UU congregation in Texas firebombed

The Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Plano, Texas, posted the following statement on its Facebook page on July 23 (a similar statement appears on its website):

“Firebomb Attack on July 23, 2023 at Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Plano

“On Sunday, July 23, 2023, between 12:00 am and 12:30 am, a firebomb attack took place at Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Plano. An incendiary device with a chemical accelerant was thrown or placed at the front doors of the main church building. The fire and smoke caused the monitored fire alarm system for the building to go off, which notified church personnel. The City of Plano 911 system received a call from a passerby who saw the fire at the same time. City of Plano Firefighters arrived on the scene and were able to extinguish the fire. Because of the quick action of Plano’s First Responders, the damage to the church property was limited to the front doors, the materials directly outside the front doors, and the entrance foyer. There were no injuries. Plano Police and Fire Department personnel did a thorough collection of evidence of the crime scene. They also interviewed multiple church personnel who arrived on-site to assess the incident. 

“Church officials have been reviewing building security and working with the Plano Police Department since the intrusion of a hate group in the church building during and after Worship Service on Sunday, June 25. That group has posted video of their activities inside the church on various social media sites.

“The church community asks for your support and prayers at this time as we deal with the impact of this incident. Thank you and blessings.”

The “hate group” mentioned in the press release consisted of Bo Alford and Cassady Campbell, both right-wing YouTubers, and and unidentified person. On July 27, NBC News reported that the men were engaged in making a video for Alford’s YouTube channel:

“Alford’s video, titled ‘We acted LGBT at LGBT Church,’ [was] uploaded to YouTube on July 12. In the video, Alford, fellow YouTuber Cassady Campbell and another man film themselves visiting the Plano church. They ask the congregation about their beliefs while in their words, ‘pretending to be LGBTQ’ with the goal of ‘testing’ the church’s theology and exposing ‘false teachers.’ At the end of the video, which has been viewed more than 200,000 times, the men stand by the church sign and ask viewers to ‘pray for these people,’ calling the church ‘pagan and satanic.'”

On July 28, USA Today reported that Alford had removed the video from YouTube. The original NBC story had a statement from Alford saying in part, “First and foremost, my prayers go out to anyone effected [sic] by the fire. As to the accusations, My [sic] channel spreads the message of Jesus and his love for us. If you watch the video you will see the members of the church having nothing but nice things to say about us. She enjoyed our conversation and even ended it with a hug. The fact we are being labeled as a hate group and being tied to this fire in any way is appalling.” Well, actually what’s appalling is that this silly young man somehow justifies his lies about his sexual orientation, and his lies about why he visited the church, just because a kind woman gave him a hug. And now his foolish thoughtlessness will be perceived by many people as being representative of all Christians; his actions are part of the reason why so many people are leaving Christianity these days. (Please do us all a favor and don’t go search for his YouTube account; if he gets lots of views from this little escapade, it’ll make him want to do it again.)

Back to the Community UU Church of Plano. It looks like their building did not experience much in the way of physical damage, fortunately. And according to their Facebook page, they continue to hold worship services. All best wishes to them, and may they thrive and continue to provide an oasis of love in Plano.

Natural dyes: pine cones

Carol and I are still investigating natural dyes. At the moment, we’re looking for dyes that (a) we can use with kids, (b) will work well for tie-dyeing cotton t-shirts, (c) are in season right now and can be easily collected by kids, and finally (d) are plentiful (i.e., we’re not going to collect endangered lichens to use as dyestuffs).

It looks like the most promising dyestuff for our purposes is going to be pine cones. They’re in season and plentiful, readily available, produce a pleasing pinkish-brown color, and I found someone who did tie-dye with them.

Carol and I went and collected some pine cones today (on land where we had permission to collect). The recipe for the dye bath says to soak the pine cones for 48 hours (see the recipe below); I’ve got some pine cones soaking now. But because I’m impatient, I also boiled some for a couple of hours this evening, even though this will probably produce a dye bath that makes a less intense color.

Stay tuned for updates on our natural dyeing experiment.

Update, 12 Sept: Follow up post here.

Update, 8 Aug.: I followed the recipe below fairly closely. The cloth emerged from the dyebath a pleasing light tan-yellow color. But nearly all the color came out in the first washing, so that now we have a very light tan-yellow. N.B.: In her book Craft of the Dyer: Colour from Plants and Lichens (Univ. of Toronto, 1980), Karen Leigh Casselman says she got a “warm tan” color from pine cones with “good colorfastness,” but she used alum and chrome mordant; I suspect, too, that she used this dyestuff with wool, not cotton.

We were not encouraged with our experience using pine cones for dyeing cotton. It’s too bad, because where live it’s easy to find plenty of pine cones. We probably would have gotten better results with a chrome mordant, but we don’t want to use chrome with kids because of the toxicity.

A pot containing pine cones in water, simmering on a stoe top.
The simmering dye bath
Continue reading “Natural dyes: pine cones”

Unwanted deification

In Terry Pratchett’s book Monstrous Regiment, there’s a deity known as the Duchess. She was once a real, live Duchess for a tiny country called Borogrovia. But at some point she became deified, in large part because Nuggan, the actual god of Borogrovia, made so many things taboo — or, in the terms of the Nugganites, called them Abominations — that people stopped trusting Nuggan. For example, Nuggan said that rocks were an Abomination, which meant you weren’t supposed to have anything to do with them. It’s really hard to get through life if you have to avoid every rock you see.

As Nuggan began to fail, people in Borogravia began praying to the Duchess. As a result, she became deified. And the Duchess did not like being deified. Finally, she said to one of her disciples:

“Let…me…go! All those prayers, all those entreaties…to me! Too many hands clasped that could more gainfully answer your prayers by effort and resolve! And what was I? Just a rather stupid woman when I was alive. But you believed I watched over you, and listened to you…and so I had to, I had to listen, knowing that there was no help… I wish people would not be so careless about what they believe.” [ellipses in the original]

Well, it’s just a story, just a satire. You don’t have to take this too seriously. But it does seem to me that you want to be careful who or what you pray to. In our culture, we tend to have this notion that our personal prayers, our personal spirituality, is our business and no one else’s. But that simply isn’t true. Everything is connected. There is no such thing as spirituality that is only personal, only restricted to one person. As the Duchess found out (to her dismay), prayers can deify someone or something who really doesn’t want to be deified. Don’t be careless about what you believe; or about what you don’t believe, for that matter.

Job alternatives for ministers

Usually I ignore whatever employment advice LinkedIn sends me in their periodic emails. They usually notify me of religion jobs for which I’m wholly unqualified: pastor at an evangelical Christian church, priest at a Roman Catholic church, etc. I guess their job-matching algorithm can’t figure out what a Unitarian Universalist is. But today, I saw that one of their emails offering me some good job advice….

Screen shot from a LinkeIn email; text of the email given below.
Screenshot: detail of LinkedIn email

“Hiring trends for Minister roles,” the email begins. “Personalized insights powered by industry and recruiting data from LinkedIn. 16% drop in the United States job market in the past week, but new jobs are still available. People with similar roles applied to these jobs: CDL Class A Driver, Scott Hesford Landscaping, Inc….”

Hmm. I know that the job market for ministers is declining. Given the ageism that exists in ministerial search committees, if I lost my current job I’d likely be hard-pressed to find another position. So yeah. Getting a Commercial Drivers License as a back-up plan might be a good idea.

Natural dyes from invasives

I’ve been researching natural dyes for textiles, and got interested in the possibility of using invasive species to make dyes. After all, if you’re going to pull up the plants anyway, why not do something with them? Here’s a list of invasive plants in Massachusetts, and also a list of plants likely to be invasive.

I’m still in the research phase, and haven’t actually tried any of these myself. Many of these appear to be recipes for dyeing wool yarn. Nevertheless, here are some possibilities I found:

Other non-native species that can be used for dyeing:

Unfortunately, much of the material I found online is not entirely useful. Some of the webpages linked to above just say that the plant can be used as a dye, but with no indication of mordants, length of time in dye bath, color-fastness, etc. And many of those dyeing are only interested in dyeing wool yarns, while I’m more interested in tie-dye projects for kids (here’s info on mordants for cellulose, e.g. cotton, fibers). Anyway, I’m planning to do some invasive species dyeing myself, and if I do I’ll give some more details.

“How sport became the new religion”

“The Conversation” website has an excellent piece titled “How Sport Became the New Religion,” by Hugh McLeod, professor emeritus at the Univ. of Birmingham (U.K.). McLeod traces the history of the rise of sport, and the concurrent decline of religion, over the past two centuries. From his perspective as a U.K. historian, he identifies several key moments:

1850s: sport was of central importance in the U.K.’s elite private high schools; these elite high schools were training grounds for Anglican clergy, and one third of the top cricketers and footballers from Oxford and Cambridge Universities went on to become clergy

1880s: “Muscular Christianity” movement begins to develop, with clergy advocates emphasizing spirt, mind, and body

1920s and 30s: a large percentage of club teams in hockey and rounders (women), and cricket and football (men) were church-based clubs

1960: the Football Association (soccer to us Yanks) lifted its ban on Sunday games

1960s: emergence of a trend of scattering a deceased person’s ashes on the field of their favorite sports team

1990s: “sports chaplaincy” movement becomes a standard position in many U.K. sports teams, esp. football (soccer) and rugby

2000s: “Game Plan,” a U.K. government initiative to “reduce crime and enhance social inclusion,” claims that participation in sports can reduce social ills — i.e., society is now looking to sport rather than to organized religion to reduce social ills

2017: in spite of sports scandals, 71% of Britons believe “sport is a force for the good”

Today: McLeod writes that “religion has been crowded out by sport in general society, it remains a conspicuous part of elite sport – with a number of studies around the world finding that athletes tend to be more religious than non-athletes.”

Obviously, the U.S. would have a somewhat different timeline. But the end result is much the same: participation in organized religion continues to decline, while participation in sports — both as a player and/or a fan — remains robust.

So don’t believe people who claim that religion is dying out in the U.S. Maybe Christianity is in decline, and probably other organized religions as well. But participation in sports is not in decline, and in fact it has taken over the role that religion used to play in the U.S.

Joe-pye Weed

Perhaps my favorite fall flower is Joe-pye weed (Eutrochium spp.). There’s something about the color of the flowers and the color of the foliage that gets me, I don’t know why. I often have a strong emotional response to certain colors, and when sunlight catches the dull purple of Joe-pye Weed, I can feel it in my chest. I have no idea why this is so, I just know that it happens.

On a walk this afternoon, I came upon some Joe-pye Weed nest to a rushing stream in the Whitney-Thayer Woods in Cohasset. About a hundred feet of the trail, near one of the crossings of Brass Kettle Brook, was flooded from the torrential rains we had last week. I was teetering along on logs and stones that someone had conveniently placed alongside the trail, when there it was by the side of the trail: those dull purple buds almost ready to burst into bloom.

A capitulesence of Joe-pye Weed showing purple buds, but as yet no blossoms

I’ve been trying to figure out which species of Joe-pye weed this was. I think it’s Coastal Plain Joe-pye Weed (Eutrochium dubium), but I admit that I get confused by the online dichotomous key of the Native Plant Trust (—are the leaf blades triple-veined? —are the stems spotted or streaked with anthocyanin? —what exactly is the shape of the capitulescence?). Admittedly, I didn’t try as hard as I might to figure it out, since the dichotomous key tells me that E. dubium is “difficult to distinguish from related species.” Nor do I really need to know exactly which species of Joe-pye Weed it is — they all have similar flowers which evoke the same emotional response in me.

A wider view of the Joe-pye weed, showing the leaves more clearly.

Astarte

I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston yesterday (in part so I could take advantage of their air conditioning on a steamy, stormy day). Major art museums in the West tend to be strange places, because they are typically full of deities from many different cultures. We in the West may have eradicated deities from our homes, and it looks like we’re in the process of slowly eradicating our public places of worship — but we like to salvage a handful of deities from all the cultures we’ve colonized, purify them of their religiosity by calling them “art,” and putting them in glass cases. Such is the trajectory the colonization of religion.

A small household shrine made of terracotta caught my eye. From Phoenicia in the seventh or sixth century before the Common Era, the shrine contains the goddess Astarte. Astarte was a goddess from Canaan. Some sources say that she was merged with, or took over from, the earlier Canaanite goddess Anat, a fierce goddess of fertility and war. Other sources say Astarte traces her origins back to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. Still other sources relate her to Esther, or to Aphrodite. There was plenty of cultural borrowing in the Ancient Near East.

King Solomon is taken to task in the Hebrew Bible because he worshiped Astarte, among other deities: “Solomon followed Astarte the goddess of the Sidonians… So Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and did not completely follow the Lord, as his father David had done” [1 Kings 11:5-6]. One of Jeremiah’s jeremiads was against Astarte. The Shalvi/ Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women has a brief article on Astarte that’s worth reading, and that concludes by saying: “Although our sources do not provide enough information to identify definitively which Israelites were particularly attracted to the worship of Astarte or the reasons for their attraction, it is possible that some devotees were compelled by the presence of a female divine figure in an otherwise male-dominated religious environment.” You can learn a great deal more about Astarte in the Bible in the essay “Astarte in the Bible” by Stephanie Anthonioz, in David T. Sugimoto, ed., Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar — Astarte — Aphrodite (Academic Press Fribourg, 2014).

But the Phoenicians apparently had no compunctions about worshiping Astarte. This small sculpture shows her nude, as if she were Ishtar. She is given an Egyptian headdress, and the columns on either side of her are topped with depictions of the Egyptian god Bes. She is, if you will, a multicultural goddess. This is not entirely surprising, given who the Phoenicians were. They were merchants and sailors, and they traded throughout the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, perhaps sailing even as far as Britain. No wonder, then, that they worshiped multicultural deities.

A small terra cotta relief sculpture of a woman standing between two columns.
Household shrine from Phoenicia, with the goddess Astarte
(Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1990.605)

Deconstruction and reconstruction

“…The term ‘postmodern’ had been used sporadically by process [theology] thinkers since the 1960s. The later French movement that gave ‘postmodernism’ wide currency reinforced many Whiteheadean criticisms of modernity, but it concluded on a ‘deconstructive’ note. Whiteheadians [and other process thinkers] joined with other constructive critics of modernity in emphasizing reconstruction.” — John B. Cobb, Jr., “Process Theology,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Routledge, 2007), p. 561.

Unitarian Universalists are in the direct lineage of process thought, through the contributions of thinkers like Charles Hartshorne and Bernard Loomer, both of whom were members of Unitarian Universalist congregations. And for many years, our thinking emphasized the reconstructive aspects of postmodernity. More recently, though, I’ve been feeling that we Unitarian Universalists (and I include myself in this critique) have been following the French postmodernists by emphasizing the deconstructive aspects of postmodernity. This is due, I think, to our adoption of liberal political discourse, which currently emphasizes deconstruction over reconstruction — liberal politics tends to default towards breaking down stereotypes and attacking the sacred cows of the existing social order, as opposed to trying to construct a better social order. We who ally ourselves with liberal politics know what we are against, but we sometimes find it difficult to articulate what we are for.

Speaking for myself, to get out of reactive deconstruction, it’s been helpful to think about process thought. But the process thought of Hartshorne, Loomer, et al., seems a little dated these days. Maybe for us Unitarian Universalists, the work that Dan McKanan is doing around ecospirituality is one way to be reconstructive rather than deconstructive. Although, finding myself still in a deconstructive mode, I can’t help but keep looking for someone who isn’t a Western white male….

Joyce Mansour

…Il n’a pas de gestes
Seulement ma peau
Et les fourmis qui grouillent entre mes jambes oncteuses
Portent des masques du silence en travaillent….

…There are no deeds
Only my skin
And the ants that crawl between my unctuous legs
Carry masks of silence while laboring….

— from the poem “Il n’a pas de mots” by Joyce Mansour, trans. Emilie Moorehouse, Poetry, June 2023, p. 244

Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) — so I learn from Marwa Helal’s introduction to the selection of Mansour’s poetry in the June issue of Poetry magazine — was born in London to a family of Egyptian and Jewish descent. She grew up in Cairo, where she spoke one or two contemporary Arabic dialects, and learned to read classical Arabic. She spoke Egyptian and Syriac, and read classical Arabic. After she married Samir Mansour, a Franco-Egyptian, she began writing poetry in French. She was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s, during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. She then lived in France, where she became associated with the Surrealists.

Helal warns us against simplistic interpretations of Mansour’s poems: “While some might try to categorize her work under the umbrella of Feminism™ [sic], Mansour was writing beyond the body and this world…. Par of colonization’s cruel work upon all of us is that it repurposes the work of poets like Mansour for its own ends and meaning. Kind of like how American English conveniently erases important etymologies, essentially whitewashing its own linguistic heritage. But language and meaning existed before colonizing languages like French and English….”

…Je suis l’argent
L’argent qui fait l’argent sans savoir pourquoi….

…I am money
Money that makes money without knowing why….

— from the poem “Je suis la nuit” by Joyce Mansour, trans. Emilie Moorehouse, Poetry, June 2023, p. 248

A final comment by Helal on Mansour: “I think what’s important to consider as you engage with Mansour’s work is to remember she isn’t some radical exception — a woman having escaped or defied gender and its imposed or cultural norms — but a woman who made a place to be her full self in these poems…. I want to avoid ascribing or imposing any kind of Eurocentric reading or categorization of Mansour’s work because, though she lived in France, she held so many cultures and lineages in her….”

More on Mansour: an essay about her by translator Emilie Moorehouse.