Ecological scientists might define an invasive species as an introduced (non-native) species that seriously upsets the balance of an existing ecosystem, i.e., that is ecologically destructive on a wide scale. Chakour and I both live in Massachusetts. In our state, we have about 2,200 plant species, of which about 725 are introduced species; of the latter, just “72 … have been scientifically categorized by the Massachusetts Invasive Plant Advisory Group (MIPAG) as ‘Invasive,’ ‘Likely Invasive,’ or ‘Potentially Invasive’,” according to Mass Audubon; only 36 species, or 5% of introduced species, are actually invasive in Massachusetts. Of the ten taxa of plant Chakour discusses in her essay, only one species is invasive here. The other 9 taxa she discusses include both native and introduced species that may or may not be classed as weeds, depending on who you talk to.

Chakour would have done better to discuss what we mean by “weeds.” We could define “weed” quite simply as a plant that a human being does not want growing where it happens to grow. To the homeowner who has been sold on the idea of a perfect green lawn, Dandelions (Taraxacum officianale) are weeds (T. officianale is not considered an invasive species here in Massachusetts). And yes, there are homeowners, golf course groundskeepers, and city parks departments who use toxic chemicals to get rid of weeds like Dandelions. Once you realize Chakour is actually writing about weeds, not invasive species — and if you remember that she’s writing about ecological spirituality, not science — then her essay makes sense.

Considered in that light, Chakour’s essay boils down to two main ideas. First, the word “weed” represents one human’s judgement, and thus may not be an accurate evaluation of a plant’s value to the wider ecosystem. Second, Chakour makes the interesting point that plants can be resources for physical and spiritual healing. Here she’s speaking as an herbalist, with what appears to be a deep knowledge of herbalism. Herbalism may be considered as a kind of ecological spiritual practice that heals both the body and the soul. So Chakour is arguing that if more people could know the health physical and spiritual benefits of some of the plants perceived as “weeds,” humans would be less likely to use toxic chemicals to get rid of those “weeds.”

It’s worth reading “Rethinking Weeds” to learn about one talented herbalist’s ecological spirituality. However, given the errors it contains, this essay should not be cited in any pragmatic discussion of land management or invasive species. This is unfortunate, because I believe ecological spiritualities could provide pragmatic help for addressing some of the big threats to Earth’s life supporting systems — but in order to do so, ecological spiritualities need to pay attention to the work of the ecologists, field biologists, climatologists, and other scientists, along with the land managers and other people who are actually out in the field working hard trying to save our planet before it’s too late.

Ecospirituality at Harvard

The spring/summer issue of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin features essays on ecological spiritualities. Dan MacKanan, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Senior Lecturer in Divinity, provides the introduction, “Making a Space of ‘Alternative Spiritualites’,” saying in part:

“When the Divinity School committed to offering a fully multireligious master of divinity curriculum about 20 years ago, we expected to see an increasing number of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu students. That has certainly been the case. But we have also been blessed by a steadily growing number of pagans, animists, readers of the Urantia Book or a Course in Miracles, practitioners of entheogenic or queer or African diasporic spiritualities, seekers, and people who affiliate with two, three, or more traditions. This diversity … invites us to reimagine both religion and the practice of ministry.”

In other words, religion in American has expanded beyond Christianity, and beyond those “world religions.” I’m putting “world religions” in scare quotes because these were the religious traditions that were judged to be the equal of Christianity, the religious tradition which until recently was assumed by many Western scholars to be the paradigm of all religion.

So McKanan and some others at Harvard Divinity School formed the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality to explore how religion was changing (or maybe to find out how our perception of religion has expanded beyond considering Christianity as the paradigm of all religion). I think I’d want to gently critique the name of this program for using the word “evolution” in the title. That’s not a value-free word, and comes freighted with all kinds of assumptions that may not be intended by the people who formed the program. In spite of that, the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality appears to be A Good Thing; I’ll be following their future work with interest.

Their first conference, held in 2022, was on ecological spiritualities. And the bulk of the spring/summer issue of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin is devoted to essays that apparently grew out of that conference. I’ll have more to say about some of those essays in later posts….

Clearly I’m in the wrong job

The Trinity Foundation, a religious watchdog organization, recently released its list of “100 Highly Paid Christian Ministry Executives.” The Foundation based their salary information on IRS Form 990. However, since churches, synagogues, and mosques aren’t required to file Form 990, they don’t have to provide any salary information. Thus, highly paid clergy like Joel Osteen do not appear on this list.

The top earner? David Cerullo, the CEO of Inspiration Ministries (radio and television stations) earned $7,319,371. No. 3 on the list is J.C. Watts, Jr., the CEO of Feed the Children, who earned $1,870,000 (I do wonder how many children you could feed with $1.8 million).

Franklin Graham earned $740,704 as CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, a relief organization. But he is also president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which claims to be a “church,” which means his salary there is not reported to the IRS. I’d bet his total income is well over a million a year (see Mark 10:23).

It’s not just conservative Christians who earn the big bucks. Andrea Kelly, the Head of School at Friends Academy in Locust Valley, N.Y., earned $635,702.

For comparison, the most recent UUA salary guidelines recommend about $113,000 as the top salary for a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving one of our largest congregations in an area with the highest cost of living. I serve a small congregation is a less expensive region, so guess what — my salary is well below that.

Dang. I should have ditched Unitarian Universalist ministry and gone into Christian broadcasting or Christian relief work.