Beth Casebolt

Continue reading "Honoring Our Covenant as Congregations"

Beth Casebolt

Continue reading "Honoring Our Covenant as Congregations"

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040855/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-09-05_Right_Livelihood.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040833/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/9-05-21-audio.mp3

"In Our Hands Is Placed a Power" (September 5, 2021) Worship Service

Welcome to our annual Labor Day service, where we celebrate the contributions to social justice by the labor movement both currently and historically. As has been true for several years now, we will be joined by members of San Francisco's labor union choir Rockin' Solidarity. Hard times have always been here for the vast majority of the world's population, but now all of us are at critical crossroads, and which roads we take over the next decade or two may determine the very survival of humanity. As we make these life-or-death choices, what can we learn from both the victories and defeats of organized labor?

Rev. Millie Phillips, Guest Minister; Wonder Dave, Worship Associate; The Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus, Pat Wynne, Director; Mark Sumner, songleader; Bill Ganz, pianist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040811/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210905MPSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040728/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210905.mp3

Please join us on Sunday (5 September 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We have completed our White Fragility book study group using the book by Robin DiAngelo.

This week we continue our exploration of the 8th principle and anti-racism as we look at environmental racism in the US.

Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign calls on us to end the silos that have so often been characteristic of the movement to remediate climate change and other social justice movements.

If we Unitarian Universalists truly believe in the interdependent web of all existence, we need to take a hard and honest look at how climate change along with all the related threats to our environment affect us all but affect most severely those who are already most marginalized among us.

All Souls Director of Religious Education Susan Caldwell will be setting up parent meetings at various times next week with the goal of offering convenient times for everyone to participate.

We want to hear what works best for your family as we start the year in religious education.

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates.

Our September 2021 Give-Away-the-Plate recipient is North Louisiana Interfaith.

North Louisiana Interfaith is a non-partisan political organization made up of religious congregations, non-profits, and other institutions throughout Northwest Louisiana.

All Souls has been a member congregation since 2005.

Interfaith leaders work together on issues that most concern the people in our institutions which arise out of house meetings where we listen to each other’s stories.

We work on issues at the local level and statewide level through our affiliate organization Together Louisiana.

Two ways to donate:

Online — Go to our donation site using this link.  If you are paying your pledge, select “2021 Pledges” and enter that amount for your pledge contribution.  Then select “Collection Plate” to give the amount you would like to give to North Louisiana Interfaith.  All online collection plate contributions for the month of September 2021 will go to North Louisiana Interfaith.

Offline — Please send your give away the plate contribution checks to All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, 9449 Ellerbe Road, Shreveport LA  71106.  Please put “North Louisiana Interfaith” on the memo line of the check if  you want to have 100% of this check go to North Louisiana Interfaith.  If you want less than 100% of the check to go to North Louisiana Interfaith, please put the amount you want going to North Louisiana Interfaith on the memo line.

Melissa Lewis will be at the church parking lot this Sunday afternoon (5 September 2021) from 2:00 to 4:00 PM to collect food and other items for the Noel United Methodist Church Food Pantry.

Items requested this month are Jiffy cornbread mix, canned fruit (any kind), and cereal (both large boxes and single-serving assortments are welcome).

Please join us next Wednesday (8 September 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

Bring your lunch and meet up with your All Souls friends, have lunch, and just catch up.

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, we have begun to broadcast a livestream video of our Sunday morning worship services.

This worship video will be available live and in recorded formats.

For our livestream video of our worship services, we are using Facebook Live.  One does not have to log into Facebook or have a Facebook account to view this video.

You can find the 29 August 2021 worship video here.

Please join us on Saturday (4 September 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

This is a sitting Buddhist meditation including a brief introduction to mindfulness meditation, 20 minutes of sitting, and followed by a weekly teaching.

The group is free and open to all.

For more information, contact Larry via email or phone using (318) 272-0014.

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

We had expectations for what Fall 2021 was going to be like … and those plans have changed. As we move into another year where covid shapes much of what we do (and don’t do), perhaps we ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040707/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuH6NrcyGes&feature=youtu.be

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

Join us either in person, outdoors at Live Oak, or on our Youtube channel for our annual Homecoming/Water Communion service.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040623/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWa6jyUDy4A&feature=youtu.be

How is your anger showing up? Are you more irritable, or carrying a slow-simmering rage? There are many justifiable reasons to be mad right now. How do we best channel that anger in a way that is productive and doesn’t harm us or the people ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040541/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4YukhliOc&feature=youtu.be

The last 5 years, and especially the last 8 months have given us ample reason to question some things we took for granted. We may be feeling disillusioned with humanity and with life itself. What do we do with those feelings?

This service will be streamed ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040458/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1eObhy2msE&feature=youtu.be

If you’re wondering how to help people who are being hit by Hurricane Ida, we’re here to help!

It can be hard to know who and what organizations to donate to because you obviously want financial resources to get to where it can be most useful. For those purposes, we’ve reached out to a few New Orleans community members that members of the BLUU OCB have long standing relationships with and asked which organizations or groups would they recommend contributing to. These are trusted sources that are distributing money on the ground currently or will be in the coming months. The recovery from Hurricane Ida is going to be a very long one.

BLUU will be continuing to vett and add to this list of groups and organizations.

A few notes about the listed groups and organizations:

*If you are able to and want to donate to mutual aid funds, these are a powerful way to quickly get money into the hands of individuals and families who need support immediately. They often don’t have arduous or complicated application and disbursement processes. These are also not tax-deductible donations.

*If you are wanting to support an organization, we will list a few options that are tax-deductible donations.

Please choose the organizations and groups that speak to you and your heart. We’ll be sharing these groups through posts on social media in the days ahead and hopefully giving a little bit of context or info for each one. Please share and invite others to support in this time of need.

Also please be aware that most organizations are being run right now by staffers or volunteers who have left the city. The city has no power and water is on a boil warning. So their websites may not reflect what has happened however their longstanding methods by which to donate are functioning and they will get the money. For many orgs you can follow on Instagram or elsewhere to be able to get updates.

BLUU has started an individual fund for students at George Washington Carver High School. Through a contact at the school we’ll be distributing funds raised to individual students through PayPal and Cash App. You can give to this specific effort by clicking here.

The House of Tulip is co-founded and led by trans folks and offers support services for trans and gender nonconforming communities, including some mutual aid. Please follow them on Instagram at @houseoftulipno and they have listed other ways to give (the usernames must be exact, sadly some people are trying to scam people by imitating and coming up with usernames that are close — but these are the correct ones AND if you want to be certain you can always give through their website):

CashApp: $HouseOfTulip

Venmo: @HouseofTulip

Paypal: Paypal.me/HouseOfTulip

Broad Community Connections is a community-led and community-based organization that is working on the revitalization of a historically Black neighborhood. They are gearing up to support those in need in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Including support of businesses.

The United Houma Nation There are many small and rural tribal nations that have been hit hard by the hurricane and will need support. Some tribal nations are offering mutual aid disbursements.

The Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe main page and the giving link here.

Imagine WaterWorks does many things including distributing mutual aid.

For more specific mutual aid giving opportunities please visit the following links displayed below from the Instagram account @mutualaiddisasterrelief

If you want to volunteer remotely, need assistance, or send supplies to Louisiana:

Please donate and help. The power is out across many areas of Louisiana. And people need help. You can also visit https://www.disasterassistance.gov/ for federal government assistance. On this site, you can look up a city and state or zip code to see if the area is currently declared a disaster due to flooding, wild fires, and hurricanes and apply for assistance.

Elizabeth Stevens

Continue reading "Bearable Together"

Image credit: Gerd Altmann

Ch-ch-ch-changes are happening to the US population, and time is changing us. The results from the Census Bureau’s 2020 head count are in: the country is growing more urban and more racially and ethnically diverse! And more citizens are identifying as mixed race. Put another way, the population is growing less white. White Americans are on track to make up the minority by 2042. What does this mean for a country founded on enslavement, settler colonialism, and systemic disenfranchisement? Let’s take several steps back to get perspective. These books from our catalog will be enlightening for our increasingly diverse future.

Did That Just Happen?!: Beyond “Diversity”—Creating Sustainable and Inclusive Organizations
Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Lauren Wadsworth

The more diverse the workplace becomes, the more we’ll need to improve cultural awareness of a variety of communities and identities to sustain inclusivity at the office. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Drs. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Lauren Wadsworth offer real-life accounts that illustrate common workplace occurrences around inclusivity and answers to questions like “How do I identify and handle diversity landmines at work?” and “What can I do when I’ve made a mistake?”

Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm
Robin DiAngelo

Old habits die harder than a block of cement. Racism is one of them, whether it’s explicit or dressed up in niceness by White progressives. Don’t be surprised to see White families flocking to strictly white enclaves, especially for “better” schools and school districts. One of the moves of “nice racism” that Robin DiAngelo identifies in White progressives is pretending their preference for segregation is accidental. “It’s just a fluke,” they’ll say, or “This school is a better fit for my child.” They’re rewarded for living in White neighborhoods and, consequently, perpetuating segregation.

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
Yaba Blay

The US Census has a pitiful track record, and you need to know its history. It reveals a lot about how the country thinks about race. Since the period of colonial enslavement, Blacks have been defined by the one-drop rule. Through historiographic overview and sixty individual stories with photographs, Yaba Blay proves how the rule has everything to do with preserving the country club of whiteness and its privileges and nothing to do with Blackness as an identity and lived reality.

Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination
Alexandra Minna Stern

It will be inevitable. White nationalists will freak out and shout claims of white genocide because of the growth in our communities of color. Alexandra Minna Stern takes a deep dive down the rabbit hole to uncover the source of this ideology and teaches us how to recognize it in our cultural, political, and digital landscapes when it rears its ugly head. Because it will. White supremacy is quite the Hydra.

Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families
Lori L. Tharps

As more individuals and families identify has mixed race, they’ll find themselves navigating colorism, color bias, and skin-color politics. Weaving together personal stories and interviews, history, and cultural analysis, Lori L. Tharps illuminates the complex and multifaceted ways that colorism affects our self-esteem and shapes our lives and relationships. She also includes a brief history of the Census Bureau and how we got the term “Hispanic” in the census in the first place.

Some of My Friends Are . . . : The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Benefits of Cross-Racial Friendships
Deborah L. Plummer

In spite of the demographic ch-ch-ch-changes, people will still find ways of staying segregated within their social circles. Most US citizens tend to gravitate toward friendships within their own race. Plummer gives an insightful look at how cross-racial friendships work and fail. She also encourages all of us to examine our friendship patterns and to deepen and strengthen our current cross-racial friendships.

Superior: The Return of Race Science
Angela Saini

Continuing with the theme from Stern’s Proud Boys, mainstream scientists can hold fast to the idea that race is a biological reality, no matter how educated they are. The hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists. Saini examines of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and reminds us that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.

Success Through Diversity: Why Inclusive Companies Will Win
Carol Fulp

Increasing demographics in our diverse society means our workforce will grow more racially and ethnically diverse. Companies that proactively embrace diversity in all areas of their operations will be best poised to thrive. Renowned business leader and visionary Carol Fulp explores staffing trends in the US and provides a blueprint for what businesses must do to maintain their competitiveness and customer base.

When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People
Duane R. Bidwell

With more people identifying as mixed race, there’s a good chance that they’ll come from two or more religious traditions. They’re part of the spiritually fluid community. No, they’re not confused or unable to commit. Duane R. Bidwell explores how they celebrate complex religious bonds, and in the process, blur social categories, evoke prejudice, and complicate religious communities. Religious and spiritual identity are not pure, static, and singular as we may assume.

White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality
Sheryll Cashin

In spite of the growing diversity of our population, opportunity hoarding and segregation will still be a thing, because white supremacy lies at the root of the US caste system. Sheryll Cashin contends that geography is central to US caste and traces the history of anti-Black residential caste to unpack its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040352/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-08-29_The_inherent_worth.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040321/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-29-21-audio.mp3

"The Power of Focus" (August 29, 2021) Worship Service

Steve Jobs is famous for his message on focus, the power of focus. In a different way, the same message has power for our spiritual and moral lives. After all, have you noticed how what we look for in the world in part determines what we find? Or how consciously deciding what we want to make happen also requires us to surrender to not making other things happen if we are to have any chance at meeting our goal? Or how choosing the qualities we put forward in the world also necessitates spiritual practices and focused time for reflection to be able to cultivate those qualities in our character and habits of the heart. As we begin to step into a new year of school, of work after summer, of church and community life, this Sunday is one chance to reflect on where each of us might choose to focus our energies.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Dennis Adams, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, organist; Brielle Marina Nielson, mezzo soprano; Mark Sumner, pianist; Jon Silk, drummer; Asher Davison, song leader & clarinetist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Judy Payne, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040252/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210829VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040229/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210829.mp3

Please join us on Sunday (29 August 2021) at 11:00 AM for “Live Into” by Rev. Barbara Jarrell.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

Watch for our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.  You can sign up for these announcements using this link.

Our August 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is YWCA’s Dialogue on Race.

We will have a  virtual coffee hour after the service on Zoom.

While we are remaining physically distant, we want to know how you are doing, what you need, and what you are interested in.  You can let us know using these online surveys.

And you can contribute to All Souls using this online resource.

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break on 29 August 2021.

As the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to spread in our community and seems to affect children more seriously, we are trying to be mindful in our planning of outdoor activities (taking into account the Louisiana summertime heat as well).

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates on our 12 September 2021 religious education event.

Please join us on Sunday (29 August 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We have completed our White Fragility book study group using the book by Robin DiAngelo.

This week we continue our exploration of the 8th principle and anti-racism as we look at environmental racism in the US.

Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign calls on us to end the silos that have so often been characteristic of the movement to remediate climate change and other social justice movements.

If we Unitarian Universalists truly believe in the interdependent web of all existence, we need to take a hard and honest look at how climate change along with all the related threats to our environment affect us all but affect most severely those who are already most marginalized among us.

Please join us next Wednesday (1 September 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

Bring your lunch and meet up with your All Souls friends, have lunch, and just catch up.

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, we have begun to broadcast a livestream video of our Sunday morning worship services.

This worship video will be available live and in recorded formats.

For our livestream video of our worship services, we are using Facebook Live.  One does not have to log into Facebook or have a Facebook account to view this video.

You can find the 22 August 2021 worship video here.

Please join us on Saturday (28 August 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

This is a sitting Buddhist meditation including a brief introduction to mindfulness meditation, 20 minutes of sitting, and followed by a weekly teaching.

The group is free and open to all.

For more information, contact Larry via email or phone using (318) 272-0014.

Dear ones –

So here I am in my bed, thinking of all the things that people have done for me —

Doctors have been paid to get me the referrals, medicines, therapies, and consultations I need.

Friends have made donations so that we can order food.

Another friend brought a casserole. (I think Jack Mandeville is leaning into his South Carolina roots, what do you think?)

My mom (hi, Joyce Buck!) has come to help Julie and me with cooking, cleaning, and all the things that will ease Julie’s burden a bit. And Morgan came a while ago and will be here again.

The Council of Third Degree Initiates of Stone Circle Wicca (USA) made a ceremony for me, honoring the work, musical and otherwise, that I have done with them over the years, as well as offering healing and strength from the four Elements.

(In that same ceremony, our comrade Jonathan White was also standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, a place from which he had watched the blood-red moon rise the night before. As he said, “The Daughter giving birth to the Mother.”

I have written here about how empowering it is to be asked to help. People like it. They like, in their strength and abundance, to be able to show love in substantive, concrete ways. I know I do. I enjoy loving on others. Buying Julie a dress that fits and is one of her good shades of green has made me happy for days and days. I am so proud. I know I did something that helped her, made her happy, and let her know I was paying attention and had her in mind.

Furthermore, and what THIS missive is about is that, even when asking for help is hard, even when the ask seems too big, I am finding that it is generally worth it. The hardest one of these asks has been speaking to my friends in Stone Circle Wicca. We have another dear friend and Initiate who is in dire health straits — more dire than mine — and I am very aware of that.

But I was and remain so aware of how important connection is. I was and remained so aware of how much I needed it and how little I was getting it. I felt alone in my pain and in my healing, and I knew where I needed to turn.I knew what I wanted, what I hoped for, and what was out there. So Julie, bless her, pushed me to ask for what I wanted. Though I desperately feared a no — that indication that now is not the right time — I knew in my heart that if I heard a no, it would be an invitation to practice.

But I did not get a no. I got welcoming inquiries about what I needed and that it was okay to have asked. In Stone Circle Wicca, our ceremonies respond to a range of human needs. Sometimes those needs are to celebrate the turning solar year, to over devotion under the full moon or in the dark of the new moon. Sometimes the need is driven by faerie whim — the sense that we need to lighten our spirits and bring levity to a situation.

But my set of needs was different. My set of needs was very clear. I needed to feel blessed, held, loved by those I love. And I longed for their prayers for healing.

And they did it, friends, they did it.

There’s a little aphorism that Julie and I often quote: “Some kind of help’s the kind of help that helping’s all about. And some kind of help’s the kind of help we all could do without.” You know that second kind, I’m sure. When someone butts in and decides what you need without asking. Ugh. I hate it. It makes me vaguely anxious, just typing about it. I’ve experienced it recently, and it’s just not fun. And I know that I need to be careful about being pushy in that way, myself. It’s true that nurturing is in my character, but nurturing is not always the way to go.

So I am so grateful to my friends and co-religionists for their inquiry. For that gentle asking about what I really needed and wanted — so they could give it to me if it was in their power.

And, as I’ve said above, they did.

So this is the blinding flash of the obvious, friends: Not only is helping good for the ones who are doing it, but — hello?! — it CAN work out for the one who dares to ask. Yes, it’s lovely to have folks volunteer out of the kindness of their hearts, or even because they’re getting paid. That can be really lovely, both of those, each in their own way.

But dare to ask, beloveds. Consider what you need, and dare to ask. Because asking to have our needs fulfilled by means we think are possible, even if improbable, can lead to beautiful gifts, and a lovely exchange for all.

I don’t look self-sufficient at all, I don’t think. But still, it was hard to ask for that ceremony. We often are so afraid of seeming weak, of being vulnerable, that we forget what love means. That we forget we are worthy of love.

Dearest, you are worthy of love. And because you’re worthy of love, you’re also worthy of help. The kind of help that helping’s all about.

This can be a hard teaching, eh? So I encourage you, wherever you are in this equation, to PILE on, to DRENCH yourself in compassion. No matter what we do, we’re doing the best we have with the tools we can reach at the time. Be gentle, gentle, gentle. Let us together be persistently gentle, and so be willing to ask for the help we need and long for.

Blessings, my loves, blessings –

~Catharine~

By Jon Hale

Photo credit: Dave Blanchard

Last week, the State Board of Education in Florida allowed parents to apply for vouchers and enroll in a different school if their children were subject to “COVID-19 harassment.” The policy enforces Governor Ron DeSantis’ anti-masking directive. His order protects parents’ “freedom to choose” whether to mask or not, despite an alarming rise in COVID cases in the state. The order also threatened to withhold funding if school boards did not comply with the law.

Gov. DeSantis’ “freedom to choose” and the use of vouchers to protect that freedom has a troubled history in Florida—as it does across the country.

A school voucher is publicly funded credit used to cover the cost of private schools. School vouchers fund or compensate a family directly as opposed to funding a public school. It is part of the conservative and libertarian mantra of “funding students, instead of systems” that is a cornerstone of the modern school choice movement.

The storied history behind vouchers and school choice in Florida and across the nation, however, is much more insidious than simply funding students.

In Florida and across the South, vouchers were initially designed to circumvent desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. They were an integral part of “school choice” policies.

Southern legislators amended state constitutions to support private school costs by compensating the cost of tuition through grants. They provided state tax credit for contributions to private segregated schools. In addition to vouchers, policymakers repealed compulsory education laws, authorizing school closures if ordered to desegregate by the government or courts. Legislators also expanded the decision-making authority of local school boards to implement pupil-placement laws.

Florida and other states also passed “freedom of choice” plans to avoid desegregation. On paper, anyone regardless of race could apply to any school in the area. But the plans placed the onus of desegregation on Black families. Withholding transportation for white schools while harassing Black transfer students, white parents and representatives ensured that such plans were largely ineffective, leading only to token desegregation.

These policies coincided with other forms of massive resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s that targeted Black schools and teachers. Legislators shuttered historically black schools and fired Black teachers with impunity.

Passed in the wake of the Brown decision, it was clear that vouchers and “school choice” were weapons in the larger fight to preserve segregation. Vouchers—and school choice in general—were used to maintain segregation and preserve control of the schools.

Though courts struck vouchers down as part of the “freedom of choice” plans in the 1960s, the idea of vouchers remained. Ronald Reagan, for instance, touted vouchers and privatization in his administration. His plans were soundly defeated, but the idea persisted and even garnered judicial support.

By the 1990s, courts retreated from enforcing desegregation goals and schools largely remained segregated—and many districts re-segregated. This paved the way for vouchers, which, on paper, promised to reform a broken public system. Once the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) and more recently in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) decision, vouchers advocates renewed their commitment.

Betsy DeVos, the controversial Secretary of Education under Donald Trump, provided unabashed support for vouchers. She advocated for millions for vouchers and other choice options such as charter schools. Though largely rebuffed by Congress, like Reagan, DeVos ignited demand and support for vouchers, positioning them as a valid option in the larger school choice debate.

Vouchers remained an enticing option for DeSantis and other southern governors like Henry McMaster of South Carolina, who proposed spending COVID relief funding on vouchers for private schools.

Today, vouchers are used in Florida in the same way as they were in the past. Gov. DeSantis passed the anti-masking mandate to “protect the freedoms and rights of students and parents.” Much like the 1950s and 1960s in the attempt to avoid desegregation and federal oversight, “freedom” is used to protect the right of parents to avoid governmental intervention.

Then and now, the use of “freedom” in this way is detrimental to the public good. In the 1950s and 1960s, the freedom to choose schools protected the right of white parents to support private “segregation academies.” The sole purpose was to preserve all-white schools. This allowed racist policy, segregation, and diversion of public funds to fester.

Also like the past, linking vouchers to freedom—in this case freedom from masks—is not only suspect, but immediately precarious. In the current context of the pandemic, vouchers effect a parallel danger to society and the larger public good. DeSantis illuminates the harm perpetuated by vouchers and legislating the “right to choose” schools. After the schools reopened this fall, COVID cases have been soaring in Florida. In one district, over 10,000 students, staff, and teachers were isolated or quarantined after the first week of school. Other districts that reported hundreds of cases have defied the governor’s orders and mandated masks.

Public schools in Florida—and other states with voucher policies—are under dual threats. They face a continual risk of losing funds over implementing recommended CDC guidelines while also losing public funds to private schools through vouchers.

The historical record documents the danger of vouchers to a shared public good. The recent use of vouchers in Florida merely affirms the clear and present danger it continues to pose.

About the Author 

Jon Hale is a professor of educational history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an advocate for quality public education. Hale’s research in education has been published in The Atlantic, CNN.com, Education Week, the American Scholar, and the African American Intellectual History Series. His books include The Freedom Schools, To Write in the Light of Freedom, and The Choice We Face. Follow him on Twitter at @ed_organizer.

Wren Bellavance-Grace

Continue reading "Of Rollercoasters and Tilt-A-Whirls"

Photo credit: Jamey Boelhower

Back-to-School season is tinged with precariousness this year. While Delta variant cases surge, many schools are reopening and resuming in-person classes. Even though the Biden administration announced plans to offer COVID booster shots in September, the fact remains that conditions at institutions of learning aren’t safe or fully resourced. We asked some of our authors what they would like folks to be aware of on the education front as students and educators return to the classroom. And given our pandemic reality, we also asked them how they think schools could take this opportunity to re-envision themselves for a better, post-COVID future.

***

Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds are heading to local public-school districts, but administrators in these districts have few good ideas of where to put the money. There was already a teacher shortage; more teachers are not available to hire. Tech companies selling often useless online “solutions” will likely rake in huge profits. But a proven, crucial use for some significant part of these funds is at hand, though rarely discussed. Put the money directly into the pockets of high school students by employing them to share knowledge and skills with their peers and younger children. They can be paid to teach or use anything they know: solving an equation, making a video, putting on a play, running a sports league, doing a dance, speaking another language (including ASL), reading Braille, collecting oral histories from elders in the neighborhood, fixing a bike, and on and on. The “proven” part is that meaningful employment in high school leads to many great outcomes: high school and college completion, higher lifetime earnings, more stable marriages, better health, and more. And of course, the young people being taught reap all kinds of benefits as well. The key to rethinking American education is to understand that the students already in high school are the culturally informed experts we currently think we lack. Pay them, and they’ll start teaching right away.
—Jay Gillen, The Power in the Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment

I am scared as hell for my nieces and nephews and for all the wonderful teachers I know who are returning to schools. At the same time, this is an opportunity to reimagine education, and make it more equitable for the most marginalized. Now is the time for radical change in how we approach schooling for our young people.
—Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

The United States has experienced the Global Pandemic as a horrific tragedy. But for the nation’s fatal embrace of “profits over people,” we could have avoided hundreds of thousands of agonizing deaths. What should have been a clarion call for re-examining the nation’s flawed institutions instead became a debate about “science vs. anti-science,” as if our problems were a matter of semantics instead of the crushing racial and class oppressions that magnify the devastating impact of COVID-19 on working class African American, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant communities.

As educators and students by the millions return to unsafe and under-resourced classrooms, we must carry forward the lessons of the global Black Lives Matter movement and fight harder than ever to end systemic racism, homophobia, and economic injustice. As teachers, we must practice compassion, patience, and antiracism in our classrooms. We should embrace lifelong learning and remember that our students, no matter how ‘disadvantaged,’ bring new forms of wisdom and dissident knowledge into our classrooms. These forms of knowledge “from below” are superior in intellectual content and liberatory potential than the ideologies of the corrupt status quo in this society. ¡La lucha continúa!
—Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

The back-to-school pictures this year on social media carried an unmistakable tone of worry that tempered the excitement of back-to-school routines. Children’s infection rates are skyrocketing with Delta variant of COVID-19, many schools have shifted from in-person to quarantine or back to online after positive cases surfaced quickly. What explains this seemingly haphazard collection of steps and missteps? In keeping with the deeply regional control over education policies that are still consistently imbued with nationalist narratives of boot-strap grit and individualism, schools are reopening as petri dishes in which those narratives are overriding the ability to say “We reopened too quickly” or “There is still so much we don’t know about this virus” or perhaps the most important statement “We are not going to run real-time experiments on people, including children.” Universities have been making strong plans to fully reopen face-to-face instruction, with a mixture of requiring vaccinated status and masks. Those hallowed halls, much like K-12 districts, are announcing changes to teach remotely days before course start; meanwhile, students are arriving on campus. 

The much decried ‘learning loss’ pales in comparison to the literal loss of life. A sad but reasonable observation is that it may take the chaos of schools reopening and full beds in pediatric units of hospitals to sober a ‘COVID fatigued’ society to revisit what it claims to be its core values and actually enact them. We have, still, the opportunity and responsibility to learn the foundational lesson of this pandemic: everything we do affects others.
—Leigh Patel, No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040146/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-08-22_Possibilities_ever_emergent.mp3

"I Know Nothing" (August 22, 2021) Worship Service

In the millions of acres of trees, in the dark and light, the shadows, the dappled light along canyon walls and rivers, there is real knowing. What is it, to surrender, to let go of having to know, to do, and to let it be enough that the elements sing?

Rev. J.D. Benson, Guest Minister; Mari Magaloni Ramos, Worship Associate; Asher Davison, bass-baritone; Wm. Garcia Ganz, accompanist; Nancy Cooke Munn, songleader; Mark Sumner, pianist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Judy Payne, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Order of Service:
https://bit.ly/20210822OSWeb2

LIVESTREAM:
https://youtu.be/dl5AOdg58-g

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040119/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210822JDBSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040058/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-22-21-audio.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035957/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210822.mp3

Please join us on Sunday (22 August 2021) at 11:00 AM for our 2021 Water Communion worship service with Rev. Barbara Jarrell and member of the All Souls congregation.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

Watch for our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.  You can sign up for these announcements using this link.

Our August 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is YWCA’s Dialogue on Race.

We will have a  virtual coffee hour after the service on Zoom.

While we are remaining physically distant, we want to know how you are doing, what you need, and what you are interested in.  You can let us know using these online surveys.

And you can contribute to All Souls using this online resource.

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break on 22 August 2021.

As the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to spread in our community and seems to affect children more seriously, we are trying to be mindful in our planning of outdoor activities (taking into account the Louisiana summertime heat as well).

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates on our 12 September 2021 religious education event.

Please join us on Sunday (22 August 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We have completed our White Fragility book study group using the book by Robin DiAngelo.

This week we continue our 8th Principle and Anti-Racism exploration.

Watch the this week’s Saturday email to the class group and the #sundayadultre Slack channel for this Sunday’s details.

Not on either of these?  Reach out to Susan Caldwell by email or text message and she will fix that for you right away.

Please join us next Wednesday (25 August 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

Bring your lunch and meet up with your All Souls friends, have lunch, and just catch up.

Stained-glass window in the former Unitarian Church in Exeter

The Postscript is the last piece of work published by Wienpahl before his untimely death in 1980 and I reproduce it here for a number of reasons.

The first is that it gives the reader/listener of my current blog/podcast series an indication of where the questions and issues raised in Wienpahl’s “Unorthodox Lecture” eventually led him. This may help readers better to understand the direction of travel that was indicated by his lecture.

The second is that The Radical Spinoza is now long out of print and so most people reading this post are unlikely to be able to access a copy with any ease. Ideally, the whole book should be transcribed (or, even better, republished) but since that seems unlikely at the moment it strikes me as important to give you Wienpahl’s summary of what he thinks a careful reading of Spinoza gifts us so as to encourage you to make every effort to track down the book yourself. You may also find some encouragement by reading the excellent and perspicacious review of the book by Don Lusthaus found at this link.

Thirdly, and related to the foregoing paragraph, being able to see what Wienpahl thinks we get from a careful reading of Spinoza, his Postscript may encourage some readers to knuckle-down and tackle Spinoza directly — although I would earnestly encourage readers to do this only after having read Wienpahl’s book first of all because traditional translations and readings of Spinoza, to my mind, seriously (very seriously) misinterpret Spinoza’s basic intention.

Fourthly, the ideas, aspirations and hopes expressed in the Postscript wholly underly and inform the Sunday Morning Service of Mindful Meditation which, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, has now become the main service of the Cambridge Unitarian Church where I am minister. Click here for more information about this service.

It is plain as a pikestaff to all that the Unitarian movement in the United Kingdom is today in an utterly parlous state and very, very close to institutional extinction — indeed, according to the last Annual Report of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches there are now only 2,824 formal members of its churches in the UK. It has no corporate idea about what it is and should be doing as a religious movement, it’s prone to endless bickering and unpleasant argumentation about what it is or should be and, as a whole, it is almost completely empty, theologically and philosophically. Spinoza’s philosophy — as interpreted by Wienpahl anyway — still seems to me to offer a practical philosophy/ethics that is not only completely amenable to most religious/philosophical expressions found within the modern Unitarian movement (including those of atheist/humanist persuasion) but it is also a practical philosophy/ethics that is completely consonant with both modern scientific understandings and, and this is vitally important, with the increasing recognition that the greatest challenge to humanity at the moment is the ever-deepening climate emergency. 

Spinoza could so easily have become the Unitarian movement’s central philosophical-theological figures but, alas, in our anti-intellectual, anything goes, tl:dr (too long; didn’t read) culture he has by now been almost completely sidelined and forgotten, and forgotten to our cost a fact that can easily be seen by anyone who pays a visit to one of our ex-chapels in Exeter which is today a Weatherspoon’s pub. There, at least, you can (as I have on a number of occasions) still raise a glass to Spinoza in front of the stained glass window dedicated to him. For those of you who have not seen this window, I reproduce a portion of it at the head of this post.  

Of course, I fully realise that for the modern British Unitarian movement it’s probably far too late collectively to reconnect with Spinoza’s thought but, for the world in general, it is not, and so, without hesitation, I wholeheartedly encourage anyone who stumbles on this piece to read Wienpahl’s Postscript below, hunt down his book and then turn your attention to Spinoza himself. Not everything in Wienpahl’s piece below will be instantly understandable without knowing the arguments found in his preceding nine chapters but there is enough here that will, I’m sure, make complete sense to many of you. As to whether you find what you read compelling, well, that’s another matter entirely . . . 

—o0o—

The Postscript to Paul Wienpahl’s “The Radical Spinoza” (New York University Press, 1979)

Some studies of historical figures are significant mainly for the history of philosophy and for persons who want to know about philosophers. Occasionally, however, a study such as the present one, because of its subject, bears not only in these ways. It may also, and perhaps more importantly, have vital significance for our own times. This is the case with Spinoza. It will both assist with understanding him and accomplish the second purpose in writing this book (see the Preface) if I develop some of the implications of the thinking of BdS [i.e. Benedict de Spinoza] for our times. In doing so I shall be continuing with the reflections commenced in the Preface. 

1. With some understanding of unity our view of what is changes drastically. Instead of seeing our world as made up of discrete things existing independently of each other, we see unity. In the language BdS provided, it is a unity of modes of being. There are not, properly speaking, entities. There is Being and modes of being. A tree is an arboreal mode of being. You and I are modes of being, or, more simply human beings. What we have taken to be the real distinctions between things dissolve, and with them the conceptual distinctions between “thing,” properties, and actions. Loving, for example, which we commonly take to be an action that some one or thing performs can itself be seen as a mode of being.—This is easy to say, but with time potent in effect. Implications are as follows. 

2. There is identity. There is also identifying with. We can identify things or say what they are. We can also identify with another mode of being, when what it is is of no moment. 

3. There is a kind of knowing that is loving. It is not of universals. In it we know Individuals. There are, then, levels of awareness: imagination and understanding. Imagination is indirect awareness and always involves images or representations of things. It includes seeing, hearing, and ratiocinative thinking. Understanding is direct awareness. We can move from images of things to direct awareness, from universals to particulars. In thinking that knowledge is of universals we mistake means of knowing for the objects of knowledge. The objects of knowing or awareness are always particular modes of being; but at first we see them through the cloud of representations of them. 

4. The so-called inanimate is no longer inanimate, except for certain purposes. All modes of being are animate. Like us they are mental as well as physical; though, of course, each in its manner or mode: human, equine, lapidary. 

5. And so they are all capable of Affections. A sailboat, a navicular being can be joyful—more clearly, can be joyfully. 

6. There is a way of humanly being that is active instead of passive, or rather more active than passive. 

7. It involves understanding God. In easy parlance this is to see that every mode of being is divine. Thus, to be humanly we are diligent toward every thing, respect, love it. God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience. 

     God is not dead. The image of God is vanishing from some Minds. This is neither lamentable nor a reason for despair. On the contrary, it is preparatory for understanding. The same is true for the dismantling of metaphysics. To have an image of God is to see Being through a cloud. With understanding religion and philosophy are found to be not really distinct. 

8. Moral responsibility looks different. It has its being in the domain of the imaginative or immature. I want to say in the domain of children, but that obscures the childishness in adults. The moral commandments are seen as truths when they are understood. As truths they tell us what it is to be humanly. It is to live without killing one’s fellow beings, without lying, without covetousness. In positive terms it is to be an Individual who loves its fellow beings. The prejudice about killing animals is sentimental. Awakened we realize that being includes eating. 

9. There is not good and ill. There is only what we call good and ill—while we make comparisons in fulfilling our interests and desires. Considered in itself, without comparison with others, each mode of being simply is. 

     We hate or disparage ourselves only when we compare ourselves with others. A proper love or self can only become improper pride when we compare ourselves to others. Moral commandments, to repeat, have the form of commandments at a level of awareness when they are not understood. 

10. Over a hundred years ago Hegel defined “the Alienated Soul” in The Phenomenology of Mind. Later Nietzsche spoke of “the strange contrast between an inner life to which nothing outward corresponds and an outward existence unrelated to what is within.” 

     The philosophical basis for the problem of alienation is the dualistic thinking in which mind and body are not only thought of but taken to the separate entities. With this thinking there is not only the problem of how the mind and the body can interact; there is also the question of how minds can interact. The tremendous subjectivity with which this dualism infuses us is one of the most powerful sources of the fact and sense of alienation—not only in the individual but between peoples. 

11. This relates to another aspect of our present position in philosophy: the ecological problem. One of its sources is our attitude toward nature. The rise of modern science and technology and the related occurrence of the industrial revolution (all curiously dependent on dualistic thinking) have been accompanied by an attitude toward nature which is destructive of Nature. (Nature includes human beings and all their products, a fact which the distinction between the natural and the manmade has tended to obscure—an obscurity that causes contempt for the man-made.) 

     This attitude has deeper roots than those in the developments just mentioned. It has roots in the Middle Ages in the rise of Christian thought, when the body was disparaged and the natural world was seen to be merely the stage for the drama of salvation. It is the attitude in which there is combined a contempt for nature with a view that it is to be controlled or used. In other words, in the dualistic outlook there is not only the radical separation of mind and body. There is the separation of the human being and nature. 

     With non-dualism our attitude toward Nature changes. It becomes God’s understanding Love. All natural things, including the man-made, come to be respected, and, as I have said, we develop a sense of diligence toward them. The import of this for the ecological problem is clear. 

12. It is in non-dualistic thinking that the Minds of the East and the West will come together. The current dialogue between East and West is largely on the level of imagination. 

13. Non-dualism is the foundation for recent developments in art and science. In other dualistic terms we could say that it provides the metaphysics for these developments. It is better to say that with non-duality these developments are illuminated. 

     I have already alluded to the new physics (pp. 96-7). In painting there is the development of non-representational art from cubism on (see Section 3 above). In psychology we have first Freud who cracked the supposedly real distinction between mind and body with the notion of unconscious mental phenomena. Dualistically speaking, an “unconscious idea” is a contradiction in terms (think of our trouble with Sp’s [i.e. Spinoza’s] use of “idea”). A somewhat parallel development is the increasing, if still fumbling, attention to psychosomatic medicine (fumbling partly because we do not have a language for it, “mind” and “body” have great force). There is, next, the third-force psychology of Abraham Maslow and others. (Maslow might have borrowed from BdS for the title of his book: Toward a Psychology of Being.) And finally there is the movement into transpersonal psychology, the study of “transpersonal experiences, that is, ones occupied with other things than oneself . . . [ones in which] to a large extent the subject-object dichotomy is itself transcended.” (See Section 2, and the appendix of Huston Smith’s Forgotten Truth.) 

14. Philosophy after reflecting on BdS seems to be a far more individual undertaking than it has been considered to be (see Sections 2, 3, 8, and 11 above). We have thought that individual philosophers provide us with our meanings or world views. We have also thought that they do this in universal terms that are applicable to all. Now it may be seen that these meanings and systems have been in the imagination. With BdS philosophizing becomes something that each Individual has to do for him or herself. Each Individual has to strive for the realization of non-dualism, for insight into unity. 

15. By the time of Descartes thinking had come to be regarded as entirely incorporeal. The original subtitle of the Meditations had been “On God’s Existence and the Soul’s Incorporeality,” not “immortality.” Still in our day Wittgenstein had to caution that we tend to think of thinking as a gaseous medium and Hannah Arendt writes that it is “nowhere.” 

     It is in fact one of the many activities human beings perform. It is no more invisible or incorporeal than feeling and hearing are. More generally, thinking is the activity of becoming conscious and living consciously. 

     As William James remarked, “thinking” is an equivocal word. “Penny for your thoughts,” we say. “Oh, I was just thinking what fun we had yesterday.” “Ah, I was thinking of that date tomorrow.” “Thinking” is used for a variety of activities: remembering, planning, problem-solving, dealing with the general as opposed to the particular, and, as we know from BdS, dealing with the particular. I suppose that we could call the activity of becoming conscious “philosophical thinking.” Arendt said that it is like “the sensation of being alive.” With BdS it seems that it is being alive. 

     In the Preface I reflected that philosophy, except as critical evaluation (pragmatism), conceptual analysis (logical positivism), engagement (existentialism), ordinary-language analysis (English philosophy), seemed finished. In none of these contemporary views of philosophy is there any word of wisdom. Hannah Arendt said: “The thread of tradition is broken and we shall not be able to renew it.” We seem also, I thought, to have broken with the tradition of the wise. With BdS a new step on the old way seems possible: the step to non-dualism, or to a new insight into wisdom. Not to greater wisdom or to a redefinition of wisdom, but to more wisdom individually. 

     Looking at the matter historically, and in these terms, we can see the development of Western philosophic thought since the time of Hume as a destructive criticism of philosophy, in so far as it was taken as an attempt to provide us with an overall rational view of the world, or a universal knowledge as Husserl called it, which would constitute wisdom. The critical examination of this attempt developed until it was finally proclaimed in the twentieth century that it had been simply a quest for certainty, or that it is meaningless or inevitably results in meaningless statements. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, it was seen that philosophy cannot provide us with the meaning of life. Let us, therefore, leave it and turn to practical matters. 

     This development, however, may be viewed constructively as well as negatively. What we have been doing in the past two hundred years is becoming aware of the nature and limits of rational thinking or the rational way of being consciously. Speaking, then, in terms of historical development and movements in philosophy, we have gradually moved on from Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, or Materialism or Idealism toward mysticism or non-dualism. With BdS we can see that it is not that philosophy died in the twentieth century. Rather it is that it reached the point where a radical new step could be taken. in Sp’s terms this is the step from the preoccupation with the rational mode of awareness to an interest in the intuitive. The pragmatists, the positivists, and the existentialists took important steps; but there is, contrary to their belief, still another philosophic step to be taken, one for which their own work prepared. 

     The matter need not be viewed only in terms of history and movements or positions in philosophy: Let us go along with Hannah Arendt and think of philosophy as the activity of providing us with meanings rather than truths, the latter being considered as the results of science. Then we can see with BdS that we have come to realize that the way of imagination (see Sections 3, 7, 15 above) is not the way to attain meaning; “philosophical meaning” we might call it. The way comes with knowing intuitively and understanding. We can then see that philosophizing does not bring us into contact with universals or essences, however these be regarded, as we had thought. It brings us into contact with particular modes of being. 

     The revolution in our view of philosophy, however, goes deeper than this indicates. For with non-dualism or insight into unity “thinking” is not simply an affair in “the land of the intellect.” It is an affair of the whole person. The physicists have a version of non-dualism with Bohr’s idea of complementarity. They have abandoned the principle of identity or the notion that they can or even have to specify what light, say, is. But philosophical thinking requires more than this. It requires involvement of the total Individual and not simply the brains or intellect; not simply abandonment of the principle of identity, but of identity. 

     It requires, in a word, spiritual exercises. Philosophy will no longer be an affair simply of the schools or academies. It will be an affair of something like the monastery or temple. An affair of becoming wise. Not wise in the sense of having universal knowledge, but in the sense of understanding and being an actively loving person. We shall see individual “meaning,” not meaning. 

16. Under the influence of the dualistic or common way of thinking we are likely to believe that BdS has given us a new and the true way of looking at things as modes of being (see Section 1). However, to think that BdS found a new universal knowledge or metaphysic is to fail to take into account the other way of knowing than the rational: the intuitive (see Section 3 and then reflect that in Section 1 instead of saying “There are not, properly speaking, entities,” we should say “There are not, more properly speaking, entities.” Unqualified, the statement makes us think that with it we have the final truth.). It is to become a Spinozist instead of whatever you are. It is to remain locked in imagination—the ETHIC itself is a work of imagination. 

     There are times, for example, when it is appropriate and useful to regard modes of being as having identities, and others, when it is natural to identify with them. In cashing a check we rely on having an identity; in loving we abandon it. 

     The human Freedom of which BdS spoke includes being able to see things in an infinite variety of ways. It includes Freedom from any “ism,” any special general way of thinking of things. I can react to or be involved with any mode of being qua that particular mode of being. I can be with our dog Shasta as a dog, as a four-footed animal, as a hunter, as a guard, or simply Shasta—that mode of being which we chose to call “Shasta.” Here is a reason why mysticism has been said to be ineffable. When we are involved directly with a mode of being, there are no words we can use except proper names. That direct experiencing is lost as soon as we begin to describe it in terms like “dog,” “animal,” and even “mode of being.” With them we then perceive Shasta, say, as through a cloud. 

     To put it otherwise, when we have a true idea of unity, that is when we are unified (and it is important to note that it is a matter of degrees), we are detached from any particular mode of thinking, and such detachment is, of course, itself a mode of being. We are neither Aristotelian, a Spinozist, a Buddhist, a Christian, nor even one who sees a dog as a dog. We attain to no-mind. Truth, meaning, substance, identity, all the categories lose their hold on us and we can be with each mode of being simply as it is. 

     Except for its ending that last sentence might have a familiar ring. Hannah Arendt wrote: “I have clearly joined the ranks of those who have for some time been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories” (see Preface above). She went on, however, to say, “What you are left with, then, is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation.” Nevertheless, she warns at the last, there are things there that are “‘rich and strange,’” “‘coral,’” and “‘pearls’” that are not to be destroyed (she has been quoting Shakespeare). And she concludes in Auden’s words: “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” 

     The attempts of the dismantlers have loosened the hold of “philosophy with all its categories.” The dismantlers’ work, however, has not only left us with the pearls of the past stored in books. It has prepared the way for seeing the other way of thinking, knowing, and living than the rational. When I said that “all the categories lose their hold on us,” I cited philosophical categories (truth, etc.). But I also had in mind, as the illustration of Shasta showed, all the concepts, all the images or representations of things. It is not only that we should not think dualistically that BdS gave us a new metaphysics. It is also that we can be freed of the images of “dog,” “human being,” “in-animate,” and “animate.” We are thus left with the pearls of the past and the possibility of a new way of thinking and knowing. One of the pearls is “know thyself.” Another is “Love thy fellow beings.” It is a way of thinking and knowing that is not of the universal but of the particular. “If now the way, which I have shown conducts to this, seem extremely arduous, it can nevertheless be come upon.” The more so today, may be added to Sp’s observation at the end of the ETHIC. For more of us have broken with the tradition of representational thinking to become aware of the other. 

By Peter Jan Honigsberg

Guantánamo Bay protest in front of the White House on the seventeenth anniversary of Guantánamo Bay, January 11, 2019. Photo credit: Victoria Pickering

Daniel A. Medina’s excellent article on Mohammed al-Qahtani, the would-be twentieth al-Qaeda terrorist hijacker, identifies an important long-term problem that all presidents have faced since al-Qaeda terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Does due process apply to Guantánamo? As Medina points out in discussing al-Qahtani’s case, the Biden administration has not taken a stance on this question.

Under a due process and rule of law system, the men in Guantánamo would not have been held for years and, for some, even a decade or more without charges. They would have had access to attorneys from the time they were first incarcerated to challenge their detentions and assure them of other due process rights. They would have been guaranteed full and fair trials in federal court to defend any charges brought against them. They would not have been systematically physically and psychologically tortured in the prison. (Psychological torture includes periods of isolation, sleep deprivation, and sensory deprivation such as wearing hoods.)

Al-Qahtani was physically and psychologically tortured in Guantánamo. He nearly died during one episode of unrelenting abuse. His heart rate dropped precipitously in an interrogation session, and he was rushed to the hospital. In 2008, senior Pentagon official Susan Crawford refused to allow the military to prosecute al-Qahtani. “We tortured Qahtani,” she admitted. 

As Median notes in his article, the Biden administration has until September 8 to decide whether to: 1.) challenge a federal judge’s order to permit a due process right to an independent medical evaluation for al-Qahtani to determine his eligibility for repatriation to Saudi Arabia for psychiatric care; 2.) agree to the medical evaluation for al-Qahtani; or 3.) repatriate him to Saudi Arabia and dodge the issue.

Key to the administration decision is whether Guantánamo detainees are entitled to due process. Previous administrations have argued that such rights do not apply to the detainees.

Due process and the rule of law are the cornerstones of our democracy. We cannot accept that administrations deny these rights to people we have detained. President Biden must take a stand if he is going to lead the US back to the respect it once commanded around the world. He must acknowledge that due process and the rule of law apply at Guantánamo. Denying these rights impacts not only the detainees but has long-term implications for the future of our nation.

“Guantánamo Bay, I think, is going to be seen as the significant start of the fall of American democracy.” In 2012, Australian attorney Stephen Kenny spoke these words to our Witness to Guantánamo project. 

For nearly a decade, Witness to Guantánamo filmed interviews with 158 people who lived or worked in Guantánamo across twenty nations. Fifty-two of the people interviewed were former detainees. Others included prison guards, interrogators, interpreters, chaplains, attorneys, medical personnel, reporters, high ranking military and government officials, and family members of the detainees.

Stephen Kenny was referring to how the United States government broke the rule of law by imprisoning 780 alleged Muslim terrorists from more than forty countries at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The US government denied the men the due process rights that all people detained by the US government are entitled to under the Constitution. Rather than charge them with crimes and hold fair trials, the Bush administration incarcerated the men and threw away the key. 

We will never know how many of the 780 prisoners were international terrorists because nearly all were never charged, tried, or convicted of a crime. In fact, many of the men held in Guantánamo were not captured by US soldiers but were purchased by the US military for ransom or bounty from Pakistani and Afghan soldiers.

Of the thirty-nine prisoners currently at the base, eleven have been charged. Ten other people have been thoroughly vetted by six national security agencies and cleared for release. Although they have been recommended for transfer, they continue to remain housed at the prison until the government can repatriate them or find other countries that are willing to accept them. The Biden administration repatriated one person to Morocco last month.  

Al-Qahtani, along with seventeen other people who were never charged, are essentially “forever” prisoners. The Biden administration should apply the rule of law and due process to Guantánamo and release al-Qahtani, the other seventeen other forever prisoners, and the ten men who have been cleared for release. What kind of message are we sending to the world on the rule of law when we hold people for nearly two decades without charges? 

President Biden must apply our cherished Constitution to the men in Guantánamo. We must be mindful of due process and the rule of law in all our actions. Stephen Kenny’s words should not haunt us in the future.

About the Author 

Peter Jan Honigsberg is professor of law at University of San Francisco, founder, and director of Witness to Guantánamo, and author of A Place Outside the Law, Forgotten Voices from Guantánamo, published by Beacon Press.

As our children settle into a new normal of regular schoolwork, I hope you will join us in a weekly respite of Sunday School.

The post Virtual Sunday School! appeared first on BeyondBelief.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035935/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-08-15_Coming_out.mp3

"Deep Time: Stories We Tell the Children, and the Work of Repair" (August 15, 2021) Worship Service

A personal story about the journey to be a good ancestor.

Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Guest Minister; Carmen Barsody, Worship Associate; Alex Taite, tenor; My-Hoa Steger, accompanist; Brielle Marina Nielson, songleader

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Athena Papadakos, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Order of Service:

https://bit.ly/20210815OS1

LIVESTREAM:

https://youtu.be/Gr_uecb1Kqw

Attached media: https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210815MGSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035830/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-15-21-audio.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035810/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210815.mp3

Beloved comrades-

What a strange, strange time. In my tradition, Lammas (August 1 to 2) begins a season of three harvest festivals followed by the Great Silence, the Close and Holy Darkness. But Lammas begins the season, still in the heat of summer, of sacrifice.

That said, Lammas also begins the season of giving oneself mindfully, clearly, wisely, and with discernment, in the service of greater goods perhaps than those we have been following. And following the greater good, the bigger institution, the more compelling spiritual idea, the more trustworthy teacher–well, these have been central to my development of my sense of self over the last twenty-five years.

Mid-June: I have a pulmonary embolism, pulmonary edema, and atrial fibrillation. When I get to the hospital and then run my labs and take chest x-rays, my heart appears to be fine, all things considered, but my lungs, not so much. It seems they have never fully recovered from the four emboli I had in 2014.

Now, though, I am being surrendered. I have prayed to know how to–to learn how to–surrender. And that can be a good thing. Offering oneself as the stalk of wheat, the neck of the sacrificial bird, the wilting flower–these are beautiful gifts.

In Sufism, though, is an incredible concept that has captured my imagination all year. It is the idea of the corpse. This is in some ways, yes, a variation on a theme in many monastic and mystical traditions. “Keep your death ever before your eyes,” sure. But that’s not the primary image or teaching that I get from it.

The Sufis say that one should pray to be in the hand of Allah, as the corpse is in the hands of those who prepare it for burial. The corpse moves because its arms or legs, trunk or head are moved. Similarly, one’s choices and actions should be ultimately and completely in accordance with Divine Love, the fullness of Divinity. You should only choose as the Divine moves you to choose. You should only touch where the Divine moves you to touch. And you cannot do this through your own will. You can only do it by making an offering of yourself, a polished soul…and I lose words and knowledge here. I don’t know how one goes from surrendering to being surrendered, from humility to abased awe before the Divine impossibility.

The edge of a bariatric bed is a hinge I must go over every time I go in and out of bed. I am on powerful blood thinners. I bruise from head to toe, especially where the bed hinge digs into my leg. My right leg has a five-inch wide, 18-inch-long bruise wrapping around my thigh.

So I’ve thought of that image of Divinity, with respect to my current conditions.

I’ve also thought of another image of Divinity, that of Brigid, the great Gaelic goddess and saint, whose image decorates not just my domicile, but that of a few of our comrades. If you’ve been around Reflections for a while, you know that Brigid is important to me, and that various of her tools, symbols, and stories inform my life. In this case, the pertinent image of Brigid is the one I first learned, the triple-faced deity, the Three Brigids. These are the faces of that goddess: the Bard, the Healer, and the Blacksmith, or the patroness of blacksmithing, depending on when and how we’re looking at Her. Specifically, it is the goddess in her guise as the Smith that captures my attention–captures, holds, binds, and won’t let go.

End of June through the beginning of July, and the first Heat Dome in Portland: bloodwork finds anemia, confirmation of my diagnosis of a recurrence of cellulitis, the big bruise goes deeply into my body and becomes an internal hematoma — a sac of fluid roughly a 7-cm sphere just beneath the surface of my skin.

I know two people who prayed to Brigid for transformation of one kind or another. One of them prayed to have a new relationship with her body. Both of them got appendicitis. Both of them had surgery, one in an emergency setting. Meanwhile, I have been dreaming of Her. A wrought-iron fence. A hammer. An anvil. A tempering pool. The bellows for the Great Forge. The Star Forge itself. And the arm that swings the hammer to send sparks off the top of the anvil…the broad and callused hand, the powerful forearm made burly by time at the Work of creation, destruction, and transformation.

So yeah, you can imagine. The image of lying on the anvil is just too easy, but there it is. Being shaped. Being shifted. Being hammered and pulled, malleable and ductile. Being heated, red-hot and then splashed into the water. Shaped and shifted, melted and stilled, birthed out of the forge into a shape I could never have dreamt up on my own.

Tuesday, late July: The wound where my hematoma was has begun to bleed regularly, but not alarmingly… until there appears to be a red water feature emerging from my leg. When my nurse comes, she says we’re doing all the right things. Beyond that, we tell her about the 7 cm, so she decides to measure the inside of the wound — 11 cm. When I call my PCP and share a photo, she directs me to go to the hospital. This wound is beyond her, and she knows it.

Then, very much NOT in dreamland, I listen to my primary care provider saying just this morning: “You know, I have seen women in their late forties or early fifties, over and over and over again. Each one has some kind of health crisis right around this time. I think it is an initiation. That it is a doorway to the beginning of Croning.” (Do you see why I love her? She’s amazing. Not taking new patients, but amazing.)

And I think of Charlie Murphy, author of the compelling-but-historically-totally-wrong song, “The Burning Times.” He wrote a line regarding the development of the military-industrial complex and ecological destruction: The Eye of the Crone is upon you.

The Eye of the Crone is upon you.

This can mean, look out because death is coming for you. It can also mean the ancient keeper of wisdom is with you.

Late July, over Lammas into August: 15 hours after arrival, surgery to drain and clear out the hematoma. More IV antibiotics and painkillers. Two rolls of gauze packed into my wound and then removed as I watched. Told I could not leave the hospital until I could–without IV painkillers–have my wound packed with spongy, absorbent material, wrapped in “drape,” attached by tubing to a little machine that applies suction and pressure to my wounds–the original one, as well as the new one the surgeons made.

The Eye of the Crone is upon you.

What do They… What does She mean? Does She watch? Does She carry the Scissors of Atropos? Or is she calling out the Descendants from Their place behind the veil of Birth? What does her transforming power mean for me? For The Way of the River?

We shall never be the same, my comrades, my friends, my beloveds. We shall never be the same. The Eye of the Crone, the Doorway of the Initiation, the Hole in the Stone…these are open to us. What shall we be when we go through?

I am well enough to say at this point that the community of The Way of the River is not ending. I am well enough to say at this point that portions of my ministry of The Way of the River will remain. I intend to be in touch with all my clients, one way or another, and we’ll talk about what will happen next!

Love a thousand times, my dears —

~Catharine~

By Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Bob Moses left us with a legacy to honor and live up to in the spirit of the civil rights movement today. His work to organize Black voters in Mississippi in the early 1960s famously transformed the political power of communities. Nearly forty years later, he organized again, this time as founder of the national math literacy program called the Algebra Project. The following passages are highlights from Radical Equations, which he wrote with Charles E. Cobb, Jr., that delve into what the Algebra Project was all about and the importance of its foundation in civil rights movement building.

***

The Algebra Project is first and foremost an organizing project—a community organizing project—rather than a traditional program of school reform. It draws its inspiration and its methods from the organizing tradition of the civil rights movement. Like the civil rights movement, the Algebra Project is a process, not an event.

Two key aspects of the Mississippi organizing tradition underlie the Algebra Project: the centrality of families to the work of organizing, and organizing in the context of the community in which one lives and works. As civil rights workers in Mississippi, we were absorbed into families as we moved from place to place with scarcely a dollar in our pockets, and this credential—being one of the community’s children—negated the white power structure’s efforts to label us “outside agitators.” In this way we were able to sink deep roots into the community, enlarging and strengthening connections in and among different communities, absorbing into our consciousness the community’s memories of “where we have been,” forcing us to our own understanding of our collective experience.

We are struggling to frame some important questions: Is there a way to talk with young people today as Amzie Moore and Ella Baker did with us in the 1960s? Is there a consensus for young Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites to tap into that will drive such a literacy effort? What price must they pay to wage such a struggle?

Like Ella Baker, we believe in these young people, that they have the energy, the courage, the hope to devise means to change their condition. Although much concern about the education of African-American young people is voiced today, I am frequently asked why I have turned to teaching school and developing curriculum—teaching middle school and high school no less. There is a hint of criticism in the question, the suggestion that I am wasting my time, have abandoned efforts at attempting real, meaningful social change. After all, in the end, such work “merely” leads to youngsters finding a comfortable place in the system with a good job. Nothing “radical” about that, I am told. This is a failure to understand what actually is “radical,” so it might be useful to repeat what Ella Baker posits as necessary to the struggle of poor and oppressed people: “It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”

~~~

So, to understand the Algebra Project you must begin with the idea of our targeted young people finding their voice as sharecroppers and day laborers, maids, farmers, and workers of all sorts found theirs in the 1960s. Of course, there are differences between the 1960s and what the AP is doing now. For one, the time span between the start of the sit-in movement and the challenge by the MFDP in Atlantic City was incredibly brief, sandwiched between two presidential elections (Kennedy-Nixon and Johnson-Goldwater). When I look back it feels like twenty years folded into four; I still can hardly believe how short a time period that was. Math literacy, however, will require a longer time frame. There is a steep learning curve and what we’re looking at with the AP is something evolving over generations as math literacy workers/organizers acquire the skills and training through study and practice and begin tackling the system. Young people, however, may speed this up as youth clearly did in the civil rights movement. And, whereas the right to vote campaign took place in the Deep South, the math literacy problem is throughout the entire nation.

Yet to understand the Algebra Project, you need to understand the spirit and the crucial lessons of the organizing tradition of the civil rights movement. In Mississippi, the voiceless found their voice, and once raised, it could not be ignored. Organizers learned to locate the vast resources in communities that seemed impoverished and paralyzed at first glance. The lessons of the movement in Mississippi are exactly the lessons we need to learn and put into practice in order to transform the education of our children and their prospects for the future. As with voting rights four decades ago, we have to flesh out a consensus on math literacy. Without it, moving the country into systemic change around math education becomes almost impossible. You cannot move this country unless you have consensus. That’s part of what we learned in Mississippi. We learned it on the ground, running.

~~~

The Algebra Project is founded on the idea that the ongoing struggle for citizenship and equality for minority people is now linked to an issue of math and science literacy. This idea determines strategies and choices made about the organization, dissemination, and content of the curriculum. It’s important to make it clear that even the development of some sterling new curriculum—a real breakthrough—would not make us happy if it did not deeply and seriously address the issue of access to literacy for everyone. That is what is driving the project. The Algebra Project is not about simply transferring a body of knowledge to children. It is about using their knowledge as a tool to a much larger end.

~~~

Organizing around algebra has the potential to open a doorway that’s been locked. Math literacy and economic access are the Algebra Project’s foci for giving hope to the young generation. That’s a new problem for educators. It’s a new problem for the country. The traditional role of science and math education has been to train an elite, create a priesthood, find a few bright students and bring them into university research. It hasn’t been a literacy effort. We are putting literacy, math literacy, on the table. Instead of weeding all but the best students out of advanced math, schools must commit to everyone gaining this literacy as they have committed to everyone having a reading-writing literacy.

This is a cultural struggle, the creation of a culture of mathematical literacy that’s going to operate within the Black community as church culture does. And that means that math won’t be just school-based, but available as reading and writing are. Kids now routinely assume that someone will be able to explain some word to them, or teach them how to read a sentence if they don’t understand it. They also take it as a matter of course that no one can help them with their “higher” math studies. Projecting several generations down the road we can see a youngster who has grown up in a Black neighborhood being able to get his or her questions about mathematics as easily answered in the neighborhood.

~~~

Many people will see our vision as impossible. There’s a sense in which most people are not going to believe or accept any of this agenda until they are confronted with the products of such an effort: students who come out of classrooms armed with a new understanding of mathematics and with a new understanding of themselves as leaders, participants, and learners. As I said before, in the sixties everyone said sharecroppers were apathetic until we got them demanding to vote. That finally got attention. Here, where kids are falling wholesale through the cracks—or chasms—dropping out of sight, becoming fodder for jails, people say they do not want to learn. The only ones who can dispel that notion are the kids themselves. They, like Mrs. Hamer, Mrs. Devine, E. W. Steptoe, and others who changed the political face of Mississippi in the 1960s, have to demand what everyone says they don’t want.

About the Authors 

Robert P. Moses (1935-2021) was the founder of the Algebra Project and was the winner of many awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a Heinz Award in the Human Condition. He was the coauthor of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project.

A journalist for major magazines for thirty years, Charles E. Cobb, Jr. is senior writer at allAfrica.com. He is the coauthor of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project.

In David Bentley Hart’s recent translation the text reads as follows,         

And the seventh angel sounded the trumpet, and there came loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the cosmos has become the Lord’s and his Anointed’s, and he will reign unto the ages of the ages.” And the twenty-four elders seated before God on their thrones fell on their faces and made obeisance to God, Saying, “We thank you, Lord God the Almighty, who are and who were [and who are to come], because you have taken your great power and have reigned, And the gentiles were indignant, and your ire has come, and the time for the dead to be judged, and for giving the reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those who revere your name, the small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” And God’s sanctuary in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen in his sanctuary, and there came lightning flashes and noises and peals of thunder and an earthquake and a great hailstorm (Revelation 11:15-19).

And so now here we are, Summer 2021, the IPCC’s report has been published and when all but the most wilfully blind and deluded amongst humankind can see that the dire warnings about an impending, human-driven environmental catastrophe — with its own flashes of lightning, noises, peals of thunder, earthquakes, and hailstorms and, of course, those other Biblical catastrophes, flood and fire — were not exaggerations but, if anything, underestimates of how just how serious and how fast the situation was going to deteriorate were we not radically to change our way of being-in-the-world. But the environmental prophets and holy ones and those who revere nature have all been ignored and we did not change. Instead, as George Monbiot has just written,

Our warnings were greeted with denial and insults: we were accused of being jeremiahs, killjoys, communists, fascists etc, etc. Even those who paid lip service to the science refused to act on it. They made speeches and set targets, but shunned the necessary economic change. Everything else came first: the corporate lobbyists, the road building, the unnecessary wars, the urge to appease media billionaires and comfortable, complacent voters. Scarcely anyone told the truth. Self-interest and egotism pushed us towards catastrophe. Even now, as the fires rage, governments delay, obfuscate, look the other way. And we, our senses dulled by consumerism, trivia and the lies and misdirections of the media, remain quiescent.

It is in this context of our dulled senses and quiescence that the paean of thanksgiving and praise uttered by the twenty-four elders in verses 17-18 particularly interests me.

What I want to do here is to re-present it to you in four steps to deliver up an interpretation of the text that, just perhaps, can speak clearly to our own age.  

So, step one. Here, once again, is that paean of thanksgiving and praise:

          We thank you, Lord God the Almighty, who are and who were [and who are to come], 

          because you have taken your great power and have reigned, 

          And the gentiles were indignant, and your ire has come, 

          and the time for the dead to be judged, 

          and for giving the reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones 

          and to those who revere your name, the small and great, 

          and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

Now, in the form of liberal religious life that claims my allegiance the term “Lord God the Almighty” is in some fashion interchangeable with “Nature the Almighty” as nature awe-inspiringly does what nature does. Another, and I think better term for nature doing what nature does is natura naturans or “nature naturing.” In making this change I’m following the lead of one of my great heroes, and one of the great heroes of the seventeenth-century Radical Enlightenment, Benedict Spinoza who used the term deus sive natura, “god-or-nature”, where the “sive”, the “or”, is one of equivalence. Consequently, however one is to understand the activity of god, god is to be understood as nature naturing; however one understands the activity nature naturing, nature naturing is to be understood as god. As the philosopher Frederick C. Beiser notes: 

Spinoza’s famous phrase “deus sive natura” made it possible to both divinize nature and naturalize the divine. Following that dictum, a scientist, who professed the most radical naturalism, could still be religious; and a pastor, who confessed the deepest personal faith in God, could still be a naturalist (“After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840-1900”, Princeton University Press, pp. 4-7).      

So, in this context, step two is to hear me, a pastor who professes a species of new naturalism, read again the passage I’ve just quoted from Revelation but with some key changes made:

          We thank you, god-or-nature, who are and who were [and who are to come], 

          because you have taken your great power and have reigned, 

          And those blind to nature naturing were indignant, and your ire has come, 

          and the time for the dead to be judged, 

          and for giving the reward to your co-workers the prophets and to the holy ones 

          and to those who revere your name, the small and great, 

          and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

Let’s now turn to step three. To take this step we need to see a singular difference between the activity of “Almighty God” as was understood by the writer of Revelation and the mythical twenty-four elders, and the activity of “god-or-nature” I have in mind. However, before doing that, because in what follows I indulging in some anthropomorphization of nature, I think it is helpful to add here Jane Bennett’s active materialist credo that concludes her book “Vibrant Matter”:

I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the com­mon materiality of all that is; expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests (Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press, 2010, p. 122).

So, to return to the paean, “Almighty God” is a being who is relating to we human beings from somewhere “over there”. Such an “Almighty God” is understood to be external to us; Almighty God’s judgement, power and rule are all things that come to us from outside our world.  

But with “god-or-nature” the situation is very different. We are helped to grasp something of the difference by the philosopher Timothy Morton. On his blog he writes,

One of the things that modern society has damaged has been thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged ideas is that of Nature itself. How do we transition from seeing what we call “Nature” as an object “over there”? And how do we avoid “new and improved” versions that end up doing much the same thing (embeddedness, flow and so on), just in a “cooler,” more sophisticated way? When you realize that everything is interconnected, you can’t hold on to a concept of a single, solid, present-at-hand thing “over there” called Nature.

So, now let’s take step four in which I’ll walk you through the paean of thanksgiving and praise line by line unfolding just some of the implications of my reinterpretation. 

The paean begins:  

We thank you, god-or-nature, who are and who were [and who are to come]

Whatever god-or-nature is, god-or-nature is that which is, was and will be in the sense that everything that is, was and will be is an expression of nature naturing, natura naturans. God-or-nature always-already simply does what god-or-nature does and — and this is vitally important to grasp — we human beings are ourselves expressions of god-or-nature, i.e. of nature naturing. We are emergent creatures as is everything in our various cultures including, very importantly, human morality. In all cases it is vital to see that we are not here and nature is not “over there.” To borrow some words from John Toland in his Pantheisticon of 1720, it is to want to say something like: 

          All Things in the World are one. 

          And one is All in all Things. 

          What’s All in all Things Is GOD, Eternal and Immense, 

          Neither begotten, nor ever to perish.

The paean of thanksgiving and praise continues:

          because you have taken your great power and have reigned, 

Naturally, there could never have been any time or place when god-or-nature didn’t have great power and was not, so to speak, reigning. So what’s going on here? Well, I think we can take this line as simply an expression of gratitude at the way the power of god-or-nature has suddenly broken through our hubristic delusions of separateness, independence, power and control and, having seen the awesome power of nature naturing, we find suddenly that god-or-nature now reigns in all our thinking about everything. Increasing numbers of us (but still far from enough) have come to see that it is simply impossible for humans to have any power or can rule over a nature that is “over there” in the form of natural resources which are ruthlessly to be exploited by oil and gas companies, industrialists of all kinds, corporate lobbyists, road builders, warmongers, media billionaires and comfortable, complacent voters. The power of god-or-nature has helped us see not only that nature is not “over there” but that it is the very same matter/energy out of which we, and everything are made. Nature naturing which is the sign of the reign of god-or-nature is within us and, consequently, the judgement which is coming upon us comes from that which we are, were, and always will be because in god-or-nature we live, move and have our being.   

The paean of thanksgiving and praise continues:

          And those blind to nature naturing were indignant, and your ire has come, 

          and the time for the dead to be judged, 

The “gentiles” mentioned in the original text are, in this context, all those who simply cannot see the power and the reign of god-or-nature, the process of nature naturing. They are angry with the angry judgement of god-or-nature/nature naturing because it really is taking away from them the illusion of human control over, and separateness from things they thought were “over there” to be controlled and exploited by them for short-term and wholly unsustainable ends. But, because this is a revelation that there is no “over there” and that everything is connected (All Things in the World are one. And one is All in all Things), the truth is the angry judgement they are so angry about is really “their” own nature angrily judging the way “they” are currently naturing. They are utterly dead to reality, to god-or-nature and in this “death” they are truly being judged.

The paean of thanksgiving and praise continues:

          and for giving the reward to your co-workers the prophets and to the holy ones 

          and to those who revere your name, the small and great

The reward this moment in time is bringing us is not salvation from this world because, in the old sense of the word anyway, there is for our own age no easy way for us to believe in “another world” where a future salvation is promised. But in a certain way we may say that there is another world, namely, this world seen differently. The reward we have available to us, our salvation is, if you like, in this world and we experience it whenever we see this world, sub species aeternitatis, as deus sive natura, god-or-nature, nature-or-god. Salvation is experienced wherever we are able to see, celebrate and give thanks for natura naturans, nature naturing everywhere and always. Whenever any person intuits or sees this awesome reality, truly sees it that is, then, with gratitude and reverence they find themselves unselfconsciously bowing before the name of god-or-nature, natura naturans. To borrow from a well-known hymn, at the name of god-or -nature every knee shall bow. This recognition, this act of obeisance is, in and of itself, our reward. But it is important to understand that this act of obesience is not made before some external potentate, over there, but to something everywhere and always active. It is additionally vitally important to realise that an “act of obeisance” is not an abstract idea about the world, a mere intellectual lip-service, but an actual movement of the material body made as a real act of respect or submission to the material body of the world made by the material body of the world itself in the form of the body of this or that human being. In this new way of being-in-the-world ethics becomes all about material movement, about how we might best move, dance and walk together with all things. 

The paean of thanksgiving and praise then concludes by stating that this is also a time

          for destroying those who destroy the earth.

And so, here we are, at a moment in the time in the life of this planet and ours species when god-or-nature, natura naturans, is beginning to destroy us, we who destroy the earth. 

Our only hope is that, since we are ourselves an example of nature naturing, in which god-or-nature is  judging “itself”, when we see that this is so, we can gratefully, if often fearfully, willingly become part of this necessary judgement. All this is to see that our present ways of behaviour require us to repent and radically to change our whole way of being-in-the-world. 

But, once again, please see that this judgement and anger is not external to us, rather it is a judgement that is as much from what we colloquially call an “inner” realm as it is from an “outward” one.

When we see this and begin to live its truth then, even if this turns out to be the beginning of the end of our particular species, then we can be assured we are playing a humble part, not in the destruction of the world, but its ongoing life. 

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035705/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-08-08_Nature_v_Nurture.mp3

"Sinking In To Ordinary Time" (August 8, 2021) Worship Service

In both the Christian and Jewish traditions, there is the idea of “ordinary time” - the time between holy days - an extended period of time that invites contemplation, a chance to sink in to the deeper rhythms that surround us like the flow of a river or the turning of the tides. Living in ordinary time means sinking in and slowing down. This is how we save ourselves and hopefully save our planet.

Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister; Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, organist; Grandview Driveby Aloha Band: Bill Klingelhoffer, Horns; Ka’ala Carmack, singer, ukulele, piano; Rosalie Alfonso, drum; Asher Davison, songleader

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Athena Papadakos, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Order of Service:

https://bit.ly/20210808OSWeb1

LIVESTREAM:

https://youtu.be/wnfvbLJ9Cng

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035644/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210808AJSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035617/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-08-21-audio.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035517/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210808.mp3

Please join us on Sunday (8 August 2021) at 11:00 AM for “And On That Note” by Rev. Barbara Jarrell.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

Watch for our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.  You can sign up for these announcements using this link.

Our August 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is YWCA’s Dialogue on Race.

We will have a  virtual coffee hour after the service on Zoom.

While we are remaining physically distant, we want to know how you are doing, what you need, and what you are interested in.  You can let us know using these online surveys.

And you can contribute to All Souls using this online resource.

By Perpetua Charles

One of those fancy-shmancy houses in the West End neighborhood of Portland, ME. Photo credit: Alexius Horatius

Two years ago, my partner and I took a small getaway to Portland, Maine. To feel confident on this trip, I was going to need my best early spring outfits and my trusty travel makeup bag. At the time, my natural curls were cropped close to my head and, to be honest, the stylist had done the cut a little lopsided. Unbeknownst to me, I’d also been struggling with the effects of an undiagnosed GI issue. But it didn’t take long into our first afternoon there to discover that my makeup bag didn’t make the trip with me. Dread and panic set in. My partner, a white, straight, cisgender male, had trouble understanding why I was briefly spiraling over this realization. In the moment, I couldn’t find the words to explain what I innately knew. In a city like Portland, I was going to stick out. Without makeup, I was going to stick out even more.

In All Made Up: The Power and Pitfalls of Beauty Culture, from Cleopatra to Kim Kardashian, Rae Nudson explains that white people have historically used beauty standards they set up as a way to keep Black and Brown people from the social and economic capital that could come from being viewed as stylish or beautiful. This dates as far back as the mid- to late-nineteenth century, where formerly enslaved people were still considered and treated as last-class citizens. Nudson writes that skin color and other physical traits associated with Black people were visible ways to make distinctions between people, reinforce social and economic hierarchies, and maintain power structures that kept Black people out.

The next day, my partner and I visited the center of town. I had fun but felt insecure. I regretted leaving my hair creams and gels at home. If I’d brought them, maybe they’d have given me a fighting chance of looking “put-together” in a strange city, I thought. Without my makeup or hair products, I walked the line between enjoying myself and trying to will myself invisible.

Black women frequently struggle with two societal extremes: being scrutinized as though under a microscope or being ignored and looked past as though we were air itself. The more access a Black woman has to beauty products that match her skin tone and conform to beauty standards of the day, the easier she can move through society, hopefully lessening the number of microaggressions she experiences daily. As Nudson explains, Black women stand out, not because of our phenotype, but because the white supremacist structure we live in uses our visible traits to discriminate against us. I couldn’t fully enjoy my lobby-pop (it’s a lobster lollipop; you really had to be there) because of a nagging feeling that I wasn’t blending in.

Perpetua and the lobby-pop

Later that evening, my partner and I went out for dinner. I was a little self-conscious about my look, but after a day out and about with no incidents, I told myself it was okay to settle into the evening. Then we were seated in the back corner. We had to wait a very long time between visits from our server. We never heard the specials. Our food was lackluster. The tables around us were dutifully attended to but we had to eavesdrop to hear what the night’s specials were. When my partner offered feedback about our experience, our server was passively apologetic. We left the restaurant in search of more (better) food and a place where we could hopefully relax after that tense dinner. We found a bar with a live band. After choosing a spot near the back, I ordered a bite to eat while my partner went to the restroom. As he returned, I watched one white woman’s eyes take him in lasciviously, only for her nose to wrinkle in disdain when he sat next to me.

Now I was ready for the evening to end, and I was ready to get out of Portland.

Nudson writes that the “wrong” makeup can cause funny looks or lead to harassment, while the “right” makeup can be completely unnoticed and unremarked upon. In my case, I felt that the “wrong” makeup was no makeup at all. While my partner raged at the injustice on our way back to our Airbnb, I replayed the events of the evening in my head. Would we have had better service if I’d worn some eyeliner and blush? If my curls had been more defined? Did the contempt of the woman from the bar stem from seeing a Black woman with a white man? Would she have been less contemptuous if she could see a hint of gloss on my lips?

Probably not. And yet, I felt some level of responsibility for how the evening had gone.

There is something to be said for the confidence we’re all called to develop and practice so that we can feel secure in ourselves no matter where we are. Black women are especially encouraged to cultivate this confidence because we often can’t count on non-Black environments to affirm us. But again, when even beauty culture is rooted in white supremacy, we can still feel self-conscious, regardless of how many mantras of self-love we whisper to ourselves every day before leaving the house.

All the Fenty in the world may not have protected me from the microaggressions of that night in Portland. What it might have done was make it easier to wave away the ignorance of others. But as writer Jia Tolentino said in The New Yorker, “What did it mean…that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant?” That trip to Portland was an invitation for me to think about how I can use my bare face to resist the demands of white-dominant beauty culture. Could I challenge myself to wear makeup only when I wanted to, and to leave it behind when my face needed a break? Could I accept that others might think I’m tired or ill without my makeup and still feel free to live my life?

Nudson’s book came to me at the right time. The last eighteen months have been an ongoing examination of my relationship with makeup. If I wear a beautiful red lip stain and then step outside wearing a mask, do I even exist? As the Delta variant spreads widely and quickly, me and my fashion favorites may have to shut ourselves away after enjoying a few months of relative freedom. Thanks to Nudson’s engaging histories that illustrate the relevance and importance of makeup when planning to smash the patriarchy, I’ve gained a new perspective on what beauty culture is, why it matters to me, and what I want my relationship with it to be like going forward.

About the Author 

Perpetua Charles joined Beacon Press in 2015. She is a graduate of Florida Southern College and earned her MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Perpetua has extensive publicity experience in the areas of race and culture, memoir, education, and history. Some of her favorite things include the Lord, TV, Disney princesses, books, 90s-00s teen pop, and the color pink. Connect with Perpetua on Instagram at @princessperpetuaa.

Dear hearts!

Just the tiniest note because I’m still very tired, but I wanted you all to know that as of last Thursday, I was writing to you from my own bed!!!! I was in the hospital for a total of something like a little less than a month, and I’ve been having all kinds of medical difficulties before that. And you’ve been with me all the way.

Thanks to Julica, Ruth, Sara, Oscar, Karen, Jack, Molly, Peter, Joyce, Alice, and of course Julie. And thanks, too, for REAL, to everyone my mooshy brain is not remembering at the moment. I truly appreciate all your beautiful support. And those who have texted me, sent Messenger notes, or even “snail mail” notes, thank you so very much. Keep that line open, because I have a long road ahead of me!

And a super-special thank you to my team, Elika, Alexis, Katy, and Jillian!!! They are simply amazing, and I can’t imagine–for real can’t imagine–working with a more supportive, helpful, accommodating, and talented group of women. Thank you so much.

I expect to be in recovery for around the next six months. During this time, the Way of the River will of necessity look different from the way it has the past six years. But we can still support one another, still ride the waves — the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” — that life throws at us. And we can still look for the lessons, gifts, and joys that come to us even in times of great pain.

Persistently yours,
Catharine

PS — If you are so moved to contact me, feel free to do so here.

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break on 8 August 2021.

As the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to spread in our community and seems to affect children more seriously, we are trying to be mindful in our planning of outdoor activities (taking into account the Louisiana summertime heat as well).

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates on our 15 August 2021 outdoor religious education event involving water.

There will be no adult religious education class on Sunday (8 August 2021).

Please join us on following Sunday (15 August 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

More details will be posted on our web site as we get closer to that date.

Please join us on Saturday (7 August 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

This is a sitting Buddhist meditation including a brief introduction to mindfulness meditation, 20 minutes of sitting, and followed by a weekly teaching.

The group is free and open to all.

For more information, contact Larry via email or phone using (318) 272-0014.

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, we have begun to broadcast a livestream video of our Sunday morning worship services.

This worship video will be available live and in recorded formats.

For our livestream video of our worship services, we are using Facebook Live.  One does not have to log into Facebook or have a Facebook account to view this video.

You can find the 1 August 2021 worship video here.

Bob Moses. Photo credit: Miller Center

The Civil Rights Movement has lost another great one. Radical educator, global-minded activist, MacArthur genius fellow. On July 25 at age 86, Bob Moses joined the ancestors. While we’re heartbroken about his passing, we remain honored to have published Radical Equations, which he wrote with Charles E. Cobb to tell his story of founding the Algebra Project. He provided a model for anyone looking for a community-based solution to the problems of our disadvantaged schools and improving education for poor children of color.

He meant so much to us at Beacon and our authors. Here’s what they have to say about him.

It was a great privilege for Beacon Press to work with the legendary civil rights activist Bob Moses and his colleague and coauthor Charles E. Cobb on his revolutionary book, Radical Equations. Bob did something completely fresh, building on his experience organizing in Mississippi to create a model for using math literacy as a new frontier in civil rights. He didn’t just teach math; he used it to build bridges and community. He was audacious even as he was entirely modest and self-effacing. His voice was ever so soft, but his witness and his work were both huge and very audible. I feel lucky to have known him and very proud to see his legacy continue to grow.
—Helene Atwan, director

In every classroom or meeting space, Bob Moses listened better than anyone. The speaker might be five years old, or a sharecropper studying for the voter’s literacy test in Mississippi, or an Algebra Project student in Chicago, or the student’s grandmother, or the Attorney General of the United States. Bob wanted their words to become a part of his life, to figure in the enormous tapestry of experience that he lived in and that he built all around him. He listened to you and then he invited you to do something more than just speak: to consider something; to look from a different angle; to try to apply what you said; to go somewhere; to meet someone; to tell someone else; to make something happen. He put tens of thousands of us in motion with this simple technique: listen, and then invite someone to move as if they meant what they said. Teacher and organizer. Listener, questioner, doer.
—Jay Gillen, The Power in the Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment 

A reminiscence about the late Bob Moses, one of the most courageous and creative activists of our time. I organized a panel for the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, which was held at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on April 4, 2003, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Our topic was “Remembering SNCC and SDS.” Two of the speakers were Bob Moses and Staughton Lynd, who had worked together in SNCC. The meeting included historians, but it was primarily a community event. The large room, packed to overflowing, included reporters and cameramen from local news stations. Jesse Jackson, who had been with Dr. King when he died, showed up and asked to join the panel. The moment Bob Moses walked into the room, unintroduced, the audience rose in a thunderous standing ovation. Staughton told a story about Bob, who in 1964 was speaking to a small gathering in front the charred remains of a Black church that had recently been burned down in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In that moment, Bob chose to speak about a bill that had just been passed by the US Congress called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which signaled a vast expansion of US involvement in the Vietnam war. Bob said everyone needed to pay close attention because the war overseas and the Civil Rights movement at home would be closely linked. His vision of struggle was international—and prescient.
—Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

Some of our authors took to Twitter to share their outpouring of love for him.

Deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Bob Moses. He was a brilliant organizer and civil rights activist who provided a model of effective leadership. He worked closely with Fannie Lou Hamer who admired and respected him. May his memory be a blessing to us all. ♥️ https://t.co/0GwEZPdAUu

— Dr. Keisha N. Blain (@KeishaBlain) July 25, 2021

Rest In Peace, brother Bob Moses. May we honor the memory of all you taught us by fighting like heaven for voting rights.

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) July 26, 2021

Bob Moses is my model for organizing. Principled, intellectual, humble, deliberate, willing to work with all who come, never berating but consistently challenging. Fun loving, kind, reflective, tender.

— Imani Perry (@imaniperry) July 25, 2021

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My dearest brother Bob Moses – spiritual genius, intellectual giant and moral titan – has left us! Words fall short! He was larger than life and one of the great exemplars of our humanity! Let us never forget him!

— Cornel West (@CornelWest) July 25, 2021

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Rest in power, Bob Moses.

Erika A. Hewitt

Elizabeth Stevens

Continue reading "Trauma-Informed Worship"

"Dare to Love Again" (August 1, 2021) Worship Service

Do I dare to love again? Many of us have asked that question at one time or another. I know I have. Whether after death, disappointment or betrayal, life is always asking us to give love another chance. But do we dare? And how?

Rev. Dr. Robert M. Hardies, Guest Minister; Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Sam King, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, organist; Leandra Ramm, alto; Richard Fey, tenor; Bill Ganz, pianist

Joe Chapot, OOS Design & live chat moderator; Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Lyle Barrere, sound; Amy Kelly, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Order of Service:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k0CZ4hhx5PZDW-tsijtfaq_-WZFAWKMB/view?usp=sharing

LIVESTREAM:

https://youtu.be/wnfvbLJ9Cng

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035455/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210801RHSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035433/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-01-21-audio.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035351/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210801.mp3

As far as literature goes, I had stumbled across Donald Hall’s Faber Introductory Anthology called “American Poetry” and then Donald Allen’s influential anthology called “The New American Poetry 1945–1960” which introduced me to a whole series of poets, especially those connected with Black Mountain College such as Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Beats such as Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Lew Welch. I was bowled over by how and what they were writing and this passion for their work completely took my attention away from the English Literature A-level curriculum and so it was actually a miracle that I even managed to scrape an “E” grade in my exam.  

As far as history goes, I had become passionate not only about the Protestant Reformation, in particular its radical forms from out of which the Unitarian movement came, but also about the English Civil War, especially the history of the Diggers and the Ranters. Two figures from this latter period that then, as now, wholly captivated my imagination, were Gerrard Winstanley and Jacob Bauthumley. It was through reading Christopher Hill’s work about this period that I was also introduced to the kind Marxist influenced thinking which, to this day, continues to shape the way I understand the world. Anyway, in history as in literature, I was so bowled away by what I was discovering that, once again, it was a miracle I even managed to scrape an “E” grade in my History A-level exam.  

L. to R. Me, Russell and Mark in Little Clacton Village Hall in 1982

But my tricky situation connected with these two awakenings was closely tied to another awakening that had come about through music. Following an exchange visit to Germany in 1979 I had discovered the music of the Beatles and, on returning, I decided I wanted to be in a band. Fortunately, I had two friends who already played instruments, Mark Sainsbury (who played guitar) and Russell Bethany (who played drums), and I was persuaded by them to play the bass guitar. Somehow I managed to convince my parents to buy me one and, in July 1980, on my fifteenth birthday, excitedly I came downstairs to find a shiny, new bass guitar and amp. To my utter surprise my grandmother (who had a quiet love of classical music and harboured a hope I would develop one too) had found a playable double bass and so there it also lay, like a beached whale, on the sitting room floor.     

I didn’t want to disappoint my grandmother and so, even as I began with gusto to play rock and pop music on my electric bass with my friends, I also began to hunt out music that used the double bass and so quickly discovered jazz. Before long, in addition to musicians like Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington (a couple of whose records were in my parents’ small record collection), I soon came across Miles Davis’ jazz-rock masterpieces “In A Silent Way” and “Bitches Brew” and records by the English jazz-rock band “Soft Machine”, especially their album “Third.” By the time I was seventeen, and just starting my A levels, I knew I wanted to be a jazz bass player. 

Naturally, living where I did, in a remote, coastal village in Essex (Kirby-le-Soken), this dream appeared insane and it will come as little surprise that my very sensible parents and teachers took every opportunity to remind me of this insanity. I was not persuaded and by 1983 things had reached a point of crisis. I clearly wasn’t going to college or university and neither was I in a band that was getting any gigs and so something had to give. In short, I needed to get a job badly.

To this end, through an employment bureau in Clacton-on-Sea, my father arranged two interviews in London with an insurance brokers and a bank and, one late autumn Monday morning, I was taken by my father to the railway station at Thorpe-le-Soken and found myself sitting in a train in a cheap suit, with a few quid in my pocket, heading up to Liverpool Street. When I got there I simply knew I couldn’t go through with this and so I went straight to a telephone box in the station concourse and called the insurance brokers and the bank in turn to say sorry but the other firm had offered me a job and that, therefore, I wouldn’t be coming in for the interview that afternoon. Somewhat shaken by the reckless audacity of my actions I immediately took myself off to Shaftesbury Avenue and Ray’s Jazz Shop where, after calming down for half an hour or so by browsing through this heaven of vinyl, I bought a copy of Chick Corea’s “Return to Forever”. I truly love this record but, to this day, I find it quite hard to put it on because I am immediately reminded of the stress of that day! 

Somehow, though God knows how, on returning home in the evening I managed to concoct a plausible enough story about why I had not been offered either job but it was now clear I had to set about urgently finding some job I could do or I was in deep, deep trouble. 

A few days later, whilst in Clacton Town Library looking through the dispiriting job vacancies columns in the local papers, I saw an advert for a job in the poetry bookshop in the Colchester Arts Centre being offered up as part of the government’s Youth Opportunities Programme. I figured this was something I could do with a clean heart and even, perhaps, full belief (pathos), and so I applied. To my surprise, a few days later I was offered an interview and during the following week I duly presented myself at the bookshop.

John Row

Immediately picking up on the fact that I liked Creeley’s work, a few days after starting work in the bookshop, John lent me a book by Martin Dubermann called “Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community” (Dutton, 1972) about the extraordinary liberal arts school called Black Mountain College which operated in North Carolina between 1933 and 1957 where Creeley had been a member of its faculty. Here is not the place to explore the history and ethos of the college but, as the various YouTube links at the end of this piece will show you, it encouraged the kind of education that was extremely attractive to me and quite unlike anything I had experienced in my own life. 

At Black Mountain College students were encouraged to linger, creatively, over their subjects without the pressure of examinations and they could, and did, meet people across the entire artistic spectrum in both the classroom and in various social settings. I was thrilled and inspired by what I read and assiduously began to follow up the work of its various teachers in an attempt to experience, if only at second-hand, something of the education Black Mountain College had offered its students. 

In music I followed up the work of John Cage, Lou Harrison and Stefan Wolpe; in poetry I continued to read Robert Creeley and delved more deeply into Charles Olson, in architecture I looked into the extraordinary world of Buckminster Fuller, in the world of painting I sought out works by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers, and Ruth Asawa and, in dance, I discovered the work of Merce Cunningham. I lingered long over the work of them all and all of it continues to inform and enrich my life today.

Playing with Tal Farlow (guitar) in 1985

The three years I spent in John’s bookshop and at various alternative literary and arts festivals around the country were extraordinary. Not only was I able to read countless books of poetry and essays but, because the bookshop was attached to an Arts Centre, I also got to meet and hear dozens of contemporary poets and attend many jazz concerts. It was only natural that whilst there I finally began to write myself and also to pick up a few jazz gigs. I could barely believe my luck. Perhaps the musical high point of that period was getting the opportunity to play with the great jazz guitarist, Tal Farlow, who had played with Charlie Parker and one of my own bass heroes, Charlie Mingus.

But, John Row was also a performer himself, and so I did a great many jazz and poetry gigs with him at various arts and music festivals around East Anglia and even, on one memorable occasion, going on tour in 1990 to East Germany in that country’s final days of existence. His occasional band was called “John Row’s Sound Proposition,” so named because, in so many ways, it was far from being a sound proposition, especially if one viewed success in financial terms which, of course, we didn’t! 

Anyway, here, for your delectation are three photos taken whilst we were in East Berlin about to play at the famous Kunsthaus Tacheles. Alas, I’m not in the photos because I was taking them. John is clearly taking one of me (standing next to our VW Camper Van) but that photo is long lost . . .

Anyway, one night, driving back very, very late from some gig or other up in rural Lincolnshire John and I passed close by the village of Little Gidding which had inspired T. S. Eliot to write one of the poems in his Four Quartets. I persuaded John that it would be well worth stopping at the village church to see the dawn break over the small church. He agreed.

During our conversation, while we waited for the sun to rise, I told him that I deeply regretted not being able to have had a Black Mountain education myself. Very slowly he turned towards me and said, “And what do you think I’ve been giving you for the last three years?” So, that morning, just as the sun rose over Little Gidding, another kind of dawn broke in my head as I realised this was exactly what had happened and I still take that dawn to have been the graduation ceremony from my first real university course—a kind of time-travel Black Mountain College “Extension Course” which, had I not taken and completed, I would never have been able either to become a professional jazz musician or, much later, get into, and get so much from, Oxford University before making my way into the Unitarian ministry.

The spirit of Black Mountain has never left me and, from time to time, I still occasionally harbour hopes that the Unitarian community where I am minister might offer people something of the same inquiring, free-wheeling educational spirit. 

These days I don’t often openly talk about this hope but it continues to be expressed subliminally in the logo I designed for the church a few years ago (see below) which still appears in an obscure corner of the current church website.

A key symbol of the Universalist movement—which is, of course, a central element in the liberal religious tradition to which I belong—is the circle and, one day, as I was finalising a design for the Cambridge Unitarian Church in which I had placed the name of the church around a circle I suddenly realised I had unconsciously been channelling the logo of Black Mountain College. The connection between them seemed and still seems to me to be very important even though my own design never really caught on and never got widely used. Hey ho . . .

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE YOUTUBE LINKS

Black Mountain College – A School Like No Other | TateShots

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xSAew7vEU]

Louis Menand on John Dewey and Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College, VISIONARIES episode

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 | ICA/Boston

Please join us on Sunday (1 August 2021) at 11:00 AM for “Transform the Pain” by Rev. Barbara Jarrell.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

Watch for our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.  You can sign up for these announcements using this link.

Our August 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is YWCA’s Dialogue on Race.

We will have a  virtual coffee hour after the service on Zoom.

While we are remaining physically distant, we want to know how you are doing, what you need, and what you are interested in.  You can let us know using these online surveys.

And you can contribute to All Souls using this online resource.

Please join us on Sunday (1 August 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We have completed our White Fragility book study group using the book by Robin DiAngelo.

Continuing our focus on living into the Eighth Principle, we will view and discuss two videos from Emmanuel Acho’s video podcast “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.”

His book by the same name grew out of this podcast series.

We will be viewing “Uncomfortable Conversations with the NFL” — Emmanuel Acho’s conversation with Roger Goodell (Commissioner of the National Football League – NFL).

They’ll be talking about the movement among players in the NFL and other sports leagues to engage in peaceful protest during the National Anthem.

The conversation is in two parts.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljgkEcc4B1k?feature=oembed&w=840&h=473]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zH53upUQQE?feature=oembed&w=840&h=473]

We will all watch and discuss both videos together on Sunday.

Feel free to watch ahead and make notes on the points that most interest you that you want to discuss in the group.

Our August 2021 Give-Away-the-Plate recipient Shreveport YWCA’s  Dialogue on Race program in memory of Thomas Ratcliff.

Dialogue on Race is a program of structured weekly conversations in small groups of 10-15 people under the guidance of two trained facilitators who endeavor to create a safe environment for open and honest dialogue on specific questions around the issue of race.

Many of our members have been through the program and several are facilitators.

We dedicate our gift to the memory of Thomas Ratcliff who grew up in our church and was tragically killed in an apartment fire on 25 June 2021.

John Ratcliff (father of Thomas Ratcliff) is a Dialogue on Race facilitator.

John and his wife Joy have designated Dialogue on Race as one of the causes that would best honor Thomas’s memory.

Two ways to donate:

Online — Go to our donation site using this link.  If you are paying your pledge, select “2021 Pledges” and enter that amount for your pledge contribution.  Then select “Collection Plate” to give the amount you would like to give to Dialogue on Race.  All online collection plate contributions for the month of August 2021 will go to Dialogue on Race.

Offline — Please send your give away the plate contribution checks to All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, 9449 Ellerbe Road, Shreveport LA  71106.  Please put “Dialogue on Race” on the memo line of the check if  you want to have 100% of this check go to Dialogue on Race.  If you want less than 100% of the check to go to Dialogue on Race, please put the amount you want going to Dialogue on Race on the memo line.

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break on 1 August 2021.

As the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to spread in our community and seems to affect children more seriously, we are trying to be mindful in our planning of outdoor activities (taking into account the Louisiana summertime heat as well).

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates on opportunities for our children to get together.

Melissa Lewis will be at the church parking lot this Sunday afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 PM to collect food and other items for the Noel United Methodist Church Food Pantry.

For this month, they are requesting travel size toiletries (shampoo, body wash, toothpaste, deodorant, and toothbrushes) – no mouthwash please.

They are also requesting breakfast cereal (any size).

By Ben Mattlin

Disability Pride Flag, designed by Ann Magill

On July 25, 2021, a day before the thirty-first anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), the New York Times Magazine published a story about the proliferation of ADA litigation. “The Price of Access” was the headline of the print edition; the online version, which had appeared a few days earlier, was titled “The Man Who Filed More Than 180 Disability Lawsuits.”

The titles say it all: the piece was sarcastic, hard-hitting, and largely disparaging of disability rights campaigns. As a lifelong wheelchair user, I was offended.

Understanding the ADA

The ADA is often referred to as a landmark civil rights bill. It outlawed discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, government programs and buildings, public accommodations such as stores and restaurants, and telecommunications. In its recognition of widespread past discrimination, it elevated the disability population—currently estimated to represent roughly a fourth of the US population—to a legally protected minority status.

As sweeping as the law is, however, it has one primary flaw: The government doesn’t go around actively enforcing it. You can’t get a ticket for access violations. Instead, the regulations must be implemented through lawsuits filed by those who feel they’ve been unfairly discriminated against. Disabled people themselves are deputized to become a sort of unpaid labor force of ADA cops.

The Times article acknowledged this. “In response to right-wing resistance to expanded governmental reach, those who fought for the ADA’s passage decided against setting up a federal office to monitor or enforce it, the way the Drug Enforcement Administration enforces narcotics laws and Immigration and Customs Enforcement pursues immigration violations. Instead, lawmakers concluded that ADA enforcement should happen through the courts—essentially transferring the role of enforcement from the government to individual disabled people and the judges who heard their cases.”

So, the fate of accessibility fell to the slow-moving courts. No one wants to be sued for an ADA violation, of course, but that doesn’t stop many companies and cities from taking their chances.

Complicated Standards

Granted, the specific access codes can be complicated. Ramps can only be so steep. Doorways must have a certain width. Menus and signs must be in Braille. No doubt, some violations are accidental or inadvertent. And no doubt, there are lawyers who recruit disabled people to pursue litigation, as the Times article implied. “In 2012, plaintiffs filed 2,495 Title III cases in federal court,” said the article, referring to charges against stores and other public accommodations. “By 2017, that had more than tripled to 7,663 cases.”

That may sound alarming, yet this spate of litigiousness doesn’t mean the ADA is a bad thing. Moreover, litigation is only part of the story. Judging the ADA by the court cases it’s engendered completely misses the point of one of the most important events in recent history.

Repercussions of Equal Rights 

I’ve been researching a book about what the disability community and the disability movement have been up to since the ADA became law. One key theme I kept finding was how the civil rights protections laid out in the ADA helped change perceptions as well as legal statutes. Not only does the average American now have an inkling about disability rights that never existed before, but disabled people themselves gained an unprecedented sense of entitlement, of belonging. The ADA enabled them to imagine a fairer, more just world. It made it seem actually possible, almost within reach.

Today, the changes brought by the ADA can be seen everywhere—wheelchair ramps, of course, but also Braille signs in elevators and elsewhere, public transit lifts, emotional-support animals, sign language interpreters at many political rallies and during the National Anthem at big sporting events, electronic listening devices in movie theaters, “reasonable accommodations” by employers such as flextime and telecommuting, and myriad other modifications.

Moreover, you see disabled people out and about, interacting with society in ordinary ways, which wasn’t always true before.

But perhaps chief among the ADA’s successes is the simple fact that so many people now accept the idea of equality for disabled people. This very notion “approaches disability in a new, unfamiliar way,” wrote Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames in the Disability Studies Quarterly. The old approach, they explained, was the “impairment model,” which essentially presumed you couldn’t expect equality if you couldn’t do certain things to function effectively in the world. After the ADA, though, disability was redefined in terms of a struggle for fairness and social parity.

The ADA as a Spark 

This proved an essential spark. Almost immediately after its passage, pro-disability celebrations began happening in Boston and New York. At “disability independence” marches, people quickly started talking about disability pride. It may not have been a brand-new concept, but it soon spread and gained traction. In time, every anniversary of the ADA’s passage became known as Disability Pride Day. Recently, the entire month of July was dubbed Disability Pride Month.

At the same time, disability studies curricula began cropping up. These gave a generation of students a unique perspective on the disability experience and the trajectory of the disability movement. As a result, perhaps, more young people are identifying as disabled (though some of that is because of improved diagnosing of learning disabilities and other neurodivergencies).

Soon, previously unrecognized pockets of the disability community began to speak out and gain attention. People of color, with all types of disabilities and chronic health conditions, of all gender identities, stressed that the disability community is not all about White men in wheelchairs, as the media had been portraying it. Disability, after all, knows no racial, ethnic, geographic, socioeconomic, or gender bounds.

This, in turn, led to greater awareness of intersectionality—the interplay of what’s come to be known as ableism with racism, sexism, homophobia, trans-phobia, and all other forms of oppression.

The Crusade Continues 

Though it had once seemed the ultimate goal, the ADA proved to be a starting point for the ever-broadening disability community. It provided a legal framework, a schematic for the future, but the disability community has taken the cause—the crusade—much farther.

Lawsuits are only one part of that. There would be fewer lawsuits, of course, if there were fewer violations. But as long as people and institutions continue to thwart the notion of fair and equal access, disabled people will keep fighting by whatever means necessary.

Beyond fighting for our rights, though, the disability community asserts itself by simply coming out of the shadows—coming to embrace our identity and connectedness to one another. That’s a key part of what disability pride signifies. We’ve moved beyond self-acceptance to redefine what it means to be disabled.

The ADA may have been society’s way of recognizing us as a group deserving of equal rights. But the legacy of the ADA is what we make of it and do with it every day.

About the Author 

Ben Mattlin is the author of Miracle Boy Grows Up and In Sickness and In Health: Love, Disability, and a Quest to Understand the Perils and Pleasures of Interabled Romance, and a frequent contributor to Financial Advisor magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Vox, and on NPR. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Follow him on Twitter at @benmattlin and visit his website.