In the final installment of this series, Possum feels better — as does Mr. Bear.

As usual, full script is below.

Sharpie: Possum, last week I told you about a new way to do prayer.

Possum: Yeah, you showed me a kind of prayer where you think about the people you love. I tried it every night this week, just before I went to sleep, and it was really good. I like thinking about the people I love.

Sharpie: That’s great!

Possum: Yeah. I feel good about it.

Sharpie: I’ve noticed that you also started coming to dinner on time for our family chalice lighting. And that you now stick around for most of our congregation’s online worship service.

Possum: Yeah. It seems like now that I have a spiritual practice that works for me, I don’t get so bored with the family chalice lighting, and going to worship services. But I’m a little worried. Because what happens if I get stuck again?

Mr. Bear: That’s my problem. I’ve been doing silent meditation since last summer, and I like it a lot. But it hasn’t been going very well recently.

Sharpie: Maybe that’s because you’re worried about Ms. Bear?

Mr. Bear: Mm. partly. Ms. Bear has to travel a lot for her job, and because of the pandemic I’m worried about that.

Sharpie: When you’re worried about someone you love, it makes everything harder, doesn’t it?

Mr. Bear: Yes, it does. But that’s also the time when you need your spiritual practice more than ever.

Sharpie: That’s partly why I attend our congregation’s worship services. I find it helps to be part of a community who care, and who share my values.

Possum: I get it! I thought I didn’t like worship services because they’re boring. But our worship service is really about being with other people.

Mr. Bear: That’s true. Plus, after I attend our worship services, I get a boost for my sitting meditation.

Possum: And listening to Caring and Sharing is going to help me do prayers for the people I love!

Sharpie: That’s what religion is really all about — helping people connect with each other.

Mr. Bear: And connecting with something bigger than us.

Possum: Plus, it makes me feel less stressed!

I finally had an entire day that I could spend outdoors. I went birding along Charleston Slough, in Baylands Nature Preserve on the Palo Alto / Mountain View border. Towards the end of my walk, I saw a man standing at the edge of Shoreline Pond and looking intently into a birding scope, and asked what he was looking at. “Barrow’s,” he said, meaning Barrow’s Goldeneye, a relatively uncommon bird. And there it was, swimming along with a small group of closely related Common Goldeneyes.

“Thanks for that,” I said. “That makes sixty species today, which is a big day for me.” (Real birders aim for over a hundred species in a day.)

We chatted for a bit, but the sun was setting, and he packed up and headed home. I slowly made my way back to my car, and on the way saw another five species of birds.

I spent all day outdoors. I saw a lot of birds. I mostly forgot about the pandemic. All in all, it was a good day.

A significant part of our congregation’s outreach to kids during the pandemic has been to send monthly packets, via U.S. mail, with word search puzzles, other puzzles, coloring pages, and mazes. Sometimes there’s a little learning in these packets, but mostly they’re a form of support and ministry to parents and kids: kids get mail addressed to them, which they love; kids get an activity that doesn’t require more screen time; and parents get a few extra minutes of free time while the kids are working on the puzzles and mazes. And it shows that our congregation remembers the kids, and cares about them, even though we can’t see them.

It’s also fun for me, since I love making puzzles. Problem is, when I get into puzzle-making mode, sometimes I make puzzles that aren’t suitable for kids. Like the one below, which is derived from the old Boggle game — and rather than waste this puzzle, I’m inflicting it on you by posting it on this blog:

Find six words that begin with the letter “c” and end with “ate.” To make words, you can join letters going up, down, sideways, or diagonally; but each letter in the puzzle grid can only be used once in a given word.

Update: Carol posted this to Facebook, and both Clarissa and Deb found another word. So now you have to find eight….

We Californians always worry about The Big One, the next big earthquake.

Apparently what we should really worry about is ARkstorms. These storms come along every couple of centuries. During the last ARkstorm, in the winter of 1861-1862, it rained for 43 days straight, and the subsequent flooding turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles long. If such a storm happened today, some scientists estimate that it would cause three times the amount of death and destruction of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake.

Just wanted to give you something else to worry about….

We find out what happened to Akhenaten….

As usual, full text is below the fold.

[Scene 1: ancient Egypt]

Khnum: Did you hear the news? The Pharaoh Akhenaten is dead!

Sekhmet: And the humans stopped believing that there is only one god.

Hathor: We can go back to being gods and goddesses again.

Bes: The humans need lots of gods and goddesses.

Khnum: Like me, Khnum, the god who made all living creatures from clay on my potter’s wheel.

Sekhmet: Like me, Sekhmet, the goddess of war, with magic that can help with healing.

Hathor: Like me, Hathor, the sky goddess who is also a cow.

Bes: Like me, Bes, the cheeky god who protects humans from evil.

Aten: And me, Aten, god of the sun.

Khnum: Sorry, Aten, but you’ve been downgraded.

Aten: What do you mean, downgraded?

Sekhmet: They’re changing your name to Re.

Hathor: They’re going to combine you with with Amun, the creator god.

Aten: But I was just getting used to being the only god!

Bes: That’s what happens when you’re a god. You’re important for a while, then the humans forget all about you.

[Scene 2: 21st century]

Greg: Aten was the only god for maybe fifty years. Then they went back to having lots of gods and goddesses.

Emma: And now we’ve mostly forgotten all those other gods and goddesses.

Greg: Some people say Pharaoh Akhenaten was the first Unitarian, because he only believed in one god.

Sarah K.: I’m not sure I want to claim him as a Unitarian.

John: Yeah, he doesn’t seem very nice.

Sarah D.: This story makes me wonder about gods and goddesses.

Emma: Me, too. Maybe gods and goddesses are just imaginary.

Sarah: Maybe humans have never really understood gods and goddesses.

John: Maybe there’s some truth in all the gods and goddesses.

Sarah D.: Maybe gods and goddesses change over time.

Greg: And maybe we should never trust someone who thinks they know all there is to know about gods and goddesses.

Warren Throckmorton has been watching prominent evangelical Christian pastors and leaders during this election cycle, documenting how these “court evangelicals” support Donald Trump. Two days ago, Throckmorton wrote a blog post asking, “Trump’s Denial of Election Reality: Will Court Evangelicals Play Along?”

The answer, of course, is “yes.” Many prominent white evangelical pastors continue to support Trump, and are now issuing statements accusing Joe Biden of stealing the election.

While these pastors doubtless think they are doing the Lord’s work, sadly what they are really doing is undermining organized religion. The many American citizens who are not white evangelicals are going to watch this kind of behavior — tweets that undermine democratic process, statements that deny reality — and begin to wonder about Christian churches. And by extension, wonder about the purpose of all organized religion — read the comments, and you’ll find someone calling for an end to tax-exempt status for religious organizations.

I’m a bit resentful because even though I’m about as far from these white evangelical pastors as you can possibly be (OK, I am white, too, but there aren’t many other similarities), as a minister I’m going to experience an erosion of trust because of the way they come across as hypocritical (Christians implicitly inciting violence), violating the separation of church and state, and out of touch with reality.

Sadly, these “court evangelicals” will not drive away the white evangelicals who fill their churches — but they will reduce the overall number of people who are willing to have anything to do with organized religion. So I predict an upwards tick in the “nones,” those with no religious affiliation, following this election.

Equally sadly, I’m increasingly convinced that what these “court evangelicals” do is really politics, not religion. So they’re destroying organized religion, but not actually doing religion themselves.

In one of the “lightning talks” in today’s session of the Religious Education Association annual meeting, Dr. Eileen Daily of Boston University’s School of Theology posed some questions about how the pandemic is going to change religious education. One of the questions she asked is whether this is an opportunity to reach out to the “nones,” those who are not affiliated with organized religion (remembering that many of the “nones” are “spiritual but not religious”).

A few hours later, I was in a small group conversation with some scholars and practitioners, and we wound up talking about online learning — not surprising given that the pandemic has driven both the academics and those of us working in congregations to doing all our teaching using distance education techniques. I posed the idea that a nonprofit structured like Khan Academy, but devoted to religious education, could be a worthwhile project. Then the conversation moved on….

But I’ve been thinking about that idea since then. What if there were a Khan Academy for online religious education? I could envision three main curricular areas such an entity could address: (1) religious literacy, including resources to introduce young people to the wide variety of religious expression in their community and in the wider world; (2) skills associated with the practice of organized religion including leadership in nonprofit membership organizations (voluntary associations), social justice organizing, group singing, etc.; and (3) building community including building both interpersonal skills (social skills) and intrapersonal skills (self awareness).

I’m leaving out a fourth major curricular area: the kind of “faith formation” that is instruction on how to participate within a specific religious or denominational tradition. Should a nonprofit producing interreligious learning material produce this kind of faith formation? Well, no — if we’re trying to serve the “nones” as well as though affiliated with organized religion, denominational faith formation will not be a central concern. But what if we think big? If this nonprofit is designed from the beginning to scale up (think: Khan Academy), and if this nonprofit builds expertise in delivering online religious education, then when it grows in size and expertise the nonprofit will eventually becomes able to enter into partnerships with various religious groups to produce this kind of faith formation material.

So what are the funding sources for this nonprofit going to be? I think at the beginning, this nonprofit is either going to be the brainchild of someone like Sal Khan, and inspired charismatic leader with the skills to create content and then bring other people into the project — in this first case, the project is self-funded until it gets big enough to scale up — either that, or it could be hosted by a university that has both experts in religious education and some level of IT support (but if such an organization starts in the academy, I would hope that the plan is to quickly spin it off as a separate nonprofit). Then as the nonprofit grows, because it’s not tied to a specific religious organization, I would expect that a substantial part of the funding would be grants from philanthropic organizations. And why not target Big Tech for grants? — using research that shows that religious literacy can reduce religious bullying and religious violence, you could make a pretty compelling case that this kind of education is important and worth funding.

I’m sure others have already come up with the same idea. And who knows, maybe there’s already such an organization out there….

We’re all dealing with election stress in our own ways. I took an hour away from work to go birding.

This is a messy election. As we all know, the pandemic means far more people mailed their ballots in than ever before, so the counting is going to continue for days. This gives both presidential candidates lots of time to badmouth each other.

Enough of that. That’s what I went birding to get away from. Sometimes denial is a fruitful way to deal with a stressful situation, especially a situation where you really can’t do anything to alter it. And look at birds; birds don’t care who wins the election. Sort of puts things in perspective.

We’re all going to have our ways of dealing with Election Day stress. For what it’s worth, I don’t recommend obsessively checking 538.com — they’ve already made their final prediction.

What I’m doing right now is listening to an hour of Black church music, courtesy of “Election Day Concert for Peace,” sponsored by the Center for Congregational Song. Pretty fabulous. Youtube Live link. I’m less interested in some of the other hour-long slots in this online concert, and they don’t have any shape-note singing — but I’ll probably check in to listen to “Sacred Social Justice Songs” at 6 EST / 3 EST.

But — oh my goodness — this Black church music online concert is incredible.

Possum, Packrat, and Dr. Sharpie — er, Queen Sharpie — present photos from UUCPA kids showing their stuffies in Halloween costumes. Whose costume is best? Queen Sharpie has an answer…. (Updated version of the video, with three more stuffie costumes.)

Complete text of the video is below the fold….

Possum: Wait, how come we’re doing the story for all ages this week? What happened to Akhenaten and ancient Egypt?

Sharpie: Now that I’m queen, I decided to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to show everyone the Halloween costumes that UUCPA kids made for their stuffed animals.

Possum: Um, Sharpie, that — you’re just wearing a queen costume, you’re not really the queen.

Sharpie: Yes, I am. And I decree that we shall now show all the slides the kids sent in of their stuffies in costume

Possum: That sounds like a good idea. Let’s go!

Possum [voiceover]: It’s Stasha with a princess costume. Elise made a mummy costume with toilet paper. Look out, Sassy Surfer. Rad! Jonathan with two superheroes. Here comes Ginger’s Wonder Woman. And Delia’s Fuzzy.

Possum: Which costume so far is your favorite?

Packie: Well….

Possum: Now think carefully!

Packie: Oh. Um. Sharpie’s costume is the best so far.

Sharpie: That is the correct response.

Possum [voiceover]: Look out, it’s a COVID-masked llama. Here comes Captain Bounce to the rescue. Alex with a cowboy. William’s knight in shining armor. Here’s Eloise’s Bam-bam Birdkeeper. Reva with a cat. Sofiya with a bat. And Niki with a Queen, Whaler, and Wizard.

Possum: Sharpie’s really getting into that queen costume, isn’t she?

Packie: Let’s just hope she takes it off when she goes to bed.

Possum: Anyway, we want to thank all the kids who sent in photos of their stuffies in costume.

Packie: Thanks, kids!

Possum: The middle school “Neighboring Religions” class has awards for all the kids who sent in photos. Kids, you’ll be getting your award certificate in the mail soon.

Packie: And we had so much fun looking at the photos, too.

Possum: Yeah, it was fun seeing other UUCPA stuffies dressed up in costume.

Packie: I can’t wait until next year!

Possum [voiceover]: And tune in next week to find out what happened to the gods of ancient Egypt and Akhenaten.

Three video lecturettes on the shared myths of Abrahamic religions. I’ll include links to all three videos below the fold, followed by texts of the talks.

Some of the books referenced in this video series:
“Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers,” Kwame Anthony Apiah (W. W. Norton, 2006)
“J.B.: A Play in Verse,” Archibald MacLeish (Houghton Mifflin, 1958)
The children’s story books are:
“Bible Stories of Jewish Children: Joshua to Queen Esther,” Ruth Samuels (Ktav Publishing, 1973)
“The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories,” Mark Water (Pilgrim Press, 2003) “Goodnight Stories from the Quran,” Saniyasnain Khan (Goodword Books, 2005)

Below are the reading texts for the three videos. I diverged from the scripts more than once, but this gives you the same basic argument.

FIRST VIDEO

Before getting in to the shared myths of the Abrahamic tradition, I need to cover a little background material.

First of all, let me answer the question: what are the Abrahamic religions? This is a fairly straightforward question to answer. These are the religions that trace their roots back to the figure of Abraham, whose story is told in the Torah and in other sacred texts. Generally speaking, these Abrahamic religions are monotheistic; that is, there is only one god whom the adherents of these religions are supposed to worship. Abrahamic religions include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha’i.

Secondly, what do I mean by “myth”? This is question that does not have a straightforward answer. In our current popular culture, the term “myth” tends to have negative connotations: a myth is something that is not true, it’s a fairy tale, or even an outright lie told to keep the schlemiels happy. When political progressives, for example, talk about the “myth of American freedom,” we know that by this they mean to imply that American freedom isn’t really available to everyone living in America.

Saying the myth is a form of lying is a simple way of distinguishing between two ways of knowing, what the ancient Greeks called “mythos” and “logos.” In today’s pop culture, we’ve reduced that distinction to the difference between truth and lies. Mythos — myths — consists of lies that humans make up to help explain the world. Logos — logical thought or reason — is a more advance form of thinking and knowing that allows us to strip away the falsehoods of myth to find the real truth. In one common formulation, mythos is religion, which is outmoded, and logos is science, which has replaced all other kinds of knowing the world.

But today’s pop culture definitions of myth are confused and often incoherent. So let’s see if we can come up with a less confused understanding of myth.

We might begin by turning to the insights of psychoanalysis. For example, psychoanalyst Carl Jung hypothesized something called the “collective unconscious” wherein symbols, archetypes, are shared across multiple individuals of a given culture. These symbols and archetypes are obviously related to myths and myth-making; they do not represent some kind of pre-scientific thinking that we’re now ready to dispense with; rather, they’re somehow integral to communal ways of knowing that help us make sense out of the world. While you may not accept Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as being valid, nevertheless I would argue that there is validity in the notion that there are symbols and stories shared across a culture that deeply affect the way we make sense out of the world.

Another way of thinking about mythos and logos is that mythos relates more to music, painting and sculpture, dance, poetry, and so on — while logos relates more science, technology, engineering, math, and so on. Science can tell us a great deal about the evolutionary biology and ecology of Eschscholzia californica — I probably mispronounced that — but poetry takes over when our hearts fill with joy when we see a hillside covered in the vivid orange blossoms of the California poppy. Understand that this is not a completely binary distinction: doing science and math can certainly fill one’s heart with joy — but there’s a reason why Henry Thoreau wrote the book Walden, rather than a scientific treatise on the biology and ecology of a glacial kettle hole.

So as you can see, mythos and logos are different ways of making sense of the world; we might even say, they are different ways of knowing about the world.

By now, it should be clear that myth is not the same thing as theology. In fact, theology has more in common with science than it does with myth. The word “theology” derives from the ancient Greek word “theos” meaning a god or the divine, and the ancient Greek word “logos” meaning (in this context) logical or rational discourse. Thus “theology” is an intellectual discipline that involves rational discourse about deities or the divine.

If I may digress for a moment, as someone trained in the Western tradition of philosophy, I can tell you that in the West what we now call science was previously termed “natural philosophy,” and during the medieval period theology and philosophy were closely related; so from a philosopher’s point of view, science and theology are merely subordinate disciplines to philosophy.

Returning to our main subject, it may help you to understand myth when you realize that fundamentalists are not comfortable with myths. A fundamentalist feels certain their knowledge of their religion is clear, unchanging, comprehensive, and not subject to correction. In this respect, fundamentalists resemble some militant atheists — Jerry Falwell and Richard Dawkins appear to have similar habits of thought. When you live in the world of myths, however, you find that while myths may seem clear at the moment, they change and evolve; that rather than being comprehensive, there is always room for one more retelling of any given myth; that myths do not exist on a binary axis of correct versus incorrect.

Now we can circle around to the question of truth and lies. Are myths lies? Well, yes; myths are lies in exactly the same sense that Shakespeare’s play MacBeth is a lie. MacBeth is one big lie. There were no witches, the actors playing the parts of Lady MacBeth and MacBeth aren’t really them, the whole play is filled with lies from start to finish. On the other hand, if you would like to know some of the deepest truths about human nature, you could do no better than to attend a performance of MacBeth. Or, better yet, several performances, because different directors and different actors will bring out different aspects of this multivalent work of art.

So I would suggest that you think of logos as encompassing theology, science, fundamentalism, technology, and other types of logical discourse. Logos, logical discourse, aims at certainty through logical argument. In logical discourse, if the logic of a given argument fails (as I would argue happens in religious fundamentalism), then the whole argument fails. Mythos, by contrast, encompasses the plastic arts, the lively arts, literature, stories, folk tales, and maybe even dreams. While we might say that the arts do have an internal logic, that logic needn’t be a formal logic; it can be the coherent logic of dreams.

So when I speak of the shared myths of the Abrahamic religions, I’m not talking about theology. I’m not talking about fundamentalism. I’m not talking about science and technology. Instead, I’m talking about the shared stories — or maybe shared dreams, or maybe even some kind of collective unconscious — that appear in different forms in several different religions.

SECOND VIDEO

In the previous video, I defined what I meant by the phrase, “The shared myths of Abrahamic religions.” With that common understanding held firmly in mind, let’s look at what some of the shared myths might be — and what some of the differences are.

And to begin that process, I’d like to start with children’s books. I happen to have on hand several children’s books.

First, there’s “Bible Stories for Jewish Children” by Ruth Samuels, consisting of two volumes, “From Creation to Joshua” (1954) and “Joshua to Queen Esther” (1973). This story book contains retellings of familiar stories about characters from the Tanakh, including Abraham, Noah, and Jonah.

Second is “The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories,” a liberal Christian story book with retellings of familiar stories about characters from the Old Testament, including Abraham, Noah, and Jonah, and characters from the New Testament, including Jesus.

Third, I have “Goodnight Stories from the Quran” (2007), published by an Islamic publishing house called Goodword Books. This story book contains retellings of familiar stories about characters from the Quran and the hadith, including Ibrahim, Nuh, and Yunus — also known as Abraham, Noah, and Jonah.

Let’s start by looking at one of the stories about Ibrahim in the Islamic story book, which begins like this: “One night, the Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him) dreamt that, to please his Lord, he was sacrificing his son, Ismail (peace be upon him). Ismail was still a child, but he was a brave boy and when his father told him about the dream he was quite ready to obey Allah’s command. Without hesitating, he said, ‘Do what you are commanded, father: God willing, you will find me one of the steadfast.'”

The liberal Christian version of this story begins quite differently: “Abraham was an old man, when he and his wife, Sarah, had a child. Now God told Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and sacrifice him! Abraham cut the wood to burn the sacrifice. He gave the wood to Isaac to carry. Abraham had the fire and a very sharp knife. Isaac asked his father the burning question: ‘I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?'”

This feels a little like the old movie Rashomon, where the same story is told from several different perspectives. Which is the true story, the real story? But that’ the wrong question to ask; that’s the question that is asked by scientists and by religious fundamentalists. An artist would ask a different question: What of the depths of human nature can be revealed by these different version of the same myth? The artist might ask: Do these retellings of this old myth do justice to the myth, and how might I retell this story?

(The artist might also ask, If I retell this story, will I put myself at risk of retribution by crazed fundamentalists who don’t want to let anyone else retell what they claim as their story? The artist might equally well ask, Will militant atheists misunderstand why I chose to retell this story and vilify me for spreading religion? In our society, it is safer to be a scientist than it is to be an artist.)

Let’s look at another pair of children’s stories. The book of stories for Jewish children begins one story like this: In the village of Galilee, there lived a man called Jonah. One night, Jonah heard the voice of God say: ‘Arise, and go to the city of Nineveh! Tell the people I will destroy their city unless they stop their evil ways.’ But Jonah was afraid to go to Nineveh, so he ran away….” Jonah gets on a boat, a storm comes up, he tells the sailors to throw him overboard, they do and he gets swallowed by a whale, who takes him to Nineveh, where he tells the people to repent. They do repent, so God forgives them. But Jonah sits outside the city waiting for God to destroy it, until he dreams he is inside a giant gourd, which protects him from the weather until a worm eats it up. Then God lectures Jonah on forgiveness.

The Islamic story begins this way: A very old and powerful community used to live around 800 B.C., in Nineveh, some 230 miles north of Baghdad. Allah sent the Prophet Yunus (peace be upon him) to this community to guide the on to the right path. Yunus (peace be upon him) preached to them for a long time, warning them to turn away from their wickedness, but they paid no heed to his words. Angry and despairing, he left these people, and headed towards a seaport….” And then Yunus gets on a ship, there’s a big storm, the sailors force him to jump overboard, he gets swallowed by a whale, he realizes that he had left Nineveh too soon, without completing his task. So he calls out to God, the whale spits him out at Nineveh, he finishes his task.

Now you begin to see how the same basic story is retold within different religions with minor differences in plot. Not only that, but the way the story of Yunus is retold in the “Goodnight Stories from the Quran” story book is different than the way it appears in the sacred texts of Islam. And you can find other retellings of that same story. Clergypersons retell these stories all the time, recasting them for their own congregations. There are comic book versions of these stories, and more than that, characters like Noah have become familiar figures in gags of comic strips. People who have no religious affiliation can retell these stories effectively: Archibald Macleish, who appears to have been non-religious, retold the Biblical story of Job in his play “J.B.”

This is what we do with myths: we make art out of them. We make low art, like the 2014 Tundra comic strip where the animals are lined up to get on Noah’s ark, and Noah has them going through a metal detector. We make high art out of them, as Archibald Macleish did with the play “J.B.” We retell these stories to our children, making our own personal interpretations out of them.

This is what cultures are supposed to do: we take the myths that many or most people in our culture know well, and we retell them. It’s easier to retell an old story than it is to make up a new plot, as Shakespeare knew full well — he stole most of his plots from somewhere else. It’s easier to do, and it can make for more effective art, because you can play off meanings and implications known to your audience. It’s like being a jazz musician, where you take an old standard and reinterpret it: when John Coltrane plays “My Favorite Things,” you can hear Julie Andrews singing it in the movie, which makes what he does with it even richer.

And it’s also wonderful to see how myths play out across different traditions. Knowing the Islamic version of the Jonah story gives you a new perspective on the more familiar Jewish and Christian versions. And this is one of the things that can keep you from sinking into the quicksand of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism requires rigid thinking, where myths have to be slotted into logical, rational, rigid little boxes.

I think we should be headed in the opposite direction. We used to talk about “world brotherhood,” a sexist term with colonialist implications; but there was a kernel of wholesome truth in that old, outmoded phrase. Instead, we can turn to Kwame Anthony Appiah, who talks about cosmopolitanism — which might be defined as the willingness to have “conversations across boundaries.”

This, I think, is why it’s so important to pay attention to the shared myths of the Abrahamic religions. We live in a country whose leaders often proclaim their Christianity and they portray Muslims as utterly alien; yet Christians and Muslims share these key myths. Similarly, we’ve seen a rise of Christian anti-Semitism in our country in the last few years, yet again Christians and Muslims share these key myths. While we are not going to be able to talk the bigots out of the bigotry, we can try on our own to have conversations across boundaries. And those of us who don’t identify as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim — or perhaps as post-Christian or post-Jewish — yet who are participants in Western culture; we are well-placed to initiate conversations across the boundaries of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; and these shared myths, common cultural inheritances of all of us, might provide enough common ground to open those conversations.

THRID VIDEO

I’m adding this third video to what was supposed to be a two-part series on the shared myths of Abrahamic religions, so I can look at some of the shared myths.

Well, so what are some of the the shared myths of some of the Abrahamic religions? One way to answer that is to look at figures who appear in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. (Unfortunately, I know less about Baha’i, and I don’t feel qualified to talk about their tradition at all.)

The obvious figure that appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is Abraham. Christians and Jew both draw from the book of Genesis for their Abraham myths, while for Muslims, Abraham appears in the Quran. While the figure of Abraham remains the same across these three Abrahamic traditions, the myths vary. For Jews, the people of Israel are descendants of Abraham, and he is the exemplar of following the commandments of the Torah and of God. Christians tell slightly different myths about Abraham; he is a spiritual ancestor of every Christian, and he is the exemplar of having faith in his god. In the Quran, Muslims tell how Abraham found a spring at Mecca and thus the ritual of the hajj can be traced to him, and he is the exemplar of submission to God.

Remember that myths change and evolve over time, and different people within a single tradition may tell different myths about the same figure. So these broad generalizations about the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim myths of Abraham will have many variations across time and across cultures, and even from one individual to another.

Other figures and myths that are shared across these three religions include Adam and Eve in the garden; Noah and the flood; Moses and the exodus; King David and King Solomon; Job and his troubles, and Jonah and the whale. Again, while the figure and general outlines of the story are shared, the specifics of the ways the myths are told and retold will vary.

Another shared myth of these traditions is the myth of hell, that place where evildoers are sent after death. All three traditions talk about hell as a place of fire. For example, in surah 5:37, the Quran says that those who are condemned to hell “will long to leave the Fire, but never will they leave there from; and theirs will be a lasting torment.” But the details of hell get described in many different ways. For example, many Christians in the United States have been influenced by the description of hell in Dante’s Inferno, or by Jonathan Edwards’s sermons describing the torments of being burned up. There are a great many variations of these myths of hell, and there is no one single way that hell is described for any one of these traditions, let alone a single description of hell that applies over all three traditions.

Another shared myth is the way Adam and Eve did something that got them in trouble with God. Many Christians in the United States have been influenced — often without their knowing it — by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” so much so that children are told Milton’s version of the myth long before they’re old enough to read “Paradise Lost.” But Jewish children and Muslim children might not hear anything of Milton’s retelling of the myth, unless they happen to take a college English class where they’re forced to read Milton’s poem.

All these differences raise some tough questions: Are the differences between the Abrahamic religions so great that they’re going to get in the way of “conversations across boundaries”? Or, conversely, are the similarities so great that the differences loom even larger, thus preventing productive “conversations across boundaries”? An article by Ulrich Rosenhagen in “Christian Century” magazine back on November 24, 2015, addressed this question. The article, titled “One Abraham or three? The conversation between three faiths,” described some initiatives where adherents of these three Abrahamic religions tried to carry out “conversations across boundaries.” About one such initative, Rosenhagen wrote:

“At the Lubar Institute [for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Wisconsin], Jewish, Christian, and Muslim undergraduates have started to overcome religious intolerance through candid conversations about cartoon controversies, gender issues, and prayer practices. Shared trips to mosques, churches, and synagogues have enabled them to form relationships of trust and respect by learning about each other’s sacred spaces, texts, and rituals. Through debate and dialogue the students have been startled and comforted by the fact that they share sacred sources, stories of prophets, and a social obligation to care for the poor (Tzedakah, Zakat, social gospel). With each new revelation of their commonality, their bounds of moral imagination have expanded, and their ‘they’ has given way to a ‘we.’ All this gives good reason to believe that the Abrahamic paradigm is not just a noble idea but a promising new foundation for civic discourse and interfaith understanding.”

And back in 2016, I participated in one such initiative, an annual conference called “Sacred Texts, Human Contexts.” Started by a group that included Muslims, Christians, and Jews, by 2016 there were also a few Buddhists and adherents of other religions. For me, this conference proved to be a very good way to engage in conversations across boundaries, and I was disappointed when they rescheduled it to a time of year when I was unable to attend.

So this idea of shared Abrahamic myths can, in fact, be a good way to begin inter-religious dialogue. And as the Sacred Texts Human Contexts conference shows, the conversation can then be widened to include other religions.

The important point for me is the attempt to find some point of commonality where you can start to have conversations across boundaries.

“I should not have any inclination to call myself a humanist, as I think, on the whole, that the non-human part of the cosmos is much more interesting and satisfactory than the human part.”

As quote in Phillip Hewett, Unitarians in Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Canadian Unitarian Council, 1995), p. 234.

The Franklin family of Palo Alto included Edward Curtis Franklin, expert on nitrogen compounds and professor at Stanford Univ.; Effie June Scott Franklin, professor of modern languages at the Univ. of Kansas; and Dr. Anna Comstock Franklin Barnett, physician and professor at Stanford Medical school. They were all affiliated with the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto (1905 to 1934) at one time or another.

FRANKLIN, ANNA COMSTOCK (BARNETT) — A physician and graduate of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto Sunday school, she was born Sept. 12, 1898, in Lawrence, Kansas, daughter of Effie Scott and Edward Curtis Franklin. Her family moved to Palo Alto in 1903.

In 1905, Anna was “one of the first pupils of the Sunday-school” of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. She was listed in the 1919 parish directory. It is likely that she participated in the life of the church through the intervening years.

Anna received her A.B. from Stanford University in 1920, and her M.D. from Stanford in 1924. On July 12, 1924, she married Dr. George de Forest Barnett; he was a physician and professor of medicine at Stanford. They had two children together, Margaret A. (b. c. 1927) and Edward Franklin (b. c. 1929); but the Unitarian church had mostly ceased operating by the time the children were old enough to attend Sunday school. After the death of her mother in 1931, Anna’s father, Edward, came to live with her.

Anna eventually joined the faculty of Stanford School of Medicine. Her husband, who had also taught at Stanford School of Medicine, died in 1955. Anna continued to live on campus after her retirement.

On Oct. 1, 1968, the Stanford Daily reported:

“The badly decomposed body of Dr. Anna Barnett, a retired Medical School professor, was discovered in the hills behind Stanford Friday morning. The body was found near Stanford’s antenna farm at 7 a.m. by Eleanore Norris, a resident of Palo Alto, who was strolling in the area near Stanford’s antenna farm. Dr. Barnett, despondent over eye trouble and a scheduled eye operation, disappeared September 13. She left a note indicating she was contemplating suicide. A morphine overdose was determined as the cause of death.”

The date of death given on the death certificate was Sept. 27, 1968.

Notes: 1900, 1930 U.S. Census; Christian Register, Dec. 17, 1925, p. 1236; Alumni Directory, Stanford University, 1921, 1931; Stanford Daily, April 30, 1924, p. 1; Stanford Daily, Oct. 1, 1968, p. 4; Carl T. Cox, “Anna Comstock Franklin,” The Orville, Sutherland, Cox Web site: Ancestors, descendants, and Family Information, oscox.org/cgi-bin/igmget.cgi/n=jucox? I17378, accessed May 25, 2017.

FRANKLIN, CHARLES SCOTT — A geologist, he was born c. 1902 in Kansas, son of Effie and Edward Franklin. He acted the part of one of the Wise Men in “King Persifer’s Crown,” a play put on by members of the Sunday school of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto on May 13, 1916. He received his A.B. from Stanford in geology in 1925.

He died in an airplane crash on Feb. 11, 1928.

Notes: 1910, 1920 U.S. Census; Alumni Directory, Stanford University, 1921, 1932.

FRANKLIN, EFFIE JUNE SCOTT — A professor of French and German, she was born Aug. 5, 1871, in on a farm in Carlyle Township, Kansas. Her father, Dr. John W. Scott, came to Kansas in 1857, and was active in the free state fight, serving in the first state legislature; Dr. Scott served in the Civil War as surgeon of the Tenth Kansas, and after that war was president of the company that laid out the town of Iola, Kansas.

Effie’s family family moved to the town of Iola, Kansas, in 1874. She graduated from high school in Iola, Kansas, in 1887. She had two much older brothers: Angelo, the eldest, and Charles, ten years older than Effie, who represented Kansas for several years as a Republican in the U.S. Congress.

After graduating from high school, Effie taught in the Kansas City, Kansas, schools, and then taught high school in Leavenworth, Kansas. She then began studies at the University of Kansas, receiving her A.B. in 1891. Subsequently she pursued graduate study at Cornell and at the University of Berlin. For two years, until her marriage in 1897, she was assistant professor of French and German at the University of Kansas; this was during the time that William Carruth (later president of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto) was professor of German there.

She married Edward Curtis Franklin on July 22, 1897, at Central Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado. She and Edward had three children: Anna Comstock (b. Sept., 1898), Charles Scott (b. c. 1902, Kan.), and John Curtis (b. c. 1905, Calif.).

Effie moved to Palo Alto in 1903 when her husband accepted a position as professor at Stanford. Effie’s mother, Maria Protsman Scott, died in 1907 while she was staying with her daughter in Palo Alto.

She joined the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto on Nov. 19, 1905, and was one of the first members of the Women’s Alliance. She made regular financial contributions to the church. In 1915, William Carruth, well-known poet and professor at Stanford, recruited Effie to serve on the Pulpit Committee with him.

She had probably been active in the Unitarian church in Lawrence, Kansas, while she was at the University of Kansas, and she served a delegate from that church to the National Conference of Unitarians in 1911, which was held in Washington, D.C.; the family moved Washington from 1911 to 1913 while Edward worked for the government Hygienic Laboratory.

In 1914, a classmate from the University of Kansas visited the Franklins, as well as former Kansans Jennie and Helen Sutliff and William and Katharine Carruth (all affiliated with the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto). This classmate wrote:

“At Stanford I spent several days with the Sutliffs and Franklins and had a pleasant visit with Dr. and Mrs. Carruth….Dr. Franklin was soon to leave for New Zealand where he was going at the request of the British government, in company with fourteen other American scientists of note. Dr. and Mrs. Franklin have a very handsome big daughter Anna, a high school girl, and two younger boys, Charles and Jack.”

Effie was an accomplished pianist, and she was elected an honorary member of the Stanford Music Club in 1916. Politically, Effie was a progressive who supported woman suffrage.

She died at her home in Palo Alto on March 31, 1931.

Notes: 1900, 1910 U.S. Census; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, 1931, p. 14; William E. Connolley, History of Kansas Newspapers, Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1916, p. 47; William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, vol. 3, Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1919, p. 1360; Iola Register, May 30, 1902; Jan Onofrio, Kansas Biographical Dictionary, St. Clair Shores, Miss.: Somerset Pub., 2000, p. 142; The Arrow of Pi Beta Phi, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Chapter of Beta, October, 1893, p. 118; Iola Register, July 30, 1897, p. 8; Christian Register, Dec. 17, 1925, p. 1236; John William Leonard, Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914-1915, New York: American Commonwealth Co., 1914, p. 305; Christian Register, Oct. 19, 1911, p. 1095; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, March, 1907, p. 224; Stanford Daily, Jan. 25, 1916, p. 2.

FRANKLIN, EDWARD CURTIS — A renowned chemist who grew up in Kansas while it was still part of the frontier, he was born in Geary City, Kansas, on March 1, 1862. He was raised in Doniphan, Kansas, where his father owned a saw mill and grist mill. At the time he was young, that part of Kansas still had the flavor of the frontier, to which some ascribed his later “noticeable impatience with convention.”

As a boy, he enjoyed the outdoors, including hunting, fishing, swimming in the Missouri River, and collecting fossils. This love of the outdoors was to remain with him his whole life, and as an adult he became an active mountain climber who belonged to the Sierra Club, and summited a number of 14,000 foot peaks.

In 1877, when he was 15, he and his brother William, later a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made their own batteries, set up a two-mile long telegraph line, and made their own telephone in 1877, only a year after A. G. Bell patented his telephone.

After Edward graduated from high school, he worked for a pharmacy in Severance, Kansas, from 1880-1884; then at age 22 entered the University of Kansas. He received his S.B. from the University of Kansas in 1888, studied at the University of Berlin 1890-1891, and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1894. He was a professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas from 1891 to 1903. He also worked for a gold mining company in Costa Rica for a short time in 1897.

Vernon Kellogg (who was affiliated with the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto) helped convince Edward to move to Stanford. Edward went to Stanford to teach chemistry in 1903. Everett remained at Stanford until his retirement in 1929. As a chemist, he was best known for his work on ammonia and other nitrogen compounds. He was considered an excellent teacher who delivered exceptionally clear lectures.

He married Effie Scott on July 22, 1897, in Denver, Colo., and they had three children: Anna Comstock (b. Sept., 1898), Charles Scott (b. c. 1902), and John Curtis (b. c. 1905).

He was affiliated with the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, though it was his wife who was most active. He once hosted a social gathering of the Unitarian Church, entertaining “the company with some experiments with liquid air.” Theologically, Unitarianism would have been a good fit for Franklin, since from his youth he had been inclined to be a free thinker and agnostic.

After his wife died in 1931, he lived with his daughter, Anna Comstock Franklin Barnett, in Palo Alto. In the last three years of his life, he took long automobile tours of the U.S. and Canada, and died just two months after returning from the last such trip, on Feb. 13, 1937.

Notes: Alexander Findlay, Journal of the Chemical Society, 1938, p. 583; Howard Elsey, Biographical Memoirs, Nat. Academy of Sciences, 1991, pp. 67-75; Stanford Daily, Feb. 15, 1937, p. 1; Jan Onofrio, Kansas Biographical Dictionary, St. Clair Shores, Miss.: Somerset Pub., 2000, pp. 139 ff.; obituary, Stanford Daily, Feb. 15, 1937; John William Leonard, ed., Men of America: A Biographical Dictionary, New York: L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1908; Pacific Unitarian, April, 1909, p. 186.

FRANKLIN, JOHN (JACK) CURTIS — He was born c. 1905 in California, son of Effie and Edward Franklin. He acted the part of one of the Wise Men in “King Persifer’s Crown,” a play put on by members of the Sunday school of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto on May 13, 1916. In 1930, he was living in a boarding house in Los Angeles and working as a radio engineer for an air transport company.

Notes: 1910, 1920, 1930 U.S. Census.

There used to be a Unitarian curriculum on the Pharaoh Akhenaten, purportedly the first monotheist, maybe the first unitarian. This is my take on the Akhenaten story….

As usual, the full text of the script is below.

Emma: It was fun seeing some of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses.

Greg: As long as you weren’t Prometheus.

Sarah K.: But what about the ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses?

John: Yes, they’re even older than the Greek gods and goddesses.

Sarah D.: Let’s go back in time to ancient Egypt!

Narrator: For fifteen hundred years, the same gods and goddesses ruled ancient Egypt.

Khnum: I’m Khnum, the god who made all living creatures from clay on my potter’s wheel.

Sekhmet: I’m Sekhmet, the goddess of war, with magic that can help with healing.

Hathor: I’m Hathor, the sky goddess who is also a cow.

Bes: I’m Bes, the cheeky god who protects humans from evil.

Aten: And me, Aten, god of the sun.

Khnum: Wait, Aten is a god now?

Aten: Yes, now I am a god.

Sekhmet: But you used to be the plain old sun.

Aten: I got upgraded. Now, I am a god.

Hathor: Pharaoh Tuthmosis the fourth decided Aten was a god.

Bes: How come a Pharaoh gets to upgrade Aten into a god?

Khnum: Because Pharaohs are gods themselves.

Sekhmet: Now there’s a new Pharaoh.

Aten: And he really likes me. I think he’s going to upgrade me even more.

Hathor: This is very confusing.

Khnum: Being an Egyptian god is confusing. Sometimes we have heads of animals, sometimes we look like humans.

Aten: I think this new pharaoh is going to get rid of all of you. The only god left will be me, the sun-god.

Khnum: But I’m the one who made all living creatures.

Sekhmet: Yes, everyone knows you need more than one god. They definitely need me, the goddess of war.

Hathor: And where would they be without me, the sky goddess?

Bes: And if there is no god Bes, who will protects humans from evil?

Narrator: But the new pharaoh will use his power to get rid of the old gods and goddesses…. Tune in next week to find out what happens.

If you can’t go out trick-or-treating this year, or go to a Halloween party, how about making costumes for your stuffed animals? You could even hold a costume party for stuffies. Here’s a video with some idea on how to make easy, effective costumes for your stuffed animals:

In the video, you’ll see Dr. Sharpie Ann get costumed as a queen (Queen of the Universe, of course), Packie the Dusky-footed Woodrat as a pirate, Possum as an angel, and Hedgehog as a cowboy.

Once you dress up your stuffies, take their photos and post them on social media.

Loré Stevens won the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society’s History Research Prize for Future Leaders this year. The title of her paper was “‘Strong at the Broken Places’: A History of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville, 1992-2019.” Some of my readers will remember that during the time from 1992 to 2019, instances of clergy misconduct were uncovered at the Nashville UU congregation.

Now Deborah Pope-Lance has gotten permission to host this paper on her Web site, here — you’ll have to scroll down past some other papers and essays on clergy sexual misconduct to find the link.

Highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to know more about the history of U.S. Unitarian Universalism in the past 25 years, or for anyone interested in the recent history of feminism in religion. If you think Unitarian Universalism has made lots of progress in becoming a feminist movement, you’ll be depressed by this paper. On the other hand, if you’re one of those who (like me) has been incredibly frustrated at how little attention has been paid to the intertwined issues of sexism, patriarchy, and clergy misconduct with Unitarian Universalism, you’ll be relieved to read this exposé of the abuse of power by male clergy and how influential and powerful people within Unitarian Universalism have covered it up.

I’d even say I was delighted to read this paper, not because I’m delighted by clergy misconduct, but because I’m delighted that this subject is finally getting the attention it deserves from historians and others. Thank you, Loré Stevens. Thank you, UUHHS. Thank you, Deborah Pope-Lance for hosting this paper online.

Several sociologists have found a characteristic that seems to predict with some accuracy who will flout social distancing restrictions designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19: Christian nationalists.

“Samuel Perry (associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma) and his colleagues, such as Andrew Whitehead of Indiana University and Joshua Grubbs of Bowling Green State University, argue in a series of new papers that Christian nationalism is either the single best predictor or a top predictor of whether a person will flout social distancing recommendations, be skeptical of science, find nothing racist about calling COVID-19 the ‘China virus’ or argue that lockdown orders threaten the economy and liberty — all while de-prioritizing the threat to the vulnerable.” — as reported by Religion News Service.

At the same time, the ideology of Christian nationalism apparently has only a weak connection to the Christian religion:

“In fact, religious devotion of any kind often had the opposite effect to Christian nationalism, and was the leading predictor of whether someone would take precautionary measures. ‘We found religious people were more likely to wash their hands, to use hand sanitizer and to avoid touching their face — all the things that were recommended,’ [Perry] said. ‘We find religious people are more likely to say, “If we have the decision between individual liberty and protecting the vulnerable, we’re going to protect the vulnerable”.’…He added: ‘In other words, (religious people) tend to look like pretty good neighbors.'”

Perry explains the trend as an “emerging crisis of authority.” Not surprisingly, Christian nationalists believe in conspiracy theories and distrust both scientists and the media. Christian nationalists feel that their country is being taken away from them; not surprising, then, that they are more likely to trust people like Donald Trump, who they think is going to save their country for them.

I wonder if the rise of Christian nationalism correlates in any way to the rise of the “Nones,” people who have no affiliation to organized religion. I’ve often thought that what really underlies the rise of the “Nones” is a rise of hyper-individualism and a distrust of authority; the Christian nationalists would certainly match that description. And we know from surveys that most of the “Nones” believe in God; might some of the “Nones” in fact be Christian nationalists? But this is entirely speculation on my part.

Remember that neither Trump nor most Christian nationalists actually belong to a church: they are too individualistic to want to submit to the demands that organized religion makes.

Whereas those of us who do participate in organized religion tend to make “pretty good neighbors.”

I am increasingly convinced that the pandemic is accelerating a number of trends that are going to change the way we do religious education in our local congregations fairly quickly. However, I don’t these trends should lead us to proclaim either the “post Sunday school era” or “the death os Sunday school.”

And before you get too excited (“Yay, the death of Sunday school!”) or too sad (“Nooo, I miss Sunday school!”), let’s look at a couple of the trends that affect religious education, trends that are being accelerated by the pandemic…..

1. Current trends affecting religious education
2. Where we came from, 1781 to the present
1965-2005
1900-1965
1781-1900
3. Why the “post Sunday school” advocates are right
4. Why the “post Sunday school” advocates are wrong
5. Expanding our religious education possibilities
6. The whole church as curriculum
7. New models for funding
8. Final thoughts

———

1. Current trends affecting religious education

First and foremost among current trends, most American congregations face looming financial difficulties. Staff costs continue to outpace inflation, driven in part by health insurance costs. Staff costs in Unitarian Universalist congregations are also under pressure because we expect our professional staff — both ordained ministers and lay religious educators — to have at least a four year college degree, and often three or more years of graduate study; staffers have to pay off their college debts, and that means they need relatively high salaries. Finally, there’s always Baumol’s Cost Disease: American congregations represent an “technologically stagnant sector” which means congregations experience “above average cost and price increases.” The amount each person gives to a congregation has to increase faster than inflation, just so the congregation can provide the same amount of services.

Thus, one of the strongest factors driving the “post Sunday school era” theorists is actually the fact that most American congregations can no longer afford to pay all the costs associated with Sunday school: dedicated classroom space, highly educated staff supervisors, and a technologically unsophisticated approach that experiences “above average cost and price increases.”

Second, organized religion in the U.S. is in decline; this is the famous “rise of the ‘Nones’.” But the reasons for this demographic shift are complicated. The “rise of the ‘Nones'” does not seem to correlate strongly with a rise in atheism — a vast majority of Americans still believe in God (notice that the pollsters touting the “rise of the ‘Nones'” often assume the Christian God is the norm) — instead the “nones” simply don’t attend local congregations. A trend that may be related seems to show that increasingly American congregations are filled with upper middle class people; working class and poor people, so it seems, are less likely to be affiliated with an in-person congregation. As more and more young people fall out of the upper middle class into lower socio-economic strata, their new socio-economic status means they are less likely to belong to a congregation.

The pandemic is accelerating both of these trends.

Even though congregational giving has remained surprisingly robust during the first half year of the pandemic, we could be facing another one to three years of restrictions on public gatherings, depending on how fast a vaccine becomes widely available. Three years of limited in-person gatherings seem very likely to adversely affect congregational incomes. And what we have seen, at least in Unitarian Universalist congregations, is that when staff position have to be cut for financial reasons, most often religious education and musician hours get the deepest cuts. Most congregations have already cut administrative and custodial hours as far as they can; and cuts to parish minister hours are usually saved till last. The financial effects of the pandemic are just going to accelerate this already-ongoing process.

And we are going to see an increasing number of people falling out of the middle class. The unemployment rate remains high. People who can find work are sometimes working seven days a week at crappy jobs, just to make ends meet. I’m guessing that on average younger people are going to take a bigger hit from the economic effects of the pandemic. As we have already seen, if you’re not in the upper middle class you are less likely to belong to a congregation; so younger, less affluent people are going to be less likely to show up in congregations with their children.

So these are some of the trends that are going to lead to the decline of Sunday school — and this is, quite simply, because Sunday schools are traditionally based in congregations, and congregations are in decline.

However, a look at history paints a less bleak view.

———

2. Where we came from, 1781 to the present

I’m not convinced this means we’re entering the “post-Sunday school era.” That will only be true if you define “Sunday school” in a very specific way, specific to the forty-year period from about 1965 to about 2005. That was the era of paid religious education professionals in congregationally-funded programs using professionally-produced curriculum purchased from a denominational or commercial publishing house. Before we proclaim that as the “Sunday school era” of which we are now “post,” let’s look at some of the preceding eras.

1965-2005

In the years from about 1900 to 1965, Unitarian and Universalist Sunday schools were typically run by Sunday School Superintendents, volunteers who supervised the religious education program of a congregation. Although the current stereotype has it that ALL the Sunday School Superintendents and the Sunday school teachers of this era were all women who didn’t have jobs and thus could afford to spend forty hours of unpaid time a week on Sunday school, I have found so many exceptions to that rule that I’m only willing to say that many, perhaps most, of the Superintendents and teachers were housewives with no paid job. For example, my mother was the Superintendent of the Junior Department of the Unitarian Church in Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1950s when she was a single career woman working a full-time teaching job in the Wilmington public schools; this was when there were some 600 children enrolled in that congregation, about half of whom were in her department. In another example, the Superintendents of the Sunday school of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto (1905-1934) included some housewives, but also a couple of Stanford professors, a certified public accountant, and for a number of years the minister served as the Superintendent.

1900-1965

Beyond the question of staffing, the years from 1900 to 1965 saw a few important trends that gradually changed the way Sunday schools operated. First, over this period Sunday schools gradually became integrated into the finances of their host congregation: at the beginning of the period, many, perhaps even most, Sunday schools kept their finances separate from the host congregation, whereas by the end of this time almost all Sunday school budgets had become part of the congregation’s budget. Second, congregations gradually built more and more elaborate physical plants for their Sunday schools, culminating in the 1950s building boom where many congregations built large buildings that resembled the school buildings built for public schools during this time. Third, Sunday schools increasingly relied on published curriculum books, and over time demanded higher and higher quality curriculum books. Fourth, inspired by the advances in developmental psychology, Sunday school began to be seen as a program that was co-equal with the main corporate worship service; in part, this was bowing to the inevitable, because parents increasingly didn’t want to bring their children to both the main worship service and also to Sunday school.

1781-1900

As we go back in time into the mid to late nineteenth century, the further back we go the more we see that everyone was expected to attend the main worship service, adults and children together; developmental psychology hadn’t been invented yet, and children were expected to sit still and pay attention to the sermon — and as we go back in time, the sermon gets longer and longer; sermons were much longer than today’s typical fifteen minute quickies. To generalize broadly, the Sunday school was a separately-funded organization; it didn’t have its own building; the primary textbook was the Bible.

We have gone a long way into the past. The mid-nineteenth century Sunday school is so different from Sunday school in 2020, it doesn’t seem right to call them by the same name. But as we go back in time into the early nineteenth and late eighteenth century, things get even stranger:

Sunday schools actually started in the late eighteenth century as literacy schools for children who had to work during the week and so couldn’t attend public school. The purpose of the Sunday school wasn’t just teaching religious and moral content, it was teaching children how to read. They weren’t housed in churches, they were housed in people’s homes. In the early nineteenth century, with the rise of denominational competition, Sunday schools shifted their focus to teaching their denomination’s specific theological point of view. But originally, Sunday schools started as a social justice project: we’d now say they brought literacy to underprivileged, underserved children. Today, when we’re in an era when people below the upper middle class are staying away from congregations, we should pay attention to how late eighteenth century congregations reached out beyond their memberships to serve children in their area.

———

3. Why the “post Sunday school era” advocates are right

The purpose of this excursion into the past is to show you that Sunday school, as an institution, has changed dramatically over time. When people talk about the “post Sunday school era” or the “death of Sunday school,” what they really mean is that the Sunday school era that lasted from 1965 to about 2005 is over.

Actually, what they often really mean is that they have a specific agenda to push. The “post Sunday school era” advocates often want to push for a new model of religious education. They want to end children attending separate religious education classes, and instead reform the worship service so that it is child-friendly, so that parents will actually want to take their children into worship. This is a sane and rational approach to dealing with some of the financial forces bearing on congregations. In this “post Sunday school” model, you promote efficiency by moving the religious education responsibilities for paid staff to the parish minister, the primary worship leader. Since you’re moving the primary physical locus of religious education into the main worship space, that means all those now-empty classrooms can be converted to other uses, including renting them out to paying customers. You can also focus more strongly on denominational identity in religious education — a big emphasis in “faith formation” is keeping children within your denomination — so that you’re raising up children who assert their denominational identity, which in turn makes their parents feel better about the choice they’ve made to belong to a particular congregation, which maybe makes them give a little more freely.

While this may sound cynical and worldly, when stated so baldly, it’s not. The Milton Friedman brand of capitalism means we are all steeped in consumerism and the survival of the economically fittest, even in (especially in) the nonprofit world. This is our historical moment; we may not like it, but we have to live in its realities. Or we may love it, and embrace its realities ever more fully.

———

4. Why the “post Sunday school era” advocates are wrong

But the “post Sunday school era” people, the “faith formation” people, the “death of Sunday school” people all strike me as conservative, even reactionary. They seem to me to be ruling out the progressive heritage of that strand of religious education which I belong.

I agree with the progressives who got kids out of the worship services; children and adults are at very different developmental stages, and a congregation that wants to include nine year olds and ninety year olds on a regular basis needs to accommodate the different needs of those two developmental stages. Sticking kids and elders into the same service every week feels like a regression to me — back to some strange conception of how things were in the good old days of the eighteenth century, when kids and adults went to the local Puritan church together every week to listen to three hour sermons.

The “post Sunday school era” people and the “death of Sunday school” folks are well-intentioned. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems facing religious education within organized religion.

———

5. Expanding our religious education possibilities

It’s clear that financial pressures are going to force changes in the way we do religious education. But what are the other possibilities besides the” death of Sunday school”?

My sense is that what parents (and kids) want is more choices, more options. This makes sense in our consumer culture: we’re all used to having a wide variety of options available. So we need to find more programs to offer in addition to, not in replacement of, weekly classes on Sunday mornings. Here are some of the additional educational formats I’ve experimented with myself, or observed at close hand, in my quarter of a century working in Unitarian Universalist congregations:

children’s worship
all-ages worship in standard weekly worship services
non-traditional worship
“junior church”
youth groups, support groups, small groups, cell groups
retreats (age-specific for ages 8+; or mixed age and family)
conferences (1 to 7 day gatherings)
performing or watching plays, pageants, liturgical drama
choirs and musical ensembles
online learning
study groups and self-directed study
lay leadership in the congregation
field trips
outdoor ministries, summer camps
pastoral counseling
“traditional” Sunday school, the 1965-2005 approach
non-traditional Sunday school

If you were to ask me to identify one or two of these educational formats that holds the most promise for the future, I’d answer — If you pick just one or two, you’re going to lose children and families.

So, for example, if you put all your religious education eggs in the all-ages worship services basket, you’ll probably lose as many as half the children in your congregation. And if you put all your religious education eggs in the “traditional” Sunday school basket, trying to replicate what we were doing from 1965 to 2005, you’ll also probably lose as many as half the children in your congregation.

In my current congregation, we try to maximize the options for parents with children, not force them into one program. Pre-pandemic, children could enjoy supervised play on the playground, or go to Sunday school classes; they could sign up for comprehensive sexuality education programs for four age groups, the Navigators scouting program, a week-long ecology summer camp, etc. During the pandemic, we’re scrambling to offer a range of options, including online Sunday school, one or two outdoors socially-distanced in-person programs, and various mailings.

The point is to expand your offerings to allow for more choices. But how do you do that economically?

———

6. The whole church as curriculum

All this takes me back to a book I first read twenty-five years ago, Fashion Me a People by Maria Harris. Harris taught me that, in her words, the whole church is curriculum. Anything a child (or an adult) does in the congregation’s building and grounds, or does with a group of people from that congregation, is curriculum. So to the list above add: all-church picnics, drinking hot chocolate at social hour, playing on the congregation’s playground, attending a Unitarian Universalist family camp in the summer, and any other activity that a child does with others from their religious community.

Being a Unitarian Universalist, I of course translated Harris’s word “church” to me “the local congregation.” But when she says “church,” she also implies a connection to a larger body; in her case, as a Christian and a Roman Catholic, she means the larger body of believers in the triune god and participants in the common rituals of that larger body. So that connection to that larger body, however you conceive that larger body, is also curriculum. In the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood, that meant that we were not only exposed to the larger Unitarian Universalist movement, but we were also exposed to connections with other liberal religious bodies around the world, like Rissho Kosei-kai (the minister of my home church visited Japan more than once to connect with Rissho Kosei-kai leaders), the Brahmo Samaj (the hymnal we used in the children’s chapel in my home church had readings from Rabindranath Tagore), and other groups.

Harris’s main point, the point I want to emphasize, is that we need to broaden our understanding of where and how learning takes place. Once you really internalize what Harris is saying, you find that things that you’re already doing are, in fact, religious education. Religious education happens the moment children set foot on your campus, or the moment they enter a room full of co-religionists.

This is why I’m troubled by the limited scope of the “post Sunday school era” and the “death of Sunday school” movements. There often seems to be a notion that we can fix all our religious education problems by bringing children into the main worship service.

———

7. New models for funding

But we come back once again to economics, to finances. Broadening educational offerings is going to be difficult for smaller congregations (which means, most Unitarian Universalist congregations), whose resources are already stretched too far — and I fully expect that many smaller congregations will only be able to focus on one or two options, like sticking all their kids into the main worship services, and then they’ll have to settle for losing half their children. Mind you, if that’s what your financial situation allows, then then you get full marks for trying to retain half your children, rather completely giving up on including children (as so many small congregations have done). And if that’s all your congregation can afford, then by all means take credit for doing what you can to salvage half your children in the midst of financial decline. But let’s not pretend that this is some educational advance; it’s not. It’s a response to looming financial ruin.

One ideal solution would be to move religious education away from being the financial responsibility of individual congregations — that’s no longer economically sustainable — and move instead towards some other funding model. (And no, let’s not expect the Unitarian Universalist Association [UUA] to solve this problem for us; their funding is declining faster than that of many congregations, and the past twenty years has seen an ongoing decline in the UUA’s ability to fund religious education staff, curriculum resources, and trainings for leaders.) What might that look like?

One popular suggestion is to move more religious education online. One exemplar here is Khan Academy, that wonderful nonprofit organization that produces those awesome videos that teach kids how to do math and science, and other subjects as well. I love Khan Academy, and one of my fantasies is that they hire me to be part of a team producing religious education videos that teach intercultural competence (and if a recruiter sees this and wants to get in touch with me, I’d love to talk with you but please use my personal email account, not my work email account). However, the Khan Academy videos are designed to supplement, nor to replace, the instruction in regular schools. So while I think we absolutely need to have religious education content delivered through something like Khan Academy, it’s important to remember it’s a supplement to in-person curriculum. Right now, a lot of people are developing videos and other online learning; what I’m hoping is that someone will decide to curate the best of this material, and make it more widely available. But who will fund the curators? I don’t know.

A recent innovation in funding that’s well worth watching is the Soul Matters program development team. I think their funding model, a subscription service for curriculum and worship, is really interesting. (However, I’m less interested by their educational offerings with its theme-based approach, or their editorial model which relies on one or two curriculum writers instead of curating curriculum from more sources.) This subscription funding model injects some efficiency into religious education staffing, by outsourcing some of the higher-level curriculum development work outside of the congregation.

Another funding innovation worth watching is the growth of summer camps. Sheri Prudhomme and Laila Ibrahim get a lot of credit here for their “Chalice Camps.” Though congregations have been doing summer camps for decades — Christian churches call them “Vacation Bible Schools” — Unitarian Universalists began to realize that Sheri’s and Laila’s “Chalice Camp” could perhaps provide a year’s worth of basic religious education in a one-week format. Better still, Sheri and Laila proved that such camps could be self-supporting, including paying salaries for key staffers; and those salaries might even be financially attractive in a gig economy. Best of all, I find Sheri and Laila’s “Chalice Camp” to be educationally interesting.

One final innovation I’d like to see is several local congregations cooperating to offer a variety of educational opportunities together. This would make all kinds of financial sense — my congregation works on the summer camp programs, your congregation works on the weekend retreat programs, a third congregation works on the weekly programs, and so on. This doesn’t mean that you all come to my summer camp, and my congregation sends our kids to your retreats, or your weekly programs; but curriculum development, volunteer training, and administration could be shared responsibilities. Geoff Rimositis started something like this two decades ago when he created shared retreats that other congregations could send their Coming of Age programs to.

Given the deeply ingrained individualism of Unitarian Universalist congregations, this kind of sharing does not come naturally. And the logistics of inter-congregational cooperation are challenging (I say this from experience). Yet we cannot let this discourage us. We can seen how individual programs involving more than one congregation and led by brilliant innovators, like Geoff’s Coming of Age retreats, can succeed. We have seen how innovative ideas, like Sheri and Laila’s “Chalice Camp,” can spread. How can we continue to fund this kind of innovation? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m sure we’ll find a way.

———

8. Final thoughts

We need to keep on looking for the many and diverse success stories that are out there. Instead of imposing top-down solutions, like the “faith formation” folks and the “post Sunday school” people, let’s look for programs that are actually working. Instead of being prescriptive — telling others what I think will work for them — let’s be descriptive — describing what is actually working for others, and seeing if it will work for us.

And ultimately, I’m advocating for a return to progressive values. I want to embrace the legacy of the late eighteenth century Sunday school as a social justice project. I want to embrace the legacy of progressives in the religious education movement of the twentieth century who drew on the insights of developmental psychology, and child-centered learning. I want to look for inspiration in today’s programs, like another one of Geoff Rimositis’ innovations, Peace Camp, a week-long day camp that used a non-violence curriculum from MOSAIC Project to reach out to both Unitarian Universalist kids and other kids and teach peace.

Forget the “post Sunday school era.” Forget the “death of Sunday school.” Instead, embrace the new possibilities that keep emerging. Embrace change and innovation, while keeping the focus firmly on children. Given the resources that we have, how are we going to raise the next generation of ethical, morally aware, empathetic, and spiritually sensitive human beings?

In the bustle of the pandemic, I almost forgot that the 250th anniversary of Universalism is celebrated today. This is the anniversary of the first sermon preached by John Murray.

Alas, too busy to say much about this now, but more on this soon!

I’ve been looking for a way to extend our congregation’s asynchronous learning, and one of the online tools I’ve looked at is Padlet.com.

Padlet.com is basically an online interactive bulletin board. Some elementary school teachers use padlets to allow students to interact with a teacher presentation — kids can comment on teacher posts, and teachers can also allow kids to make their own posts. (An individual bulletin board is typically referred to as a “padlet.”) Some teachers also use padlets as parent communication tools.

I wasn’t excited or inspired by the gallery of examples on Padlet.com, but since it’s a free service, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s better than I thought.

While it’s hard to imagine that children or teens in a religious education program will voluntarily interact with a padlet — unlike elementary school teachers, those of us in religious education cannot complete students to use something with the threat of a bad grade — I feel that padlets could be useful parent communication tools, to help parents know know what’s going on in a class. I think padlets could work quite well to organize resources to share with adult education classes. And Padlet.com is fairly easy to use for volunteer teachers — there’s not much of a learning curve. Finally, Padlet.com is obviously better for a volunteer-run program like Sunday school than a learning management system like Google Classroom, which has a steep learning curve and requires domain email addresses for all users (who wants another email address?).

However, I don’t think Padlet.com offers much advantage over using existing tools — such as Google Drive — to organize resource materials and allow student interaction. I’m also annoyed because when I just logged on to a padlet I created for other religious educators, Padlet.com refused to display embedded content — see the screenshot below. This does not make me want to pay for a premium account, and if this is what end users are going to see, I’m definitely better off using a Google Drive folder. It also occurs to me that all my volunteers already know how to use Google Drive, and why should I make them learn how to use Padlet.com?

Maybe I’ll return to Padlet.com in the future, but at this point I’m not overly enthusiastic.

William R. Jones, UU theologian and one-time religious educator, pointed out may years ago that the myth of Prometheus serves as a useful counter to the myth of Adam and Eve. For Adam and Eve, rebellion is sinful; for Prometheus, “a response of rebellion is soteriologically authentic.” Although Jones considers the Prometheus myth to be important for humanists, I think Prometheus is important for anyone who is an existentialist — which means almost every Unitarian Universalist today, whether they are humanist existentialists, Christian existentialists, pagan existentialists, Buddhist existentialists,….

That means the myth of Prometheus should be an integral part of Unitarian Universalist religious education for kids. Here’s one attempt to make that happen, as several ordinary people go back in time to relive the myth o Prometheus:

Full script is below….

A: Who’s your favorite character from Greek myths?

B: I like Zeus, because he’s the most powerful.

C: I like Athena, because she’s the wisest.

D: I like Hephaestus, because he’s a Maker.

E: I like Poseidon because he’s wet.

Greg: I like Prometheus.

F: Wait, who was Prometheus?

Greg: Let’s go back in time, and I’ll show you.

[Eerie music, TARDIS sweeps by Ancient Greek temple.] Voiceover: “The gods and goddesses created all the animals … And they ordered Prometheus and Epimetheus … to equip these creatures….”

Athena: All right, Zeus. That’s the last one. We’re done.

Zeus: Wow, Athena. That’s a lot of work!

Hephaestus: Oh, darn it, we didn’t pass out the gifts that will allow the animals to survive.

Poseidon: Oh no. I’m too tired to do any more.

Zeus: I’ll tell you what, I’ll order two lesser gods to get the job finished. [looking down] Prometheus! Epimetheus!

Epimetheus [looking up]: Sir, yes sir!

Zeus [looking down]: There’s all the animals. There’s the gifts that will allow the animals to survive. Let’s get the job done.

Epimetheus [talking with Prometheus]: Gee, look at all these animals. Mountain lions, mule deer, fifty kinds of rabbits, about a million kinds of beetles….

Prometheus: And look at all these gifts. Warm fur, speed, sneakiness, good hearing, claws, pinchers, stingers… This is going to take forever.

Epimetheus: Tell you what, I’ll pass out the gifts, and you can inspect my work.

Prometheus: Good plan.

Epimetheus: I’ll start by giving claws to mountain lions.

Prometheus [holding list and pen]: Check.

[Dramatic music. Prometheus and Epimetheus at work.]

Epimetheus: Stinging cells to the Portuguese Man of War. That’s the last one. We’re done.

Prometheus: Oops.

Epimetheus: Oops? What do you mean, “oops”?

Prometheus: All the gifts are gone, but there’s one more creature — human beings.

Epimetheus: Look at them. Naked. No claws or hooves. Slow. Not very strong. No stingers. Nothing. If we send them out like that, the other animals will tear them to shreds.

Prometheus: Are you sure you gave out ALL the gifts?

Epimetheus: Yep. Nothing left.

Zeus [looking down]: Hi guys. Just checking in with you. Are all the animals are ready to go?

Hephaestus: We worked hard on them, so I hope you did a good job.

Poseidon: I hope you got all the swimming creatures.

Athena: Yes, we’re really looking forward to seeing every single one of the creations.

Epimetheus [to Prometheus]: Uh oh. NOW what do we do?

Prometheus: Don’t worry, I have a plan….

What do you see in this photo?

At the literal level, here’s what I see: a White presidential candidate kneeling in front of half a dozen Black men, at least one Black woman, and another White man. I see pews and a crucifix, so I assume that this is in a church, probably a Black church. It looks like a standard presidential campaign photo opportunity. I do wish they had practiced adequate social distancing, to set a good example.

As it turns out, according to Religion News Service (RNS), this is a video still from a video taken when Joe Biden visited Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Del., not long after the death of George Floyd. According to RNS, Biden was at the church to talk about “racial injustice and police brutality before praying with those assembled.” So my literal reading of the photo wasn’t far wrong.

Campaign staffers for the Donald Trump presidential campaign would like to have you see this image in a different light. RNS reports that this video clip has been used to conclude a Trump campaign video which equates Joe Biden with civil unrest. I didn’t have the stomach to watch the video myself, so I will trust RNS when they tell me that immediately following the video clip showing Biden in a Black church, “words appear on the screen reading ‘stop Joe Biden and his rioters’ as Mike Pence declares ‘you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America’.”

Thus it appears that what the Trump campaign staffers who created this ad would have you see is something rather different from what I saw. It appears that what they want you to see is that Joe Biden and Black church leaders are dangerous. However, when the RNS asked this question of Donald Trump’s press secretary, this interpretation was categorically denied:

“Asked whether the ad meant to suggest there was something unsafe about Black churches or meeting with Black leaders in a church, Trump campaign deputy national press secretary Samantha Zager replied, ‘That’s absurd and it’s shameful to even make the allegation.’ When Religion News Service followed up to ask what, exactly, footage of the church visit was meant to imply, Zager did not respond.”

In spite of Zager’s denial, it’s clear to me that the intent of this advertisement is to allow people to complete an equation in their mind: dangerous rioters equals the Black church equals Joe Biden. There is also a clear effort to equate Joe Biden with rioters, and with those athletes who kneel during the national anthem. It also seems likely that this advertisement wants to imply that this White man, Joe Biden, will kneel down before Black men and women.

I had quite a few years of training in the visual arts, and I’m always impressed at the multi-layered messages that visuals in political campaign ads can evoke. And I’m cynical enough that it doesn’t surprise me that the Tump campaign is using racial fears to motivate voters; American politicians have been doing that for centuries now, often with great effect; why would a politician who’s hungry to be re-elected give up a tried-and-true campaign strategy?

But I am troubled that a good portion of the American electorate is still so susceptible to political manipulation through their racial fears that it makes it worth the while of unscrupulous politicians to manipulate the emotions of susceptible voters in this way. Someone thinks this may be a winning strategy for the Trump campaign, and they may well be right. All the elegant theories of White privilege and White fragility and White supremacy — these theories haven’t change the emotional make-up of a great many White Americans. Anyone with training in the visual arts knows that a few well-crafted images can easily bypass the most elegant of theories….

I suspect there’s a role here for artists, illustrators, film makers, video game designers, and other visually skilled people. The visual impact of a movie like “Black Panther” may make more of a difference than your average street protest. There may be a role for amateur artists, too, in flooding the interwebs with imagery that equates Black Americans with patriotism, honor, intelligence, serving the public good, and other politically positive messages.

Possum and his friends act out the Sumsumara-Jataka (no. 208):

Full script is below the fold….

Possum: Hey, guys, let’s act out a Jataka tale.

Nanas: What’s a Jataka tale?

Sharpie: Buddhists believe that Jataka tales are stories about one of Buddha’s previous lives.

Elephant: But I don’t believe that people had previous lives.

Sharpie: Well, Jataka Tales are also just good, fun stories that can make you think.

Possum [as narrator]: A monkey lived in in a fig tree by a river, and in the river lived some crocodiles. One day, one of the crocodiles said to her son, “I want the heart of a Monkey to eat.” Now this little crocodile was stupid, but he came up with a plan. He swam to the tree where the Monkey lived.

Crocodile: Oh, Monkey, come with me to the other side of the river where the mangoes are ripe.

Nanas: But I can’t swim.

Crocodile: I’ll take you over on my back.

Possum: The monkey wanted some mangoes, so she jumped onto the Crocodile’s back.

Nanas: This is great!

Crocodile: Check this out!

Possum: And the crocodile dove under the water. The monkey didn’t like that at all.

Nanas: Don’t dive! I can’t breathe underwater.

Possum: Now remember, this crocodile was stupid. He said:

Crocodile: I’m going to drown you so my mother can eat your heart.

Nanas: Oh, that’s too bad. I didn’t bring my heart with me. It’s up there.

Possum: And the monkey pointed to one of the figs hanging way up high in the tree.

Crocodile: You mean you left your heart in your tree?

Nanas: Yes. If you want it, take me back to my tree. But first, take me to the island so I can get some mangoes.

Crocodile: No, monkey. Give me your heart first, then I’ll take you to the island.

Possum: But as soon as the monkey jumped onto land, she ran quickly up the fig tree, and she shouted down to the crocodile:

Monkey: O silly crocodile! Did you really believe there were animals who kept their hearts in a tree?

Possum: The crocodile went back sorrowing to the place he lived.

Elephant: I like the way the Monkey did not have to use violence to get herself out of trouble.

Possum: I like the way this is a religious story, but the Monkey does not call on a god or goddess to get herself out of trouble.

Sharpie: There are many ways to interpret this story. How do YOU interpret it?

In a book published this year, the philosopher Evan Thompson says, “When science steps back from experimentation in order to give meaning to its results in terms of grand stories about where we come from and where we’re going — the narratives of cosmology and evolution — it cannot help but become a mythic form of meaning-making and typically takes the structures of its narratives from religion.” — Why I Am Not a Buddhist, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2020), p. 18.

What Thompson says is akin to what Hannes Alfvén said back in 1984, in his paper “Cosmology: Myth or Science?” Alfvén argued that “there has been — and will perhaps always be — an oscillation between mythological and scientific approaches.” He further documented what he felt was a mythical orientation in the cosmology of 1984: “In a true dialectic sense it is the triumph of science which has released the forces which now once again seem to make myths more powerful than science and causes a ‘scientific creationism’ inside academia itself.”

And these days, I’ve heard apparently well-educated people saying things like, “I don’t believe in religion, I believe in science” — thus ignoring or passing over the fact that scientific models are not matters for belief, they are intended to be checked against empirical evidence through multiple investigations, and they are subject to a constant revision that is not compatible with what is generally meant by “belief.” I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn science into a religion, and it would be better to find one’s mythic meaning-making elsewhere, maybe in poetry or music or paintings or novels or even religion.

The final installment of the “Possum Feel Stressed” series of videos:

As usual, full script is below….

Possum: Sharpie, you were going to show me one last spiritual practice.

Sharpie: Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. I’m going to show you my personal favorite spiritual practice.

Possum: Is it hard? Yoga was too hard. And I couldn’t memorize prayers, though you said it was OK if I just read them out loud. I don’t want something that’s too hard.

Sharpie: I don’t think it will be too hard for you.

Possum: Is it something I can do with other people? Sitting meditation and mindfulness was too much inside my own head.

Sharpie: It’s something we can do with other people.

Possum: Wait. You said “we.” We’re going to do it? You’re going to do it, too? I noticed you didn’t do any of the other spiritual practices with me. You just told me how to do them.

Sharpie: We’re going to attend a Sunday service with our congregation.

Possum: Wait a minute. That’s a spiritual practice?

Sharpie. Of course it is. And this week, we get to attend the annual Water Communion service.

Possum: Uh. Remind me what a Water Communion is?

Sharpie: Water Communion is where we each share a bit of water symbolizing who we are or where we’re from. It’s a feminist reinterpretation of an old religious ritual, showing that we’re embodied beings, where our intersubjectivity is revealed, not through some disembodied intellectualism, but through our very embodiment…

[bell sound]

Possum: Wait a minute. I just heard the bell. They must be starting the service already. We better hurry.

Sharpie: Ms. and Mr. Bear!

Mr. Bear [off stage]: Coming.

Sharpie: Elephant! Nanas!

[Elephant trumpets offstage]

Sharpie: Hurry up. We don’t want to be late for the Water Communion.

Possum: Yeah, hurry up, you guys.

[Mr. and Ms. Bear, Elephant and Nanas, hurrying to get to the service]

[All six stuffed animals in the UUCPA video studio]

Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern: Hi everybody, I heard you might be coming over. I’m so glad. I see Possum and Nanas, and Sharpie Ann and Elephant, and Mr. and Ms. Bear. It’s really great to have you here at our Water Communion.

Lecture for an online class at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.

The full text of the lecture is below the fold.

N.B.: The written text diverges slightly from the text in the video.

What is religion?

This is the first in a series of adult classes on religion at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto. Each class can be taken separately, but if you attend all of the classes, you’ll probably see that I’m making some long-term arguments about the role and place of religion in today’s world.

Full disclosure: I am not trained in religious studies. I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and a graduate degree in practical theology; I have substantial training in the arts; and I work full time in a religious organization. My biases and blind spots will, no doubt, become quickly obvious, but I hope I also bring an interesting perspective to the topic of religion.

Let’s dive right in and try to define religion. Since my job is in religious education, I spend a fair amount of time talking with children and teens, and American children and teens have a pretty good idea of what religion is. Religion, in their view, requires belief in a supernatural masculine deity named “God.” Religion is most often associated with conservative political commitments including opposing LGBTQ rights and abortion rights, and an unthinking American patriotism. Religious behaviors include praying to a supernatural masculine deity, attending worship services every week, reading the Bible, and behaving sanctimoniously. In short, religion looks a lot like white conservative evangelical Protestant Christianity.

Actually, many of the American adults I know define religion in much the same way. I know devout Jews who say, “I’m really not religious,” meaning they’re not conservative white evangelicals. I know devout Catholics who are apologetic because they go to mass regularly. The few white conservative Christian evangelicals I know are defensive about their religious commitment, which is not surprising, given how many other people don’t want to be identified with white conservative Christianity. Mind you, these are all people who live in the United States; I’m not speaking about everyone in the world here.

On the face of it, it’s obviously absurd to think that religion is the same thing as white conservative evangelical Christianity. Of course there are many other religions besides Christianity, and of course there are non-white Christians, and progressive Christians, and so on. Yet there’s a grain of truth in the common perception that religion is the same thing as white conservative evangelical Christianity.

We can trace that grain of truth back to the origins of the concept of religion. You see, religion is actually a fairly recent concept; it emerged from the European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. The concept of religion was originally formulated in part as a way to justify how emerging nation-states were accumulating power. “Religious” was defined as something separate from “secular” to set up two spheres of influence; the nation-state stayed out of the religious sphere, but at the same time the nation-state reserved the ultimate authority over coercive power both within and outside its borders. You can find a good summary of this argument in the book “The Myth of Religious Violence” by William T. Cavanaugh.

Thus when we say we have “freedom of religion,” that’s actually just a way of saying that religions are prohibited from having any military or police power. It’s also increasingly clear that nation-states in fact do have what can only be called religious rituals. In the United States, some of our holidays — remember, “holiday” really means “holy day” — include veneration of quasi-deities such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King; we have huge temples dedicated to such quasi-deities, such as the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and pilgrimage sites such as the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. I see a strong resemblance between United States civil religion, and how the ancient Romans venerated and deified their emperors and heroes.

But to get back to the Enlightenment. While one purpose of the concept of religion was giving Enlightenment thinkers a way to better define the secular state, there was another less savory purpose. The development of the concept of religion coincides with the development of European colonialism. The secular nation-states of Europe found that the concept of religion was a powerful tool for justifying and extending colonialism. The Europeans equated civilization with Christianity, with Christendom. There were Jews in Europe, too, of course, and so Judaism was understood as a religion, though it defined as an early predecessor to Christianity and therefore not the equal of Christianity.

What about those other religions beyond Christianity? They were defined as primitive, heathen religions, and one of the justifications for colonialism was to extend Christendom, to extend civilization to the heathens. And those other religions could never match up to Christianity, because the concept of religion had been defined using Christianity as the paradigm, so by its very definition no other religion could be as good as Christianity. So you can see, when we say “religion,” we’re naming a concept that started out as a tool for justifying European colonialism, where the only real religion was Christianity, and anything else was there to be subjugated. No wonder we feel some visceral discomfort with the word “religion.”

Then as the Enlightenment continued, an increasing number of thinkers began to question the supernatural elements of Christianity. By the nineteenth century, the category of religion had been expanded to include Buddhism. Why? Because Buddhism looked to some Western thinkers to be like Christianity with the yucky bits taken out. These Westerners claimed that Buddhism was more in tune with science, and they saw Gotama Buddha as Jesus without the miracles; what they were really doing was helping to invent a new movement that scholars now call Buddhist modernism. In any case, at some point Buddhism began to look enough like Christianity that it came to be accepted as another religion, as something more than heathenism. Eventually, Buddhists in Asia and elsewhere picked up on this idea, and now Buddhist modernism is everywhere.

Another nineteenth century development led to European recognition of another religion. In the Indian subcontinent, a number of Indian leaders realized that their English colonial overlords guaranteed religious freedom. They then began defining some of their rituals and their philosophy as a religion that became known as Hinduism. Thus Hinduism as a “world religion” emerged during British colonial rule as a way for colonized peoples to enjoy some legally guaranteed freedoms.

During the twentieth century, scholars added more “world religions” to their field. World religions were typically distinguished from so-called local religions. Thus, the Navajo religion is a local religion because it only exists on the Navajo Indian reservation. But religions that spread to more than one locale had a chance of counting as world religions; here again, Christianity remains a paradigmatic case for how religion is defined, because Christianity is a missionary religion, which means is spreads over wide geographic areas. So too with Buddhism and Islam, the other two major missionary religions.

What’s remarkable during the twentieth century is the extent to which religions of Africa and the African diaspora were utterly ignored. Religions indigenous to Africa were often dismissed by religion scholars as “primitive religions,” or “local religions.” Religions of the African diaspora were at best dismissed as “cults,” or more often ignored altogether. In one example, Orisha devotion, now counted as a major world religion, was only studied by a few scholars prior to the 1990s. In another example, here in the States it’s difficult to find books or unbiased coverage on African Independent Churches or African Indigenous Churches.

As a case study, I’d like you to consider the way the Nation of Islam is covered in the popular imagination in the U.S. Most people will dismiss it as a violent racist cult. Those of us who know something more about the Nation of Islam might say they can’t be real Muslims because they don’t read Arabic, and they don’t follow the Five Pillars of Islam. As if we, non-Muslims that we are, get to define what constitutes Islam! This attitude towards this black religious group reveals the colonial impulse that still lives within the concept of religion.

There’s still this sense that we, as outsiders, get to judge other religions, and if we judge that some other religion is falling short in some way, then we can justify dismissing it, or even using governmental authority to forcibly control it. In other words, the concept of religion is still used to justify colonization. There’s plenty of scholarship to show how African Americans in the U.S. are treated as colonized peoples, and one of the ways white people maintain colonial control over black people is through religion.

Again, no wonder we feel discomfort with the word “religion.” But we should feel even more uncomfortable with the militant atheists. They claim to be not religious, and claim they want to eradicate religion. Yet what they do reminds me of the conservative Christian evangelicals they profess to hate. To my way of thinking, they look exactly like those purifying Protestants who want to get rid of everyone who doesn’t believe what they believe. And too many of the militant atheists seem to believe in a scientific triumphalism that seems as unbelievable to me as conservative Christian theology; instead of a big daddy God who’s going to save us all from our sings, it’s big daddy Science that will save us instead. Worse still, some of the militant atheists want to get rid of religion, which is just too similar to European and American colonial powers wanting to get rid of other religions among their colonized peoples.

So what do we do now? Should we just get rid of the concept of religion? Well, that’s pretty unrealistic. What we can do is to start thinking about a more accurate definition of religion.

First big point: When deciding what gets to be a religion, we should be more inclusive rather than less inclusive. Ideally, we want to divorce the concept of religion from colonialism, so we have to be careful about saying something “isn’t really a religion,” or it’s “primitive” or it’s a “cult,” or just be generally dismissive. As an example, here in the U.S., we have to be especially careful when it comes to black religions, or indeed any religion that does not have predominantly white member. Therefore, we better think hard before claiming the Nation of Islam “isn’t really a religion,” and we better be careful about being dismissive of Pentecostalism.

Second big point: When we define religion, we should not use Western Christianity as the paradigm. Western Christianity is deeply concerned with faith and belief and dogma. Therefore, we should be suspicious of any definition of religion that focuses on belief and personal choice. Instead, we will consider a wider range of defining characteristics for religion, including social organization, material culture, ritual, myths and narratives, and so on.

Western Christianity also understands religion primarily as a matter of personal choice. Therefore we should be wary of claims that religion is always a matter of personal choice. We’ll look for external factors that can affect the religious affiliation of individuals and groups, factors like economic pressures, colonialism, and globalism; as well as kinship ties, citizenship in a nation-state, and other social influences.

By the way, all this will make us skeptical of the term “spiritual but not religious” — this is a valid term only insofar as “spirituality” is located within the experience of an individual — so a definition of religion that extends beyond Western Christian norms can safely ignore the supposed difference between “spiritual” and “religious.”

Western Christianity also claims that there are well-defined boundaries between religions, that is, an individual is either one thing or another, and one person can’t have multiple religious identities. Therefore, we should be cautious of defining religion such that multiple religious affiliations are not allowed. Instead, we’ll consider multiple religious belonging as a normal feature of religion.

This leads us to a third big point: When defining religion, we must remember that religions interact with one another, trading influences back and forth, so much so that it can be difficult to determine where one religion ends and another one begins. For example, does the Chrislam movement in Nigeria belong to Christianity and Islam? — it’s almost impossible to say. So under our definition of religion, any taxonomy of religious groups will be considered quite fluid.

Religions also change over time. This means there is no static thing called “Christianity,” there is instead a dynamic changing movement. And religions also change radically in different cultural contexts, so that even within Christianity in one time period, the Quakers of suburban Philadelphia are wildly different from Ethiopian Orthodox Christians of Addis Ababa. In short, our definition of religion will recognize that religion is characterized by change and dynamism.

A fourth big point, based on the above points: As we define religion, we’re going to be extremely skeptical of any claims that there’s some universal truth that’s in every religion. Why are we going to be skeptical? First, such universalizing claims have been made in the service of colonialism, to help integrate subjugated people into the worldview of the colonizers. Second, such claims usually arise from the Western Christian notion of considering belief or doctrine or dogma to be central, rather than looking at ritual, social organization, or material culture. Third, such claims tend to ignore how religions change over time, and change across cultures.

One final big point: Any definition of religion is liable to change over time and across different societies. If religion is a social construct, then it’s going to be constructed by a social group. As that social group changes over time, the social construct might change as well. And two different societies — for example, the U.S. and China — might come up with different social constructs for religion.

Well, here we are at the end of the time allotted, and I still haven’t defined religion. Yet I feel as though we’ve made some progress. We know that religion is NOT the same thing as Western Christianity. We know that religions change over time and interact with one another. We know that belief and dogma is a small part of religion, and we know our investigations of religion have to look far beyond belief to things like social organization, material culture, ritual, myths and narratives, ethics, personal and group experiences, and so on. So even though we haven’t defined religion, at least we have some notions about how we might study religions.

The past couple of weeks have been a wild ride for me.

At work, this is always the busiest time of year because we’re getting ready for a new school year. This year is busier than usual because so many things have to be moved online. Fortunately, we were able to delay the start of Sunday school classes till after Labor Day, but even with that there’s a lot to be done.

The weather has been crazy. We had thunderstorms last week that lit wildfires all around us, and now just about the whole state of California is covered in a big smoke cloud. There are fires burning to our south — they’ve closed Highway 1 south of Half Moon Bay down to Santa Cruz because of the fires — and fires burning to our east, and fires burning to our north. There’s smoke everywhere. At its worst, the AQI peaked at over 400 in our area, then we had a couple of clear days, and now the AQI is up to about 150. Here’s a recent screenshot of fire.airnow.gov. Density of smoke plumes is indicated by the darkness of the gray overlays; the little squares and circles are AQI monitors, with green being healthy, yellow moderate, orange unhealthy, and purple hazardous; then the little flame icons show locations of fires, and the little glowing dots are potential fires from satellite imagery:

And now we have a Red Flag Warning — a warning for high danger of potential fires — because of a forecast of the possibility of more dry lightning over the next four days. Someone recently asked what a Red Flag Warning means. For me, it means: double-check your go-bag, then place it by the front door because you may only get 30 minutes warning to evacuate. Ah yes; the joys of living in a world dominated by global climate change.

Then if that’s not enough, I’ve been sitting too long at the computer — because, of course, when you work at home you have to spend hours and hours sitting in front of your computer — and my foot muscles got all cramped up; so much so that it’s actually painful to walk. I didn’t even know that could happen to my feet.

Pandemic, wildfires, and job. It would be easy to get discouraged, but I look at it this way — at least I get to work indoors.

Before we went to bed Saturday night, we saw a couple of flashes of distant thunder. The National Weather Service had said that moist air from a tropical storm to the south was being driven up the Pacific coast by a big, hot high pressure system parked over the southwest, and they had predicted the possibility of thunder and lightning. Since this is the Bay Area, where we hardly ever get thunder and lightning, and what we do get is inconsequential, we thought that was the end of it.

We were awakened at half pst three by lightning flashes and loud thunder and wild wind and — could it be? — the sound of rain. It never rains in the Bay Area in August, but this sounded like real rain. Then the power went out. We got up, and went around closing windows. I stood out on the back steps for a moment, just so I could feel some raindrops.

The power was still out when we awoke on Sunday morning. That meant the huge cemetery gate that closes every evening wouldn’t open. I had to open it so I could drive to work. The hand crank was missing, meaning I was stuck inside until the cemetery staff showed up. And of course it started raining again while I was out there.

Since then, it’s been muggy — by Bay Area standards, muggy means relative humidity of about 60% — and partly cloudy — we hardly ever get real clouds in August, just high fog. It feels like the New England summer days I’m used to. It’s very pleasant. I just wish we’d get another thunderstorm, but I know that’s too much to ask.

In the third installment of the Possum Feels Stressed video series, Possum learns about prayer as a spiritual practice (even though he doesn’t believe in God):

The first poem mentioned in the video is by Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian minister:

I am only one.
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything.
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

The second poem mentioned in the video is by Universalist poet Edwin Markham:

Outwitted
They drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took them in.

Full script for the video is below….

Here’s the full script, pretty much as it appears in the video:

Possum: Sharpie, you were going to show me some kind of spiritual practice that uses words.

Sharpie: That’s right. You’re looking for a spiritual practice that will help you feel less stressed out.

Possum: Right.

Sharpie: This time, we’re going to try prayer.

Possum: I don’t think prayer is for me. I don’t believe in God.

Sharpie: You don’t have to believe in God. Some prayers are directed at a god or deity, but there are also centering prayers, prayers for thanks (like saying grace), prayers to express concern for others, prayers to ancestors, and petitionary prayers which form an interesting philosophical puzzle that…

[Cymbal hit]

Possum: Sharpie, stop! You’re getting all intellectual again.

Sharpie: I’ll keep this practical. You like talking, right?

Possum: Right.

Sharpie: Well, some prayers are like short poems which you can memorize, then say out loud when you need them. So it’s a kind of talking, and it can be very calming.

Elephant: What are you two doing?

Possum: Oh, hi Elephant. I’m going to memorize a prayer to help me feel calmer.

Elephant: I love to memorize. And I need to feel calm. Can I try?

Possum: Sure!

Sharpie: Here’s the first Unitarian Universalist poem that I think works as a centering prayer:
I am only one.
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything.
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Elephant [holding written copy of poem/prayer in his trunk]: I’m going to memorize this one!

Sharpie: Here’s the other Unitarian Universalist poem that works as a centering prayer:
They drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took them in.

Possum [holding written copy of poem/prayer]: That’s the one for me!

[Possum reading poem to himself; time passes]

Sharpie: How did it go?

Elephant: “And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” Saying this has made me feel calmer, because it tells me that I don’t have to fix everything.

Sharpie: How about you, Possum?

Possum: I can’t memorize things. I guess I failed at this spiritual practice, too.

Sharpie: Did it make you feel better to read it out loud?

Possum: Yeah! Sometimes people try to shut me out. But this reminds me that love is more powerful than trying to shut people out.

Sharpie: Did this spiritual practice work for you?

Possum: Yeah, but … could we try another one?

Sharpie: Next week, I’ll have something new for you.

Possum: I can’t wait!

This is the only sermon I’ve been able to find that was preached at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, which existed from 1905 to 1934. It’s a sermon preached at the dedication of the new building of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, March 24, 1907. It was doubtless revised for publication, and then was printed in the Christian Register (later called the Unitarian Register) on April 25, 1907, pp. 465-466.

George Stone, who preached this sermon, was the first minister the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto ever had. He was actually the American Unitarian Association’s Field Secretary for the West coast, and part of his duties were planting new Unitarian churches; since Palo Alto was a college town, it was seen as a likely spot for a Unitarian congregation, and that’s doubtless why Stone went ot Palo Alto in 1905. He worked with the new Palo Alto congregation for about a year, until 1906, when they called their first settled minister, Sydney B. Snow. Evidence in the extant documents of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto show that they considered him their minister, even though he wasn’t a called minister. And in 1907, he returned to Palo Alto to preach the dedicatory sermon when their new building was complete.

But this sermon is of more than historical interest. True, we might not agree with some of the theology, and certainly the gender-specific language (e.g., “man” for “humankind,” male pronouns for the deity, etc.) now sounds dated. But Stone argues for the continual progress of organized religion; looking back at old forms of American religion, Stone says that our spiritual forebears “were passing through a stage of evolution which to us seems a sad one.” And he acknowledges that some day, he, too, will seem outdated: “Who knows but our descendants will look back upon the record of our lives with equal pity and tenderness?” Yet Stone has some powerful things to say about the purpose of public worship. A Unitarian congregation, says Stone, “stands for the solidarity of the race rather than for the single individual” — and yet, all these years later, we Unitarian Universalists are still overly individualistic, and reading Stone’s sermon might help us realize how far we have yet to go in our religious development.

“Public Worship” by Rev. George W. Stone

The mission of Unitarianism is to help mankind to a higher and more spiritual faith than it has had before; for Unitarianism is not a theology and a philosophy only, it is a life. It is, least of all, a negation or a denial of some other religion. It is a comprehensive religion, including the good in the older religions. No man is ready to become a Unitarian until he is able to do his own thinking. In order to be a Unitarian he may outgrow the old theologies, but he must not outgrow religion. Until he learns to use his freedom wisely, and not make it simply a license to reject everything he cannot understand, until then, he may not be orthodox, but he is not necessarily a Unitarian, for Unitarianism is a positive faith. It believes that love is the only divine power in the universe, and that at last all mankind will grow into it, that the process of man’s development from the animal, through the human, into the spiritual, is now going on, that it will one day be completed.

Public worship should be an expression of this faith. Shall we call it a simple faith? It may be simple to us; but to the mind long accustomed to the complexities of ecclesiasticism, so long familiar with the ancient theology only, it seems barren rather than simple. This is easily understood; for, just in proportion as the mind apprehends and the intellect becomes convinced of the highest spiritual truth, the soul grows calm and trustful, the element of pursuit is over, and only rest remaineth.

When the soul comes to that point of development where it can absolutely cast its cares on God, trusting him and his love for everything in the spiritual life, here and hereafter, self-interest, the most restless and eager passion of human nature, is satisfied. It is then that calmness, placidity of spirit is attained which is sometimes mistaken for indifference by those who cannot comprehend it. It is at this point that Unitarianism often ceases its work; that is, when self-interest has been victorious, has achieved its ends, the new-born Unitarian sometimes looks upon his work as finished. Having escaped from the dominion of fear, he congratulates himself that the battle is won, forgetting that there is such a thing as human brotherhood. If the soul that gains a victory over fear was the only soul on earth, then the victory would be won, and the victor might enter into his rest. But there is no rest, in that sense, on the earth. Said Jesus, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” So will every man and every woman, who has reached this condition of perfect trust, continue to work for others, if they have learned their spiritual lessons. There is no provision in this world for drones in any walk of life. There is nothing in this life worth having that does not cost persistent effort. Every victory in life but reveals another battle that must be fought. So with this one. When we have attained the real spirit of Christianity, we shall forget self. We shall find that not only our duty, but our inclination also, leads us to engage in the service of others. This will affect the character of our worship, for then worship will take the form of service. We shall care less for forms, and more for the spiritual uplift we receive when we See the blessings of life descend upon others. I think that the social worship — that is, worship in congregations — which distinguishes modern life has grown out of this spirit of sympathy with others. This brings me to the subject which I shall try to place before you in a practical way.

Ours is not a new church; but it is entering upon a new career, and, may we not hope, one which shall prove to be successful? Public worship, which is the subject of this discourse, is one of the subjects that deserve attention.

First, let us ignore the phases of the subject which do not interest Unitarians, and confine ourselves to those upon which we have more or less agreement. I presume no one desires to see a revival of either synagogue or temple worship. Priesthood is not a feature of our system, and, therefore, ritualism is out of the question. We must have forms of some kind and some ceremonies. We need only such forms as are conducive to the establishment of a distinctively social order of public worship. I assume that this is the object we have in view; namely, to adopt the best possible form of social public worship.

One of my ministerial brethren in New England said to me a few years ago: “I have numbers of men and women in my parish who would give up almost any doctrine with less hesitation than the old forms of public worship. That which they call the congregational form is dearer to them than theological opinions.” It is not surprising that men should be attached to familiar forms of all kinds. I think we are alike in this. Still, as Unitarians, we are committed to the principle of hospitality to new thought. Progress is one of our favorite words, and we ought to be able to rise above mere custom or routine when there is sufficient reason for so doing. There can be no principle involved in the form of public worship. There may be sentiment, emotion, taste. Forms that help one to worship may hinder another; but it is unlikely that any form would be adopted by a Unitarian church that would not, in a brief time, commend itself to those who sought earnestly to utilize it.

What is called the “enrichment of the church service” has been the subject of many addresses and of much discussion in the ministerial associations of many denominations during the past few years. Attention has been called to the rapidly increasing tendency of Unitarian young people to visit those churches which emphasize more strongly than we do a liturgical form of worship, not only to visit them, but in many cases to forsake their own, and ally themselves permanently with those churches. This shows that they are willing to endure a theology which they cannot approve, for the sake of the spiritual uplift they get from the ceremonial features of the service. We are too unconscious of the change which is coming over the religious world. We are slow to appreciate how far the basis of religion has shifted, how new the motives, the ideals of the religious life; and this spirit of progress has affected Unitarians even more than it has those in the orthodox churches. But the forms of public worship have remained unchanged. No one has attempted to give the new jewels brighter or more attractive setting. The old Puritan form of worship is used in quite ninety per cent of our liberal churches. Some of our younger people have caught a new spirit. The social consciousness seems to have increased: co-operation, noblesse oblige, these words express their central ideas. These young people seem to be unable to put these ideas into the old forms. They do not mix well with them.

The old forms were made to suit the old ideas. They did express them perfectly. Man, a lesser being, must be redeemed to be saved. Only one way of redemption,— he must accept and believe certain doctrines. Only the Church knew those doctrines. The Church being the official representative of the Most High, this redemption was conferred by the Church. The Church, therefore, indirectly, controlled the future of every soul. In Puritan New England it once furnished the passports to citizenship; that is, in early days, only church members were allowed to vote at the general election. The minister was the official head of the church. He assumed personal power over individual souls. He knew the law and expounded it. The great object of the Church was to save souls. Personal salvation was the incentive for all religious activity, the sole object being to keep out of hell and to get into heaven in the next world. This world was not important. Everything was done for the sake of a future world. The principle of insurance was the dominant one in the church. Church attendance and church subscriptions and support were the premiums the person must pay. Fear was the power behind the throne. The doleful hymns, the abject prayers, the blazing sermon with its warnings and appeals, its doctrinal demands and its fiery exhortations,— all these were merely the appropriate settings for the dreadful dogmas which were believed with pathetic earnestness by as good men and women as the sun ever shone upon. These worthy ancestors of ours were passing through a stage of evolution which to us seems a sad one. Who knows but our descendants will look back upon the record of our lives with equal pity and tenderness?

Now religion, among those who think and those who accept the results of modern research, has shifted to a new basis, a new motive; namely, man is imperfect, partially developed, but, nevertheless, divine by nature. He must be educated. The Church is a spiritual training-school. Its teachers are selected from those having the most profound knowledge of spiritual things. The minister is the leader in the church. The object of the Church is to educate men and women and children in spiritual things, to educate them for this world, to improve present opportunities to live a large and fuller life. The Church, therefore, stands in a different relation to life now from that in the olden time. It stands for the solidarity of the race rather than for the single individual. Man’s highest aim is to save others, for in that effort he finds his own salvation, as well as his greatest pleasure. We are bound together, and together we must go, down or up.

Now the power behind the throne is low. Therefore our service should furnish a setting for this finer gem,— happy hymns, the trusting prayer, the sermon with its aim to afford spiritual strength, comfort, and instruction. The atmosphere of the Church ought to be one of sunshine, hope, faith, love. No minor music, nothing that shall depress, but one continued strain of encouragement. The bright side of things should be presented. Life has enough sorrow, enough pain, poverty, and wretchedness, that we cannot escape. Surely we need not carry it with us to church. Happiness is the chief end of life: not pleasure, but happiness, and happiness will come when we graduate with honor from an institution like the Church, wherein true spiritual instruction is imparted. To know the truth is to know God. To be possessed by the spirit of love is to be pure in, heart, and purity of heart brings the beatific vision of God himself.

In this church, the minister is the chief servant. He leads the. service, but he should only lead it. Under the old system he monopolized the service. He delegated a small part of his power to a choir, but it was his service. The people looked on and saw him worship, and then went away and discussed the manner of his doing it. They entered the church with only the thought, What shall I do to be saved? and left it with the feeling that their attendance had in some way helped their chances for future happiness. This has passed away, and now men and women may come as to a feast, expecting to find spiritual food that will satisfy and nourish them. If they find it, they will come again; if not, they will remain away.

This, then, is the lesson I seek to teach, that we need not be bound to old customs when they cease to serve present needs. We may furnish the newer settings for the newer gems if the old ones do not properly display them. We need a service that includes every person that seeks to join with us in our work. We may believe in social worship without being frightened by names. If what is called a liturgy will bring us nearer together, and all of us nearer the Father, then let us be ready for that. What we need is a simple form that shall help those in the pews to the comfort that comes with sincere worship. There is help in repeating, with a congregation, the simple prayer taught us by Jesus, and used as the channel of spiritual communication by uncounted millions since he left the world.

Sentiment! you say. Yes, sentiment! But remember this: The best, the most beautiful, the most useful element in human life is sentiment. Not sentimentality. that is quite another emotion, but sentiment. From the feeling awakened by the tiny flower we see in early spring, up through children, wife, mother, to God himself,— all is sentiment. God grant we may never lose it; for without it life would be a blank, a desolation.

Let us not be afraid, then, to consider new methods. We must look forward for our ideas, not back. We may go back and look, to make sure we have left nothing useful behind, but our ideals are before us. Great sons of men have shown us h0w to live, how to suffer, how to die; but they could not know what we now know, for revelation is continuous and will be endless. Our responsibility is to the present and the future.

Finally, I have tried to show why I believe in progress in public worship. I would have the service of public worship so arranged that all may join in it: not observe it, but make it. Let the preacher preach as best he can, but he cannot worship for you. We do not believe in the substitutionary, the priestly theory. Let us have congregational worship, congregational music, congregational unity in every word and work, knowing no rich or poor, no learned or unlearned, asking only this question of those who seek to join us: Do you believe that love is the fulfilling of the law? Can you commit yourselves unreservedly to this great obligation? Will you endeavor to be governed in all things by the law of human brotherhood and love, and promise to share your liberty in common with all men?

Once within those doors, let it be understood that every one stands before the Father on a perfect equality. In the great world without, the lines of education, of wealth, of belief, may be sharply drawn. But let us make these precincts sacred by the sovereignty of good alone. So may we have for one hour, in every week, at least, a foretaste of the kingdom of God.

The second video in the Possum Feels Stressed series. Mindfulness meditation didn’t work out as a stress-reliever for Possum, and in this episode he and his friend Nanas the monkey try yoga…

The script is below, for those who like that sort of thing. Be warned, it got changed a bit in performance and editing.

Possum: Sharpie, don’t forget that you were going to show me about yoga.

Sharpie: That’s right. You said you felt stressed because of global climate change, and because your human friends are worried about COVID, racism, and the elections.

Possum: Right.

Sharpie: And I showed you how to do sitting meditation, but sitting still isn’t something you like to do.

Possum: Right. And now we’re going to do yoga. And after I learn how to do yoga, maybe I won’t feel so stressed out. What is yoga, anyway?

Sharpie: What we call “yoga,” or more properly called “hatha yoga,” is one of a set of Hindu spiritual practices, which also includes bhakti or devtional yoga, jnana or knowledge yoga, and karma yoga. Hatha yoga consists of asanas, or postures, and dates back to the Vedic… [sees Possum staring at him] …What?

Possum: Sharpie, this is too complicated for me. I just want something to help me feel less stress.

Sharpie: Well, honestly, I don’t really know how to do yoga myself. But a friend of mine who’s a yoga teacher recommended an online video on beginner yoga that you could watch.

Possum: Let’s do it!

Sharpie [setting up laptop]: Here, let me find that video….

Nanas: What’s going on, guys?

Possum: I’m going to learn how to do yoga, Nanas.

Nanas: I want to try, too!

Possum: This might be too hard for a little monkey like you.

Nanas: Pleeeease?

Possum: Sure, why not!

Sharpie [at laptop]: OK, the video is all set up.

[Possum and Nanas in front of laptop, watching a video]

Voiceover: Now lift your left hand up and move your right hand down. Keep your spine long

[Shots of Nanas and Possum doing yoga. Possum falls over.]

[Shot of Nanas in lotus position; Possum has given up and is sitting, shoulders hunched]

Sharpie: How was it learning yoga?

Possum: Good, I guess. Nanas had fun. She’s still sitting in lotus position and meditating.

Sharpie: Possum, how did it go for YOU?

Possum: Yoga was too hard for me. I know, I know — you have to keep doing it so you can get better. But it just didn’t feel good for my body. If I want exercise, I can just go outside and raid compost piles.

Sharpie: Well, mindfulness meditation didn’t work for you. Yoga didn’t work for you. I know you like talking, so next week we’ll try something that involves word.

Possum: Sounds great, let’s do it!

Alice Locke Park, pacifist and early feminist, was a member of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto from 1907 to 1920. Alice resigned from the church in 1920 in protest of the way some people in the church supported the the First World War; she was probably referring to people like Rev. Bradley Gilman and George Fullerton Evans, both of them saber-rattlers who spouted pro-war “propaganda” (in the words of another pacifist in that congregation). She later joined the Quakers. But she was a Unitarian for 13 years, and some of her writings seem to me to encapsulate a very contemporary Unitarian Universalist worldview—like this statement:

My religion is humanity—humanitarianism—confident that the present time is all that we are sure of, and [that] our duty, our progress and our usefulness are all here and now—If we think earnestly of the present and try to do all we can right here and now—we are at least sure of immediate results. My religion is boundless—Nothing human is alien to me. [quoted in Eunice Eichelberger, “‘Hearts Brimming with Patriotism,’” ed. Robert W. Cherny, California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression, Univ. Neb. Press, 2011, pp. 321-332.]

I think this would make a good responsive reading, if you arranged it something like this:

My religion is humanity—humanitarianism—

Confident that the present time is all that we are sure of, and that our duty, our progress, and our usefulness are all here and now—

If we think earnestly of the present and try to do all we can right here and now, we are at least sure of immediate results.

My religion is boundless—Nothing human is alien to me.

Not that this is some final definition of religion, some kind of dogma. By the end of his life, my father had become such a strong environmentalist that he refused to call himself a humanist any more, and I can imagine his criticisms of this reading. Nevertheless, the call to action and the appeal to a wide humanitarianism should be pleasing (if not definitive) to most.

The fourth and final installment of the Contestants on a Game Show! series:

Here’s the full script as written, though some parts got changed or left out during performance and editing:

Aarav: Last week, you guys invited me to play Celebrity Family Feud with you, so we could raise money for the congregation. But I don’t think we were actually on Celebrity Family Feud.

Emma: It was really more like a game show.

Sarah K.: And they called it “Celebrity Family FOOD.”

John: And it was all questions about famous Unitarian cooks. What was really going on?

Greg [or Dan, if Greg can’t make it]: Well, actually, you WERE on a game show. It was just a game show from a parallel universe. In that parallel universe, there IS a game show called “Celebrity Family FOOD.”

Sarah D.: You see, the two of us are actually Time Lords.

Greg: In our universe, we are called “Eternals.” Our job is to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

Sarah D.: But in your universe, you don’t have any Time Lords.

Greg: Except on television programs.

Sarah D.: Which means that lots of things go wrong in your universe.

Greg: Yes, in YOUR universe, you have pandemics, and racism, and people who don’t think science is real.

John: Wait a minute. You’re saying you’re from another universe?

Sarah D.: Yes. We’re from another universe.

Aarav: So we won all that money in another universe?

Greg: Yes. In OUR universe, your congregation won over a hundred thousand dollars.

Emma: You mean we can’t have any of that money?

Sarah D.: No, you can’t.

Sarah K.: That doesn’t seem fair.

Greg: It ISN’T fair. Unfortunately, there is a lot of unfairness in your universe.

John: Well, isn’t there a lot of unfairness in YOUR universe?

Sarah D.: No, there is NO unfairness in our universe.

Greg: Of course, there’s also no freedom in our universe.

Sarah D.: No freedom at all. You have to do what you’re told.

John: If we go to YOUR universe, we get the money, but we have to do whatever you say, right?

Sarah D.: That’s right.

Aarav: What if you tell us to do something we think is wrong?

Greg: Too bad. You have to do it anyway.

Aarav: That’s not fair.

Greg: Funny, it seems fair to me.

Sara K.: Thank you anyway, but I don’t think we want to go to your universe.

Greg: But that means you still won’t have enough money for your congregation. If you come to OUR universe, you can have all the money you want. Of course, you can’t be Unitarian Universalists, because we would tell you what religion you could be.

Emma: We’ll just have to raise the money ourselves. That way, we get to choose what religion we want to be.

Aarav: Besides, I think your way of doing things in unfair.

Sarah D.: It looks like we’re wasting our time here.

Greg: I agree. Let’s go back to our own universe.

[10 seconds of Greg smiling at the camera]

[10 seconds of Sarah D. smiling at the camera]

Sarah K.: I’ve often seen a person without a grin.

Emma: But a grin without a person! What an odd thing to see.

Aarav: Even though we lost all that money, I’m glad they’re gone.

John: Yes, I agree. Rather than having their money, I prefer the freedom to CHOOSE to do what WE think is right.

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing and producing videos nearly every week for the online worship services at the UU Church of Palo Alto. For my own reference, I just created blog posts for each of the videos I’ve done so far, including a still from the video, a link to the video on Youtube, and a full script. The posts are backdated to the Sunday on which the video appeared in the worship service.

You can see all these blog posts here.

The third installment of the Contestants on a Game Show! series:

Here’s the full script as written, though it may have been modified in performance or in editing:

John: So far we’ve made two hundred and ten thousand, one hundred dollars for our congregation by appearing on game shows.

Sarah: This week, we’re going to try Celebrity Family Feud.

Emma: Aarav, we want you to be part of our family.

Aarav: I’m willing. But we’re not exactly celebrities.

John: Once we’re on TV, we’re automatically celebrities. Let’s go!

[Greg appears to wild applause, bowing to the audience, while the Announcer speaks offscreen] Announcer: It’s time for Celebrity Family Food! Introducing Aarav, Emma, John, and Sarah playing for UUCPA! Playing against Fannie Farmer! And now, the star of our show, Greg Becker!

Sarah: Did he just say “Celebrity Family FOOD”?

Greg: Welcome to Celebrity Family Food!

Aarav: Yes, he just said “Celebrity Family FOOD.” What’s going on here?

Greg: Now it’s time to play — Fast Money! Fannie Farmer, I’m going to ask you three questions about Unitarian food in 20 seconds. If you can’t think of an answer, just say pass.

Sarah (as Fannie Farmer): I’m ready.

Greg: Tell them what you’re playing for.

Sarah: Twenty five thousand dollars.

Greg: All right, here are your questions. What famous Unitarian published a cookbook in 1896?

Sarah: I published my cookbook in 1896, and it’s still in print.

Greg: Who introduced the idea of standardized measurements in cooking?

Sarah: I said that you should use a LEVEL teaspoon, so it was always the same amount.

Greg: Who printed the first recipe for brownies?

Sarah: I didn’t invent the brownie. But my cookbook had the very first recipe for a brownie.

John: This is weird. Isn’t he supposed to say, “Survey says,” and then show how many people answered the question in the same way?

Aarav: I don’t think this is Celebrity Family Feud, guys. It’s like we’ve entered some kind of weird alternate universe.

Greg: Now it’s time for the UUCPA team to answer some Unitarian food questions.

Emma: Can I ask you a question?

Greg: Sure, ask me a question!

Emma: Aren’t you the same person who the host of the last game show we were on?

Greg: Don’t ask me a question. I’m going to ask you questions about Unitarian food. Since there are four of you, you get four questions. Which famous Unitarian printed a cookbook with a recipe for roasted opossum?

Aarav: Irma Rombauer, in her cookbook The Joy of Cooking.

Greg: What famous Unitarian got the help of her women’s group at church to write her cookbook?

Sarah: Irma Rombauer.

Greg: Marion Rombauer Becker, who grew up in a Unitarian church, wrote the fifth edition of The Joy of Cooking. What was her mother’s name?

John: Irma Rombauer.

Greg: Here’s your last question….

Emma: Irma Rombauer.

Greg: I didn’t even ask the question.

Emma: Irma Rombauer.

Greg: Well, that happens to be correct, so you beat Fannie Farmer and win twenty-five thousand dollars!

Aarav: Is this game show legit?

Greg: What do you mean?

Aarav: This doesn’t look anything like the real Family Feud.

Sarah: Yes, what’s going on?

Greg: Well, actually….

Announcer: Tune in next week, and find out what’s actually going on!

The second installment of the Contestants on a Game Show! video series:

Here’s the full script as written, though it may have been modified in performance or in editing:

Announcer: And now, here he is, the one, the only, Groucho Becker!

Groucho: Oh, brother, what I know about him. Oh, that’s me! [Audience applause]

Groucho: Well, here I am again with a chance for our contestants to win ten thousand bucks. No contestant ever won ten thousand dollars, they’re either dumb, or we’re crooked. And if any of them say the secret word, the duck will pay them a hundred dollars.

DUCK DROPS DOWN WITH THE SECRET WORD: “NAME”

Groucho: OK, Duck, oh ree-vwah. (to audience) He’s a French duck.

Announcer: Groucho, we have John, Emma, and Sarah from Silicon Valley. Folks, come in here and meet — Groucho Becker.

Groucho: What made you want to come on this show?

John: We’re raising money for our congregation.

Groucho: Is that right? Now, Sarah, what do you do?

Sarah: I’m a student at Mountain View High School.

Groucho: I didn’t know they had any students at Mountain View High School. (looks at audience for laugh) John, are you a student too?

John: Yes, I study history.

Groucho: You know, I’ve noticed that most historical figures are dead. Is that true?

John: Yes, but can I just say that you remind me of someone?

Groucho: I hope I remind you of me. Now Emma, what profession are you studying for?

Emma: Artist. Umm, may I say a few words?

Groucho: Sure, go ahead.

Emma: Food. Smile. Tree. Room. Street. [she looks up for the duck] I didn’t get it.

Groucho: What kind of artist did you say you wanted to be?

Emma: A painter.

Groucho: I was thinking maybe con artist. And now let’s play You Bet Your Life. If you get four right answers in a row, you win ten thousand dollars. You selected Unitarian Universalist History. Who stayed with the Universalist Nathan Johnson on his first night as a free man?

John: Frederick Douglass!

Groucho: That’s right! What Unitarian Universalist theologian wrote the book “Is God a White Racist?”

Sarah: William R. Jones.

Groucho: That’s correct. This congregation that you’re raising money for, is it Unitarian Universalist?

John: Why, yes.

Groucho: I could have guessed that. Which Unitarian Universalist won two Nobel prizes, one in Chemistry, one in Peace?

Emma: His name was Linus Pauling.

DUCK DROPS DOWN

Groucho: NOW you said the secret word. (Hands money to them) You three split a hundred dollars.

John, Sarah, and Emma: Thank you!

Groucho: You have three right answers, one more and you win ten thousand dollars. You sure you don’t want to change topics?

John: No, not really.

Groucho: I could ask you questions about something you know nothing about.

Sarah: No, that’s OK.

Groucho: If you answer this question correctly, you win ten thousand dollars. Which Unitarian was the most famous African American author of her day?

John: Sarah Watkins Harper.

Groucho: That’s correct. That’s ten thousand dollars. Go ahead, give ’em the money.

[Announcer hands them the money]

John: Thank you!

Sarah: We’ll give this money to our congregation.

Emma: If I say “name” again, do we get another hundred dollars for our congregation?

Groucho: No. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show, now get out of here.

Sarah: Did you notice that Groucho looked a lot like the game show host from last week?…

We’ve been having some warm evenings here, warm enough to sit outside in our small back patio. I wanted to sit and the patio and read, so I picked up the LED lantern we have as emergency lighting. We now have to have emergency lanterns on hand because Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has decided that in times of high fire danger, it’s cheaper to turn off power than to actually spend their shareholder’s money to upgrade their crumbling infrastructure.

The problem with LED lanterns is that you have to keep buying batteries. Plus the LED lanterns we have tend to have weird internal reflections and shadows. I looked at Carol’s collection of oil lamp parts, harvested from her scrounging expeditions, but unfortunately there weren’t enough compatible parts to make one working oil lamp.

Surely there must be a way to make a simple oil lamp without buying anything, I thought to myself. A quick Web search revealed lots of DIY plans for a glass jar oil lamp, all of which probably stem from an old Mother Earth News article on the subject.

I took one of Carol’s Mason jars, cut a piece of cotton string for the wick, and bent a piece of wire to hold the wick up, and poured in some olive oil (the only vegetable oil we happened to have on hand). The tiny wick didn’t produce enough light to read by, so I braided three pieces of string together. Now the lamp produced enough light to read by.

Unfortunately, with the bigger wick, the lamp produced a lot of smoke; I’d never use this lamp indoors. And the glass jar didn’t adequately shield the flame from the evening breezes, so the flame flickered and jumped, making it hard to read; in fact, I had to leave the LED lantern turned on to have enough light to read.

There’s a reason manufactured oil lamps have elaborate glass chimneys, and large flat wicks the height of which can be adjusted by a turn screw. Those technological innovations provide more light, and prevent the lamp from smoking. The glass jar oil lamp is better than nothing, so it’s useful for emergency lighting if you don’t have anything else. But with fire season due to begin soon, and with the continued incompetence of PG&E suggesting that we’re going to have more power outages this fire season, I guess I’d better bite the bullet and buy some manufactured oil lamps, with wide flat wicks and glass chimneys.

The first installment of the Contestants on a Game Show! video series:

Here’s the full script as written, though it may have been modified in performance or in editing:

Sarah: I heard that because of COVID, our congregation is losing lots of rental income.

John: How can we raise money to help? I’ve got it! We’ll be contestants on game shows.

Sarah: Whatever prize money we win, we’ll give to the congregation!

John: Let’s start with our favorite game show….

Offscreen announcer while Greg is on screen smiling: Here’s Alex Tribble!

Greg: This is Lethargy, America’s favorite answer and question show. Today’s contestants are John and Francesca from Silicon Valley. And our returning contestant is Sigmund Freud, from Freiberg, Austria.

John: Hi!

Sarah: Hi!

Sigmund Freud: Hi.

Greg: Here are the three categories for in this round: Famous Unitarians, Famous Universalists, and Famous Unitarian Universalists.

Sigmund: What is this Universalist Unitarian nonsense?

Sarah: I’ll take Famous Unitarians for $200.

Greg: She wrote the famous children’s book Little Women.

Francesca [hitting buzzer]: Oo, oo, I know! Who was Louisa May Alcott?

Greg: That’s correct.

John: I’ll take Famous Universalists for $500.

Greg: He started a famous circus.

John [hitting buzzer]: Who was P. T. Barnum?

Greg: That’s correct.

Sigmund Freud: I choose Famous Unitarian Universalists for $1000!

Greg: The answer is: The inventor of the World Wide Web.

Sigmund [hitting buzzer]: What is the interpretation of dreams?

Greg: No….

Sarah [hitting buzzer]: Oo, I know! Who is Tim Berners-Lee?

Greg: That’s correct! Now it’s time for Final Lethargy. The category is: Unitarian Universalist hymns.

John and Sarah jumping up and down: OO! OO!

Greg: Whoever gets this right wins $100,000! And the answer is: The hymn with a rose in wintertime.

Sarah (hitting her buzzer): I know! What is “Come Sing a Song with Me”?

John (hitting his buzzer): I know! What is “Come Sing a Song with Me”?

Sigmund (looking confused): What? What is this rose? Are you all neurotic?

Greg: John and Francesca, you each win $100,000! Today’s third place contestant wins a beautiful lounge suite.

Sigmund (looking furious): I hate lounge suites.

John: Wow, we won!

Sarah: We have $200,000 to give to our congregation!

Greg: Tune in next week when I host another game show….

I did register for the online General Assembly (GA), but I have to admit I attended very few sessions. I discovered that I have a limit on how much screen time my body will tolerate in any given week, and I had pretty much reached that limit by Thursday. I watched perhaps an hour of the business sessions — long enough to realize that I’m going to miss our current co-moderators. I find them inspiring and visionary in their leadership. And while I’m sure the incoming co-moderators are highly competent people, it was awfully nice to have co-moderators who were younger than I am.

The one session from GA that really stands out in my mind is a session that I missed, but was brought to my attention by Linda H., a member of the curriculum subcommittee in my congregation. This was session 203, “Collaborative Planning of Highly Interactive Family Worship,” with Louise Marcoux of the UU church of Sharon, Mass. I started listening to the recording, and remembered that I heard Louise talking about this concept a couple of years ago. At that time, I had filed the idea away in my memory as very interesting but impossible to do in our physical space at the UU Church of Palo Alto, because we don’t have a room we could use for family worship on Sunday morning. But we’re going to be doing everything online for some time to come, and it looks like Louise’s concept could translate really well to an online setting.

A video of memories of the stuffed animal sleepover:

Here’s the full script as written, though it may have been modified in performance or in editing:

Mr. Bear: Last week’s Stuffed Animal Sleepover was so much fun.

Ms. Bear: Let’s show some of our favorite photos from the sleepover. Dr. Sharpie, can you start the slide show?

Sharpie: Mm-hm. [Slideshow begins]

Mr. Bear: I wish we could have a sleepover at UUCPA every week, so I could see my stuffed animal friends.

Ms. Bear: Yes, it’s sad that we can’t see our stuffie friends every week. But think about the UUCPA humans: because of COVID-19, they won’t get to see all their human friends at UUCPA for months.

Mr. Bear: Well, it’s very nice then that we can show them all their favorite places at UUCPA. And it’s nice that we got to drink hot chocolate for them.

Ms. Bear: Remember when Pengui spotted the trash, and we were worried Trashman would appear?

Mr. Bear: Thank goodness Ecojustice Avenger showed up in time to prevent that! Ms. Bear, do you think we’ll be able to have another stuffed animal sleepover at UUCPA?

Ms. Bear: Yes, we will. I’ll be talking with Amy and Dan, the UUCPA ministers, to figure out a time for another sleepover.

Mr. Bear: We’re coming to my favorite part of the sleepover.

Ms. Bear: You mean playing Red Light, Green Light?

Mr. Bear: No, my favorite part was the evening worship service. I felt so peaceful afterwards. [Slide show ends]

Ms. Bear: It’s fun looking at these photos.

Mr. Bear: I can’t wait until we have another sleepover!

Below is the text of an online talk I gave on feminist theology this evening. The best part of the talk was the discussiona fterwards; unfortunately I can’t reproduce that here.

I’d like to begin with the predictive power of feminist theory. Back in the year 2000, feminist theorist and public intellectual bell hooks wrote a slim volume titled Feminism Is for Everybody. In one of the essays in that book, hooks describes what men can become in the absence of feminism:

“Patriarchal masculinity encourages encourages men to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent on the privileges (however relative) that they receive simply for having been born male. Many men feel that their lives are being threatened if these privileges are taken away, as they have structured no meaningful core identity.”

These two sentences, written twenty years ago, accurately describe several contemporary politicians, including Donald Trump, our current president of the United States. Trump is an extreme example of what happens to a man who is firmly rooted in patriarchal masculinity. Unfortunately, he’s not the only American male this description fits. I’ll go further and say that, due to a decades-long decline in feminism, most white American men — including myself — fit this description to a greater or lesser degree. We white men in America all tend to think we are the most important people in the room, even when we claim to to be enlightened feminists; this means we are all narcissistic to some degree, and infantile insofar as we are psychologically dependent on our male privilege. (Parenthetical note about the reality of male privilege: one of the most interesting things that I have learned from the greater willingness of transgendered persons to be open about their gender identity is hearing what it’s like for people who transition from female to male in their college years: they report that suddenly they have male privilege; suddenly women and other men defer to them; suddenly their opinion becomes more important just be virtue of being male.)

Seeing all these narcissistic, infantile, dependent men should be a wake-up call to all of us, and especially to us as Unitarian Universalists. We already knew that patriarchal masculinity damages girls and women girls through sexual violence and sexual harassment, through repressing their natural abilities. But patriarchal masculinity is also warping boys and men, and it’s creating increasing numbers of toxic monsters like Donald Trump.

We need feminism more than ever before. In particular, we Unitarian Universalists need to develop a feminist theology that offers a positive vision of hope for our future. For this is one of the things that Unitarian Universalism can do best in our society: offer a positive vision.

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA), we say that our mission is to transform ourselves, each other, and the world. A positive feminist vision can help all genders, including men, transform themselves into whole and psychologically healthy human beings. A positive feminist vision can help us keep men and boys from being warped by patriarchal masculinity, and help all other genders from suffering damage at the hands of patriarchal masculinity. A positive feminist vision can help us envision a world where humans do not try to dominate other humans, and where humanity does not try to dominate the non-human world.

With this in mind, this adult religious education class is going to be a whirl-wind tour of feminist theology. I’m going to touch on four feminist theorists that have influenced the way Unitarian Universalists have thought about women and about feminism. And in the end, I hope I will have outlined something of a feminist vision of hope.

I’ll start with Mary Daly, because her 1973 book Beyond God the Father had a huge impact on U.S. feminists, including Unitarian Universalists. Beyond God the Father pointed out how religion did not need to be founded on a vision of a male god; we did not need to reinforce patriarchal masculinity through the belief structures and institutions of organized religion. In this book Daly wrote: “Exclusively masculine symbolism for God, for the notion of divine ‘incarnation’ in human nature, and for the human relationship to God reinforce sexual hierarchy. Tremendous damage is done….” [p. 4] Unitarian Universalist paid attention, and within ten years we, like many of the more liberal religious groups in the U.S., began including women’s voices and images in religion by, for example, issuing collections of hymns that replaced the old masculine religious imagery with gender-neutral imagery. By 1985, the Unitarian Universalist Association had revised its statement of principles and purposes with the express intent of removing sexist references.

However, Unitarian Unviersalists did not, for the most part, follow Daly as she became increasingly radical in her feminism. Unitarian Universalists aimed for equality between men and women. But in 1978, in her book Gyn/Ecology, Daly criticized equality under what she calls “tokenism.” According to Daly, tokenism “is commonly guised as Equal Rights, and [it] yields token victories….” Daly went on to assert that tokenism, or equal rights, whatever you want to call it, serves to deflect what she calls “gynergy,” which might be loosely defined as female power unbounded by patriarchy.

The effect of tokenism and equal rights, said Daly, is that:

“…female power, galvanized under deceptive slogans of sisterhood, is swallowed by The Fraternity. This method of vampirizing the Female Self saps women by giving illusions of partial success while at the same time making Success appear to be a far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain ‘elusive objective.’ When the oppressed are worn out in the game of chasing the elusive shadow of Success, some ‘successes’ are permitted to occur — ‘victories’ which can easily be withdrawn when the victim’s energies have been restored. Subsequently, women are lured into repeating efforts to regain the hard-won apparent gains.”

While this statement still may appear radical to us Unitarian Universalists today, I believe Daly gave an accurate prophesy of what actually happened in Unitarian Universalism. We Unitarian Universalists went down the path of equal rights: we worked hard to make sure of women’s equality in ministry; we worked hard to provide non-gendered references in our hymnal and other worship resources, in the name of equality; we worked hard to provide equality in lay leaders, both at the level of local congregations, and at the denominational level. And what was the result?

Today, a bit more than half our Unitarian Universalist ministers are women; yet male ministers are still more likely to have the high-paying positions at high-profile congregations. Furthermore, religious educators — who do what is traditionally considered “women’s work” and nine-tenths of whom are women — are mostly part-time and poorly paid employees whose jobs are the first to be cut in economic hard times. (Parenthetical note: two northern California congregations have cut their religious educator position entirely in the past twelve months rather than reduce the hours or salary of the minister position, thus revealing that “men’s work” is more valuable to us than “women’s work.”) So even though women serve equally as unitarian Universalist ministers, “women’s work,” taking care of children, is still devalued. Overall, success for women as religious professionals remains exactly what Daly said it would be: a “far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain ‘elusive objective’,” in spite of some hard-fought successes.

It is depressing to see this play out in Unitarian Universalism. In 1985, Daly wrote: “Despite the many and solid gains of recent years, the battering of women’s psyches in this period of backlash has dis-couraged many from the process of understanding phallocracy and imagining ways of breaking out. Indeed women are terrorized into amnesia and made afraid to know the full implications of patriarchal power.” Too bad Unitarian Universalism didn’t follow Mary Daly’s lead; as it is, we still don’t have an adequate feminist vision of hope for the future.

Unfortunately, I even see this dynamic at play in our own congregation. While girls at UUCPA have a great role model in Amy Morgenstern as the religious head of the congregation; while they can see me, a man, getting great satisfaction from doing women’s work; — nevertheless the congregation is still run on the “Great Man” model of leadership, with a powerful Board president (who happens to be a woman), and a powerful senior minister (who does however make every effort to distribute power widely). This is to say: we still rely on a patriarchal model of leadership and management at UUCPA; perhaps it could not be otherwise, for here we are in Silicon Valley, surrounded by the virulent sexism of the tech industry; and like it or not, we are affected by our surrounding culture. At UUCPA, we are perhaps less patriarchal than the surrounding culture, but we are very far from the positive vision outlined by Daly, of women freed to be themselves, freed of male domination.

Domination becomes an important concept in feminist, and to explore it a little further I’ll turn now to Rosemary Radford Reuther. Reuther is a feminist theologian who is connected to eco-feminism, which I addressed in the last class. So I won’t spend as much time on her as I did on Daly. But I would like to read you this passage from Reuther’s book “Sexism and God-talk,” where she talks about the roots of domination:

“In her well-known article ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’ Sherry Ortner postulates a universal devaluation of the hierarchy of culture (the sphere of human control) over nature (spontaneous processes that humans don’t originate or control but are dependent on). Women are symbolized as ‘closer to nature’ than men and thus fall in an intermediate position between culture as the male sphere and uncontrolled nature. This is due both to woman’s physiological role in the biological processes that reproduce the species rather than in processes that enhance her as an individual and to the ability of male collective power to extend women’s physiological role into social roles confined to child nurture and domestic labor. Female physiological processes are viewed as dangerous and polluting to higher (male) culture. Her social roles are regarded as inferior to those of males, falling lower on the nature-culture hierarchy.” [p. 62]

Reuther wrote this in 1983, and we might argue with her based on today’s more careful distinction between gender identity, biological sex, and gender roles. Nevertheless, it’s clear that patriarchy exists; and Reuther is making a larger point here:

“Ultimately we have to ask why nature itself comes to be seen as devalued and inferior to the human. We cannot criticize the hierarchy of male over female without ultimately criticizing and overcoming the hierarchy of humans over nature.” [p. 62]

In this passage, Reuther is leading us to the conclusion that environmental destruction is caused by patriarchy. It’s a hierarchy, where humans are more highly valued than the non-human realm, and then in the human realm men are more highly valued than women. We can, by the way, extend this argument further: non-white humans have been symbolized as somehow closer to nature than white humans — black people are supposed to be better dancers and athletes, indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen to be more attuned to nature, and so on — and thus non-white people are seen as falling lower on the culture hierarchy than white men.

Since we explored ecofeminism in the last class, I’m not going to go any further into this topic, except to say that I continue to believe that ecofeminism, with its critique of domination, offers a powerful vision of hope for the future.

Domination is related to another topic in feminist thinking, understanding violence against women. And this brings us to Rebecca Parker, a liberal Christian who was for many years the president of Starr King School for the Ministry, a Unitarian Universalist theological school. In a book she wrote with Rita Nakashima Brock titled “Proverbs of Ashes,” Rebecca Parker wrote:

“A woman’s religious home can be a place where she is endangered rather than nurtured, put at risk rather than initiated into freedom and life…. women need to construct alternative religious ideas that allow for women’s lives to be resurrected from the scourges of violence and abuse.” [p. 19]

Parker writes from a liberal Christian perspective, and she specifically targets Christian ideals of sacrifice. Many Christian women find justification for tolerating abuse in the Christian story: that Jesus died for our sins, that the Christian God was sacrificed on the cross to redeem all humanity. If Jesus could make the ultimate sacrifice, then surely a human woman could follow Jesus’s example, and put her life at risk by enduring abuse from her husband, a clergyman, a man in her church.

Now then, non-Christian Unitarian Universalists, you shouldn’t feel smug when you hear this. True, Unitarian Universalists — both those of us who are Christian and those of us who are not — have for the most part rejected the idea that Jesus gave his life to redeem all humanity. However, all too often I have seen Unitarian Universalism women abused by men, and not finding the resources to resist such abuse in Unitarian Universalism.

I am particularly bothered by the male Unitarian Universalist ministers who prey on women. In my home church, the man who was minister when I was a child had sexual intercourse with quite a few women in the congregation. I don’t want to demonize him, for he did many things right: he spoke out against the Vietnam War when it wasn’t popular to do so; he advocated tirelessly for better programs and ministries for children. But at the same time he was a sexual predator, and the congregation tolerated his behavior for too many years before finally ousting him.

And UUCPA is a congregation where many women were not able to feel safe from the mid-1970s through 1999. Bill Jacobson was the minister of UUCPA during this time, and it’s pretty clear that he was a sexual predator who had sexual intercourse with women in the congregation, possibly including teenagers. Now some might want to excuse Jacobson, arguing that in those years we didn’t know as much as we do now about the negative effects that happen when a minister, someone with institutional power, has sex with someone in the congregation. I’m willing to excuse single male ministers who married a woman in their congregation — behavior we now know to be unacceptable, but which was considered acceptable for many years — but I am not willing to excuse a male minister who had sexual contact with multiple women in his congregation; there never was any acceptable justification for such behavior; those male ministers were sexual predators because they could get away with it, not because it was considered right or proper behavior.

Indeed, it was only a few years ago that the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association changed its code of ethics to specifically prohibit having sex with congregants. And the code of ethics went further than that: if one minister believed another minister was engaging in behavior against the code of ethics, the first minister was supposed to confront the misbehaving minister before doing anything else. I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association in those days, and I ignored that last requirement. There were male ministers who were known to us to prey on female religious educators, and I was one of several ministers who told women who were new religious educators to stay away from those male ministers; confronting those men would have been an exercise in futility, since they were part of the Old Boys Network, and we religious educators were relatively powerless; confronting them might cost us our jobs; yet we wanted to be sure vulnerable women were warned.

(As an aside, one of those sexual predators is still an active Unitarian Universalist minister and is revered in the denomination; everyone once in a while, someone will tell me how wonderful he is, and I still stay silent. He has more power and money than I do, and I don’t want to be sued by him for slander nor bad-mouthed by him to important denominational officials. I tell you this as an example of the extent to which patriarchy still rules in Unitarian Universalism.)

I will say that UUCPA is doing better than the denomination as a whole in protecting women in our congregation from sexual harassment, including sexual predation, unwanted touch, unwanted contact, and so on. At UUCPA, we have a pretty good behavioral covenant. Men at UUCPA mostly behave pretty well — or at least, we behave better than the wider culture — and for the most part, when UUCPA men are told to back off, we back off. For the most part.

But let’s face it, in a society governed by patriarchal masculinity, I may well be unaware of instances of misbehavior by men in the congregation (and if you’re a woman who has experienced sexual harassment at UUCPA, I hope you will feel able to tell Amy, me, or a member of the Committee on Ministry about it). And I readily admit we UUCPA men are still pretty bad about dominating conversations, talking over women, not hearing women’s concerns or women’s voices. We still have work to do.

Nevertheless, Rebecca Parker offers us a vision of hope for the future, and I recommend the book Proverbs of Ashes to you. Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock offer powerful stories of how women have faced up to sexual violence. They also offer an important message for those of us who haven’t experienced sexual violence, but who are trying to help and understand those who have. Brock and Parker say: Be quiet and listen. I think this is especially powerful, because under patriarchy we’re either supposed to fix problems, or defend ourselves and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Of course, if a woman tells me that she is currently experiencing sexual harassment or sexual violence or domestic violence, I’m going to ask her if I can help extricate her from that situation. But more important is to listen without turning away; to listen in order to try to understand.

This is an important part of a feminist vision for the future: listen to those who have experienced violence. And in this moment when the wider culture is suddenly aware of the daily violence experienced by people of color, this is an important thing to remember. Yes, we all need to work together to change policing policies so we prevent further violence. But those of us who have not experienced this kind of violence also have to listen to people of color who have experienced; to listen without turning away from the anger and rage. I would go further and say this is ultimately a religious task: to still our own needs, and listen to those who have been harmed by violence. And this is an essential step towards ending, or at least greatly reducing violence.

I have time for a brief look at one more feminist theologian, the neo-Pagan writer Starhawk. Here is Starhawk’s vision for her feminist neo-Pagan theology, taken from her 1987 book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery:

“We are never apart from the power of the mysteries. Every breath we take encompasses the circle of birth, death, and rebirth. The forces that push the blood cells through our veins are the same forces that spun the universe out of the primal ball of fire. We do not know what those forces are. We can invoke them, but we cannot control them…. Yet somehow we human beings … have managed to create a culture in which the power of the mysteries has been denied and power itself has been redefined as power-over, as domination and control… We are not particularly happy in this condition. We do not enjoy being the targets of nuclear warheads or developing cancer from our polluted environment. We do not enjoy starving, or wasting our lives in meaningless work, nor are we eager to be raped, abused, tortured, or bossed around. Whether the bosses enjoy their role is not the issue. The question is, how are the rest of us controlled? Or, even more to the point, How do we break control and set ourselves free?” [p. 6]

Starhawk has been a big influence within Unitarian Universalism partly because she offers a powerful vision of a feminine divinity, but perhaps more importantly because of her insistence that religious ritual is essential for social justice work, and also because she offers practices and exercises to reveal the working of power and authority in groups. Indeed, her book Truth or Dare is almost a recipe book for how to do groups based on feminist power analysis. I use her tools and exercises all the time in small groups that I’m a part of.

In particular, she takes the distinction between power-over and power-with — a distinction that, to the best of my knowledge, was first articulated by theologina Bernard Loomer, who was affiliated with both the Presbyterians and the Unitarian Universalists — Starhawk takes the somewhat lofty concepts of power-over and power-with and translates them into practical things you can implement in your small group. Here’s how she defines these two types of power in Truth or Dare:

“Power-over is decision-making power, control. In a hierarchy, it flows from the top down. In an egalitarian group, it remains broadly based. Decisions are made by the people most affected by them, and/or those who will carry them out. Power-with is influence. Whose voice is listened to? Whose ideas are most likely to be adopted?” [p. 268]

Starhawk also considers a third type of power, power-from-within, and explores how that type of power can be used to resist domination and control. And although Truth or Dare is a little dated now, it’s still an excellent resource for building non-patriarchal leadership in small religious groups.

So I’ve almost concluded my whirlwind tour of feminist theology. I’ve left a lot out of this whirlwind tour. I wish I had had time to talk about Sharon Welch, a theologian and ethicist who is both a humanist and a feminist. I wish I had had more time to talk about the feminist thinking of black women theologians, and Latina women theologians, and so on. I wish I had had time to dive into Queer theology, and talk about non-binary gender definitions in theological thinking. I wish I knew enough myself to talk about some of these things!

But I don’t have time. So I’ll end with a final vision of hope from the feminist bell hooks, again from her book “Feminism Is for Everybody,” published back in 2000:

“We are told again and again by patriarchal mass media, by sexist leaders, that feminism is dead, that it no longer has meaning. In actuality, females and males [editorial addition: and all other genders] of all ages, everywhere, continue to grapple with the issue of gender equality, continue to seek roles for themselves that will liberate rather than restrict and confine; and they continue to turn to feminism for answers. Visionary feminism offers us hope for the future….” [p. 117]

I heard about stuffed animal sleepovers from my sister Abby, the children’s librarian. Children’s librarians have been hosting stuffed animal sleepovers at their libraries for some years now. I thought it would be fun to do one for my congregation, but the time never seemed quite right. But now, when children aren’t allowed to go into the congregation’s buildings due to the pandemic, is the perfect time for a stuffed animal sleepover.

So here’s how you can host a stuffed animal sleepover at your congregation.

The end result of a stuffed animal sleepover is a photo album that you post on Facebook or other social media platform. I started out by looking at a couple of Abby’s photo albums from her stuffed animal sleepovers at the Harvard, Mass., public library: the 2019 Stuffed Animal Sleepover and the 2018 Stuffed Animal Sleepover. And for your reference, here’s our 2020 Stuffed Animal Sleepover.

Abby pointed out some of the educational content in what seems like light-hearted fun. In the course of the sleepover, the stuffed animals see some of the library’s resources that might be of interest to children; they look at some books that Abby wanted to make more widely known; and they became familiar with the library building as a place that was both fun and welcoming to children.

That helped me establish my own educational content. In my congregation, our primary educational goal is to have fun and build community. This is both a practical goal — organized religion is very much an optional activity in our culture, and if it isn’t fun then families are less likely to remain involved — and an idealistic goal — religious education is not mere preparation for life, it is learning by doing, learning how to build the beloved community by creating community in religious education settings. So in my congregation, a Stuffed Animal Sleepover is going to be light-hearted fun for kids, it’s going to promote a feeling of identity with the congregation, and it’s going to show stuffed animals living in beloved community.

With that idea in mind, I began to write out a script for the photos I wanted to take. Because children have now been away from our building for three months, I wanted to show remind them what their classrooms and other places on campus look like. I wanted to incorporate some of the basic rituals of congregational life, including lighting a flaming chalice, drinking hot chocolate (in surveys with children, over 90% of kids report hot chocolate as a favorite part of our congregation), and being in a worship service in our Main Hall.

The actual written script didn’t go into all this high-level stuff, though. My script was terse and practical. Here’s an excerpt:

Saturday morning:
Room 10:
Brunch
[Props: Granola, hot chocolate]
Lighting chalice, check-in
[Props: chalice, candle, matches]
Room 7:
Play time
[Props: play equipment already in the room]
Room 6:
Playing games
[Props: board games]
Coloring
[Props: crayons, coloring pages]
POST PHOTOS TAKEN THUS FAR

Our campus is spread out, so I used a wagon to carry the stuffed animals from one location to the next. The wagon also allowed me to show more of the campus: I could leave the stuffies in the wagon, as if they’re going on a tour, and take photos of them admiring parts of the campus.

The captions you write are just as important as the photos themselves. In the captions, you find out that the stuffed animals vote when they’re making important decisions; you learn that some of the stuffies identify as LGBTQ+; you discover that the stuffies have conversations about race and racism; etc.

I was also able to showcase some of my favorite cooperative board games, and I could highlight some books to which I wanted to draw attention.

I created an online registration form for the stuffed animals. Mostly, I wanted to have the cell phone and name of the adult who was going to be dropping off the stuffed animal. But, at the instigation of my sister, I added questions like: What time does your stuffie have to go to bed? and What kind of snakc is your stuffed animal allowed to have?

Publicity started going out 3 weeks before the event, with an announcement in the monthly religious education newsletter. I made a two and a half minute video with the two chaperones, two plush puppets named Mr. and Ms. Bear who were going to be the chaperones of the event, and this video was aired during the congregation’s online worship service the week before the event. Then I sent out email announcements 3 days before, and the day before. Out of a total enrollment of 112 children and teens, 10 children brought stuffies to participate. (Several other parents told me that their child couldn’t bear to part with a stuffie; some families just plain forgot; and some more families reported that their family didn’t understand what it was all about, but now that they knew they would participate the next time.)

I spent most of Wednesday prepping rooms for photos. A homeless shelter had just vacated our rooms a few days before, so I did some touch-up cleaning, arranged furniture the way kids would remember it, etc. More importantly, I got props ready — story books, games, snacks, etc., were either placed in the room where they’d be used, or were placed in paper bags ready to carry to the appropriate room.

Drop-off for stuffies was Friday evening. I asked that stuffies be brought in a paper bag, and told everyone that they were going to be left overnight in quarantine (actually to minimize my own risk of getting COVID-19 from a stuffie). I posted a few photos of the check-in process on Facebook, to build some initial interest.

Saturday was a 12 hour day. I planned to take between 80 and 90 photos (I actually wound up taking 83 on Saturday). Moving stuffies from room to room, arranging the stuffies and props, taking extra photos just in case, uploading photos to Facebook and writing cpations — it all takes time. I managed an hour for lunch, and half an hour for dinner. Bed time for the stuffies was 8 p.m., but then I spent another hour or so cleaning up.

Then on Sunday morning, the stuffies appeared in the livestreamed service. Arranging them, and lighting them, took more time of course. Then once the service was over, I returned them to their paper bags, and spent the afternoon waiting for families to come pick them up again.

As my sister Abby warned me, doing a Stuffed Animal Sleepover takes hours and hours of time; I spent most of my forty hours this past week on the sleepover. The response — both from the children, and from adults with no children — has been overwhelmingly positive. Plus this is the perfect activity for this pandemic– yes the stuffies are cute, yes there’s some obvious educational content — but right now people of all ages just want to see the campus that they spent so many happy hours in before shelter-in-place.

A group of Christian evangelicals have published a book titled “The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump.” In an interview with Religion News Service, the editor, Ronald J. Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, answers the question, “So what is the spiritual danger of Donald Trump?”

“I would summarize it this way [Sider says]: Trump lies constantly. He has repeatedly demonstrated adulterous sexual behavior. He fails to make justice for the poor a concern in his policies. He constantly stokes white racism. His response to COVID-19 was dreadfully weak in the first couple of months. His position on climate change is simply disastrous. And his constant attacks on the fake media undermine democracy.”

Most Unitarian Universalists don’t like Donald Trump, but rarely do we speak about why he is a spiritual danger; mostly we focus on why he’s a political danger. I’m obviously not an evangelical Christian, and therefore not the target audience for Sider’s book or his remarks, but I think this summary of Trump as a spiritual danger is spot-on.

Another interesting point Sider makes in this interview is in response to the question of why white evangelicals supported Trump so strongly in 2016. A part of Sider’s response is particularly relevant to Unitarian Universalism:

“It’s partly because, let’s be honest, there’s a left wing fundamentalism as well as the right wing fundamentalism. And there’s a part of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which is really, I think, hostile to Christianity and certainly to evangelicalism. White evangelicals feel that, and don’t like it.”

This describes too many Unitarian Universalists: we can indeed come across as left wing fundamentalists who refuse to acknowledge that intelligent people can disagree with us on religious issues. For example, there are Unitarian Universalists who are convinced that global climate change is one of the top two or three most pressing issues facing humanity, who claim they’ll do everything they can to arrest global climate change, yet who are condescending and dismissive when they hear the term “creation care.”

There is no doubt that Donald Trump represents a pressing spiritual danger: he’s a liar, a racist, a misogynist, and he’s going to let the world go up in flames. It would be wise for us Unitarian Universalists to figure out how we can work effectively with all those who want to stop this clear and present spiritual danger.

It has been very interesting to listen to Donald Trump respond to the protests following the lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers: Trump has made calls for “law and order.” For anyone who remembers Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon, in the not-so-distant past a call for “law and order” was code for using police to keep African Americans in their place. But that history goes back before Goldwater and Nixon, as is made clear in this excerpt from “O Say Can You See,” the blog of the National Museum of American History:

“William J. Simmons, a former minister and promoter of fraternal societies, founded the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in 1915. His organization grew slowly, but by the 1920s, Simmons began coordinating with a public relations firm, in part to chip away at the (accurate) perception that the Klan was an outlaw group involved in extralegal violence. Membership in the Klan exploded over the next few years. As part of this PR campaign, Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal newspaper in January 1921. While explicitly advocating white supremacy, Simmons played up his group’s commitment to law and order … and even boasted of his own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of law enforcement belonged to his organization, and that the local sheriff was often one of the first to join when the Klan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that ‘[t]he sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get 200 members of the Klan at a moment’s call to suppress anything in the way of lawlessness.'”

This blog post ends with a pertinent question in Latin, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Here’s my free translation of this phrase: “Who will police the police?”

It’s been interesting watching to see what online religious education resources people actually use. How-to craft videos? Single digits for number of views. Read-aloud programs? Low double digits, if I’m lucky. It’s not a great return for my invested time.

But what about “Story for All Ages” videos that are included in the Sunday service? We typically get over a hundred log-ins to our Zoom worship services, probably representing 1.5 humans on average, and posting on other social media (Facebook Live, Youtube) might add 10-30 views to the total. Plus a lot of informal positive feedback. These videos are definitely a better return for the time I invest, and as a result that’s what I’ve been concentrating on recently.

Since the “Story for All Ages” gets the largest audience, I thought maybe I’d try a tie-in video. The current “Story for All Ages” video series is about the conflict between Ecojustice Avenger and a dastardly villain named Trashman. The Ecojustice Avenger videos have a 12 second jingle, and after two episodes some kids had memorized all the lyrics to the jingle. That inspired me to expand that 12 second jingle to a full 1:41 music video, with videography inspired by Nam June Paik:

Will this reach kids? Maybe…probably not. But doing religious education in the age of COVID-19 requires constant experimentation until we discover what we can do that will reach kids.

Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a couple of articles on virtual meetings. Back on March 5, they published an article by Bob Frisch and Cary Greene titled “What It Takes To Run a Great Virtual Meeting.” If you’re experienced at running online meetings, most of this will seem like good common sense, but you should read it anyway. Some of HBR’s suggestions should be obvious, like “test the technology ahead of time.” Others may be less obvious, but are still critically important, like “make sure faces are visible.” HBR suggests having a facilitator for meetings, someone who can take the pulse of the group; and one of their more innovative ideas is that the facilitator can use a parallel phone-based survey tool like “Phone Everywhere” to get that feedback.

An earlier article, published in 2015, by Keith Ferrazi was titled “How To Run a Great Virtual Meeting.” This covers much of the same ground, though with different emphases. Ferrazi spent a couple of years researching virtual meetings, and his article summarizes his research findings. One of my favorite points from this article: ban multitasking, because it doesn’t work and it slows down the team. I’ve been guilty of multitasking at virtual meetings, and it’s true: when I start checking email, I lose track of what’s going on in the meeting. That’s one reasons why Ferrazi says to leave video on: so you can see when someone is trying to multitask. (This, by the way, is a big drawback of Google Meet: depending on how you set up the meeting, you can only see 4 people at a time.)

An article by John Wimberly of Congregational Consulting Group got me started reading up on the topic. Wimberley titles his article “Will There Ever Be A Non-Virtual Meeting Again?” Wimberley says that once the COVID crisis ends, many urban congregations will keep doing virtual meetings because of the time it saves commuting to and from meetings. Actually, it’s not just urban congregations: congregations in suburban areas also have traffic problems; plus virtual meeting can include those who can’t travel at night (elders and people with young children); and for those of us in regional congregations, drawing from a big geographical area, virtual meetings allow our more far-flung members to participate. Before COVID-19 hit, our Palo Alto congregation was already doing hybrid meetings — some people in person, some people online — and I expect after COVID-19, there will be more committee and Board members who opt for the virtual option.

The bottom line: since virtual meetings are here to stay, we should learn how to run great virtual meetings.

Beginning back in the 1980s, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle wrote a column for BYTE magazine called “Computing at Chaos Manor” which consisted mostly of entertaining accounts of his struggles with computers and other IT software and hardware. Later on his blog “Chaos Manor,” arguably the first blog ever, Pournelle continued to write about his IT struggles, though unfortunately it looks like those old posts disappeared when Pournelle moved his blog to the WordPress platform in 2011. That’s too bad, because it would be fun to read those posts today, and se whether we’ve made any progress in home computing.

This past week, I’ve felt like I entered the land of Chaos Manor.

My troubles began when my HP Laserjet 1320 started malfunctioning: it would only print a page or two of a multi-page document, then shut down. At first I suspected that perhaps I’d missed an update for the printer driver, only to learn that HP no longer issues updates for that printer; I have to rely on Apple’s drivers. I’m told that writing printer drivers is not that hard — if you’re a software engineer, which I’m not. Instead, I looked online and bought a smaller, more energy efficient monochrome laser printer for under a hundred dollars. I had grown to like the old printer, as one grows attached to well-designed and reliable tools. Plus there is still plenty of toner in the cartridge (a corollary of Murphy’s Law says that a printer will die not long after you’ve purchased a new toner cartridge), and it can still print one page at a time. So it will go to my office as a last-ditch emergency back-up printer.

Then I made the mistake of learning how to use JamKazam, a service that allows you to make music online with other people, in almost real time. The problem with making music with other people online can be summed up in one word: latency. From a musician’s point of view, latency is the lag time between musicians, measured in milliseconds. 10 milliseconds of latency is approximately equivalent to standing 11 feet from your fellow musician; for a rule of thumb, think of 1 additional millisecond of latency as being 1 additional foot away from a fellow musician. Most musicians won’t even hear a latency of 10 milliseconds; 20 milliseconds becomes noticeable and may require extra concentration; and a latency of, say, more than 35 milliseconds makes it difficult to play in synch. If you want to know more about latency, you can read these posts on JamKazam’s support forum.

Jam Kazam provides a way of minimizing the latency, but it is not a plug-and-play-music solution. As I found out very quickly. When I tried to use the JamKazam service, their desktop client gave me several error messages. After a certain amount of swearing and head-scratching, the problem proved to be in my 11 year old wifi router. I attempted a firmware update, and the router stopped working. I had a moment of panic — Carol and I both rely on our internet connection, and we’d be in deep trouble if the router went down — but when I shut the power off and rebooted the router, it started working again. Sort of. Clearly, it was time to buy a new router.

The new router arrived today, and setting it up was mercifully easy. I started up the JamKazam desktop client on my MacBook Air, and everything worked well. However, the Jam Kazam client reported that at time I was using 20% of my processor power — and that was with just me, and no other musicians. So I started up the JamKazam desktop client on my Mac Mini, which has a much faster processor, plugged in my Blue brand Snowball USB microphone — and JamKazam returned an error message. The Snowball microphone samples at 44.1 KHz, and although JamKazam claims to allow you to change the sampling rate of your microphone, it soon became clear that unless I used a USB mic with a sampling rate of 48 KHz, the audio quality would be poor. In addition, the JamKazam desktop client revealed that the internal latency of the Mac Mini was quite high; it turns out this is a known issue with Macs: the Mac sound card introduces significant latency, which can be overcome by purchasing an external audio interface for, oh, two or three hundred dollars, or more.

I had just spent $180 on a blazing fast new wifi router; that expense I can justify. I cannot justify spending several hundred dollars on an audio interface and a new microphone. I went back to the MacBook Air. Using the internal microphone, the basic latency was under 10 milliseconds — more than sufficient for me to try using JamKazam with other musicians to see if I even like the experience.

One final addition to my home office has nothing to do with information technology, though it is the biggest improvement so far. I purchased a small apartment-sized rowing machine for under a hundred dollars. I can’t type while I’m rowing, but I can sit on the rowing machine and watch webinars or even read long pieces on Web sites. And whenever I need a five minute break, there it is, ready for me. If you’re ever on a videoconference call with me, and I turn off my video, you’ll know why — I’m rowing.

Speaking of which, I’ve been sitting at my computer too long. It’s time to row.

Religion New Service has reports on an important consideration before your church reopens:

You’ll want to talk with your insurer first.

Insurance companies, as you’d expect, are remaining “neutral on whether churches should reinstitute physical gatherings when restrictions are lifted.” Yet because they’re concerned with safety in general, insurance companies are offering concrete suggestions on how churches might one day safely reopen. According to Religion New Service:

“Guy Russ, Church Mutual’s expert on risk control, said his company’s recommendations include maintaining 6-foot distance from other parishioners in all directions, sterilizing all surfaces, using hard-cover seating options instead of fabric-covered pews to expedite cleaning, removing physical holy books or hymnals from use, and posting signage or projected messages to clearly indicate expectations for worship attendees.”

For our church in Palo Alto, that means reducing the seating capacity from 150 seats to about 50. Then since most of our chairs have fabric covers, we’d have to dig up 50 chairs with hard surfaces.

“Russ also stressed the need for religious groups to train staff and volunteers not only on cleanliness and social distancing practices, but also on how to address individuals who fail or refuse to comply with posted guidelines. In addition, he suggested houses of worship consider instituting some form of ‘contact tracing,’ whereby faith leaders either retain the contact information of people who attend events or use smartphone applications to help local authorities to trace the spread of the coronavirus if members of the congregation get sick.”

This means training a lot of volunteers. This also means taking attendance, including names and contact information, for all in-person services.

“‘If everybody has followed everything that you ask them to do and somebody who has attended an event at your facility becomes ill, what is your protocol going to be?’ he said. ‘We are recommending that each organization thinks through that question.'”

This means yet another safety policy for the Board of Trustees to vote on BEFORE reopening.

Plus there are other considerations. For instance, our music director tells us that we probably shouldn’t have any group singing, nor any group speaking, until there’s an effective vaccine — so no hymns. Beyond that, no choirs and no wind instruments either. From my perspective as an educator, I see major difficulties enforcing social distancing with younger children, so maybe there would have to be a lower age limit.

It begins to look like it will be a major challenge to hold in-person services before there’s an effective vaccine.

Which leads me to ask: What about those states that are allowing churches to reopen soon? Have they thought all these issues through?

More to the point, what about those churches that decide to reopen because they are sure God will protect them? Rev. Stephen Fearing of Beaumont Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, has the best answer to that one:

“Bad theology has consequences.”

Former president Barack Obama has called the current presidential administration’s response to the coronavirus situation “an absolute chaotic disaster.” (Full quote here.)

Even accounting for some measure of political calculation, hoping to help his own party’s chances in the November election, there’s a lot of truth in what Obama said. For example, look at this bar graph showing the number of cases per country:

And to quote the BBC: “More than 77,000 people have now died and the US has 1.2m confirmed cases — both by far the highest in the world.”

Just one of those weeks. A few too many things to do at church, a big outside volunteer commitment, plus the ordinary maintenance things that have to be done.

On Monday, Zoom released a major update to the Zoom client. If your church is using Zoom for religious education and services, note that the 5.0 version will be required for all users by May 30, so start reaching out to your congregation now — after May 30, they won’t be able to log in to one of your meetings without upgrading.

If you run kids’ programs on Zoom, you will want to upgrade now. Zoom has plugged some obvious holes that could be exploited by trolls — or by mischievous kids wanting to disrupt a class. Most important, the host “can disable the ability for participants to show their profile picture or change it in a meeting.” Other critically important security upgrades for those of us who do Zoom meetings with legal minors include the ability to embed an audio watermark in recordings (you really don’t want anyone recording minors without parental permission). And there are a few other enhancements to security that will also be helpful to teachers.

According to the Associated Press: “Louisiana authorities arrested pastor [Tony Spell] on an assault charge on Tuesday after he admitted that he drove his church bus toward a man who has been protesting his decision to continue holding mass gatherings at church in defiance of public health orders during the coronavirus pandemic.”

By contrast, after learning that the governor of Georgia planned to reopen churches and other businesses, despite contrary advice from public health professionals, “Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, the presiding prelate in Georgia for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, instructed the state’s roughly 520 AME congregations not to gather,” according to Religion News Service.

And by way of further contrast: Angelus Temple, a megachurch in Los Angeles, has now served 350,000 free meals during the pandemic, according to Religion News Service. The pastor, Matthew Barnett, said a few people disagreed with the decision to stop holding services in mid-March and concentrate instead of feeding people in need, but such criticism is “not productive in bringing about healing and possibilities of what we can do during this time.”

The difference between Tony Spell on the one hand, and Reginald T. Jackson and Matthew Barnett on the other, is that Jackson and Barnett have a more mature understanding of Christianity. They understand that their actions go far beyond the churches they supervise; their actions have ethical and moral implications that transcend their own self-interest.

What I’m taking away from this: I’m going to do my best to NOT be like Tony Spell, selfish and immature when it comes to quarantine restrictions. Instead, I’m going to do my best to model my behavior after Jackson and Barnett — looking to the greater good, acting with kindness and compassion.

My younger sister the children’s librarian has inspired me. Her library is closed, or course, so she’s creating online content by uploading an average of a new video every day to the Harvard (Mass.) Public Library Children’s Room Youtube channel. So far, she’s got a simple craft project, story time that parents can do with young children, and she’s reading aloud the entire Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

I like several things about Abby’s videos. First, they’re a great supplement to Zoom calls — some of us are getting Zoom burnout, and it’s nice to be able to watch a video when YOU want to watch it. Second, they’re Goldilocks videos — not too long, not too short, but just the right length. Third, they don’t put a big burden on parents — the crafts project can be done by kids on their own without parental supervision, kids can watch the installments of Alice on their own, and the story time for young children has them doing what they’re going to be doing anyway which is sitting in a parental lap.

So I repurposed this Youtube channel, where I already had some religious education videos. I added a video we used in last Sunday’s service. I created a couple of playlists, one for crafts (Abby’s craft video is included there), and another for story time (Abby’s Alice stories are going there, because Alice in Wonderland is a sacred text). I’ve got a children’s librarian from our congregation half convinced to do a story time, I’m planning a story time (I think I’ll read aloud from an old edition of the Jataka Tales), there will be more crafts projects.

Blog readers, if you know of some videos that you think would be appropriate to share on this Youtube channel, please send me the links. I can’t promise to put everything up, but I’d really like to see your suggestions — send them to danharper then the little “at” sign then uucpa then a dot then org.

This Sunday, during our congregation’s online service, we’re going to go back in time…

…to the year 29 C.E., to a small town in the land of Judea. There we will meet a fellow named Ishmael, who’s the kind of person who loves to spread rumors.

If Ishamael lived today, he’d be the kind of fellow who emails you the latest internet conspiracy theory. But since he lives in the year 29 in Judea, he spreads his rumors face-to-face in the town’s marketplace. He meets up with a woman named Martha. When he learns that Martha’s brother Peter has joined the entourage of the famous rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, not surprisingly he has a few conspiracy-theory-type rumors to tell Martha. This causes Martha to wonder if her brother is going to be OK….

Our trip to the past will take less than three minutes, allowing us plenty of time for the usual singing, music, preaching, etc. The whole thing will be livestreamed on the Facebook page of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, this Sunday at 9:30 and 11.