What is a species? In a field ornithology class, I was taught that a species is a unit of biological classification (a taxon), a set of organisms whose members can interbreed with each other; but if one species interbreeds with another species, they will produce either no offspring, or infertile offspring. A species, then, is defined (so my professor said) by the possibility of successful breeding.

There are other ways to define what a species is. In his book The Social Amoebae: The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ., 2009), John Tyler Bonner outlines two other ways of defining a species:

“The tradition for cellular slime molds’ classification is entirely based on their morphology. I can remember way back discussing this point with Kenneth Raper, who himself discovered many of the new species, and he was quite adamant that the classification of the group was for the purpose of making them easy to identify; it said nothing about their phylogenetic relations. This is in the spirit of Linnaeus, who thought each species was created by an act of God, and who has been the basis of taxonomic keys beloved by some (not me!) through the centuries.” (p. 19)

In other words, a species is a conceptual tool for making classification easier for the scientists who study organisms. Or, a species gives us insight into the act of God which created that species; it is a kind of category of theological ontology.

And there is yet another way of looking of species: a species is defined by common ancestors:

“For taxonomists, the ultimate goal is to classify every plant according to clean monophyletic clades, in which each group contains all the descendants from a common ancestor and none from parallel lines.” Thomas J. Elpel, Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification 6th ed. (Pony, Mont.: HOPS Press, 2013, p. 22).

In other words, organisms within a given species will share a common evolutionary ancestor; and the further classification of that species into genus, family, order, etc., gives us insight into how that species evolved. This helps us understand that a species is not a static category. A species is not, as Linneaus thought, a static insight into the way things were created in the past and always will be in the future. For example, the Iceland gull (Larus glaucoides) complex, comprising subspecies L. glaucoides glaucoides, L. g. kumlieni, and L. g. thayeri may represent speciation in action: subspecies that are evolving perhaps into becoming full species. More broadly, the genus Larus consists of closely related species some of which have only recently evolved into separate species. Thus, sometimes species give us a look at evolution in action.

After reading a biography of Buffy Saint-Marie, I got curious about one of the instruments she played: a mouthbow. After listening to listening to several Youtube clips of mouthbows, I decided to make my own. I went out and found a fairly straight twig about as thick as my little finger; and took the bark off and shaved the butt end down with pocketknife and block plane so it would bend evenly across its length. I used a 010 loop-end steel banjo string I happened to have, attached the loop end to a copper tack in one end of the stick, and tied the straight end of the string through a 1/64″ hole I drilled in the other end of the stick. It looks like this:

When you play the mouthbow, the fundamental note of the string sounds as a drone throughout, while changing the mouth cavity brings out overtones to produce the melody — that combination of melody and drone sounds to me a little like a mountain dulcimer. While I make no claims to mouthbow virtuosity, here’s an audio recording of the instrument I made today:

Since your mouth cavity acts as the resonator, you can hear the mouthbow louder yourself than anyone around you can hear it. So I’m thinking this might be a good instrument to make with children: fairly easy to make, fun to play, quiet enough that it won’t drive everyone else crazy. However, if I do make it with kids, I won’t use a steel string: it’s too easy to hurt yourself if a steel string breaks; and something like nylon monofilament or linen thread would make for a quieter instrument.

Mouthbows were used by Indigenous peoples in North America, including California Indians: “Southern Yokuts men sometimes played the musical bow after settling themselves in bed; the Chukchansi in mourning the dead. These may be but two expreissions of one employment. Modern forms of the instrument have a peg key for adjusting the tension…. In old days a true shooting bow, or a separate instrument made on the model of a bow, was used. Mawu or mawuwi, was its name. One end was held in the mouth, while the lone string was tapped, not plucked, with the nail of the index finger; the melody, audible to himself only, was produced by changes in the size of the resonance chamber formed by the player’s oral cavity.” Alfred Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, p. 542. Elsewhere, Kroeber says, “The musical bow is a device definitely reported from the Maidu and Yokuts, but probably shared by these groups with a number of others…. [It] was tapped or plucked….” p. 419. Kroeber also reports the musical bow being used by the Pomo and other tribes.

Buffy Sainte-Marie is probably the best-known contemporary player of the mouthbow, mostly because she played mouthbow on several television shows, including “To Tell the Truth,” “Sesame Street,” and the folk-music showcase “Rainbow Quest.” Sainte-Marie makes her own mouthbows; while they may look primitive at first glance, they are tuneable, and she writes: “I like to tune my bow precisely and work with other instruments, so I favor a geared peg, like the Grover peg in the picture.” Sainte-Marie’s blog post on making and playing mouthbows is excellent. Here’s Sainte-Marie playing the instrument on Sesame Street:

Notice that she holds the mouthbow at the end farthest from her mouth; that way, she can control the tension of the string, and thus adjust the pitch as she’s playing. By contrast, traditional Appalachian mouthbow player Carlox Stutsberry does not flex the tension of the bow to alter the tone:

Both Stutsberry and Sainte-Marie pluck the mouthbow with a pick; however, the mouthbow can also be tapped (like the strings of a hammered dulcimer), or bowed. South African jazz musician Pops Mohamed plays mouthbow using a bow:

If you search Youtube for “mouth bow,” you can find quite a few modern practitioners of the instrument. But only a few of them are worth listening to, including Pops Mohamed, Carlox Stutsberry, and Buffy Sainte-Marie; clicking on the photos above will take you to videos by those three.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211109174520/https://www.danielharper.org/yauu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/BlogFeb1919.mp3

Zoe Samudzi, doctoral candidate in sociology at UCSF, on class and race:

“I think it’s really telling about the kind of limitedness with which we understand wealth redistribution because of the ways we refuse to understand white supremacy as a necessary part of capitalism and race as the kind of anchoring structure through which resources are inequitably redistributed.” (interview in Geez magazine, winter, 2018, p. 42)

Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, a Marxist who specializes in race an American politics:

“Anti-racism — along with anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc., as well as diversity as the affirmative statement of them all — is a species of a genus of social and economic justice that is utterly compatible with neoliberalism: parity in the distribution of costs and benefits among groups defined by essentialized ascriptive identities.” (interview in Platypus Review #75, April, 2015)

I feel that Samudzi represents a younger generation of thinkers and activists who have abandoned traditional Marxist critiques of capitalism in favor of critiques based on identity politics; Reed represents an older generation of thinkers who continue to extend Marxist critiques of capitalism and who criticize identity politics as neoliberalism, which is to say, another form of capitalism. As someone who had training in the Frankfurt School as an undergrad (under a black Marxist professor, interestingly enough), I’m aligned with Reed’s generational cohort. But the zeitgeist is now blowing in the direction of Samudzi’s generation.

We had periods of heavy rain and hail on Monday, then when the storm passed it got quite chilly. It still felt downright cold, by Bay Area standards, late Tuesday morning when we went out to the car.

We drove down the hill from the cemetery to where there’s a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay. We both exclaimed, “Snow!” The peaks of the mountains on the east side of the Bay were white with snow, from the mountains around Mission Peak (elev. 2,520 ft.) southwards to the mountains around Mt. Hamilton (elev. 4,265 ft.). Since a good portion of Mission Peak range was white, I figured the snow must have come down well below 2,000 feet.

I dropped Carol at work, and drove south to Palo Alto, periodically marveling at the sight of snow when the mountains across the Bay came into view. When I got off the highway and headed west into Palo Alto, I tried to see if Black Mountain (elev. 2,812 ft.) and the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains had snow; but I had to keep my eyes on the road and couldn’t get a clear view. But a page one story in Tuesday’s edition of the San Mateo Daily Journal said that there was indeed snow on the Santa Cruz Mountains:

“The highest elevations in San Mateo county saw snow Monday night…. Snow fell just about everywhere above 1,000 feet Monday, including in parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with temperatures as low as 32 degrees around that area.”

And according to Palo Alto Patch, not only was Page Mill Road in Palo Alto closed Tuesday due to snow and ice, but:

” ‘One spotter in Morgan Hill said he saw snow at 700 feet,’ [National Weather Service meteorologist Matt Mahle] said. ‘It started accumulating … at about 1,000 feet.’ “

When I drove to work on Thursday (yesterday), the Hamilton range was still mostly white with snow; I don’t remember the last time snow lasted that long, but it was several years ago. And there is more snow coming Saturday night, according to the National Weather Service:

The latest models bring snow levels down to around 1,500 feet over the North Bay and around 2,000 feet over the Central Coast during the day Sunday.

This is nothing like the polar vortex in the eastern U.S., but it is unusual weather for us.

In early adolescence, some of my favorite book were the Henry Reed series by Keith Robertson. Originally written in the 1950s and 1960s, the books are set in an all-white suburban utopia where women are stay-at-home moms and the only thing kids have to worry about are grumpy neighbors. I recently reread the Henry Reed series, and while I enjoyed them I’d be reluctant to recommend them to today’s early adolescents; nevertheless, if you read these books as period pieces, they remain charming stories.

I’d classify Robertson as a minor but talented mid-twentieth century children’s book author. As is true for so many children’s book authors, he has now fallen into obscurity. He published more than 30 books from 1948 through 1986, including 5 books in the Henry Reed series (one of which was published posthumously) and 4 books in the Carson Street Detective (or Neil and Swede) series. Most of Robertson’s books were aimed at the children and young adult markets, but he also wrote 6 mysteries for adults under the pseudonym Carlton Keith. Eight of his books were good enough to receive starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews.

There are so many minor but talented authors who fade into obscurity; yet in Robertson’s case, I couldn’t even find a good bibliography of his published works. He may not be worthy of serious critical study, but here at least is the best bibliography I was able to compile of his published books:

Keith Carlton Robertson bibliography
This bibliography does not include any of his publications in periodicals; it may not include all his published books. Sources for this bibliography include Kirkus Reviews, WorldCat, and other sources.
* books with a asterisk received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews
Ticktock and Jim (1948) *
The Dog Next Door (1950)
The Missing Brother (1950) *
The Lonesome Sorrel (1952) *
Lost Dog Jerry (1952)
The Mystery of Burnt Hill (1952) [Neil & Swede series]
Mascot of the Melroy (1953)
Outlaws of the Sourland (1953)
Three Stuffed Owls (1954) [Neil & Swede series]
The Wreck of the Saginaw (1954)
Ice to India (1955)
The Phantom Rider (1955)
The Pilgrim Goose (1956)
The Pinto Deer (1956)
The Crow and the Castle (1957) * [Neil & Swede series]
Henry Reed, Inc. (1958) * [Henry Reed series]
The Diamond-Studded Typewriter, or A Gem of a Murder (1958) [writing as Carlton Keith]
If Wishes Were Horses (1958) *
The Navy (1958)
Missing, Presumed Dead, or The Missing Book-keeper (1961) [writing as Carlton Keith]
Henry Reed’s Journey (1963) * [Henry Reed series]
Rich Uncle (1963) [writing as Carlton Keith]
The Hiding Place (1965) [writing as Carlton Keith]
Henry Reed’s Baby-Sitting Service (1966) * [Henry Reed series]
The Crayfish Dinner, or The Elusive Epicure (1966) [writing as Carlton Keith]
New Jersey (1968)
The Year of the Jeep (1968)
A Taste of Sangria (1968) [writing as Carlton Keith]
The Money Machine (1969) [Neil & Swede series]
Henry Reed’s Big Show (1970) [Henry Reed series]
In Search of a Sandhill Crane (1972)
Tales of Myrtle the Turtle (1974)
Henry Reed’s Think Tank (1986) [Henry Reed series]

“Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must always be in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past.”

Samuel Johnson, in a letter to Hester Thrale; quoted by David Nokes in Samuel Johnson: A Life, Henry Holt & Co., 2010, p. 357.

As I develop some new middle-elementary curriculum materials, I’ve been looking at myths and religious narratives for deities who do not have a binary, male-or-female, gender.

The most familiar example of a non-binary gender deity — but an example we mostly ignore — is in one of the two stories of the creation of humankind in the book of Genesis. The more familiar Genesis story of the creation of humankind comes from the second chapter of Genesis, where God creates a male human, then puts the male human to sleep, takes a rib, and makes a woman. However, as feminists began pointing out back in the 1970s, there’s another story about how humans were created in the first chapter of Genesis:

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27, NRSV)

Commenting on this passage, Susan Niditch, professor of religion at Amherst College, says:

“For feminist readers of scriptures, no more interesting and telegraphic comment exists on the nature of God. The male aspect and the female aspect implicitly are part of the first human and a reflection of the creator.” (Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, Westminster/John Know Press, 1992, p. 13)

While agreeing with Niditch, I would add that this passage implies to me that the God of Genesis 1 cannot be reduced to a single binary gender.

The Navajo deity Turquoise Boy is of non-binary gender in a different way. In the Dine Bahane, the Navajo creation myth, when the humans get to the Third World, the men decide to live apart from the women, and cross a river in order to separate themselves. But the men take Turquoise Boy with them, because he is able to do the women’s work of grinding corn, etc., which the men ordinarily wouldn’t be able to do. (See: Aileen O’Bryan, The Dîné: Origin Myths of the Navaho Indians, Bulletin 163, the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1956.) White Shell Girl is also a non-binary gender deity; the narrative refers to her as being intersex, or in the O”Bryan translation, a hermaphrodite.

Turning to Chinese myths and religious narratives, Lan Caihe (Lan Ts’ai-ho), one of the Eight Immortals of Taoism, is ambiguously gendered. According to folklorist E. T. C. Werner:

“Lan Ts’ai-ho is variously stated to have been a woman and an hermaphrodite…. According to the Hsiu hsiang Pa Hsien tung yu chi, … though he was a man, he could not understand how to be a man (which is perhaps the reason why he has been supposed to be a woman).”(Myths and Legends of China, E. T. C. Werner, London: George Harrap & Co., 1922, p. 293)

There are many other deities with ambiguous or non-binary gender, including perhaps most famously the ancient Greek deity Hermaphroditus. What I find particularly interesting is that non-binary gender plays out in many different ways in these various myths and religious narratives. I want to say that there is a spectrum of gender choices, but I think saying that imposes my early twenty-first century Western cultural framework on other cultures. Better to say that gender has been interpreted in many ways in different religious traditions.

A few months ago, I found a dead skunk in a forgotten corner of St. John’s Cemetery; at that time, all that was left was the skin and the skeleton, and of course a faint smell of skunk. The skunk was lying in the midst of a deer trail. I couldn’t figure out how it had died: did a predator such as a raptor or a Bobcat kill it (Carol has seen a small Bobcat near the cemetery)? or did it die in some other manner? Based on what was left of the pelt, I’d say it was a Striped Skunk (Mephitis mephitis), not a Western Spotted Skunk, the only other species that lives in this area.

Since I first saw the body, the decomposers have been at work, and as the skin withered and decayed, the skeleton has slowly been emerging. Some of the smaller bones are now missing — it looked like Mule Deer have stepped on what’s left of the skunk — but the skull is now clearly visible. Using a stick, I positioned the skull and jawbone so I could see the teeth.

The dental formula for both the Striped Skunk and the Spotted Skunk is: Incisors 3 per side upper / 3 per side lower, Canines 1/1, Premolars 3/3, Molars 1/2, for a total of 34 teeth. This individual was missing one lower right incisor, the lower right canine, and one upper right premolar.

We have seen Striped Skunks wandering around the cemetery at night. In fact, skunks are the primary reason to not go into the cemetery at night: it would be far too easy to stumble across one as it came walking around from behind a gravestone, and the consequences of such a meeting could be unpleasant. Most of us would prefer to run into a ghost than a skunk.

It has been a moist winter, and I’ve been seeing quite a few mushrooms walking around San Mateo. Most of the mushrooms I’ve been seeing are small and inconspicuous, but a few days ago I came across a showy large orange fungus in a hidden location. Today I went back and took some photographs:

I feel fairly confident assigning this to genus Gymnopilus, given its large size, its orangeish color, and the fact that it is growing on decaying wood. Based on the description in A Field Guide to Mushrooms of North America (Kent and Vera B. McKnight, Houghton Mifflin, 1987), and without taking a spore print or doing chemical tests, I’d venture to guess this is a Showy Flamecap (Gymnopilus junonius, formerly G. specatabilis).

(Written on Jan. 19 and posted on Jan. 25; I held this post for several days, because subspecies of Gymnopilus junonius from the eastern U.S. and Korea may contain psilocybin. I didn’t want some idiot to find this mushroom and, based on my very tentative identification, ingest it hoping for hallucinations. The mushroom in the photographs is now pretty well decayed, so that danger is past.)

Gallup has been polling people in the U.S. since 1977 about perceptions of the honesty and ethics of various professions. These Gallup polls rate the perceived honesty of professions as “very high/high,” “average,” or “very low/low” (with the obvious addition of a choice for “no opinion”).

In Gallup’s most recent poll about perceptions of the ethics and honesty of various professions, the nursing profession again tops the list, with 84% of people giving them a “very high/high” rating, 15% giving them an “average rating,” and 1% giving them a “very low/low” rating.

By contrast, only 37% of people give clergy as a profession a “very high/high” rating for honesty and ethics; 43% give an “average rating,” 15% give a “very low/low” rating, with the remainder offering “no opinion.” In their report, Gallup made a special note of the decline in the perception of clergy honesty and ethics:

“Gallup has measured Americans’ views of the clergy’s honesty and ethics 34 times beginning in 1977, and this year’s 37% very high/high rating is the lowest to date. Although the overall average positive rating is 54%, it has consistently fallen below that level since 2009. The historical high of 67% occurred in 1985. Positive views of the honesty and ethics of the clergy dropped in 2002 amid a sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, and although positive ratings rebounded somewhat in the next few years, they fell to 50% in 2009 and have been steadily declining since 2012.”

However, although the Catholic sexual abuse scandal is foremost in many people’s minds, evangelical Christian blogger Warren Throckmorton notes that there are other clergy scandals affecting some people’s perceptions of clergy. Throckmorton specifically mentions the recent accusations of clergy financial misconduct at Harvest Bible Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch near Chicago: when some whistle-blower bloggers made those accusations public, rather than addressing the accusations, Harvest Bible Church sued the bloggers for defamation. Throckmorton contrasts Harvest Bible Church with Willow Creek Church, another big evangelical Christian megachurch which recently ousted its founding pastor after credible allegations of misconduct; subsequently the entire leadership team resigned, realizing their leadership had been compromised by their poor handling of the allegations, and realizing that the church needed to get a fresh start. (Throckmorton’s most recent blog post about Harvest Bible Church, which links to the Gallup poll, is here.) We could add more examples from outside evangelical Christianity of how organized religious groups respond poorly to accusations of ethical lapses and dishonesty: the many accusations against the Church of Scientology and their opaque responses come immediately to mind.

One thing that I get from Throckmorton’s post is that poor governance goes hand in hand with decline in trust in clergy. And we should distinguish governance from polity. The hierarchical polity of the Roman Catholic Church should in theory be more effective at removing unethical clergy than our Unitarian Universalist congregational polity; more than one unethical Unitarian Universalist minister was able to continue their unethical ways because the Unitarian Universalist Association cannot prevent a local congregation from hiring whomever they want as minister. However, all too often the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy covered up clergy misconduct. The Unitarian Universalist Association, by contrast, has recommended that search committees carry out careful background checks of potential new clergy hires; in Unitarian Universalism, the failures in governance too often take place at the local level, representing the biggest weakness of congregational polity is dealing with ethics; but on the whole, despite the weakness of its polity, Unitarian Universalists have a somewhat better record of dealing with clergy misconduct than the Roman Catholic Church. Again, my point here is that no type of polity is immune from ethical lapses; the real issue is good governance practices within whatever polity a religion might have.

I suspect, therefore, that the decline in the perception of clergy honesty is linked to a wider decline in trust of organized religion — a decline that in many cases is deserved. Lay leaders and clergy, regardless of our polity, need to be scrupulously careful about maintaining good governance practices that are transparent and that strengthen accountability; and when ethical violations arise, we need to address them quickly and transparently.

According to the BBC:

The date of 4 January is marked as the day when CEOs of Britain’s biggest companies already earn what it takes an average worker to make in a year. But British CEOs are not the only ones who out-earn their workers so quickly. An analysis of the wage gap between CEOs and workers in 22 countries by the financial and media company Bloomberg shows that executives in the United States and India can get the average worker’s yearly wage even faster.

In Great Britain, CEOs make 201 times the average workers salary; in the United States, they make 265 times as much as the average worker. So if you live in the U.S., Great Britain, or India, your CEO may already have made two or three times your annual salary.

Silicon Valley has a high concentration of CEOs living here (that is, one of their many houses is located here). We also have a heck of a lot of homelessness here — people living in RVs, people couch surfing, people living in tent encampments, people living on the street, people living in homeless shelters — because of the high cost of housing, which has been driven sky-high in part by demand from people who have lots of money to spend on housing.

Which means if we want to solve the homelessness problem, it’s not enough to build more housing (the supply-side solution). Cutting CEO salaries, and the salaries of all the top 1/10%, is a good first step; Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, is not worth $40 million a year, nor does she need that much money, nor does she deserve it when her salary means that lots of people have to live on the street.

This also means that it’s not enough for Democrats to get angry with Donald Trump. The Democrats have been trying to ally themselves to Silicon Valley, but in terms of inequality of wealth the Silicon Valley execs are just as evil as Mr. Trump.

In article on Feminist Current, a Canadian Web site, Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the Univ. of Texas Austin, questions his assignment into the category of cisgender:

“…Sex is a question of biologically determined male and female, gender of socially determined masculinity and femininity. The dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture asserts that men are naturally competitive and aggressive, and that being a ‘real man’ means struggling for control, conquest, and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants, and takes it. This is sometimes labeled ‘toxic masculinity,’ which implies it is an aberration from some ‘normal’ masculinity. But this understanding of masculinity-as-seeking-dominance is the default setting for most males growing up in patriarchy, especially through the glorification of aggression in the military, sports, and business.

“All that definitional work [Jensen continues] is necessary to explain why I am not cisgender. As a male human, this patriarchal conception of masculinity is not my ‘chosen’ identity, nor do I believe it is my fate. As a short, skinny, effeminate child … I never felt very masculine. As an adult with feminist politics, I reject and struggle to overcome the masculinity norms in patriarchy. If we were someday to transcend patriarchy, would I feel more ‘like a man’? That would depend on how the term was defined, but in the world in which I live, I refuse to embrace the patriarchal gender identity handed to me….

“So [Jensen concludes], I’m not cisgender and I’m not transgender. I am not gender fluid, non-binary, or multi-gender. I self-identify as an adult biological XY male who rejects patriarchal gender norms and works from a radical feminist perspective to eliminate patriarchy….”

While it has some problematic moments, I think Jensen’s essay offers a small but useful addition to the ongoing debate about the term “cisgender.” If you haven’t been following that debate, some have argued that “cisgender” is analogous to the introduction of “heterosexual” as the opposite of “homosexual”; similarly, “cisgender” can help non-trans people realize the extent to which they have the privilege of not having to articulate their gender; therefore it is a necessary term. Arguments against the term include the possibility that setting up such a strong distinction between transgender and cisgender may actually work against a widespread acceptance of transgender as normal; others claim that transgender and cisgender are Western cultural concepts that don’t apply cross-culturally (e.g., Native Americans who reject the identification of the Two-Spirit tradition with transgender).

What Jensen offers to this debate is his personal experience of gender. He does not see himself as typically masculine; therefore, he does not see that his biological sex matches society’s expectations about the gender role he should take on. Yet he does not consider himself transgender, either. There’s an argument to be made that Jensen has cisgender privilege because he’s non-trans, and thus the term is useful; however, I’m not convinced that biological men and boys who are not masculine, but also non-trans, get the same level of privilege as a stereotypically masculine biological male since (depending on how effeminate you are) a straight non-trans non-masculine man will tend to experience some level of bullying and teasing.

The word “cisgender” is not going to go away, and I feel it remains useful in some settings. What Jensen makes me realize is that we should be careful in how we use the term: we shouldn’t use the term “cisgender” in such a way that it reinforces gender stereotypes. For example, we wouldn’t want to reinforce gender stereotypes of masculinity by grouping Robert Jensen together with Donald Trump under the rubric “cisgender men”; Trump is constantly enacting stereotypes of a hyper-masculine gender role (marrying a woman much younger than he, asserting his virility in various ways, putting success above everything else, etc.); Jensen is taking on a significantly different gender role.

So I’ll continue to use “cisgender” as a term for larger groups of people. But I’m going to be disinclined to apply it to a individuals, aware of its cultural assumptions, and careful not to turn it into yet another binary division.

As I look into the economic and political forces driving global environmental collapse, I’ve been researching neoliberalism, an economic doctrine that was first tried on a practical basis under Pinochet in Chile. Neoliberalism now has come to dominate much of the world, including the United States, where neoliberalism is now so entrenched that it represents an unquestioned economic consensus of both major political parties.

Here are two definitions of neoliberalism. The first comes from journalist George Monbiot, author of How Did We Get into This Mess?:

“Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state….

“[T]he most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of it is owned by multi-millionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests. Those which threaten their plans are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and television channels that the socially destructive ideas of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations’ tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language…. Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers, and benefit cheats. These terms, all deliberately invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral.

“Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by the means it forbids: greater intervention on the part of the state.”

George Monbiot, from his 2008 article “How Did We Get into This Mess?” (written, you will notice, before the 2008 Depression hit).

The second definition of neoliberalism comes from leftist geographer David Harvey, quthor of A Brief History of Neoliberalism:

“There are two things to be said [about defining ‘neoliberalism’]. One is … the theory of neoliberalism and the other is its practice. And they are rather different from each other. But the theory takes the view that individual liberty and freedom are the high point of civilization and then goes on to argue that individual liberty and freedom can best be protected and achieved by an institutional structure, made up of strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade: a world in which individual initiative can flourish. The implication of that is that the state should not be involved in the economy too much, but it should use its power to preserve private property rights and the institutions of the market and promote those on the global stage if necessary….

“Liberal theory goes back a very long way … to the 18th century: John Locke, Adam Smith, and writers of that sort. Then economics changed quite a bit towards the end of the 19th century and neoliberalism is a really revival of the 18th century liberal doctrine about freedoms and individual liberties connected to a very specific view of the market. And the leading figures in that are Milton Friedman in this country and Friedrich Hayek in Austria. In 1947 they formed a society to promote neoliberal values called the Mont Pelerin Society. It was a minor society but it got a lot of support from wealthy contributors and corporations to polemicize on the ideas it held.”

From an interview with David Harvey, On Neoliberalism: An Interview with David Harvey, in MRonline.

Questions have been raised about the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a psychological test which purports to find implicit bias in individuals. Olivia Goldhill, writing for Quartz, an online business journal, reports that the IAT has a low reliability, or test-retest, score; where perfect reliability would score as 1, and strong reliability would score as 0.7-0.8, the race IAT has a reliability score of 0.44, or unacceptable. Goldhill also reports that several meta-analyses have found that the IAT is a poor predictor of behavior.

I have my own criticism of the well-known race IAT, which you can take online at the Project Implicit Web site. I took this test online, and scored as having a low to moderate bias in favor of African Americans. As much as I’d like to think I’m Mr. Egalitarian, I had a problem with the test: it required me to make fast judgments about low-resolution photos of facial characteristics, and I know myself well enough to know that I have poor facial recognition ability — I once passed my mother and younger sister on the street and only recognized them when I realized that these two women were laughing at me — so any test that requires me to recognize facial characteristics is not going to produce accurate results.Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the actual test, I’m still skeptical of using tests for implicit bias to implement organizational change. In my experience, that’s not the way organizational change actually happens: it’s not as easy as administering a test, identifying who has implicit bias, and then watching the complete eradication of bias. If it were that easy, we already would have eradicated racism, sexism, etc.

“What the ‘Bias of Crowds’ Phenomenon Means for Corporate Diversity Efforts,” an article by Liz Kofman (a change management consultant with a doctorate in sociology), suggests a different path towards changing organizational biases that I find more pragmatic. Writing for Behavioral Scientist, an online non-profit magazine, Kofman identifies three recommendations for organizations wishing to get rid of bias.

First of all, Kofman suggests that we “focus on changing processes, not people.” In other words, forget all those training sessions where you make individuals in the organization confront their inner biases; instead, change your organizational processes to reduce chances for bias. Why don’t more organizations do this? I suspect it’s because it’s much easier to hold a workshop on implicit bias than it is to do the hard and detailed work of changing organizational processes. It’s fine to hold those workshops, and Unitarian Universalist congregations wishing to address bias should continue to offer, for example, the excellent “Beloved Conversations” class developed by Mark Hicks at Meadville/Lombard Theological School. Just don’t expect one workshop to take the place of lots of rather boring but necessary detail work.

Kofman’s second recommendation is to “prioritize process change and stick to it.” She points out that this is not easy; it takes “organizational will and discipline to implement and sustain … new processes.” Furthermore, Kofman says, an organization needs to focus on a few key process changes, making those a priority; otherwise, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with too many changes and then nothing happens. Prioritizing process changes, and sticking to them, has proved to be an insurmountable problem for most Unitarian Universalist congregations I’ve known: lay leadership changes from year to year and so priorities change from year to year; new and attractive projects arise and draw attention away from ongoing projects. It’s easier to do that high-profile capital campaign, or to add solar panels on your building, than it is to stick to the hard work of implementing new organizational processes designed to reduce racism and sexism.

And this brings us to Kofman’s third recommendation: “provide resources and incentives for change management.” Because “everyday processes influence the bias of crowds” in any organization, you need to change those everyday processes; but too often there are not resources to help people change those processes, in addition to which there’s little incentive for change. Take for example a Unitarian Universalist congregations which wishes to become less white. Clearly, one thing you’ll need to do it completely overhaul the intake process — how potential members are greeted on their first visit, the processes used to integrate newcomers into the congregational culture, and so on. All that is hard work, so one critical resource required for change will be staff time, from both paid and volunteer staff; and because staff time is a limited resource, other projects will have to received fewer staff hours. And how will you provide incentives for those staffers, particularly for the volunteer staffers? None of this is easy.

To summarize: While Implicit Association Tests might be fascinating, they are probably not particularly useful tools for implementing organizational change. Instead, congregations seriously committed to, e.g., becoming less white, should pay attention to the change management technique of process change.

For quite some time now, the very few leftists remaining in the United States have been openly critical of the Democratic Party’s attempts to address racism. This is, in part, because leftists view the Democrats as neo-liberals who are committed to maintaining the inequalities inherent in free-market capitalism. One such leftist is Dr. Toure F. Reed, a historian at Illinois State University. Back in 2015, he published an article titled “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class” in the leftist-socialist magazine Jacobin, in which he offered a historian’s critical assessment of contemporary liberal attempts to  address racism.

In his view, the liberal attempts to address racism in the 2010s (including, e.g., Black Lives Matter, etc.) do not compare well with the anti-racist efforts of the 1950s and 1960s. Those earlier efforts grew out of New Deal labor-liberalism, a very different political context  from the neo-liberalism of the 2010s; the earlier efforts were committed to broad economic egalitarianism, according to Toure, whereas contemporary efforts resist any attempt to include economic class as crucial to fighting racism. In his 2015 article, Professor Touré concluded:

“If one views the excesses and failures of the criminal justice system solely through the lens of race, then victims of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct tend to be black or Latino. However, if one understands race and class are inextricably linked, then the victims of police brutality are not simply black or Latino (and Latinos outnumber blacks in federal prisons at this point) but they tend to belong to groups that lack political, economic, and social influence and power.

“From that vantage point, the worldview expressed by Johnson and others misses the mark and falls into the same trap that, ironically, liberals have offered a stratum of credentialed black Americans for decades: opportunity within a market-driven political and economic framework that disparages demands for social and economic justice for all (including most black people) as socialist, communist, un-American, or even class-reductionist.”

Three years later, in late 2018, the situation hasn’t changed. And in 2018 Professor Touré published a new book, Why liberals separate race from class: The conservative implications of race reductionism. (New York & London: Verso, 2018). I haven’t read it yet, but I came across an interesting quotation that makes me think that I must read it:

“Emancipation and even Reconstruction were produced by a convergence of interests among disparate constituencies — African Americans, abolitionists, business, small freeholders, and northern laborers — united under the banner of free labor. The civil rights movement was the product of a consensus created by the New Deal that presumed the appropriateness of government intervention in private affairs for the public good, the broad repudiation of scientific racism following World War II, and the political vulnerabilities Jim Crow created for the United States during the Cold War. To be sure, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and even the civil rights movement failed to redress all of the challenges confronting blacks. But the limitations of each of these movements reflected political constraints imposed on them, in large part, by capital.”

In contrast to the current Democratic party agenda, I am convinced that racism can only be addressed by tackling classism, and by promulgating a broad egalitarianism. As a result, I don’t fit in well with the much of the political agenda of broader Unitarian Universalism. Our religious tradition is currently dominated by the concerns and outlook of the white college-educated elite (i.e., the majority of our members); elite Unitarian Universalists are unwilling to face up to the extent to which they benefit from the exploitation of the working class, and from the continuation of business-as-usual consumer capitalism. Fortunately, there were a goodly number of Unitarian Universalists who supported Bernie Sanders — even though I would consider him a center-leftist, rather than a socialist — he isn’t as far to the left as, say, Bayard Rustin or the later Martin Lught King, Jr., — but still, he represented a desire for a broad egalitarianism.

In any case, I’m going to have to read Professor Touré’s new book.

Elisa Freschi, a philosopher specializing in Indian-subcontinent philosophy, has written an interesting post about atheism, in which she says: “in European history, atheism is the refusal of theism as conceived in modern times, with God as one ‘thing’ among others.” Thus if you refute a theism in which God is a “natural cause” — which is mostly what modern atheism does — you wind up with modern atheism, which can be defined as atheism-as-naturalism. However, such atheism-as-naturalism doesn’t have much to say about the God of Meister Eckhart.

In Indian philosophy, according to Freschi, when people talk about God, “God” may have at least four different meanings: the devatas (the mythological gods); the isvara (the God of rational theology); the Brahman (an impersonal deity); or the bhagavat God (the God of personal devotion). Freschi contends that “atheism in India is mostly targeted at two concepts of god, on the one hand the gods (devata) of mythology and on the other the Lord (isvara) of rational theology.” Freschi goes on to outline how in the 13th to 14th centuries C.E., Indian philosophers such as  Venkatanatha responded to the atheism of the earlier Nyasa school by developing new forms of theism, which Freschi calls “post-atheism theism.”

This discussion becomes relevant to Unitarian Universalism when one considers that many current arguments against theism in our congregations are arguments for naturalism; that is, arguments for modern atheism, which considers God as a “thing.” These arguments become less intelligible when considered as arguments against, e.g., Martin Buber’s conception of God as “Thou,” or God considered in panentheist or pantheist terms.

Another way of saying this is that when using the English-language term “God,” you have to be careful to define in what sense you are using that term. When you argue against God as a thing which is a natural cause, your arguments will have little effect on those for whom God is defined in terms of a personal devotional relationship.

Furthermore, if a modern atheist winds up arguing with a mystic, someone like Henry David Thoreau or me, they might find they’re arguing with a religious naturalist who agrees entirely with their naturalist arguments, but who does not define God as a thing which is a natural cause. If we don’t clarify which definition of God we’re using, the argument is going to get confusing very quickly.

The No-Rehearsal Christmas Pageant we do every year requires some kind of minimal costume for the six animals in the manger scene. The vinyl animal noses I’ve been using for the past decade and a half have started to get tacky, and it’s time to stop using them. Nor did I want to purchase new animal noses; the world doesn’t need any more cheap vinyl junk. First I made a chicken hat as a possible replacement for the chicken nose, but this week I decided that making five other animal hats (and finding a place to store them) simply wasn’t practical.

So instead I made animal ears mounted on head bands. It turns out that animal ears mounted on head bands are a substantial cottage industry, sold on Etsy (just search for “farm animal ears”) and elsewhere. But I decided to make my own — cow ears, donkey ears, dog ears, pig ears, mouse ears, and a chicken crest — using hair bands, felt, wire for stiffener, and a hot melt glue gun.

It would have been cheaper (once you figure in my time) and easier to purchase the ears available on Etsy. However, having made them I know how to repair them, and I anticipate that these animal ears will last until I finally retire.

You may have difficulty accessing this site over the past couple of days due to a move to a new server. There will be a couple more short down times for software upgrades. Back to normal by the weekend.

For quite a few years now, while serving in four different congregations, I’ve been doing a No Rehearsal Christmas Pageant as an intergenerational service on one of the Sundays before Christmas.

The simple costumes are what make this participatory pageant so much fun. Back in 2003, I bought a bunch of rubber animal noses at a theater supply store in Berkeley to serve as costumes for the farm animals who gather around the manger. These rubber noses have to be rubbed down with alcohol after every performance, which is easy enough for the cow, camel, and pig noses — but the chicken noses have lots of hard-to-reach interstices, and are difficult to clean adequately.

So this year I decided to come up with alternate costume for the chicken. Starting with with a cotton baseball hat and some yellow and red felt, here’s what I came up with:

I think this chicken hat will be a fun addition to the No Rehearsal Christmas Pageant.

The December, 2018 issue of the Atlantic carries an article by Joan C. Williams titled “The Democrats’ White People Problem.” White argues, in part, that Trump and the Republicans have a strategy of keeping liberals focused on race and racism, instead of addressing class issues:

“These gestures [Trump’s inflammatory comments on race] may seem like pandering to racists. But in truth they are aimed equally at the left, in an effort to keep liberals’ attention focused on race rather than class. If Democrats were to focus more attention on economic issues, they just might be able to win back the non-elite white voters they’ve been bleeding for half a century.”

I admit that I have little skill in political analysis, so I have to take Williams’ political analysis on faith when she outlines some strategies that the Democrats could follow to regain votes.

But Williams is also making an ethical observation here, and ethics is something I know more about. She is speaking of ethics when she says:

“A final dynamic will be particularly hard to fix: the broken relationship between elite and non-elite white people, for which people of all races are paying the price. This is a white-people problem, and white people need to fix it. (I wouldn’t presume to advise people of color on how to respond to racism, or to suggest that they should refrain from seeing the 2016 election through the always-powerful lens of race. But as an elite white person, I do see it as my place to tell elite whites to stop displacing blame for their own racism onto non-elite whites.)” Williams emphasizes this last point later on: “Once you start a conversation about class, elite white people have to admit they have not only racial privilege but class privilege, too.”

We elites whites cannot dodge our own ethical responsibilities by bad-mouthing Trump and his supporters. Fighting classism is as ethically necessary as fighting racism, and in both cases we elite whites have to begin by examining ourselves: How are we contributing to the problem? And then: How can we stop contributing to the problem?

Or, as a sage two thousand years ago put it: Don’t go trying to pull the sawdust out of another’s eye when you’ve got a chunk of wood stuck in your own.

The World Wildlife Federation believes humans have wiped out 60% of vertebrate animals since 1970, according to an article in the Guardian. And global climate change is NOT the culprit:

“The biggest cause of wildlife losses is the destruction of natural habitats, much of it to create farmland.”

Too damn many humans consuming too many resources.

Should we repudiate dead white men who made racist comments?

To make it a Unitarian Universalist question: Theodore Parker was an abolitionist. But as has been documented by Mark Morrison-Reed and others, Parker also believed blacks were inferior to whites, and he espoused views that today many would define as white supremacist views. Should we repudiate Parker for his racism?

There’s a strong argument to be made that Parker is morally suspect because of his racism. But in an article on Aeon titled “Why sexist and racist philosophers might still be admirable,” philosopher Julian Baggini argues that we should be careful about condemning dead thinkers out of hand:

“Why do so many find it impossible to believe that any so-called genius could fail to see that their prejudices were irrational and immoral? One reason is that our culture has its own deep-seated and mistaken assumption: that the individual is an autonomous human intellect independent from the social environment. Even a passing acquaintance with psychology, sociology or anthropology should squash that comfortable illusion. The enlightenment ideal that we can and should all think for ourselves should not be confused with the hyper-enlightenment fantasy that we can think all by ourselves. Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren’t even aware of.”

In other words, progressives in the early twenty-first century have our own blind spot: we still believe in the myth of hyper-individualism — what Baggini terms the “hyper-enlightenment fantasy.” We believe this myth, or fantasy, even though it is so patently false.

This doesn’t mean that Parker gets a pass. It does mean that, even though he was really smart, Parker could not entirely transcend his social environment.

Rather than rejecting Parker for his racism, I think about the fact that even though he couldn’t transcend his social environment, he pushed as hard as he could along the moral arc of the universe towards justice. And I’m pretty sure that if I could measure his progress along that moral arc of the universe, I would discover he moved further from where he started to the ultimate goal of justice than I ever will. That same statement would be true of most people alive today: I imagine there are very few people alive today who are righteous enough that they are in a position to condemn Parker (I know of none personally); it is given to very few to transcend their social environment that far.

This tallies with an observation I’ve made about how progress is made in the fight against racism. I’ve seen more than one congregational program to get white people to understand how they personally are racist; in my experience, those kinds of programs lead to some personal enlightenment for a few individuals, but don’t really change the system. What works better is setting up policies and procedures in a congregation that dial back the institutional racism; in my (limited) experience, this is more effective than consciousness-raining exercises. We can and should think for ourselves; but lasting change is more likely to happen through changing the social environment than through changing individuals.

You are unlikely to see people looking like this when they sing hymns at a Unitarian Universalist church:

I took this photo at today’s Sacred Harp singing in Davis, California. Everybody, even the people who are new to this kind of singing, are in full voice, not holding back, letting the song carry them away even if they disagree with the lyrics.

Unitarian Universalists, by contrast, tend to be of three types: Trained Singers, Overly-polite Singers, and Timid Singers. Many of the Trained Signers will be in the choir, and the rest of the congregation defers to them because they have at least some training. The Overly-polite Singers are the inheritors of Lowell Mason’s Better Music Movement, which swept both Unitarians and Universalists in the mid-nineteenth century: this movement expunged American composers and singing styles and replaced them European composers and bel canto singing. The Timid Singers, usually the majority of people at any given Unitarian Unviersalist worship service, having been cowed by the Trained Singers and the Overly-polite Singers, assume they can’t sing.

Sacred Harp singers don’t fit into any of these categories. Sacred Harp singing is an American tradition (there are both black and white versions, but they’re closely related) that does not sound like bel canto singing. Sacred Harp singers may get carried away with the music. Sacred Harp singers know that they should sing as well as they can for every song, even if they don’t like it, so that everyone else sings along on their favorites. Sacred Harp singing is a distinctly egalitarian tradition that says everyone can sing. And Sacred Harp singers let themselves be carried away with the music, as in the photo above.

(There might also be a fourth type of singer in some Unitarian Universalist congregations: the Popular-music Singer. These are the folks who sing along to various types of popular music. They may not read music, but once they hear a song they can generally sing it. They tend to be more egalitarian than the other three types of singer, and they tend to be more passionate singers. However, they are generally outnumbered by the Better Music Movement Singers.)

I wish more Unitarian Universalist congregations sang as if they were being carried away with the music. I wish we were less polite singers. But I suspect that music feels a little too uncontrolled, too irrational: we want to keep it carefully under control.

Below are some videos of faith communities that let their singing get ecstatic. Probably the majority of Unitarian Universalists will find these recordings unpleasant, and disturbingly passionate. Besides, we don’t want to look funny while we sing. That’s who we are; we don’t want to sing like our lives depended on it.

What religious music have you heard that sounds like someone’s life depends on it?

Old Regular Primitive Baptists singing Amazing Grace (white tradition)
New Home AME Zion Church singing I Was Living in a Strange Land (black tradition)
California Sacred Harp singers singing Marlborough (white tradition)
Wiregrass Singers singing Amazing Grace and other songs (black tradition)

While my laundry was in the machines at the laundromat, I took a walk along the bay. High tide pushed the shorebirds in close to the bike path, so it was easy to sort out dowitchers, Willets, Marbled Godwits, and Black-bellied Plovers. There were also half a dozen Black Skimmers spaced out along the water, each one making a striking contrast to the mixed flock of shorebirds.

Quite a few years ago, when I was visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA), I saw the ancient Egyptian board game Senet made out of wood and faience, a kind of pottery. Scholars and board-game-lovers have invented modern rules for Senet, based on ancient Egyptian depictions of people playing Senet, and based on the several surviving copies of the game. I’ve read through several modern reconstructions of the game, but all the modern rules seem overly complicated. I wanted a set of rules that would be easy for school aged children to learn.

This week I came up with a simple set of rules, rules which remain fairly consistent with what is actually known about the game but are easily learned by school-aged children. The rules are below the fold.

The interesting thing about Senet is that it can be understood to represent the journey of the ba (roughly equivalent to soul) after death through the underworld to some kind of eternal life — it’s not just a game, it’s religion! Some day, I’ll write a lesson plan that ties Senet to ancient Egyptian religion. In the mean time, it’s still a fun game.

Here’s printable PDF of the game board:

Senet Game Board (printable PDF)

Above: The game board, printed out and trimmed to size. I used whatever I had around the house for playing pieces — 5 light-colored cubes, and 5 coins (mostly old Boston subway tokens). I made throwing sticks out of some pieces of wood I happened to have (popsicle sticks would work better), and I used a rubber stamp to put an Egyptian scarab beetle on one side so each stick has one clear side and one marked side.

Rules for playing Senet follow….

Senet rules (printable PDF)

SENET RULES

Senet was a game played by the ancient Egyptians. No one knows exactly how the ancient Egyptians played Senet, and the rules here are based on reconstructions by several different Egyptologists. This version of Senet is designed for relatively fast play (approx. 20 minutes), and is suitable for ages 8 and up.

Overview of the game:

Your soul, or ba, has entered the realm of the dead through the grand entrance in the Western Desert. You must journey through the realm of the dead and reach the god Osiris, who will let you live forever. But the forces of evil — represented by your opponent’s playing pieces — can get in your way. Will you reach Osiris, or will the forces of evil defeat you?

The object of the game:

Be the first to move all your playing pieces off the board.

Equipment:

5 blue playing pieces and 5 red playing pieces (or two different colors of your choice)
4 throwing sticks (you can also play with a six-sided die)
1 game board

To start:

Arrange the red playing pieces on odd-numbered spaces 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. Arrange the blue playing pieces on even-numbered spaces 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. (See the diagram below.)

Both players throw the throwing sticks. The player who throws the lowest takes the blue playing pieces, and goes first. (Or if you use a die, whoever rolls the lowest number goes first.)

How to use the throwing sticks:

The throwing sticks have one marked side and one unmarked side.

1 marked side up, move one square
2 marked sides up, move two squares
3 marked sides up, move three squares
4 marked sides up, move four squares
NO marked sides up, move five squares

Basic play:

Throw the throwing sticks and move one of your playing pieces the number of squares indicated. Move from lower numbered squares up to higher numbered squares (see the diagram below).

If you land on a square that is already occupied, you must send that playing piece back to the square where you started (even if it’s your own playing piece!).

If you cannot move any of your pieces forward, you must move one of your pieces backwards.

If you can’t move any piece forwards or backwards, you lose your turn.

Special squares:

Squares 26, 28, 29, and 30 are “safe” squares. If there is another playing piece on one of those squares, you cannot move your piece there.

Square 27 is the “bad” square. If you land on this square, go back to square 15, and if there is another playing piece already there send it backwards to the next open square.

Moving your playing pieces off the board:

You must move each playing piece off the board by exact count.

Optional additional rule:

Square 26 has the Egyptian symbol nefer, meaning “beautiful” or “good.” Before proceeding to the final four squares, you must land each piece on this square by exact count. (If you play with this rule, the game will take longer.)

Early Sunday morning, I got the announcement from Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice: “Local synagogues will be gathering TODAY, Sunday 10/28 at 7PM at Congregation Beth Am for mourning, prayers and mutual support after the tragedy at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, PA. Other congregations are warmly welcome to join them.”

Several of us from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA) decided to join them. Just in case there were a lot of people, we decided to carpool over. We left the UUCPA parking lot and drove down Charleston Rd., and by the time we crossed Foothills Expressway we realized we were in a line of cars headed to Congregation Beth Am. Even though we were fifteen minutes early, there were no parking places left, and we wound up parking off the road under a tree.

When we got inside the synagogue, the sanctuary was already filled, and they had begun opening up the sliding doors into the social hall. We helped set up more chairs, then sat down. The woman next to me was checking the score of the ball game; she was rooting for the Dodgers, but said her daughter was rooting for the Red Sox. When she found out that I came with some Unitarian Universalists, she thanked us and warmly welcomed us to her synagogue.

More people kept arriving. They brought out even more chairs. I told the woman sitting next to me that I was perfectly able to stand, so if anyone wanted to sit down, she should give the chair to them. I stood near the door, and watched people stream in. There were a few women wearing hijabs. I saw a couple of clerical collars. Not everyone was white. People just kept coming in, and when I finally turned to look behind me I saw that now the entire social hall was filled, too, and there were dozens of us standing along the walls.

The best parts of the service were the songs we sang together. I couldn’t see the words projected on the screen at the front, but I hummed along as best I could. There were good speakers, too, but how much could you say about the senseless murders of eleven people? One of the speakers who touched me most was a Muslim woman; I don’t remember what she said, but I remember her tone of voice which said she knew viscerally what it was like to be a target, and that we all had to look out for one another. The other speaker who touched me deeply was the rabbi who said that her ten year old daughter didn’t want to go to temple on Saturday morning because it wasn’t safe; her rabbi mother insisted they go, and that touched me because that’s what we have to do: we can’t hide from this kind of terrorism, we must face up to it somehow.

It took a quarter of an hour to get out of the parking lot. While we sat in line, Laurel told us about the door-to-door canvassing she was doing in the Central Valley to turn out the vote. I couldn’t help thinking that politicians need to back off with their divisive rhetoric, even if divisiveness wins votes; I couldn’t help thinking that it’s mostly Republican candidates who are making statements that incite violence — Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln! We can’t hide from this kind of divisive rhetoric, we must face up to it somehow. Door-to-door canvassing might be one of the best ways to do this; we learned this during the successful campaign for same-sex marriage: demonstrably the strategy that worked best in moving people towards tolerance was face-to-face conversations.

Above: The view from halfway back in Congregation Beth Am (blurry, because I couldn’t hold the phone steady).

Another story for liberal religious kids, which I found as I was cleaning up my files.

One day, four of Buddha’s followers came up to him and asked how they might learn to meditate and rise above earthly things. Buddha explained to the four bhikkus how they might do so, and each of the four went off to learn a different kind of meditation. The first bhikku learned the Six Spheres of Touch. The second bhikku learned the Five Elements of Being. The third bhikku learned the Four Principal Elements. The fourth bhikku learned the Eighteen Constituents of Being. And each one of these four bhikkus learned how to meditate so well that they each achieved Enlightenment and became a holy person.

Now one day all four of these bhikkus came back to tell the Buddha what they had done, and each of them claimed that their way was the best form of mediation. At last one of them said, “Buddha, each of us has achieved Enlightenment, but we each used a different type of meditation. How could this be?”

The Buddha said, “It is like the four brothers who saw the dhak tree,” and he told them this story:

***

Once upon a time Bramadatta, the King of Benares, had four sons.

One day, the four sons sent for a charioteer and said to him, “We want to see a dhak tree [butea frondosa]. Show us one!”

“Very well, I will,” the charioteer replied. “Let me begin by showing the eldest son.”

The charioteer took the eldest to the forest in the chariot. It was springtime, and eldest son saw the dhak tree at the time when the buds had not yet begun to swell, and the tree looked dead.

But the charioteer told them he could not return right away. After two or three weeks had gone by, the charioteer brought the second son to see the dhak tree, but now it was entirely covered with reddish-orange flowers.

Again, the charioteer told them he could not return to the tree right away. After two or three weeks had gone by, the charioteer brought the third son to see the dhak tree, but now the flowers were gone and the tree was covered with leaves.

Again, the charioteer told them he could not return to the tree right away. The fourth son waited and waited until at last he could wait no more. The charioteer brought him to see the dhak tree when it was covered with long brown seed-pods.

When at last all the brothers had seen the dhak tree, they sat down together, and someone asked, “So what is the dhak tree like?”

The first brother answered, “It is like a bunch of dead twigs!”

And the second brother said, “No, it is reddish-orange like a big piece of meat!”

And the third brother said, “No, it has leaves like a banyan tree!”

And the fourth brother said, “No, it looks just like the acacia tree with its long seed pods!”

None of them liked the answers the other gave. So they ran to find their father.

“Father,” they asked, “tell us, what is the dhak tree like?”

“You have all seen the tree,” the king said. “You tell me what it’s like.”

And the four brothers gave the king four different answers.

“You have all seen the tree,” said the king. “But when the charioteer showed you the tree, you didn’t ask him what the tree looked like at other times of the year. This is where your mistake lies.”

And the king recited a poem:

Each one of you has gone to view the tree,
And yet you are in great perplexity.
But you forgot to ask the charioteer
What forms the dhak tree takes throughout the year.

***

Buddha then spoke to the four bhikkus. “These four brothers did not ask themselves what the tree looked like in different times of the year, and so they fell into doubt. So the four of you have fallen into doubt about what is true and right.” Then the Buddha gave another stanza for the king’s poem:

If you know truth, but with deficiency,
You’ll be unsure, like those four and their tree.

Source: Adapted from the Kimsukopama-Jataka, in The Jataka; or, Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, edited by E. B. Cowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), book 2, no. 248.

One of the nice things about living in the old caretaker’s house in St. John’s Cemetery is being able to be in the cemetery after hours. It’s a lovely place on a night like tonight, the night before the full moon: peaceful, with a feeling of quiet transcendence. You feel a quiet connection with all those people who were buried here, and with the people who loved them and wanted a calm place to remember them.

Just as I finished taking this photo, Carol said, “Watch out!” I turned around in time to see a skunk walk past, its tail raised in warning. We retreated back into the house, leaving the cemetery to the moonlight.

“Standpoint epistemology,” according to philosopher and law professor Brian Leiter, is the Marxist idea that our social position influences our beliefs; if you are, for example, a member of the working class, your beliefs have been “distorted by the ideology propagated by a different, dominant class, which systematically distorted social reality in its own interests.” This is in distinct contrast to current “bourgeois academic philosophy” where “standpoint epistemology has, ironically, been turned on its head. Now the social position of the purported ‘knower’ — usually ‘race’ or ‘gender’ or ‘sexual orientation’ — is not taken to be a distorting influence on cognition, but rather an epistemic advantage, one which even demands epistemic deference by others.” A key point Leiter makes is that this kind of thinking is done by “well-to-do professors who never challenge the prerogatives of the capitalist class.” The full post, which is short, is here.

My sense is that much of the thinking about identity politics done within Unitarian Universalism follows a similar pattern. We Unitarian Universalists often do give epistemic deference to knowledge based on social position, particularly for social positions based on race, gender, and sexual orientation; recognizing, however, that we tend to assume that the social position of white, male, and/or straight persons is distorted, and therefore should be subjected to serious critique. Contrast this with the epistemological approach of some past Unitarian and Universalist thinkers: early Universalists grounded their epistemology in reason and scripture, both of which were assumed to be equally accessible to all persons; Transcendentalist epistemology assumed that all persons had access to the divine through their faculty of intuition; early humanists relied on the powers of reason which were accessible to all persons; etc. Current Unitarian Universalists tend to be critical of all these earlier approaches, since they were typically written down by white, straight, male thinkers.

I find three interesting points here. First, current Unitarian Universalism generally assumes that knowledge is not accessible by all persons equally; the knowledge of white, straight, and/or male persons is assumed to be in some sense distorted. Second, current Unitarian Universalism (as has been the case through most of its existence) tends to ignore class status; the viewpoint of working class white persons are grouped together with elite white persons like Donald Trump, under the assumption that the standpoint of all white persons leads to a distorted knowledge of the world — the standpoint of all white persons, that is, except for enlightened white persons (such as white Unitarian Universalists) who have questioned their white person’s standpoint. Third, many current Unitarian Universalists are now seriously critical of the notion that there exist some kinds of knowledge accessible to all persons.

I know I’m cynical, but I’m tempted to believe this complicated identitarian epistemology helps Unitarian Universalists maintain their comfortable belief in capitalism.

Overwork and health issues have kept me away from this blog for a couple of weeks, but I now bring you an important scholarly article just in time for Halloween.

Back in 2015, two scholars published a peer-reviewed article in the academic journal GeoHumanities titled “The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins.” From the abstract: “Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places.” In other words, according to the authors, rural working class white folks dig pumpkins; urban middle class non-white folks, not so much; furthermore, this difference can lead to riots.

This could have been an interesting article, except I got lost in jargon-filled prose like this: “Spaces where actual pumpkins reside differ from spaces in which metaphorical pumpkins are segregated in the social landscape of modern U.S. cultures.” I’m honestly not sure just what that means, although maybe I just don’t get the jargon of the interdisciplinary study of geography and humanities.

But this next sentence I am quite sure I understand: “Actual pumpkins and the ideas of pumpkins intersect; both stay on the page for the remainder of this article.” I saw no actual pumpkins staying on the page for the remainder of the article. Or I suppose if I had seen the intersection of actual pumpkins, and ideas of pumpkins, it would have looked like this:

By the way, you will notice that this Venn diagram stayed on the page for the remainder of the time you were looking at this article. I have come to expect that sort of behavior from Venn diagrams, although to paraphrase Lord Berkeley’s question: If a Venn diagram is on the page, and no one sees it, does it stay on the page for the remainder of the article? The only reason I can indulge in such stupid sophomoric humor is that the authors of this article needed a remedial course in writing good prose.

I just completed a major re-write of A Manual for Sunday School Teachers in Unitarian Universalist Congregations.

Among other improvements, I completely rewrote Section 2, “Basics of Teaching and Learning,” based on my observations of what new Sunday school teachers really want to know. On Saturday, I’ll be leading a workshop on “Teaching 101” at Pot of Gold, the district religious education conference, and I’ll base this workshop on the revised Section 2 (with added hands-on activities).

I’ll post the table of contents below the fold.

Above: A Sunday school teacher coaching a middle schooler on how to use a power tool during a Sunday school class at my church. No, this is not your mother’s Sunday school!

A Manual for Sunday School Teachers in Unitarian Universalist Congregations
Table of Contents

Section 1: Goals and Visions
1-A. The principles and mission of the congregation
1-B. Four Big Learning Goals
1-C. What does a Sunday school teacher do?

Section 2: Basics of Teaching
2-A. Setting the stage
2-B. The opening circle
2-C. Using your curriculum book
2-D. The closing circle
2-E. Back-up or sponge activities
2-F. Classroom management

Section 3: Models of teaching and learning
3-A. Developmental stage theories
3-B. Learning styles and multiple intelligences
3-C. The traditional three-way learning styles model
3-D. How to use games, songs, movement, and more
3-E. Is it school, or something else?

Section 4: Procedures and policies
{Most of this section is specific to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.]
4-A. Substitutes
4-B. Supplies and equipment
4-C. Child and youth protection
4-D. Emergency and health procedures

Are the concept of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding universal and shared across different cultural and religious traditions? Or are there no important philosophical concepts that are shared among people in all cultural and religious traditions?

The interdisciplinary team of the Geography of Philosophy Project aim to find out. They’re taking an empirical approach, and just opened a Web site where they plan to report at least some of their progress. Not much there yet, but I plan to keep an eye on the Go Philosophy Web site.

(Thanks to.)

Progressive Confucianism is a new Web site, primarily in Chinese, though with a small amount of English-language content as well. I wish I read Chinese, because the material on Progressive Confucianism in English makes the concept sound pretty interesting, such as this passage:

“The idea that ethical insight leads to progressive political change, which in turn leads to greater realization of our potential for virtue, lies at the heart of Progressive Confucianism.”

(Thanks to.)

In a post on the Indian Philosophy Blog, Elisa Freschi distinguishes between global and local atheisms:

“The M?m??s? school of Indian philosophy started as an atheist school since its first extant text, Jaimini’s M?m??s? S?tra. At a certain point in its history, however, it reinterpreted its atheist arguments as aiming only at a certain conception of god(s). In other words, it reinterpreted its atheism as being not a global atheism, but a form of local atheism, denying a certain specific form of god(s) and not any form whatsoever.”

I find this an extremely useful distinction, which in my experience is mostly absent in Western thought. In the West, our religious thinking has been dominated by monotheistic religion — Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism — which have tended to force our thought into either/or, binary thinking: either I believe in the the monotheistic Christian (or Jewish) deity, or I believe in nothing. It is difficult for us to conceive of any other option.

In the Indian religious landscape, however, there is a multiplicity of deities. I suspect that kind of landscape allows a more nuanced approach to thinking about deities. In one example, Freschi quotes one Indian philosopher as saying: “I have refuted the inference to the existence of the Lord said by other scholars, but I have not refuted the Lord Himself” (Nayaviveka, tarkap?da, end of sambandh?k?epaparih?ra).

But I can see other possibilities that could also be interesting, such as refuting the existence of certain classes of deities. This brings to mind Xenophanes, a thinker from the pre-Christian West, who made some well-known criticisms of the class of anthropomorphic deities:

“Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds” (fragment 15, John Burnet translation); and

“The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair” (fragment 16, John Burnet translation).

Xenophanes also criticized the class of deities that not only looks like but behaves like humans:

“Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. (fragment 11, John Burnet translation)

All this raises an interesting line of thought: arguments supporting atheism in the Western tradition tend to argue against the monotheistic traditions of Christianity and Judaism. And indeed, Western atheists have developed some powerful arguments against these monotheistic deities. But because their arguments focus so narrowly on the specifics of Western monothesitic deities, I find their arguments less convincing when considering, for example, panentheism. (And no, that’s not a typographical error; see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on panentheism.)

The most interesting point here for me is that in an increasingly multicultural world — that is, in a globalized world where cultures previously separated by comfortable distances now find themselves living literally next door to one another — arguments against the Western concept of “God” might suddenly be revealed to be a local atheism. Similarly, arguments for the Christian or Jewish deity might well be a local theism.

For the past five years, I’ve been researching Unitarians who lived in Palo Alto from 1895 to 1934, and writing short biographies of these ordinary Unitarians. I’ve finally collected these biographies and printed them in a perfect-bound paperback book, Available on Lulu.com either as a print copy for $10.84 (plus whatever Lulu charges for shipping and handling), or as a PDF download. The Introduction to the book appears below the fold.

Unitarians in Palo Alto, 1895-1934: A Biographical Dictionary
by Dan Harper
ISBN: 978-0-9889413-5-9

A biographical dictionary of Unitarians living in Palo Alto, Calif., from 1895 to 1934, most of whom were associated with either the Unity Society of Palo Alto (1895-1897) or the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto (1905-1934).

Introduction

There have been three different Unitarian congregations in Palo Alto: the Unity Society, gathered in 1895, organized in 1896, and disbanded by about 1897; the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, formally organized in 1905, and finally dissolved in 1934; and the Palo Alto Unitarian Society, gathered in 1947, the forerunner of the present Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.

The first chapter of this book has biographical entries for the few people we know were associated with the Unity Society.

The second chapter, a much longer chapter, has biographical entries for many of the names appearing in the extant written records of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. There are also entries for a few other Unitarians who lived in Palo Alto, but who were apparently not affiliated with the church. The second chapter also highlights six multigenerational Unitarian families, giving several examples of how Unitarian affiliation continued across generations. Family groups are preceded by a family tree, and each family group ends with a typographical ornament.

Why a biographical dictionary

This book represents my interest in telling the stories of ordinary Unitarians. Most historical accounts of Unitarianism focus on institutional history at the denominational or congregational level, or on the biographies of prominent Unitarians. Institutional histories typically focus on ministers and perhaps other paid staffers such as musicians; famous persons who are part of the institution; and prominent lay leaders. However, given the realities of sexism, racism, and class bias, histories of this type will tend to minimize the importance of women, children, non-white persons, working class persons, and less-educated persons who are part of Unitarian congregations.

This book also represents my interest in telling the stories of Unitarian women. In Palo Alto, there were Unitarian women in leadership positions beginning with the Unity Society. The Women’s Alliance of the Unitarian Church left excellent records, documenting how women provided funding and lay leadership for the congregation as a whole. A biographical dictionary which includes most of the people in the congregation places equal importance on men’s and women’s stories.

I am also interested in trying to document the complex net-work of relationships which arguably are the most important element of congregational life: more on this below.

The questions that remain

Originally, I had hoped to be able to do statistical analysis of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, particularly to investigate socio-economic class status. I wanted to answer questions like: How many had college degrees? How many had servants living in their homes with them? How many had passports and were able to afford overseas travel? However, I soon realized that ac-curate statistical analysis was not possible without an accurate list of everyone who was affiliated with the church. Membership rolls and donation records are no longer extant, and I estimate that I had the names of perhaps only half of the members of the church. Thus statistical analysis is impossible, and these questions remain unanswered.

I had also hoped to be able to investigate the ethnicity of the Palo Alto Unitarians. Racially, these Palo Alto Unitarians were homogenous, almost entirely non-Hispanic whites. Ethnically, though, Palo Alto Unitarians were somewhat less homogenous. A surprising number of them were first or second generation Germans, many of whom spoke German as well as English. However, tracking ethnicity proved to be challenging, and I was able to reach no firm conclusions.

A related question: many of the Stanford professors and students who were part of the church seem to have been affiliated the German department, more than would have been expected by mere chance. This may be related to the apparently large percentage of first and second generation Germans mentioned above, but still we have to ask: Why so many German speakers? The answer may be because of the prominence of German as an academic language in the early twentieth century; social networks among German speakers; or even because of strands of liberal religion among German immigrants made them sympathetic to Unitarianism. Yet this question also remain unanswered.

The most interesting problem for me remains the problem of how to trace social networks within a congregation. Social networks are incompletely or poorly documented in the written record, so it is convenient for the historian to ignore them. Yet from for many of these Palo Alto Unitarians, their experience of and participation in social networks may be just as important as Unitarian theology and ministers, the building, denominational affiliation, etc. How can we trace social networks within a congregation, either at a given point in time or over a length of time? My methodology has been to compile this biographical dictionary, but I consider this only a provisional solution. A better methodology is needed to trace social networks among ordinary Unitarians.

In short, this biographical dictionary offers incomplete answers to what I hope are some interesting questions. Perhaps future researchers will be able to investigate these and other questions, to learn more about how ordinary people experienced religion and religious institutions.

Inevitably errors appear in a complex research project like this, which extended over five years and took hundreds of hours. Up to the moment the book went to press I was correcting typographical errors, errors of fact, and errors of interpretation; but finally I had to move on to other projects. I apologize for the many errors that doubtless remain uncorrected.

A “Mr. Wolff” served on the Committee of Ushers of the old Unitarian Church in Palo Alto in 1908. Who was this man, mentioned only once in the extant records of that long-defunct church?

A likely candidate is Franklin Fowler Wolff. The son of a Methodist minister, he was born in Pasadena in 1887, and rejected orthodox Christianity while he was in his teens. He studied mathematics, psychology, and philosophy at Stanford University, and received his A.B. in mathematics in 1911. He then did graduate study in philosophy at both Stanford and Harvard, returning to Stanford in 1914 to teach mathematics. But after only a year, he left academia to pursue his own studies, and changed his name to Franklin Merrell-Wolff. He eventually became known as a spiritual teacher, a mystic, and a writer.

This identification of “Mr. Wolff” should be considered tentative. Another possible “Mr. Wolff” is Marcus Wolff, who received his A.B. in economics from Stanford in 1906; however, he appears to have been living in San Francisco in 1908.

But if Franklin Merrell-Wolff did indeed attend a Unitarian Church while an undergraduate at Stanford, barely out of his teens, it would not surprise me — the Emersonian philosophy that underlies much of Unitarian theology could have had a distinct appeal to a developing mystic.

Notes: Ron Leonard, The Transcendental Philosophy of Franklin Merrell-Wolff (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999).