Category: Theology

Mystics and Transcendentalists

Below is the uncorrected text of the talk with which I began a class on the mystical tradition within Unitarian Universalism, focusing (of course) on the Transcendentalists. A fascinating discussion followed, in which participants offered corrections where I was vague or in error, amplified things that needed to be amplified, and added lots of good thinking. So if you read this, remember that you’re missing the most interesting part of the class. Also, I diverged from the text at several places, so the talk you heard may not be the talk you read here.

Yes, liberal religion has a mystical tradition!

It seems odd that I have to assert this so vigorously. But our Unitarian and Universalist traditions, and Unitarian Universalism today, have not been particularly hospitable towards mystics. Throughout our history, and into the present day, the rationalists dominate our theological conversations — and I include both the theistic rationalists and the atheist rationalists. Our faith tradition clings to its belief in a rationalism inherited from the Enlightenment; we believe in carefully reasoned arguments; we have a tendency to focus on the brain and mind and ignore the heart and the rest of the body; we are most likely to use logical thought, and we are inclined to ignore other ways of knowing and interpreting the world.

However, by the same token, the mystics among us been not been kind towards their non-mystical co-religionists.

Emerson against religious formalism

Back in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave what is now known as the Divinity School Address; he spoke to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, supplier of most Unitarian ministers of the day, and told them how to be good ministers. Do not be coldly rational formalists, he warned. And then, speaking of the minister of his Unitarian church in Concord, Massachusetts, a man by the name of Barzillai Frost, Emerson said:

photo of Ralph Waldo Emerson“Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined.”

Emerson was prone to really bad puns, and here he indulges himself in a hidden pun: It is Barzillai FROST who is speaking in a SNOW STORM; bad as this pun may be, it points up a difference between two kinds of coldness: there is the coldness of the snow, which is real and can be experienced; and there is the coldness of religious formalism. Continue reading “Mystics and Transcendentalists”

Oh, that explains it

I’ve been reading about the meltdown of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in the mainstream media. It all sounds so Serious and Mysterious — Was it outside thieves or insider embezzlement? — What will this do to online finances? — And, whither the future of bitcoin and similar currencies?

It’s not serious or mysterious, it’s actually stupidity. Charlie Stross, science fiction author and former computer programmer, points out that “MtGox” stands for “Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange.” Then he goes on to add:

“C’mon, folks. Mt. Gox was a trading card swap mart set up by an amateur coder and implemented in PHP! And you expected NSA-levels of trusted computing security, so you trusted your money to it?”

Now that I know all this, the whole story just seems Sad and Sordid. A few Magic card freaks move into amateur banking. A bunch of credulous people trust way too much money to the Magic card freaks. As happens all too often in human affairs, stupidity bred disaster.

I think there’s theology in here somewhere: Something about the essential fallibility of humans. And (more importantly) something about the way humans need to pretend that stupid human mistakes are actually Serious and Mysterious.

New blog on Indian philosophy

There’s a new blog on Indian philosophy called, not surprisingly, The Indian Philosophy Blog. Some of the posts are technical, some of the posts are academic news. But some of the posts, and associated comments, are pretty interesting.

Take, for example, a post on Penguin India’s decision to recall and destroy all copies of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, in response to right-wing Hindu demands. But, says blogger Andrew Ollett, “India has long traditions of argumentation,” and he concludes that:

“The politics of outrage and offence, and the struggle to ban and silence competing viewpoints, are antithetical to this long tradition of reasoned debate. They impoverish public discourse and they endanger critique and the kind of truths that depend on critique.”

The comments get even more interesting. There’s a comment from someone in India, there’s discussion of the legacy of colonialism, and more.

Interesting stuff. Definitely a blog that I will be scanning on a regular basis.

William R. Jones writing collective forming

In this comment, Hasshan Batts writes:

“Practitioners Research and Scholarship Institute (PRASI) www.prasi.org is gathering a collective of individuals that have been influenced by Dr. Jones’ oppression theory for an upcoming writing project. If interested please email me at justequality@yahoo.com”

One definition

This is from Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education:

“A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”

This strikes me as a pretty good definition of at least part of religious education.

We Unitarian Universalists are most likely to speak about duty in connection with our social justice work. However, we are also concerned about duty in terms of personal morality: whenever possible we aim to recognize that other beings are not mere means to our ends, but are ends in and of themselves. This means that we try to get beyond exploitation in our personal relationships; and beyond sexism, racism, and other destructive “isms”; and we try to honor and respect those who can’t stick up for themselves because they’re weaker than we are (e.g., children).

Many of us Unitarian Universalists have a hard time with the word “reverence.” But read over Whitehead’s definition carefully: the present moment holds within in itself eternity, and once we perceive this, we have the foundation of reverence. Notice that Whitehead is not making any claims about divinity, nor is he defining what existence he; he is talking about a kind of knowing. That’s the foundation of reverence: that you can know in the present moment in ways that open up all of time and space to you. Mathematicians and theologians would likely agree.

How to have sex like a UU?

E., a Quaker and one of my dearest friends, sent me a link to a really good post by Quaker blogger Kody Gabriel Hersh titled “Having Sex Like a Quaker.” In this post, Kody, a self-described “queer, trans, sex-positive, Christian, Quaker youth worker,” outlines some of the basic Quaker ethical and theological principles that should inform sexual ethics and morality:

“Equality. Nonviolence and peacebuilding. Care for the earth. Community. Integrity. The direct availability of God to all people. The presence of something ‘of God’ in every human soul. Listening. Waiting for guidance in our decision-making, and checking out important decisions with our community. Continuing revelation.”

Then Kody goes on to present his own personal “list of sexual of sexual commitments and values,” an evolving statement of personal sexual morality rooted in the above principles.

— So for those of us who are Unitarian Universalists, what would be on our equivalent list of ethical and theological principles that should inform our sexual morality? (And no, the “seven principles” are too wordy and vague, and not equivalent to Kody’s list.)

— Next, based on that, what would be your own personal “list of sexual commitments and values”?

I’ll give my own lists in a follow-up post.

Why you should get your child dedicated

On her blog “All Together Now,” Karen Bellavance-Grace describes the child dedication ceremony that her Unitarian Universalist congregation held for her children:

“I trusted the words that came from our minister, Rev. Barbara McKusick Liscord: ‘For years to come, these children will be a part of our community of mutual caring, concern, responsibility and affection. Wherever they are in the world, they will always be tucked in the heart of this community. Do you, this gathered congregation, dedicate yourselves to nourish their spiritual growth, to welcome and value them, to share with them what you know of life and to learn from them what they have to teach us?’

“I heard the words, thought they were lovely, and trusted the members of the congregation would be kind to my children, smile at them, make small talk at coffee hour, and teach their Religious Education classes. I heard those words, prayed they would hold lasting meaning, and assumed that at the least, this congregation would witness their growing up….”

Well, now her daughters are entering their teen years, and their parents are splitting up, and Bellavance-Grace rightly worries about the girls:

“I knew we had a potential recipe for disaster. There were days when they didn’t want to talk to either of us to process this transition. We asked who the adults were in their life that they would be willing to speak to. One by one, they listed the names of members of their home congregation. Their minister, their OWL teachers, the woman who had taught their RE class when they were in kindergarten, a member of the congregation they thought of us a second grandmother, a Mystery Pal from a few years back. In that moment, I knew they would be okay.”

This is one of the hidden aspects of religious education, an aspect which actually has little to do with education, or with theology. In today’s U.S. society, kids have very few places where they can get to know ordinary adults. Most of us don’t live with extended families any more, and most of us don’t live in true villages or small towns where there is a lot of intergenerational contact. Most of the adults in kids’ lives are authority figures who are focused on specific goals that kids are supposed meet, adults like teachers and sports coaches. One big exception to this societal trend is congregations, where kids can meet and get to know a number of adults, adults who are not going to grade them, or get them to win games.

I like child dedication ceremonies because lying at the theological center of a child dedication ceremony is a promise to support parents and child as that child grows up. The congregation is entering into a set of promises, a covenant, with one particular child, while reminding itself of a wider covenant it has with all children in its purview. When Bellavance-Grace’s children were dedicated, that covenant was explicitly named by the minister, which is a good thing — but even if that covenant isn’t explicitly stated, it is still a core element of a child dedication ceremony.

I also like child dedication ceremonies because they remind congregations of their responsibilities. And because they remind older kids who see the ceremonies that they, too, are part of a covenant. And (maybe most of all) because they keep us focused on one of most important functions congregations have: raising kids.

If you haven’t gotten your child or children dedicated, think about doing it. It’s good for you, good for your kids, and good for everyone.

REA 2013 conference: Tom Groome and a pedagogy for teaching religion

For the Sunday morning breakout session at the Religious Education Association conference, I attended Tom Groome’s workshop titled (somewhat mysteriously) “Teaching to ‘Learn From’ Religious Traditions.”

Groome began by asking the question: How do you go about teaching religion in the schools? What is an appropriate pedagogy? He said he wanted a pedagogy that could work in either a public school or a private school, with diverse student populations, a pedagogy in which one could teach any given religious tradition without proselytizing.

More specifically, he wanted to teach religion such that students would become better people within their own tradition (or within their lack of religious tradition). He told a story about a Muslim student named Mohammed who had been in his class on Catholicism at Boston College. Groome told Mohammed that he wanted him to become a better Muslim through learning about Catholicism from his Catholic professor. Some years later Mohammed told Groom that indeed he had become a better Muslim because of that class. This is Groome’s ideal for teaching religion in the schools.

Groome said that they Enlightenment gave us two option: we could learn about religion, or we could learn to become part of a given religion. These two options come, in part, from Katn’s distinction between pure and practical reason. However, Groome takes seriously the feminist eopistemologists who pointed out the objective viewpoint of Kant’s pure reason does not really exist — “there is no view from nowhere.” Thus Groome proposes a third option on which to base an appropriate pedagogy: to learn from religions for your own life.

In other words, Groome called for a pedagogy that would teach religions as “great spiritual wisdoms for life,” rather than presenting them as data or history. “They’re not just a cognitive exercise,” he said, but rather a way for students to learn from other traditions in order to enrich their own traditions.

As an example, he spoke about how one might teach about the Muslim practice of Zakat; this is the practice of giving away 2-1/2% of one’s capital each year to persons in need. This spiritual practice not only promotes charity, it also promotes non-attachment to material goods, and it teaches about the ultimate power of God (i.e., it is God who really owns whatever material possessions one has). Groome said if he were teaching Zakat, he might begin be having the students name what they know about people who are in need, and then teach them Zakat as one religious response to poverty and need. “The learning outcome,” he said, “is that you’re going to encourage their own discernment about poverty.”

The workshop participants engaged in lively discussion with Groome.

There was some discussion about Groome’s theoretical underpinnings for his pedagogy, and one participant (I didn’t get his name) could not agree with Groome’s tendency towards universalism, i.e., that there is a common thread running through all religions. However, after some discussion it seemed clear that even people like me who tend to follow Mark Heim and Stephen Prothero in asserting that religions do not have a universal end or goal could still effectively use Groome’s pedagogical approach.

I asked about assessing learning outcomes, and Groome acknowledged that you can’t test or assess for the student’s own feeling — i.e., you can’t assess whether they have become, or will become, more humane — but you can test them for the data. However, pedagogy need not be driven completely by assessment.

Catherine Owens of Episcopal Divinity School pointed out that so many young adults today are unaffiliated, and having no grounding in any religious tradition, they are “appropriating bits and pieces from religions” (I would be blunt, and say they are often misappopriating) to build their own spiritual life. Therefore, part of what we need to do is to, as it were, expose them to the real thing.

I was sitting next to Kevin Sandberg, and in the time for small group discussion he suggested a “pedagogy of friendship” to supplement Groome’s pedagogy. I liked this formulation, and am thinking about how one might teach using a “pedagogy of friendship.”

A UU CO

Reflection delivered by Samuel Erickson at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, Calif., 13 October 2013

As a member of the male gender, and a United States citizen, when I turn 18 I am required to register for the draft. When I do so, I plan on registering as a conscientious objector. For those who might be unclear about what that means, and certainly what it means for me specifically, being a conscientious objector means that I, as a conscious and thought out decision, believe that military force, in fact force at all, should not be used. In the end force does not solve whatever problem it is aimed at. Were I to get conscientious objector status, I would not be conscripted to fight and kill but rather would be assigned to other tasks that would not contribute to the killing of others.

The first question you may have is why? Why, when a draft is so unlikely? Why devote my time to something that in the end has little to no actual significance at a time when my schedule is crammed with so many things — college applications, music, sports, classes, and even the occasional bit of social life. What makes it worth it?

In the end this is not about time in my schedule, it is not just another thing in a long list of things, it is the right thing to do for who I am, and therefore I must do it. Following my own moral ideology, and indeed even being able to say I have a moral ideology, is not about following the way that is easy, but that if I don’t say and recognize what I believe I simply wouldn’t be me. For the person who I am it is the logical step, and therefore the one I take.

So where does that belief come from? Where? Where, when the anti-military movement was at its peak during Vietnam two decades before I was even born, when most of the organizations that assisted conscientious objectors have shut down due to lack of interest, where does it come from? First and foremost, my beliefs come from my family, and then from my community, namely this church.

My parents — most vocally my dad — have always, when commenting on the news and talking to me, discussed issues through the lens of nonviolence: wars don’t solve problems, they create them. Always take the nonviolent approach, talk about problems rather that react to them physically.

As for this Unitarian Universalist church, I know we do not specifically teach pacifism, but I believe what we do value directs itself to such. This church, I think we can agree, highly values basic humanism. We should help and assist those in need, provide essential services to those who cannot afford them or get them themselves. Those ideas generally clash with the feeling that there are people in the world who need to die.

Along with my other influences, I believe my mindset perpetuates such a mentality. I would like to think that I live my life with a little more logic than those some of those around me. That logic supports to the argument that indeed force is no longer needed to compel countries and individuals to act in a certain way.

Pacifism, for me, and indeed for the world we live in, does not, and should not, mean that you are incapable of ever thinking a violent thought, that you should never play really any video game ever, or even that you can’t once in a while recognize that it would feel really good to punch that really irritating person in the face.

No, pacifism is when we stop and think about any situation, you and I realize that violence will never accomplish anything, death will not solve problems. When we extrapolate our actions from there and to the rest of our lives, that is what means to be a conscientious objector.

———

Copyright (c) 2013 Samuel Erickson. Used by permission. If you would like to reproduce this reflection elsewhere, I’d be happy to pass your request on to Sam.

Samuel Erickson is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, and is on the Board of Trustees. He is a senior in high school.

Theology deadlock

One of the things I see as I watch the slow-motion train wreck that is the budget deadlock in Congress is a battle between two competing theologies.

These two competing theologies have, above all, differing notions of sin and salvation (soteriology):

On the one side, the possibility of salvation is understood to reside primarily in individual humans. To put it another way, fighting sin is primarily the responsibility of an individual. The way to fight sin, and move towards salvation, is to assign the highest level of responsibility to individuals. This theological position tends to deplore government intervention in social problems, such as providing health insurance; thus in the context of this theological position, individuals, not impersonal social structures, are ultimately responsible for saving themselves and, e.g., taking care of their own health.

On the other side, the possibility of salvation is understood to reside both in the individual and in social institutions; however, in practice the emphasis tends to be on social salvation and social sin, since social sin is perceived to be so much more powerful a force than individual sin. To put it another way, fighting sin is primarily a battle that must be fought in social institutions. The way to move towards salvation is to assign the highest priority to fighting sin in society. This theological position tends to urge governmental solutions to social problems; thus in the context of this theological position, individuals are not powerful enough in themselves to fight social sin, and must use social structures such as government to fight sin and reach salvation by establishing a moral society.

These two different theological positions also have differing understandings of the nature of human beings (theological anthropology): Continue reading “Theology deadlock”