Category: Religion

The basis for inter-religious dialogue

Raimundo Panikkar was a scholar who studied inter-religious dialogue. He held doctorate degrees in philosophy, chemistry, and theology. While serving as professor of religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Panikkar wrote a short essay about the necessary conditions for inter-religious dialogue:

“The modern kosmology (sic) assuming time is linear, history is paramount, individuality is the essence of Man (sic), democracy is an absolute, technocracy is neutral, social darwinism, and the like, cannot offer a fair platform for the Dialogue [between religions]. The basis for the Dialogue cannot be the modern Western myth.” — “The Ongoing Dialogue,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, vol. 2, 1989.

We Unitarian Universalists mostly assume that we have somehow moved beyond myths; yet most of us buy into the modern Western myth. Our “Seven Principles” specifically affirm individuality and democracy as among our highest values. Many of say “We believe in science,” and part of that belief is that science (and there seems to be little difference between our “science” andwhat Panikkar calls “technocracy”) represent a culturally neutral viewpoint. And of course we affirm that time is linear. All these things seem to us to be axiomatically true; how could they be doubted?

Yet I think Panikkar is correct. We think of human individuality, democracy, belief in science, and the linearity of time as axiomatic — but we also know from our own tradition of logic that axioms cannot be proved from within a logically consistent system. These axioms, like all axioms, are in some sense matters of belief. They are part of our foundational myth.

We Unitarian Universalists think we’re supremely rational and we don’t have myths. This attitude can cause problems when we try to engage in inter-religious dialogue. I don’t mind if we think we’re right and other religions are wrong — that’s what human beings do — but I do mind when we we’re not even aware that that’s what we’re doing.

What I see in an old photo

Cleaning out the files on my laptop, I came across an old low-resolution photo from 1999, showing a dozen people posing for the camera. It was a photo of the participants in the first “Essex Conversations” colloquium. Using GIMP, I increased the size of the photo to see if I could recognize those people…

I think I can identify most of them. From left to right are Lena Breen, then head of the religious education department of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA); Ginger Luke, minister of religious education; Jeanellen Ryan, leadership development director in the UUA’s religious education department; Frances Manly, minister of religious education; Tom Yondorf, parish minister; Susan Davison Archer, minister of religious education; Susan Suchocki Brown, parish minister; and Susan Harlow, professor of religious education at Meadville/Lombard.

In the front row at left is John Marsh, parish minister; a woman whom I’m sure I know but whose name I can’t remember; me, then a lay director of religious education; and Tom Owen-Towle, parish minister.

Several things struck me when I looked at this photo. Everyone is white. At 38 years old, I was the youngest person in the photo. And today, I’m the only one still active and working in a Unitarian Universalist congregation or organization (see the notes at the end of this post).

After looking at the photo, I dug out the essay I presented at that colloquium in 1999. It holds up surprisingly well in a number of areas, especially in its critique of the limitations of developmentalism, and in its insistence on talking about real live learners — I thought then, and think now, that too much theorizing about religious education is done without having real live children and teens in mind.

But it’s also fun to re-read that old essay to find all the things I no longer agree with. First, and perhaps most importantly, my essay didn’t adequately address how it is that learning and individual development depend on social interaction (I read Vygotsky a couple of years after I wrote it). Second, the world has changed a great deal since 1999, and Unitarian Universalist religious education faces new challenges, especially the ongoing decline of religious education enrollment in UU congregations, and the rise of religious disaffiliation, two linked trends that have been accelerated by the COVID pandemic. Third, over the past decade I’ve become increasingly aware of just how religiously illiterate most North Americans are, and I’ve seen research showing how religious literacy improves cross-cultural understanding, and how improved cross-cultural understanding can reduce violence and conflict in our communities; I wish now I’d made religious literacy integral to the essay. Finally, I’m less critical of schooling than I used to be, since I now believe some of the favored alternatives to schooling promoted in UU circle are artifacts of upper middle class white culture; yet because most children in North America attend school, schooling is can be more easily accepted across racial, cultural, and ethnic boundaries.

A revised version of my 1999 essay was published in the book Essex Conversations: Visions for Lifespan Religious Education (Skinner House: Boston, 2001); a book which, somewhat to my astonishment, is still in print. I think it’s past time for another generation of UU religious educators to write new essays about the future of religious education. Unfortunately, a colloquium like the one I attended costs a lot of money, and I suspect the declining financial health of the entire denomination means there won’t be another one in the foreseeable future. And religious education is no longer the priority it once was for Unitarian Universalists, partly because religious education enrollment has been declining since 2005 — but also because the current generation of children is majority non-white, and any attempt to encourage a bunch of non-white youngsters to come into our 95% white denomination is going to run smack up against the systemic racism that pervades the UUA.

Nevertheless, I wish we could put together a group of thoughtful people who are dedicated to religious education, who could spend a long weekend together to talk about what’s needed in religious education for the current generation of children. I wish we could have a new book of essays that address today’s religious education challenges — essays that address how we might keep Unitarian Universalist religious education from completely dying out.

Notes about the people in the photo:

John Marsh died in June. According to the UUA directory of professional religious leaders, Lena Breen, Ginger Luke, Jeanellen Ryan, Frances Manly, Susan Davison Archer, Susan Suchocki Brown, and Tom Owen-Towle are all either retired or no longer active. Susan Harlow, who was a United Church of Christ (UCC) minister, is retired from People’s Church in Chicago. Tom Yondorf left the ministry in 2000 to become a school teacher.

Generational divide

Paul Gilroy is a professor at University College London, and director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism there. He’s four years older than I am, and though in many ways we’re quite different it turns out we share a perception of today’s anti-racism work:

“Anti-racism has changed since Gilroy’s youth, its edge blunted. For much of the 20th century, being against racism meant being for a radically different political and economic settlement, such as socialism or communism. Today it can mean little more than doing what Gilroy mockingly calls ‘McKinsey multiculturalism’: keeping unjust societies as they are, except with a few ‘black and brown bodies’ in the corporate boardrooms. (‘I’m not very interested in decolonising the 1%’ he [says].) What is left is a more individualistic anti-racist culture, which is keen on checking privilege and affirming the validity of other people’s experiences, but has trouble creating durable institutions or political programmes.” — “The Last Humanist,” Yohann Koshy, The Guardian, August 5, 2021.

One reason I continue to call myself an “unrepentant Marxist” is that capitalism has proved unable to change racist systems in the U.S. (Indeed, from a historical perspective it’s arguable that capitalism initially thrived due to the way it exploited nonwhite labor, e.g., chattel slavery in the U.S.) I recognize that my view represents a tiny minority in the United States, or indeed in Unitarian Universalist circles, and that I may very well be wrong. However, if capitalism was able to solve the problem of racism in the U.S., I would think it would have done so many years ago. And it’s hard to see how a system built on inequality, as capitalism has always been, could somehow magically create racial equality. While Marxism may be the wrong answer, it’s no less wrong than capitalism.

Where does that leave us? As Paul Gilroy points out, we’re left with an “individualistic anti-racist culture” which does not seriously address unjust societies.

The Ten-minute Wedding

Over the years, I’ve performed a number of ten-minute weddings. What’s the point of a ten-minute wedding? I’ve done these weddings for couples who had a friend officiate at their wedding ceremony then needed a legal wedding, and for other couples whose wedding ceremony was not, for some reason or other, a legal wedding. These weddings are also useful for those who want a courthouse-type wedding, but who prefer not to go to city hall to be married. Mostly I’ve done this type of wedding in my office at church, but memorably I did one for a couple at a restaurant where the waitress was one of the witnesses (the couple gave her a really big tip).

I realized I’ve never put this ten-minute wedding on my Web site. In case it might be useful to someone else, here’s the form I use:

The Ten-Minute Wedding

Intention: A and B, it is now time to begin your passage into marriage, by declaring your intent to marry and then by making your vows to each other. Are you now ready to begin your passage into marriage? [Answer “I am.”]

Vows:

I, A, take you, B, to be my spouse,
to join our visions for a better future,
to join our voices for equality and love,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
as long as we both shall live.

I, B, take you, A, to be my spouse,
to join our visions for a better future,
to join our voices for equality and love,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
as long as we both shall live.

[Or use these more traditional vows: “I, A, take you, B, to be my spouse, / to have and to hold, / from this day forward, / as long as we both shall live.”]

Declaration: Inasmuch as A and B have agreed in their desire to go forward in life together, seeking an ever richer, deepening relationship, and because they have pledged themselves to meet sorrow and joy as one, we rejoice to recognize them as married.

CC0

As far as I know, all these words are in the public domain, so I slapped a Creative Commons CC0 “No rights reserved” label on the wedding above (the words in blue type). That means it’s in the public domain, so you can use it, modify it, etc.

Here are some thoughts on this wedding from:

(1) Obviously, other vows may be used.

(2) While I’m pretty insistent on making weddings absolutely gender-neutral —I feel vows should be the same for both persons in the couple, and I use the gender-neutral “spouse” — you may have different views on gender neutrality. Feel free to use words like “husband” and “wife,” or to have one spouse to say they’ll “honor and obey” the other spouse (just so long as I don’t have to attend the wedding).

(3) An unspoken assumption in this wedding form is that both persons involved know exactly what they’re getting into, and both freely consent to the marriage. I wouldn’t perform a wedding unless both parties are fluent in English, or unless there’s a certified interpreter — many courthouse officiants have similar requirements. All the usual criteria for consent also apply: e.g., I won’t perform a wedding where one member of the couple appears to be dominating or abusing the other, or where one member of the couple appears to be intoxicated, or where one member of the couple is under the age of consent.

(4) I feel it’s archaic and ridiculous for the officiant to say, “You may now kiss.” (And no way would I ever utter the sexist words, “You may kiss the bride.”) If both members of the couple are above the age of consent, why do they need my permission? But at the end of the brief ceremony, I might remind them that this a a time when couples often kids each other, if they choose to do so.

(5) Although I call this a Ten-minute Wedding, if you’re the officiant you’ll want to schedule at least 15 minutes. You’ll need five minutes to check the marriage license, and get the couple settled down. The actual wedding takes about five minutes. Then another five minutes for you to sign the marriage license, and to have any witnesses sign as well (if your state requires witness signatures).

Finally — yes, I can do a Ten-minute Wedding for you if you need one. Email me to schedule a time to meet in my office. If I don’t know you, I’ll require a minimum $50 donation to LifeMoves, a nonprofit that provides services and housing to homeless people; if you can’t afford $50, let me know and we’ll work out a sliding scale. (Also, if you want anything more than the wedding shown above in blue — that means any customization, including writing your own vows — my fee immediately goes to $500, because customization requires more time from me.)

Many conservative Christians are appalled by anti-vaxxers

Steve Hassen, a conservative Christian, has written a blog post that explains why conservative Christians should get vaccinated. The blog post is based on a podcast interview with Professor Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:

“I asked Throckmorton for his view on the COVID-19 pandemic and what he thinks about vaccination? He and his family are vaccinated. When I asked him about Christianity and science, he told me Biblical sources provide believers guidance. He pointed out that Timothy, a disciple of St. Paul, had a stomach ailment. He was not advised to pray or just have faith but to take a little wine (that is, treat the ailment). Luke, who wrote one of the Gospels, was himself a physician. God gave us incredible gifts: our minds, intelligence, and curiosity. Certainly, we are meant to use our minds and think and not allow irrational fears to cause harm and death.”

Hassen covers a lot of ground in his blog post. He takes on Trump: “How can anyone [who’s] religious think God is using Donald Trump?” He explains how science and conservative Christian faith are compatible. He critiques Christian nationalism and dominionism, two of the biggest threats to U.S. democracy today. And he touches on the problem of narcissism in the pastors of mega-churches (some of what he says there reminds me of one or two people who used to be ministers of some of our largest UU congregations).

Hassen reminds me of the conservative Christians I used to know back in the day: people whose intelligence, morals, and ethics I held in great respect, even while disagreeing with them on some theological points. Unitarian Universalists who like to demonize white evangelical conservative Christians might want to read this post, and expand their horizons a little bit. If we’re going to stop the threat to democracy represented by QAnon and Trumpism, we need all the allies we can get.

Reforming police, 1969

In July, 1969, Jules Siegel interviewed several Black Panthers for an article he was writing. The Panthers he spoke to talked quite a bit about a topic that has been very much in the news over the past year — reforming the police. Field Marshal “D.C.” [Donald Cox] of the Black Panthers laid out the fundamental problem:

“It has been called police brutality. It’s a matter of educating people to the fact that yes, it’s brutal, but the term for it is fascism. Black people already know, because they’ve lived under fascist terror ever since we’ve been in this country. Fascism is the police running amok in the black community.”

“Poison,” a field lieutenant from the Chicago Black Panthers, outlined the Panthers’ solution — community control of police:

“Lots of people don’t understand what community control means. It means giving the people a voice. Right now they have no voice because it is a centralist form of government. Community control of the police doesn’t mean that the community would take over the present pig [i.e., police] department. It means that people will have people from within that community policing that community. If one of these police would commit a crime against the people, he [sic] would have to come home at night. It’s a hard thing to go home if you’ve committed a crime against your own people. Before you commit that crime, you begin to think.”

It’s also important to note that Field Marshal D.C. asserted that the fascism of the police was not rooted in race and racism per se:

“It’s in the interest of the power structure to propagate the idea that it’s a race struggle rather than a class struggle. As long as they can keep people divided into ethnic groups, the masses are not going to join together to form a united front against the exploiter who is oppressing everyone.”

In short, the Panthers saw that the real problem was not the police, but the power structure that the police represented.

The Black Panthers had many problems, including rampant sexism. But I still find much of their vision for society compelling. They saw that U.S. capitalism was upheld by a form of fascism, and that police brutality was one manifestation of that fascism. They wanted to wrest social control away from “the oppressor,” and put that control back in the hands of the people. And they combined grand theory with practical action: by July, 1969, the Panthers’ “Breakfast for Children” program was feeding 50,000 children a week across the U.S. In spite of their flaws, theirs was a grand vision for a more just and egalitarian society. This vision provides a necessary context for their proposals for police reform.

A screen grab from a National Archives video of the Black Panthers, c. 1966-1969, showing Party leader Kathleen Cleaver (?) speaking at Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland.

Notes: Interview excerpts from “The Black Panthers” by Jules Siegel, from his book Record (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books/Rolling Stone, 1972). More about the Black Panther Party at the National Archives, including vintage video footage, and brief biographies of prominent women Panthers.

The big divide in U.S. religion today

U.S. Catholic bishops have voted 155 to 55 (with 6 abstentions) to deny holy communion to U.S. politicians who support abortion rights. Elected officials who openly support the death penalty will still be allowed to receive communion, even though the church’s catechism states, “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Elected officials who deny climate change will still be able to receive communion, even though Pope Francis has said, “We need to act decisively to put an end to all emissions of greenhouse gases by mid-century at the very latest, and to do even more than that.” This is typical of U.S. religion today.

I have come to believe that the big divide in U.S. religion these days is actually politics, not theology. Do you support the Republican party line, or the Democratic party line? — that’s how the U.S. religious divide is defined. The U.S. Catholic bishops voting to deny communion to politicians who support abortion rights, yet taking no action on politicians who support the death penalty, may not seem logically consistent. Nevertheless, their stance is entirely consistent with Republican politics.

I’m pretty sure that Unitarian Universalists suffer from the same problem, on the other side of the political divide. Unitarian Universalism is doing its best to stand up against racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism (to some extent), and other forms of systemic injustice. Classism, however, is mostly dismissed or ignored within Unitarian Universalism. Nor does Unitarian Universalism engage in systematic critique of capitalism. Our stance may not be logically consistent, but it is entirely consistent Democratic politics.

Therefore, fellow Unitarian Universalists, before you speak scornfully of the Catholic bishops, first reflect on how Unitarian Universalism hews so closely to the Democratic party line. Instead of speaking of another religion with scorn, we might instead reflect on the words of a wise ancient Jewish teacher who said, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” In other words, I do hope we Unitarian Universalists don’t become merely a special interest group of the Democratic party.

A naturalist’s field journal

I’ll be leading a workshop on ecological spirituality at Ferry Beach Conference Center in Main this summer. One of the ecological spiritual practices I’m going to explore with participants is keeping some kind of nature journal. Although most nature journals focus on musings and emotions, it’s also possible to keep a nature journal rooted in the practices of field biologists. An example of the first type of journal might be Henry Thoreau’s early journals, where he relates his philosophical musings to his observations of the natural world. An example of the second type of journal might be Henry Thoreau’s later journals (1853 and later), where his close observations of the natural world lead to deeper insights into non-human organisms.

I’ve found lots of books and online resources that tell how to keep the first type of journal, but it’s more difficult to find accessible books and resources that teach people how to keep the second type of journal. So I wrote an eight-page introduction to the topic to share with the participants in the upcoming workshop. Click on the image below to read a PDF of “A Field Journal for Naturalists.”

The 2021 Stuffed Animal Sleepover

Birago Lion and Belinda Sheep introduce the 2021 Stuffed Animal Sleepover at the UU Church of Palo Alto. Dr. Sharpie and Elephant are going to help out, too.

Click on the image above to view the video on Vimeo.

Full script is below.

Continue reading “The 2021 Stuffed Animal Sleepover”

Black Wall Streets

The centennial of the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” has got me thinking about other Black Wall Streets that once existed in the U.S. — places where black entrepreneurs could find success more easily, places where African Americans could accumulate wealth. What happened to them?

Richmond, Virginia, had Jackson Ward, another Black Wall Street, a locus for black-owned businesses. In the 1950s, urban renewal — a turnpike cut through the middle of the neighborhood — was a major factor in destroying Jackson Ward as an economic center.

The Hayti neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina, is considered a Black Wall Street. Although much of the financial growth was driven by a couple of large black-owned businesses, the neighborhood launched a significant number of African Americans into the middle class. In the 1960s, it was destroyed by an urban renewal scheme.

The Fifteenth Ward of Syracuse, N.Y., was a Black Wall Street. Guess what killed off the Fifteenth Ward? If you guessed “urban renewal,” you guessed correctly.

What killed these Black Wall Streets? White mob violence (with the connivance of local government and even the National Guard) in Tulsa — government-decreed urban renewal in Richmond and Durham. The methods might have changed, but the outcome was the same, thus demonstrating yet again that capitalism in the U.S. gives preference to certain classes of people, while blocking others from achieving wealth through entrepreneurship.

In a number of places, local groups are starting their own initiatives to promote black entrepreneurship. I did quick Web search and turned up Black Wall Street organizations in St. Louis, Mo., Asheville, N.C., and Kalamazoo, Mich. There are other organizations that don’t use the “Black Wall Street” name, but promote a similar ethic, such as Black-Owned Brooklyn.

Many of us are skeptical of capitalism these days; there’s a growing suspicion that systemic racism may actually be a core part of capitalism’s feature set. Nevertheless, capitalism and entrepreneurship are just about the only way to get into the middle class these days. That being the case, maybe the best way to memorialize the demise of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street is to do business with local black-owned businesses.

Except that Amazon has eviscerated local retail business, Big Tech is degrading local businesses into the gig economy, banking and insurance and manufacturing are dominated by huge multinational white-owned companies which have destroyed local businesses…the methods keep changing, but somehow many African Americans still find themselves shut out of the middle class. As Mariahdessa Ekere Tallie puts it in her poem “Global Warming Blues”:

seem like for Big Men’s living
little folks has got to die.