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Part Three of a history I’m writing, telling the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.
Following Rev. Sydney Snow’s departure, the leaders of the Palo Alto church were able to attract Rev. Clarence Reed as their next minister. Reed had been ordained in the Methodist Episcopal church in 1894, served a series of short-term pastorates in that denomination, and wound up in San Francisco in 1904. He then decided he was a Unitarian, resigned from his Methodist pastorate to spend a year at Harvard Divinity School, and was called to the Alameda Unitarian Church. The Alameda church was even smaller and had less money than the Palo Alto church, but it proved convenient for Reed to serve there while pursuing graduate study in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. The Alameda church had paid him $1500 per year (roughly $44,000 in 2020 dollars), and by moving to Palo Alto he received a modest increase in his salary to $1600 per year (roughly $47,000 in 2020 dollars).
Reed took two extended sabbaticals while at Palo Alto. In 1910, just a year after arriving at the church, he spent eight months traveling in Europe recovering from a health crisis. Then in 1914, he spent six months traveling in East Asia. Thus although he served the Palo Alto church from 1909 to 1915, he was actually at the church for only five of those six years.
Reed’s relationship with the Board of Trustees was not entirely harmonious. There are moments in the Board minutes where Reed is portrayed as ambitious, driven, and annoying, while for their part the Trustees seem content to remain a small, close-knit group comfortably supported financially by the American Unitarian Association. Not to put too fine a point on it, Reed wanted the church to grow, and the Trustees weren’t that interested. Reed also managed to ruffle the feathers of other lay leaders. Emma Rendtorff sounds slightly resentful when she notes in her Sunday school records that Reed took over running the Sunday school from her, and then didn’t even keep careful records of attendance. Yet Reed must have done something right, for he increased average attendance in the Sunday school to around 60 students, probably twice the average attendance Emma Rendtorff was able to achieve.
Despite the low-level tension between Reed and some lay leaders, the years when Reed was minister were a golden age for the church. Sunday attendance probably averaged around 60 to 70. The congregation finally built the social hall that they had hoped for since they bought the building lot in 1906. Sunday school enrollment climbed to 90 children and teenagers; the church had enough children and teens to stage a fairly elaborate play, “King Persifer’s Crown,” in May, 1916. But beyond these statistics, what was the church like during this golden age?
By our standards, the Unitarian Church Palo Alto church did little of what we now call social justice work. In the early twenty-first century, Unitarian Universalists believe social justice work should be one of the primary purposes of local congregations. But Unitarian churches a century ago did not necessarily share this belief, nor would they have known the phrase “social justice.” Today’s Unitarian Universalists congregation’s might provide social services (e.g., hosting a homeless shelter), take a public stand on an issue, participate in direct witness (e.g., protests, rallies), and/or provide education about societal ills. By contrast, Palo Alto Unitarians of the early twentieth century understood their church as an organization for spiritual nurture; changing society was less the responsibility of the church as an institution, and more the responsiblity of the individual members of the church.
Individual Palo Alto Unitarians were directly active in several social reform movements during the years from 1909 to 1915. Reform of women’s rights undoubtedly had the widest support. Alice Locke Park, Annie Corbert, Emily Karns Dixon, Helen Sutliff, and other Unitarian women were deeply involved in the woman suffrage issue, culminating in the 1911 statewide ballot measure which gave women the right to vote in California. In addition to the political activism of the woman suffrage movement, many women lived out the fight for women’s rights in their own lives. Caroline Morrison is a case in point. She was reportedly the first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science degree in the United States, when she earned her D.Sci. in physics at Cornell in 1898. She married in that same year, but taught physics, co-wrote a physics textbook, and published at least one journal article before abandoning her career to have children. Another case in point is Dr. Eugenie Johnson, who began practicing medicine in 1907 and continued through the early 1960s; she was able to pursue her career because she never married.
Unitarian women also belonged to other progressive women’s organizations. A dozen or so Unitarians were members of the Palo Alto Woman’s Club, including Emily Karns Dixon, Fannie Rosebrook, and Dr. Anna E. Peck, another woman physician. Fannie Rosebrook and probably other Unitarians were members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
A number of Palo Alto Unitarians were pacifists. Alice Park was probably the most active of the pacifists, but Anna Coggins, Guido Marx, Karl Rendtorff, Marion Alderton, and Ewald Flügel all held pacifist views as well. Marion Alderton was Vice President of the Palo Alto Branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Annie Tait was a member of the organization. David Starr Jordan, though he was barely involved in the congregation during the years leading up to the First World War, was also a well-known pacifist. But there were others in the church who were most definitely not pacifists. By 1916, Melville Anderson ardently supported American involvement in the war, putting a strain on his friendship with Ewald Flügel, a pacifist. In the years leading up to the war, ill feelings would grow between the pacifists and the war supporters in the congregation.
The church also included a handful of eugenicists. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, during the early twentieth century era some white people saw eugenics as another means for carrying out the Progressive ideals of creating a good society through science and rationality. Vernon Kellogg, professor of biology at Stanford, was one of these Unitarian eugenicists, and William Herbert Carruth was another. Most famously, David Starr Jordan, who was only loosely affiliated with the church in these years but widely considered to be a Unitarian, was a prominent eugenicist.
The presence of eugenicists helps us understand the racial attitudes of the church and its members. All the church members and friends were white. Most were descended from northern Europeans, a fact important to remember in those days of prejudice against Europeans from Mediterranean countries. The church records show no interest in or awareness of the racism faced by black or indigenous people in those years. Indeed, George Morell, the publisher of the Palo Alto Times who was peripherally associated with the church in 1919, publicly advocated for racially segregated housing in Palo Alto. Most church members evinced little interest in racial justice, and some went further than that: before moving to Palo Alto, Isabel Dye Butler had actively worked to enslave indigenous people. However, there were also a few individuals who showed remarkably enlightened racial attitudes, like Dr. Eugenie Johnson, who was known in Palo Alto for her lack of racial bias in treating patients.
Aside from the activities of individual Unitarians, the church did distribute modest charitable contributions on a fairly regular basis. For example, Clarence Reed announced to the Board in November, 1914, that a special offering for the Red Cross was $79.20 (roughly $2,075 in 2020 dollars); in that same month, the church donated an unspecified amount to combat child labor. The church also made regular contributions to various appeals from the American Unitarian Association, to help further the cause of Unitarianism, and the members of the church probably saw these contributions as contributing to the betterment of society.
One remarkably progressive step taken by the congregation was hiring Rev. Florence Buck while Clarence Reed went on sabbatical in 1910. By 1910, the wider Unitarian movement had turned against women ministers. Perhaps the Palo Alto church only hired Florence Buck because they could pay a woman less money than a man; but the congregation may also have been influenced both by the memory of Eliza Tupper Wilkes, and the examples of professional women who were members of the congregation. In any case, after seeing Buck in the pulpit, sixteen-year-old Helen Kreps was inspired to pursue a career in ministry (tragically, Kreps died in the great influenza epidemic, just before completing her divinity degree). Since other girls surely found inspiration and a role model in Florence Buck, her presence in the pulpit helped the wider cause of women’s rights.
The church relied on a few key lay leaders to keep the institution going. Karl and Emma Rendtorff were the most important lay leaders in the congregation from 1905 through 1913, constantly serving in various leadership roles. But when William Herbert Carruth came to Palo Alto in 1913, he immediately moved into a central leadership role in the church, both because of his personal charisma and because of his experience as a lay leader at the national and local levels. Before arriving in Palo Alto, Carruth had served on the national board of the American Unitarian Association, and had been the national president of the Unitarian Laymen’s League. Less than a year after moving to Palo Alto, he was elected president of the Board of Trustees of the Palo Alto church. Until his untimely death in 1925, William Carruth was also one of the central leaders of the church, along with the Rendtorffs.
Just before Carruth had arrived in Palo Alto, Isabel Dye Butler, another important lay leader, had died. Isabel, with her husband John Strang Butler, were a wealthy couple who gave the single largest contribution to the church lot subscription fund in 1906, and continued as significant donors thereafter. After Isabel died, John moved to Oakland and ended his financial contributions to the church. After John left Palo Alto, Emily Karns Dixon was the one wealthy person left in the church, and she never gave as generously as did the Butlers.
During this golden age of the church, the Sunday school doubled in size, from about 45 scholars to about 90. By 1915, the Sunday school was able to use the recently completed Social Hall as well as an outdoor garden designed by Clarence Reed as an outdoor classroom. The garden, measuring fifty by seventy feet, was laid out within the rectangle formed by the Social Hall and the church; a pergola covered with climbing roses and vines outlined the other two sides of this rectangle, leaving a gravel court twenty-five by forty feet in the center. A large sandbox in one corner could accommodate all the younger children, while the other age groups met in various places under the pergola.
The curriculum was an innovative as the outdoor meeting place. Reed wrote:
“One purpose of the outdoor Sunday school has been to discover the symbolism that will make religious ideals real to boys and girls. Ant and spider houses were constructed in order to teach industry by the observance of the habits of ants, and perseverance by the study of spiders. A bird’s nest in a rosebush has been guarded by the pupils as a sacred trust. A class of boys has been held spellbound by a graduate student of Stanford University, through the teaching of religious ideals by means of a series of experiments illustrating the great discoveries of science. Artist’s clay has been used to make a map of Palestine, and to build an Oriental house.”
Religious education that used dioramas, nature study, and science was surprisingly progressive for 1915.
Another highlight of the golden age of the church was the visit of the Bahá’í prophet ‘Abdu’l Bahá. David Starr Jordan invited ‘Abdu’l Bahá to speak at Stanford on October 8, 1912, and probably arranged for the prophet to speak at the Unitarian church that evening. After Clarence Reed gave a brief introduction, ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s began his address thus:
“Praise be to God, this evening I have come to a Unitarian Church. This Church is called Unitarian—attributed to unity. Hence I desire to discourse on the subject of unity, which is a fundamental basis of Divine teachings.”
At the conclusion of ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s remarks, Reed gave a brief and very Unitarian conclusion to the evening:
“I feel that a man of God has spoken to us tonight. There is no way I know to close the service than with a prayer—not a prayer in spoken words, but a prayer in silence. Let each person pray in his own way for the coming of the universal religion—the religion of love, the religion of peace, a religion of the fullness of life. (Silence.) You are dismissed.”
This address is still remembered by Bahá’ís today, and occasionally a Bahá’í will stop by the current Unitarian Universalist church, only to be disappointed when told that it is not the building in which ‘Abdu’l Bahá spoke.
The Unitarian Church of Palo Alto’s golden age lasted until Clarence Reed’s departure in the summer of 1915. Reed, being an ambitious man, must have welcomed the energy that William Herbert Carruth’s arrival brought to the congregation, but not even Carruth’s charisma could fix the fundamental problems of the church: Palo Alto did not have a large enough population to support a larger church, and more to the point, the congregation had no ambition to increase in size. In 1916, Reed picked a fight with the Board of Trustees over finances, indirectly accusing the treasurer, Andrew McLaughlin, of financial mismanagement. After McLaughlin resigned as treasurer, an audit found little wrong with the church finances—but Reed was already on his way out, and was immediately called by the Unitarian church in Oakland. By moving to a larger, wealthier church, Reed nearly doubled his salary, from $1,600 per year in Palo Alto to $3,000 per year (roughly $78,000 in 2020 dollars) in Oakland. Probably from the start, Reed viewed the the Palo Alto church as a just a stepping stone in his career. After six years there, he was ready to take the next step.
Part four coming soon.
Over the past year, I’ve talked to quite a few UU professionals who are thinking about changing jobs. Mind you, this happens every year. If you have a professional job in a small nonprofit, the typical path for job advancement is to find a job at another, slightly larger, nonprofit. This is obviously true for part-time directors of religious education — the quickest path for a part-time professional to advance in their career is to find a similar position elsewhere that’s full-time. There’s also the classic career path for full-time senior ministers — stay in a small congregation for about seven years (until you get your first sabbatical), then move to a larger congregation that pays more.
The result of all this is a constant movement of professional employees — directors of religious education and parish ministers — among UU congregations. This kind of movement is actually a good thing, because it helps spread best practices and new ideas from one UU congregation to another. It also provides an obvious upward career path, which means we all can continue to attract the best talent into our congregations.
Problem is, there are too many UU congregations who do a lousy job of hiring new employees. I’m going to give three examples of lousy hiring practices by UU congregations. I’m going to change details to protect the innocent — and by “protect the innocent,” I don’t mean I’m going to protect the UU congregations who have lousy hiring practices — no, I mean I’m going to protect the UU professionals who provided some of these examples for me.
Several months ago, a colleague showed me a job posting where a UU congregation in the northeastern U.S. posted a job that required eight hours a day, six days a week.
The first problem with this is that it’s stupid. Back in June, 2019, Shainaz Firfiray, Associate Professor of Organisation and Human Resource Management at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, England, wrote a piece for The Conversation titled “Long hours at the office could be killing you,” in which she cites growing evidence that a 35 hour work week is most efficient, whereas longer work weeks can cause stress, anxiety, and depression. That’s even more true in the middle of the pandemic, where I’m seeing a huge increase in stress, anxiety, and depression among UU professionals.
I know we have congregational polity, so no one can stop your congregation from being stupid and demanding six day work weeks of your professionals. But if you do that, please do not complain to me or express surprise when your professionals grow stressed, anxious, and depressed — and then become less efficient and effectual — and even in the worst case scenario engage get driven into unethical or unprofessional behavior. Do not complain or express surprise, and also, please, accept full responsibility for being stupid.
The second problem with demanding a six day work week is that it’s unethical. Why? Well, first of all, if you claim to be paying a salary that conforms to UUA guidelines for this six-day-a-week job, you’re lying. The UUA guidelines are for full-time work, so if you’re demanding more than full-time hours, then you’re not paying the salary required by guidelines. I’ll walk you through this. Let’s take the example of a parish minister in a small congregation with fewer than 150 members in Geo Index 3. For full-time work, the UUA guidelines call for a range of $54,100 to $76,500. If you’re demanding a six-day work week, then on an hourly basis you should pay time-and-a-half for every hour over 40 hours. That gives a salary range of $70,330 to $99, 450. So if you advertise a salary range of $54,100 to $76,500, require a six-day workweek, and claim to be meeting UUA guidelines, you are in effect lying.
There’s another reason why this is unethical. It’s treating your professional employee like a wage slave. Actually, a congregation that demands a six day work week of its professionals is treating them worse than wage slaves. I spent twelve years punching a time clock, and when you punch a time clock your employer tends to be very respectful of your extra hours. But an unscrupulous employer will ask for more and more hours from a more-than-full-time salaried employee, because demanding more doesn’t cost them a cent.
Recently, BBC News reported on “Why companies don’t post salaries in job adverts.” UU congregations appear to be part of this world-wide trend. Over the past year, UU colleagues have pointed out to me several instances of UU congregations posting jobs that give no indication of what the salary is.
In addition, there now seems to be a trend of posting jobs with the vague claim that the congregation “pays UUA guidelines.” Except that when you get to the interview, it turns out that the salary that’s offered is the lowest possible salary the congregation can get away with. A year ago, I was shown one job posting for a religious educator that claimed to “pay UUA guidelines.” Now for religious educators, there are five different salary levels based on your level of experience and training. For example, the salary ranges for a full-time religious educator position in a mid-sized II (250-349 members) congregation in Geo Index 3 range from $55,100 to $65,200 for a Credentialed Masters Level religious educator, down to a range from $34,700 to $37,900 for an inexperienced, untrained Religious Education Coordinator. When my colleague got to the interview, this congregation that claimed to “pay UUA guidelines” for a Director of Religious Education was actually only offering $34,700, the lowest possible salary for a Religious Education Coordinator. That’s dishonest.
It’s not only dishonest, it’s stupid. As the BBC reports, “knowing the expected salary upfront lets a candidate understand whether a job will be financially viable for them.” So the hiring committee is actually wasting its own time reviewing applications and conducting interviews with people who are going to turn them down when they hear what the salary is. Furthermore, it’s also stupid because, according to the BBC, “organisations that are more transparent about their salaries can win over the best candidates and attract diverse applicants.” BBC quotes one expert as saying, “if the salary banding isn’t there, I think there can be a tendency for some of the better talent on the market to not apply.” In short, lack of salary transparency means you’ll attract a lower-quality and less diverse talent pool.
Finally, it’s not only dishonest and stupid, it’s also illegal in some states. As of 2019, Colorado requires employers to disclose pay ranges in all job listings. Similar legislation is pending in other states. The very title of the Colorado law makes it clear that this is a justice issue — “Equal Pay for Equal Work At” –and the law is designed to eliminate the gender pay gap, and all other pay disparities. So to avoid potential fines, and to hep further justice in the work world, you might as well get in the habit of posting the salary range in your job listings.
Some UU congregations post jobs where they claim to compensate at UUA salary guidelines, but then they don’t offer the full benefits package called for under UUA guidelines. So technically, they’re not lying — the congregation is in fact paying the salary called for under UUA guidelines. But the total compensation package does not meet UUA guidelines. That’s dishonest. It’s the old bait-and-switch game.
Actually, sometimes it goes beyond dishonest into stupid. A colleague showed me one job posting where the congregation claimed to pay at UUA salary guidelines. Of course the actual salary wasn’t listed. But they did list the benefits. And the benefits package wasn’t even close to the UUA recommendations. I guess they assumed that applicants were going to be either desperate enough not to care, or ignorant enough not to look at the UUA guidelines. It’s stupid when you go out of your way to try and attract applicants who are desperate and/or ignorant. It’s also stupid to assume applicants are going to be desperate, when in actuality there’s a nationwide labor shortage.
First lesson to be learned: There’s a labor shortage right now. If UU congregations want to attract the best candidates, especially if they want to attract more diverse candidates, they need to offer reasonable hours, they need to be transparent in their job postings, and they need to offer a decent benefits package.
Second lesson to be learned: If the congregation’s budget won’t pay for all the staff they want, trying to squeeze more work out of your staffers for less pay is not the way to go. You’ll get lower quality work, and pissed-off staffers. Either raise more money, or reduce your expectations of what you can get out of staff.
Third lesson to be learned: Financially, it’s gotten to be a harsh world for small nonprofits. We all know that staff cuts are going to be the norm for most congregations for the foreseeable future. We all know that the way to attract the best talent in this harsh world is to be fair and transparent. And I’m predicting that the congregations that attract the best talent, the most diverse talent, are going to be the congregations that survive — and even thrive — in the face of today’s harsh financial realities.
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn now lives in the Bay Area, where he attends the Lighthouse Church in San Francisco, and plays in the worship band. According to a recent news article — about how he recently recorded four songs that will benefit the church’s homeless ministries — being a Christian in the U.S. may require apology:
“While he doesn’t have ‘any hesitation’ identifying as a Christian, [Cockburn] is starting to wonder if that’s such a good thing to say in public in the U.S. these days. If someone asks if he’s a Christian, he still says, ‘Yes, I’m a Christian, but I got vaccinated.'”
We took some kids backpacking to the Black Mountain Trail Camp last night. The trailhead is a short drive from Palo Alto, and the hike in is just two miles with only 500 foot elevation gain, making it a nice get-away for both church and Ecojustice Camp kids.
I got up before sunrise and heard some Great Horned Owls. And then, as the muted chorus of autumn birds was starting up, watched “rosy-fingered Dawn [Eos]” cast her glow on low-hanging stratus over Black Mountain.
It was a good way to start the day.
Part Twoof a history I’m writing, telling the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.
In 1905, Ewald and Helene Flügel invited Rev. George Whitefield Stone, the Field Secretary of the American Unitarian Association for the Pacific States, to come to Palo Alto to christen their children. When Stone arrived in September, 1905, the Flügel children were aged 4, 10, 13, and 15 years old. The family had lived in Palo Alto since 1892; it may be Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes had christened the two eldest children in 1895. In any case, Stone came to Palo Alto, and while there he conducted Unitarian services each Sunday from September 10 through October 8. At the conclusion of the service on October 8, Stone said he was willing to continue with weekly worship services if those assembled showed sufficient interest. Karl Rendtorff made a motion “that a Unitarian Church be formed at once,” giving Stone the authority to appoint a “Provisional Committee” to transact any necessary business until a regular congregational organization could be formed. The motion was seconded by Melville Anderson, and “carried by a rising vote.”
Stone promptly appointed five men and two women to the Provisional Committee: Melville Anderson, John S. Butler, Henry Gray, Agnes Kitchen, Ernest Martin, Fannie Rosebrook, and Karl Rendtorff, who became the Secretary-Treasurer. Melville Anderson, Henry Gray, Ernest Martin, and Karl Rendtorff were all professors at Stanford. John Butler and Fannie Rosebrook had both been on the executive committee of the old Unity Society. Agnes Kitchen was active in civic affairs in Palo Alto, including the Woman’s Club. Once again, women filled leadership positions in the new Unitarian congregation from the very beginning.
Just two weeks later, on October 23, the women formed their own Unitarian organization. The Women’s Alliance, formally known as the “Branch Alliance of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto,” became a local chapter of the National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women. How did the Palo Alto women decide to form their own Branch Alliance so quickly? Perhaps George Stone promoted the idea. The national organization existed to “to quicken the life of our Unitarian churches,” which would have suited Stone’s goal of building a self-sustaining Unitarian church. But it’s equally possible that some of the women had already belonged to a Unitarian women’s group. The National Alliance had roots in several earlier organizations, including the Western Women’s Unitarian Conference, organized in St. Louis in 1881; Emma Rendtorff and her mother Emma Meyer were active Unitarians in St. Louis in that year. Closer to Palo Alto, the women’s organization of the San Francisco Unitarian church, called the Channing Auxiliary had been active in promoting Unitarianism along the entire Pacific Coast ever since it was formed in 1873; perhaps some of the early members of the Palo Alto Alliance had contact with the Channing Auxiliary.
According to the national organization, the general goals of a Branch Alliance were as follows:
“The first duty of each branch is to strengthen the congregation to which it belongs. … Each branch is expected to engage in some form of religious study, not only for the improvement of the members themselves, but to enable them to gain, and to give others, a comprehensive knowledge of Unitarian beliefs. … With this preparation the Alliance undertakes the higher service of joining in the missionary activities of the denomination. … This includes…aiding small and struggling churches, helping to found new ones, supporting ministers at important points, and distributing religious literature among those who need light on religious problems.”
The Palo Alto Branch Alliance carried out all these tasks with dedication and perseverance from its founding in October, 1905, until its final dissolution in October, 1932. The Alliance raised a significant amount of money for the church during its 27 years of existence. Its members engaged in regular “religious study,” and may have been better versed in Unitarianism than many of the men in the church. The Alliance acquired a selection of Unitarian pamphlets and distributed this religious literature both in the church and through the U.S. mails. Alliance women cleaned the buildings, taught in the Sunday school, organized church social events, and met with other Unitarian women to learn from one another. It was the single most important group within the church, and without it the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto could not have existed.
The importance of women leaders in the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto cannot be overemphasized. Although prominent or charismatic men got most of the credit—male ministers like Sydney Snow, or male laypeople like David Starr Jordan and William Herbert Carruth—the Women’s Alliance did much of the critical behind-the-scenes work that allowed the male leaders to stand in the spotlight. And the national network of Unitarian women also provided key financial support to the nascent church: both the Channing Auxiliary in San Francisco and the St. Louis Branch Alliance made significant financial contributions in the first year of the Palo Alto church’s existence.
The American Unitarian Association also provided critical financial support to the new church. In fact, the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto could not have afforded to pay its ministers without the financial support from the denomination. The lay leaders of the new church aspired to become financially independent in the future, especially as it became clear that money from the denomination entailed some loss of local control, but for the moment they were happy to receive whatever financial assistance they could get.
In the late autumn of 1905 and through the winter, the prospects for the new church looked bright. More than a dozen people signed the church covenant, “In the love of the truth, and the ‘Spirit of Jesus,’ we unite for the worship of God and the service of man.” Equally importantly, some forty Unitarians contributed varying sums of money to purchase a building lot on which to erect a church. A newly-elected Board of Trustees were able to obtain the services of respected Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck, who was himself a Unitarian, to design their new church building. And the American Unitarian Association found a minister to send to Palo Alto, one Sydney Bruce Snow, a former newspaper reporter who was about to graduate from Harvard Divinity School in the spring of 1906.
Then on April 18, 1906, the great earthquake temporarily halted the church’s forward progress. Guido Marx, professor at Stanford University and a Unitarian, remembered the earthquake:
“Gertrude [his wife] and I were rudely awakened by the shaking of the house and the accompanying rumble, roar, and crash. ‘What is it?’ said she. ‘It’s an earthquake—and it’s a bad one,’ I replied. ‘What shall we do?”Stay right here. This little house will last as long as anything.’ I knew the sturdy construction of our bungalow…but in my heart I felt that nothing could survive such a vicious shaking—that this was the end for us. It was like a terrier shaking a rat.” [Quoted in Sandstone and Tile, vol. 30, no. 1, winter, 2006 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Historical Society, 2006), p. 3.]
The damage in Palo Alto was not as bad as it was in San Francisco, but it was still extensive. Palo Alto Unitarians had to turn their attention to relief work, so they had little time to think about their new congregation. There could be no progress on the new building in any case, since Maybeck’s plans for the new church building burned in the San Francisco fires following the earthquake.
Sydney and Margrette Snow’s arrival in Palo Alto in the autumn of 1906 served as a coalescing force for the new church. The congregation ordained Snow on October 14, 1906, renting space for the ceremony in Jordan’s Hall on University Ave. in Palo Alto. Sydney and Margrette formally joined the church as members that same month, and Margrette also joined the Women’s Alliance. In his first year as minister, Snow had to officiate at the funeral of Agnes Kitchen, a member of the Board of Trustees. This was confirmation that forming a new church was the right thing to do. The Palo Alto Unitarians had wanted a minister who could officiate at rites of passage—think of George Stone christening of the Flügel children—and the untimely death of Agnes Kitchen helped justify the work and expense that was going into the new congregation. Having a church with a minister was already much better than the old lay-led Unity Society.
Another reason the Palo Alto Unitarians formed their church was to provide religious education for their children. The church organized almost right away, and Emma Rendtorff became the Superintendent. In the 1905-1906 school year, nine children enrolled in the Sunday school. We can make a good guess of who those nine children were by looking at children from church families who were about the right age. These include Felix Flügel, who turned 13 in 1905; Barbara Alderton, who turned 12; Stephanie Marx (child of Charles and Harriet), 12; Ewald Flügel, Jr., 10; Henry Alderton, Jr., 9; Eleanor Marx (child of Guido and Gertrude Marx), 8; Anna Franklin, 7; Alberta Marx (child of Charles and Harriet Marx), 5; and Guido van Dusen Marx (child of Guido and Gertrude Marx), 5 years old.
Enrollment in the Sunday school increased to 12 children the following year, and then to 17 children in 1907-1908. Adele Meyer, Emma Rendtorff’s sister, took over as Superintendent of the Sunday school in 1907-1908, which is also probably the year that Emma’s daughter Gertrude was finally old enough to enroll.
Bernard Maybeck drew up a new set of plans for the church building, over the summer of 1906. Funding for the building came from the American Unitarian Association, and from the national Young People’s Religious Union organization, which hoped to promote Unitarianism in yet another college town. Frances Hackley of Tarrytown, N.Y., a Unitarian philanthropist, also donated money. Because of the rebuilding efforts following the earthquake, construction prices had risen. but luckily “the lowest bid was just low enough,” and construction began.
While their new building was under construction, the church continued to meet in rented space in Jordan’s Hall in Palo Alto. On Sundays, the Sunday school met first, at ten o’clock, with the worship service at eleven. And in late November, 80 people came together for the first anniversary dinner. Finally, in March, 1907, their new building was ready for them. A lengthy description of the building appeared in the Palo Alto Times on March 17, 1907:
“The new church, which has attracted considerable attention during its construction, is somewhat unusual in design. It is the work of Mr. B. R. Maybeck, of the firm of Maybeck & White, who has erected several of the buildings connected with the University of California and other semi-public structures in Berkeley. The church in Palo Alto is noteworthy in the use of rough, less expensive forms of material for a permanent building, designed to have all the atmosphere of a church. The only materials used in the interior finish are redwood boards and battens, common redwood shakes, rough heavy timbers, which rather more than carry the weight of the roof, and cement plaster like that used for the outside of buildings, forming a deep chancel arch as high as the roof. The timbers, whose rough surfaces have been left unplaned, are stained with an old-fashioned logwood dye, such as our grandmothers used in their dye-pots, giving a deep color, almost black. The shakes were dipped in an acid solution before they were put on the ceiling, and have turned gray, not unlike the stone-gray of the cement. The surfaced redwood of the walls and pews is being finished by a Japanese painter who understands the treatment of this fickle wood, and it will take on a soft gray color to harmonize with the shakes and plaster.
“The windows of the church, which are set high, will have small leaded panes of a light amber tone, and the lanterns for illumination at night will give as nearly as possible the same light. The color scheme is completed by the hangings and upholstering in the chancel, a soft plush velour, rose pink in shade. The pulpit and a high hooded chair are to be covered with this material, and a curtain will hang behind the chair across the whole width of the chancel and down the sides to the arch. It is intended later to cover the rail of the choir loft, and the swinging doors from the vestibule to the church with the same material.
“The aisles of the church are along the sides, the pews running solid through between two rows of posts, which form the main support of the building. From these posts and from the posts set in the side walls run heavy beams clear to the roof tree. The roof spaces between the beams are covered with shakes down to the walls, where the boards and battens begin. The chancel arch is the denominating feature of the interior. It is, as already stated, as high as the roof, and is massive like the rest of the structure. The pulpit stands directly under the center of the arch, three or four steps higher than the lower level of the church floor.
“On each side of the chancel is a room, the larger one in the tower on Cowper Street being a parlor, and the smaller, on the other side, a study for the minister. The parlor is very high and is finished similarly to the church. The building is set very close to the street, its front steps coming almost to the sidewalk on Channing Avenue, and the tower lying only a few feet from Cowper Street. This position was made necessary by the size of the lot, but after construction had begun the congregation bought an additional fifty feet on Channing Avenue, making a frontage of 125 feet, and 100 feet on Cowper Street. This gives room for enlargement and development. The church with the gradual slope of its roof, and the three dormers on each side, is low in effect. The tower at the rear, however, breaks the skyline with its turrets. The vestibule at the front has a lower, flat roof, whose beams project beyond the wall, and with cross-lattice work form support for vines. It is planned to have the whole church overrun with vines, for like all such buildings, it is not complete without the setting which only time and the growth of shrubs and vines can give.”
The congregation chose to use the hymnal Hymns of the Ages (1904), edited by Louisa Putnam Loring. This hymnal was a selection of hymns from the University Hymn Book, an 1895 hymnal compiled by Unitarians at Harvard University. However, according to Unitarian historian Henry Wilder Foote, Hymns of the Ages “represented a rather limited and individualistic point of view and did not prove adaptable to general use.” A few years later, during Clarence Reed’s tenure as minister, the church would replace this hymnal with the American Unitarian Association’s new Hymn and Tune Book (1911).
By the time of its third anniversary, the new congregation was still small, but growing. On November 10, 1908, “between fifty and sixty people” attended the third anniversary celebration which included dinner, after-dinner speeches, and dancing. Because the church didn’t have a social hall yet, the celebration again took place in Jordan’s Hall. The church could look back on three years of steady accomplishment: they had purchased a building lot, called a minister, survived the great earthquake, and built a building. And they looked forward to further progress, for at the dinner the Women’s Alliance announced a initial contribution of $100 ($2900 in 2020 dollars) so they could build a much-needed social hall.
Five months later, on April 11, 1909, Sydney Snow announced his resignation. He had been offered the position as minister of the Unitarian church in Concord, N.H., a larger congregation with a larger salary. The lay leaders of the Palo Alto church presented Snow with an expression of their appreciation done in beautiful calligraphy, which said in part:
“You have won your way into our hearts; you have brought us many messages of inspiration, of comfort, and of steadfastness; you have never failed to give us the sympathy, the friendship, and the light which we have needed. … Though our hearts are torn with personal sorrow at your going, though we would have you ever with us as your guide and friend, yet we do not falter or despair… Go from us, then, to be to others all you have been to us.…”
During the rest of its existence, the members of the congregation were never able to retain the ministers they liked best. They were always too small, and they never had enough money to pay an attractive salary to keep a minister for more than a few years.
Part One of a history I’m writing, which tells the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. Rather than telling history as the story of a succession of (mostly male) ministers, my focus is on the lay people who made up the congregation. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.
Unitarianism and Universalism arrived in Palo Alto before there was a congregation. Some of the first residents who arrived in Palo Alto in 1891, the year Stanford University opened, were already Unitarians and Universalists.
Emma Meyer Rendtorff began studying at Stanford University in 1894, eight months before Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes, a Universalist and Unitarian minister, preached the first Unitarian Universalist sermon in Palo Alto, at Stanford’s Memorial Church. Emma’s parents had been Unitarians, and as a girl she had attended Sunday school the Church of the Unity, a Unitarian church in St. Louis, Missouri. She was a lifelong Unitarian, and would play a key role when the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto was organized in 1905.
David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, grew up in a Universalist family. As a young adult he briefly joined a Congregational church. While president of Stanford he disavowed any denominational affiliation, although he often spoke in Unitarian churches and at Unitarian gatherings. Whether or not he would have called himself a Unitarian or Universalist when he arrived in Palo Alto, he was often perceived as a Unitarian and often provided financial and moral support to the Palo Alto Unitarians. And when he retired from Stanford, he finally did join the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto.
Luna, Minnie, and Leander Hoskins were probably Unitarians before arriving in Palo Alto. Minnie moved in Palo Alto in 1892 when her husband Leander became a Stanford professor, and Luna had joined them in Palo Alto soon after. Luna and Minnie Hoskins were recognized as delegates by the Committee on Credentials of the Pacific Unitarian Conference at San Jose on May 1-4, 1895, a few days before Eliza Tupper Wilkes arrived in Palo Alto. Since they knew about Unitarianism before Eliza Tupper Wilkes arrived, she couldn’t have been the one to introduce them to Unitarianism, so it seems likely they had been Unitarians when they came to Palo Alto.
Eleanor Brooks Pearson, who came to Palo Alto in 1891 from South Sudbury, Massachusetts, may have been a Unitarian before she arrived in Palo Alto; her childhood home in South Sudbury would have been close to the Unitarian church in Sudbury Center, she was one of the organizers of the Unity Society in 1895, and she later married a Unitarian, Frederic Bartlett Huntington. Some sources hint that there were others who were Unitarians or Universalists before arriving in Palo Alto, but so far it has proved impossible to name them.
In November, 1892, the very first issue of the Pacific Unitarian, a periodical devoted to promoting liberal religion up and down the West Coast, declared that a Unitarian church should be organized in Palo Alto:
“The University town of Palo Alto is growing fast. Never was there a field that offered more in the way of influence and education than this. A [building] lot for a church ought to be secured at once, and the preliminary steps taken towards the organization of a Unitarian Society.”
Organizing churches in college towns had been a standard missionary strategy for the American Unitarian Association (AUA) since the denomination had funded a Unitarian church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1865. These “college missions” were seen as “one of the most effective ways of extending Unitarianism,” and many of them resulted in strong Unitarian congregations.
But where would the Palo Alto Unitarians find someone who had the time and the skills to organize a Unitarian church? The Unitarian church in San Jose was the one nearest to Palo Alto, and a minister of that church could have been such a person. In fact, in early 1893, the two ministers of the San Jose church, Revs. Nahum. A. Haskell and J. H. Garnett, organized two new Unitarian congregations in Los Gatos and Santa Clara. But they didn’t come to Palo Alto. Support for a new Palo Alto congregation would have to come from someone else.
Coincidentally, around 1890, Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes, an experienced Universalist minister who had founded a number of Universalist and Unitarian churches in Iowa and Dakota Territory, began spending winters in California on account of her health. Soon she was hired as the assistant minister in the Oakland Unitarian church. The Panic of 1893 resulted in an economic depression, and by 1894 Oakland had to reduce her position to part-time. The Pacific Unitarian Conference then hired Wilkes on a part-time basis to organize new congregations in California.
Wilkes attended the Pacific Unitarian Conference in San Jose, May 1-4, 1895, as did Palo Altans Minnie and Luna Hoskins. There weren’t many people at the San Jose gathering and surely the three women encountered one another. And Wilkes was already headed to Palo Alto; that Sunday, May 5, the day after the conference ended, she became the first woman to preach at the Memorial Church of Stanford University. It seems likely that David Starr Jordan, who had connections in the Pacific Unitarian Conference, encouraged Minnie and Luna Hoskins to attend the San Jose gathering, and that he arranged for Wilkes to preach at Stanford; if so, Jordan could be counted as one of the organizers of Palo Alto Unitarianism.
By the autumn of 1895, the Women’s Unitarian Conference was paying much of Wilkes’s salary, and they specifically authorized her to “preach in Palo Alto, assist in Berkeley and elsewhere.” In November, 1895, Wilkes began conducting Unitarian services at Parkinson’s Hall in Palo Alto, and continued to do so into the next year. Professors, students, and other residents of Palo Alto began attending these services, and on January 12, 1896, John S. Butler hosted a meeting at his house to formally organize a new congregation.
The thirty people present organized the Unity Society of Palo Alto for “the promotion of moral earnestness, and of freedom, fellowship, and character in religion, and which shall impose no restriction on individual belief.” A “Unity Society” was the Unitarian term in those days for a lay-led congregation, and no one expected Wilkes to continue as the minister in Palo Alto. Prof. Leander Hoskins was elected president of the new society; Dr. William Adams, a physician, was elected secretary; and John S. Butler, a wealthy man who had retired to Palo Alto, was elected treasurer. Two others were elected to the “committee on executive and finance”: William F. Pluns, a German immigrant and builder, and Fannie Rosebrook. It’s noteworthy that the first board of the first Unitarian society in Palo Alto included a woman.
A Sunday school was part of the new congregation from the start. The Sunday school committee included Minnie Hoskins; Eleanor Brooks Pearson, a teacher at Castilleja Hall; and Anna Zschokke. Anna Zschokke was a Bavarian immigrant with a deep concern for education, and she has been called “the mother of the Palo Alto schools.”
Unity Society services were held in the parlors of the Palo Alto Hotel at 2:30 on Sunday afternoons. Sunday school began at 2:45. Music for the services was provided by a quartet. Sunday speakers included Prof. Melville B. Anderson who gave a talk on poetry and religion and read “extracts from different poets in illustration.”
How was the new congregation perceived by the rest of Palo Alto? An article in the local newspaper shows that some of the same jokes told about Unitarian Universalists today were also current in 1896:
“Ecclesiastical babies like human babies have all the funny things told about them. Our infant Unitarian Church, or Unity Society as they call it, therefore must expect to come in for their share.
“A San Francisco daily recently noticed their beginning under the conspicuous headlines ‘An organization that does not believe in anything in particular founded at Palo Alto.’
“Another good one is told on them when they met for service in the hotel parlor two Sabbaths ago. After the little company sang some hymns, and read some prayers, the Professor who was to address them began his talk upon the Relation of Poetry and Religion. In the course of his remarks he had occasion to refer to the Bible. He looked for one in the pulpit and under the pulpit but there was none there. Then he appealed to some one in the congregation to lend him theirs, but the Law and the Gospel was not in the possession of them. Finally the good landlady went up stairs and succeeded in finding one in the room of some benighted godless student, and as she placed it in the hands of the Professor he dryly remarked, ‘I knew this was a very advanced society, but I thought you still clung to the Old Book.'”
At the time of the April, 1896, meeting of the Pacific Unitarian Conference, Wilkes was still providing some support to the Palo Alto congregation, but she was only interested in starting new congregations, not keeping them going once they were started. Rev. Carl Wendte, the director of the Pacific Coast Unitarians, expressed his opinion that “the two San Francisco churches should make this Palo Alto movement their peculiar care, aiding it by ministerial service, money contributions, and general supervision and help.”
If the San Francisco churches did provide support, it was not enough to keep the Palo Alto Unity Society going. The tiny congregation continued in existence for another eleven months. It was listed in the Pacific Unitarian in the March, 1897, issue, but after that it disappears from the written record.
The Unity Society was gone, but there were still Unitarians and Universalists in Palo Alto. When the California Sunday School Association took a census of the town in November, 1898, parents reported 21 school-aged children who were Unitarians, and five who were Universalists. Some of these Unitarian and Universalist children may have attended Sunday schools in other churches, but their parents would have longed for a liberal church in Palo Alto.
On Sunday, March 25, 1900, Rev. B. Fay Mills, minister of the Oakland Unitarian church, led a Unitarian service in Palo Alto, preaching on the topic of “the claims of liberal religion upon the modern world.” Organizers informed a local newspaper:
“A series of religious services will be held in Palo Alto every Sunday afternoon at Fraternity Hall, under the auspices of the Unitarian church. Cards pledging support are circulating that the members recognize the need of a religious organization in Palo Alto that shall represent the thought of our age, and leaving unquestioned the theological belief of its members, shall make its bond of Unity the Fellowships of the Spirit, and the Service of Man.”
The next Sunday, April 1, Rev. Nahum A. Haskell, minister of the San Jose Unitarian church, preached to the Palo Alto Unitarians. After forming Unitarian congregations in Los Gatos and Santa Clara in the 1890s, Haskell had turned his attention to Palo Alto. Unfortunately, on April 10, 1900, the annual meeting of the San Jose church asked for Haskell’s resignation, feeling he was responsible for their declining membership. Haskell managed to remain as minister of the San Jose for two more years, but after that vote he was no longer able to help form a new church in Palo Alto.
On May 31, Haskell officiated at a double wedding in Palo Alto for Alice and Florence Emerson, Stanford students and daughters of a wealthy lumber tycoon. Their wedding was the last formal Unitarian activity in Palo Alto until 1905.
...to be continued…
I just updated the selection of games on my curriculum Web site. In-person games now either have adaptations to make them COVID-safe, or they’re clearly marked “not suitable for COVID.” There’s also a modest selection of field-tested online games for online classes and groups. There are games for all ages from school-aged children up to adults. These games can be used in Sunday school classes, youth groups, adult classes, and other small groups.
Games Web page with COVID-safe games and online games.
We’ve now been teaching my Neighboring Religions curriculum online since March, 2020. This curriculum has transferred extremely well to online teaching. Now I’m writing out the adaptations that we’ve used to make it work so well.
Neighboring Religions curriculum with online adaptations.
If you have any feedback or comments about either the games, or Neighboring Religions, please leave them here.
Another story for liberal religious kids. I think I originally wrote this story for the First Parish in Watertown, Mass., back in the mid 1990s. I rewrote it in 2004 when I was at the UU Society of Geneva, Ill., and then forgot about it. Here’s the 2004 version:
Once upon a time, about a hundred and fifty years ago in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, a family lived in a house they called “Apple Slump.” There were four children in the family, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, along with their father, Mr. March, and Marmee, their mother. At the time this story takes place, Mr. March was far away, serving in the army during the Civil War.
Jo had long, chestnut-colored hair. She was a tall tomboy who didn’t really like being a girl. Jo also had a terrible temper; she had a hard time controlling their anger. But Jo figured out a way to keep her temper under control. She had what I think of as a “mood pillow.”
“Apple Slump,” the house that the March family lived in, was a big, old, rambling New England farmhouse. Jo thought the best room in the house was the garret, a room up in the attic that had a nice, sunny window. Next to the window stood an old sofa.
The sofa was long, and broad, and low. It had been the perfect thing for the girls to play on when they were little. They had slept on it, ridden on the arms as if they were horses, and crawled under it pretending they were animals. As they got older, they had long, serious talks sitting on it, they lay down and dreamed daydreams on it.
Jo liked the sofa more than the other girls. It was her favorite place to read. She would curl up in one corner with a good book, and half a dozen russet apples to eat. As she sat reading and eating her apples, a tame little rat would stick its head out and enjoy her quiet company.
But sometimes Jo went up into the garret for a different reason. She had a terrible temper, and sometimes she would get in a horrible nasty mood. Sometimes, when she was in a particularly bad mood, she just needed to be alone.
She would run up into the garret, and pick up the pillow that was on the sofa. This was an old, hard, round pillow shaped liked a sausage. This repulsive-looking old thing was her special property. If she stood it on its end, that was a sign that any one of her sisters, or her best friend Laurence, or her mother, was allowed to come and sit down next to her on the sofa and chat; but if it lay flat across the sofa, “woe to the man, woman, or child who dared disturb it!” When they were younger, her sisters and Laurence had been pummeled mercilessly by this pillow, and now they knew better than to try to sit next to Jo when it lay flat.
I call this her “mood pillow,” and I think it’s a great idea. When Jo was in a bad mood, or angry about something, or when she just needed to be alone, she could use the pillow to let her family and friends know that they should leave her alone for a while. That way, she wouldn’t hurt those around her when she was in a bad mood.
When you’re in a bad mood, what do you do to keep from hurting those around you?
Thomas Reese, a senior analyst with Religion News Service, who earned a doctorate in political science from UC Berkeley, has written a short and helpful essay analyzing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Early in his essay, Reese points out that the Trump administration made an agreement with the Taliban declaring that the United States would be leaving, and that the Biden administration is finally implementing that agreement. (This was a helpful reminder to me here that both Democrats and Republicans agreed that it was time to leave Afghanistan; it must have seemed a truly hopeless situation if those two deeply polarized parties actually agreed we had to get out.) Moving quickly past blame and recriminations, Reese’s essay gets to what I think is the heart of the issue:
“What we and our allies should learn from Afghanistan, and what we should have learned from Vietnam, is that the United States military cannot save countries from themselves. If their leadership is corrupt, if their government does not have popular support, if the country is divided by warring ethnic or religious factions, if there is civil war, the American military cannot solve their problems. In fact, history tells us that American troops often make matters worse by using tactics that cause disproportionate collateral damage and by making the local military dependent on us.”
This will be hard for many Americans to hear, but it’s obviously true: our military can’t solve every problem. Our leadership, and our electorate, needs to learn this lesson before we get involved in yet another mess like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Reese ends his essay by advocating for morality in diplomacy:
“Political realists argue that morality has no place in foreign policy, but their tactics have consistently failed. It is time to try a moral strategy that uses diplomacy rather than guns, and fights corruption rather than tries to bribe elites to do our bidding.”
I agree with Reese. Back in the 1970s, the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood was riven by conflict over Vietnam. Some members of the church thought the war in Vietnam was a moral stand against communism. Some church members thought the war in Vietnam propped up an immoral South Vietnamese regime and used immoral methods. When they called Dana Mclean Greeley as their new minister in 1971, they hoped for someone who would offer guidance out of this intra-congregational conflict. Greeley didn’t take sides on Vietnam. Instead he explained that in the nuclear era, war can no longer be considered a reasonable, sensible option. A few months after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, he preached a sermon which was even more pointed:
“War is insanity in this day and age. It is total destructiveness; it is total immorality; it is total waste. The end of war should be our goal today. Negotiation should be our commitment. We ourselves ought to be both wiser and more ethical than our fathers, but we are not.”
Back in 1975, Greeley called upon us to learn how to be ethical. Now in 2021, Reese calls upon us to be moral. I agree with them both. Rather than using the military to try to solve problems, our goal should be — as Greeley said so many years ago — to end all war.
Many Unitarian Universalist espouse pluralist theories of religion. What is a pluralist theory of religion? According to S. Mark Heim, such theories “attempt to transform religious diversity from an apparent embarrassment for claims to religious truth into supporting testimony for one truth subsistent in all faiths: (“Pluralistic Theology as Apologetics,” ch. 4 in Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion,Orbis: 1995, p. 123).
This is the familiar argument that while all religions might be different in specifics, they all have the same goal. One analogy used is that all religions are paths up the same mountain — the paths start from different places, and take different routes up the mountain, but they all wind up at the same summit. That’s what a pluralist theory of religion is.
Back to Heim:
“There is a great deal of discussion today about ‘post modernity’ and about the possible changes which may follow the dethroning of North Atlantic views of history, knowledge, and justice from their supposed universal status through a recognition of valid alternatives from other cultures. Insofar as such a transformation were actually to take place, pluralistic theologies would seem to be among the most likely casualities, defensively structured as they are around the presumed universality of the codes of modern rationality. Ironically, pluralistic antidotes to Christian particularism may prove to be much more culture and time bound than the theologies they condemn. The very religious traditions pluralistic theologies wish to affirm may find on the whole they have as much to fear from the pluralists’ embrace as the exclusivists’ denial.”
Ouch. Take that, Unitarian Universalists. Heim is telling us that we can’t have our commitment to rationality, which is a Western invention, and at the same time claim a commitment to pluralism, since by claiming the universalist of rationalism we’re undermining the very pluralism we claim to support. Heim continues:
“The primary challenge to pluralist theologies is to make explicit their case for the global normativity of the Western critical principles that determine their univocal definitions of religion.”
“Transgracial” — that’s not a typographical error. Rebecca Tuvel, professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, explores the implications of a “transgracial,” or combined transgender and transracial identity, in a post to the American Philosophy Association (APA) “Black Issues in Philosophy” blog. In this post, Tuvel argues that transracial identity is analogous to transgender identity, where “analogous to” doesn’t mean “identical to.” When she first published these ideas in 2017, apparently some people were outraged. But I think Tuvel’s proposed analogy is less interesting than an essay she refers to written by Ronnie Gladden, who presents as a black man but who identifies as a white woman.
This essay, published in 2015 in Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies is titled “TRANSgressive Talk: An Introduction to the Meaning of Transgracial Identity.” The author, at that time a doctoral student in education at Northern Kentucky University, identifies their names as both Ronnie Gladden and Rachael Greenberg, so I’ll refer to them as Gladden/Greenberg. (For reference, it appears in 2021 that they identify simply as Ronnie Gladden.) In 2015, Gladden/Greenberg began their essay by saying:
“My confrontation with my internalized racial unrest, along with a growing awareness of my authentic gender identity, has been prompted, in part, by two socio-political shifts: 1) the escalating tensions belying the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, and 2) the increased visibility of transgender individuals in a myriad of public spaces. Increasingly, I feel an urgency to be forthcoming about my true identity in an era where transparency is not just encouraged; it is demanded. In spite of presenting as outwardly black and male — by and large I view myself as white and female….”
Gladden/Greenberg writes about an intersectional identity that I hadn’t thought about before. They describe tensions in their life that I wouldn’t have thought about. At the same time, claiming a transracial identity in the U.S. today may not seem possible, given the way we understand race in our society. But a 2014 article in Georgetown Law Journal by Camille Gear Rich, Gould School of Law at USC, titled “Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification”, referred to in Tuvel’s blog post, may help to think further about the question of transracial identities. In this article, Rich writes:
“[W]e are in a key moment of discursive and ideological transition, an era in which the model of elective race is ascending, poised to become one of the dominant frameworks for understanding race in the United States. Because we are in a period of transition, many Americans still are wedded to fairly traditional attitudes about race. For these Americans, race is still an objective, easily ascertainable fact determined by the process of involuntary racial ascription — how one’s physical traits are racially categorized by third parties. The elective-race framework will challenge these Americans to recognize other ways in which people experience race, including acts of voluntary affiliation as well as selective and conditional affiliations.”
Rich acknowledges that this new elective model of race poses distinct challenges: “The elective-race framework rejects claims about the obdurate, all-encompassing nature of white privilege and the need for racial passing” (p. 1506). Rich isn’t denying that white privilege is real, but at the same time different individuals may navigate white privilege in different ways. Rich also points out that “neither lay understandings nor institutional understandings of elective race are fully developed”; I’m finding Rich’s article to be an excellent resource as I develop my own understanding of elective race.
Given that a significant number of people — let’s say, a growing number of people — accept the evolving concept of elective race, it should be no surprise to find people who identify as living at the intersection of transracial and transgender identities. I imagine that will be a difficult intersection at which to live. I wonder how Unitarian Universalism (and other religions, for that matter) will respond to the persons living at that intersection.
Raimundo Panikkar was a scholar who studied inter-religious dialogue. He held doctorate degrees in philosophy, chemistry, and theology. While serving as professor of religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Panikkar wrote a short essay about the necessary conditions for inter-religious dialogue:
“The modern kosmology (sic) assuming time is linear, history is paramount, individuality is the essence of Man (sic), democracy is an absolute, technocracy is neutral, social darwinism, and the like, cannot offer a fair platform for the Dialogue [between religions]. The basis for the Dialogue cannot be the modern Western myth.” — “The Ongoing Dialogue,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, vol. 2, 1989.
We Unitarian Universalists mostly assume that we have somehow moved beyond myths; yet most of us buy into the modern Western myth. Our “Seven Principles” specifically affirm individuality and democracy as among our highest values. Many of say “We believe in science,” and part of that belief is that science (and there seems to be little difference between our “science” andwhat Panikkar calls “technocracy”) represent a culturally neutral viewpoint. And of course we affirm that time is linear. All these things seem to us to be axiomatically true; how could they be doubted?
Yet I think Panikkar is correct. We think of human individuality, democracy, belief in science, and the linearity of time as axiomatic — but we also know from our own tradition of logic that axioms cannot be proved from within a logically consistent system. These axioms, like all axioms, are in some sense matters of belief. They are part of our foundational myth.
We Unitarian Universalists think we’re supremely rational and we don’t have myths. This attitude can cause problems when we try to engage in inter-religious dialogue. I don’t mind if we think we’re right and other religions are wrong — that’s what human beings do — but I do mind when we we’re not even aware that that’s what we’re doing.
Cleaning out the files on my laptop, I came across an old low-resolution photo from 1999, showing a dozen people posing for the camera. It was a photo of the participants in the first “Essex Conversations” colloquium. Using GIMP, I increased the size of the photo to see if I could recognize those people…
I think I can identify most of them. From left to right are Lena Breen, then head of the religious education department of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA); Ginger Luke, minister of religious education; Jeanellen Ryan, leadership development director in the UUA’s religious education department; Frances Manly, minister of religious education; Tom Yondorf, parish minister; Susan Davison Archer, minister of religious education; Susan Suchocki Brown, parish minister; and Susan Harlow, professor of religious education at Meadville/Lombard.
In the front row at left is John Marsh, parish minister; a woman whom I’m sure I know but whose name I can’t remember; me, then a lay director of religious education; and Tom Owen-Towle, parish minister.
Several things struck me when I looked at this photo. Everyone is white. At 38 years old, I was the youngest person in the photo. And today, I’m the only one still active and working in a Unitarian Universalist congregation or organization (see the notes at the end of this post).
After looking at the photo, I dug out the essay I presented at that colloquium in 1999. It holds up surprisingly well in a number of areas, especially in its critique of the limitations of developmentalism, and in its insistence on talking about real live learners — I thought then, and think now, that too much theorizing about religious education is done without having real live children and teens in mind.
But it’s also fun to re-read that old essay to find all the things I no longer agree with. First, and perhaps most importantly, my essay didn’t adequately address how it is that learning and individual development depend on social interaction (I read Vygotsky a couple of years after I wrote it). Second, the world has changed a great deal since 1999, and Unitarian Universalist religious education faces new challenges, especially the ongoing decline of religious education enrollment in UU congregations, and the rise of religious disaffiliation, two linked trends that have been accelerated by the COVID pandemic. Third, over the past decade I’ve become increasingly aware of just how religiously illiterate most North Americans are, and I’ve seen research showing how religious literacy improves cross-cultural understanding, and how improved cross-cultural understanding can reduce violence and conflict in our communities; I wish now I’d made religious literacy integral to the essay. Finally, I’m less critical of schooling than I used to be, since I now believe some of the favored alternatives to schooling promoted in UU circle are artifacts of upper middle class white culture; yet because most children in North America attend school, schooling is can be more easily accepted across racial, cultural, and ethnic boundaries.
A revised version of my 1999 essay was published in the book Essex Conversations: Visions for Lifespan Religious Education (Skinner House: Boston, 2001); a book which, somewhat to my astonishment, is still in print. I think it’s past time for another generation of UU religious educators to write new essays about the future of religious education. Unfortunately, a colloquium like the one I attended costs a lot of money, and I suspect the declining financial health of the entire denomination means there won’t be another one in the foreseeable future. And religious education is no longer the priority it once was for Unitarian Universalists, partly because religious education enrollment has been declining since 2005 — but also because the current generation of children is majority non-white, and any attempt to encourage a bunch of non-white youngsters to come into our 95% white denomination is going to run smack up against the systemic racism that pervades the UUA.
Nevertheless, I wish we could put together a group of thoughtful people who are dedicated to religious education, who could spend a long weekend together to talk about what’s needed in religious education for the current generation of children. I wish we could have a new book of essays that address today’s religious education challenges — essays that address how we might keep Unitarian Universalist religious education from completely dying out.
Notes about the people in the photo:
John Marsh died in June. According to the UUA directory of professional religious leaders, Lena Breen, Ginger Luke, Jeanellen Ryan, Frances Manly, Susan Davison Archer, Susan Suchocki Brown, and Tom Owen-Towle are all either retired or no longer active. Susan Harlow, who was a United Church of Christ (UCC) minister, is retired from People’s Church in Chicago. Tom Yondorf left the ministry in 2000 to become a school teacher.
Someone in our congregation pointed me to diffen.com, which says it will et you “Compare anything.” Want to compare the first generation Apple TV remote with the second generation version? Diffen has got you covered. My informant said that Diffen also has a religion category, so of course I had to check it out.
Diffen’s comparisons of religion would have gone well back in the 1960s, when we were beginning to understand that there was a great big world out there but we still unquestioningly accepted a world view centered on Europe and the United States. (A less polite way of saying this is that Diffen is about fifty years behind the current state of religious studies scholarship.) Yet Diffen’s understanding of religion is probably similar to that of the majority of Americans and Europeans. In other words, Diffen probably represents an accurate picture of pop culture notions of religion.
Let’s take one of their comparisons between two religions and pick it apart. Let’s click on Cao Dai vs. Confucianism.
“Place of origin” seems pretty straightforward, right? Clearly, Cao Dai originated in Vietnam, and Confucianism originated in China. Well, sort of. It might be more accurate to say that Cao Dai began in French Indochina; yes, that’s Vietnam, but Cao Dai emerged partly in response to colonial oppression. As for Confucianism arising in China, there was no nation known as “China” when Confucianism began, and indeed the teachings of Kongzi (“Master Kong,” i.e. Confucius) were often a direct response to the political situation of the Spring and Autumn period of the Eastern Zhou empire. Imperial China arose several hundred years after Kongzi lived, during the Qin dynasty.
Emphasizing the historical nature of religion is not mere nitpicking. One of the key goals of religious literacy, according to the American Academy of Religion, is helping people understand that religions change over time. With its simplistic category of “Place of origin,” Diffen removes historical nuance and may even lull you into thinking that religion is some timeless thing outside of history.
Later we come to “Use of statues and pictures.” Maybe Diffen thinks its intended audience isn’t smart enough to understand a term like “material culture.” But to me this feels like another instance of Western bias. We Westerners are still concerned with the split between Protestants and Catholics. We still think it’s important to know if a religion uses a lot of statues and pictures, because we want to know if that religion is more like Catholicism or Protestantism. But a more fruitful, and more nuanced, line of inquiry is to ask about the material culture of a religion. What physical objects are important to the religion? How are physical objects used by the religion?
You see attempts at nuance as you go down the list of comparisons between Cao Dai and Confucianism. There’s an item asking for a comparison of “Concept of Deity,” and under Confucianism it says, “Most [adherents] believe in One God, but this is not necessary since Confucianism is not a religion but a belief system about social ordering.” Whoever wrote this at least understands that Confucianism doesn’t fit well into the Western category of religion; whoever wrote this also understands that there’s at least some internal diversity within Confucianism. But once again Confucianism is reduced to some kind of simplistic East Asian Christianity. The underlying problem here is Diffen assuming that the way you must compare religions is to compare the “Concept of Deity” — given their Western bias, they obviously assume that all religions must have a concept of a deity. And indeed, a little further down the list, Diffen asks for a comparison of “Concept of God.” Because if it’s a religion, it must have a God (capitalized and singular).
I’m trying to be kind to Diffen. But — wow, I thought Wikipedia’s articles on religion have problems, but Diffen is unbelievably bad.
I don’t think the problem lies in Diffen, though. I think the problem lies in the religious illiteracy of Western culture. Most college graduates haven’t reached the basic, low-level standards for religious literacy established by the American Academy of Religion (more about those standards here). Many Americans are actually proud of being religiously illiterate: many American Christians think all they have to know is their Bible, and many American atheists and nones think religion should be ignored. Americans have a sense of cultural superiority and insularity that allow them to ignore the rest of the world. If you’re a white American, you can say: Why should I bother with Black culture, I’m not Black. If you’re a Christian, you can say: Why should I bother about Jewish culture, I’m not Jewish. If you’re an atheist or a none, you can say: Why should I bother about religious culture, I’m not religious.
Unfortunately, when it comes to religion, Diffen plays right into this sense of cultural superiority and insularity. Diffen might be great for comparing two different Apple TV remotes, but it’s not up to the task of comparing religious traditions.
What happened here?
It’s like one of those crime scenes you see in pop culture. Except that instead of human remains, it’s the remains of a bird. I found this on the dike next to Adobe Creek in Palo Alto, right across from the island in the marsh where there’s a California Gull nesting colony. The rib cage in the upper right corner of the photo is big enough to be from a gull — it’s about eight inches long — and check out that huge breast bone for the flight muscles to attach to. The other bones are scattered in the center of the photo, though there appear to be some bones missing. There are lots of feathers — grey feathers characteristic of juvenile gulls.
Before you start mourning the death of a young gull, remember that the mortality rate of young gulls is high. Something on the order of 75% of nestlings die before they develop flight feathers (Patricia Baird, Comparative Ecology of California and Ring-billed Gulls [Larus californicus and L. delawarensis], Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Montana, 1976). After the birds learn to fly, but before they move on to winter quarters, mortality rates are on the order of 5%, although in bad years post-fledging mortality rates could be as high as 70% (Kristie N. Nelson, Nora Livingston, and Teague Scott, “Population size and reproductive success of California Gulls at Mono Lake, California,” Point Blue, 2015). In short, perhaps 75-90% of young California Gulls die before they’re six months old. Predators
So it would not be surprising if a juvenile California Gull were killed here. Any number of predators might have killed it — a raptor, a dog off leash, a raccoon, a coyote. But any clues to what the predator was have doubtless been obliterated by the carrion eaters that came along after the predator was finished — Turkey Vultures, American Crows, rats, and other critters must have further scattered the bones and feathers.
About all we can say for certain is that a juvenile gull died here. It died some time after it fledged — California Gull nestlings were fledging beginning about a month and a half ago — but long enough ago that the bones are been picked clean and are now dry and without odor.
Paul Gilroy is a professor at University College London, and director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism there. He’s four years older than I am, and though in many ways we’re quite different it turns out we share a perception of today’s anti-racism work:
“Anti-racism has changed since Gilroy’s youth, its edge blunted. For much of the 20th century, being against racism meant being for a radically different political and economic settlement, such as socialism or communism. Today it can mean little more than doing what Gilroy mockingly calls ‘McKinsey multiculturalism’: keeping unjust societies as they are, except with a few ‘black and brown bodies’ in the corporate boardrooms. (‘I’m not very interested in decolonising the 1%’ he [says].) What is left is a more individualistic anti-racist culture, which is keen on checking privilege and affirming the validity of other people’s experiences, but has trouble creating durable institutions or political programmes.” — “The Last Humanist,” Yohann Koshy, The Guardian, August 5, 2021.
One reason I continue to call myself an “unrepentant Marxist” is that capitalism has proved unable to change racist systems in the U.S. (Indeed, from a historical perspective it’s arguable that capitalism initially thrived due to the way it exploited nonwhite labor, e.g., chattel slavery in the U.S.) I recognize that my view represents a tiny minority in the United States, or indeed in Unitarian Universalist circles, and that I may very well be wrong. However, if capitalism was able to solve the problem of racism in the U.S., I would think it would have done so many years ago. And it’s hard to see how a system built on inequality, as capitalism has always been, could somehow magically create racial equality. While Marxism may be the wrong answer, it’s no less wrong than capitalism.
Where does that leave us? sa Paul Gilroy points out, we’re left with an “individualistic anti-racist culture” which does not seriously address unjust societies.
Over the years, I’ve performed a number of ten-minute weddings. What’s the point of a ten-minute wedding? I’ve done these weddings for couples who had a friend officiate at their wedding ceremony then needed a legal wedding, and for other couples whose wedding ceremony was not, for some reason or other, a legal wedding. These weddings are also useful for those who want a courthouse-type wedding, but who prefer not to go to city hall to be married. Mostly I’ve done this type of wedding in my office at church, but memorably I did one for a couple at a restaurant where the waitress was one of the witnesses (the couple gave her a really big tip).
I realized I’ve never put this ten-minute wedding on my Web site. In case it might be useful to someone else, here’s the form I use:
The Ten-Minute Wedding
Intention: A and B, it is now time to begin your passage into marriage, by declaring your intent to marry and then by making your vows to each other. Are you now ready to begin your passage into marriage? [Answer “I am.”]
Vows:
I, A, take you, B, to be my spouse,
to join our visions for a better future,
to join our voices for equality and love,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
as long as we both shall live.
I, B, take you, A, to be my spouse,
to join our visions for a better future,
to join our voices for equality and love,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
as long as we both shall live.
[Or use these more traditional vows: “I, A, take you, B, to be my spouse, / to have and to hold, / from this day forward, / as long as we both shall live.”]
Declaration: Inasmuch as A and B have agreed in their desire to go forward in life together, seeking an ever richer, deepening relationship, and because they have pledged themselves to meet sorrow and joy as one, we rejoice to recognize them as married.
As far as I know, all these words are in the public domain, so I slapped a Creative Commons CC0 “No rights reserved” label on the wedding above (the words in blue type). That means it’s in the public domain, so you can use it, modify it, etc.
Here are some thoughts on this wedding from:
(1) Obviously, other vows may be used.
(2) While I’m pretty insistent on making weddings absolutely gender-neutral —I feel vows should be the same for both persons in the couple, and I use the gender-neutral “spouse” — you may have different views on gender neutrality. Feel free to use words like “husband” and “wife,” or to have one spouse to say they’ll “honor and obey” the other spouse (just so long as I don’t have to attend the wedding).
(3) An unspoken assumption in this wedding form is that both persons involved know exactly what they’re getting into, and both freely consent to the marriage. I wouldn’t perform a wedding unless both parties are fluent in English, or unless there’s a certified interpreter — many courthouse officiants have similar requirements. All the usual criteria for consent also apply: e.g., I won’t perform a wedding where one member of the couple appears to be dominating or abusing the other, or where one member of the couple appears to be intoxicated, or where one member of the couple is under the age of consent.
(4) I feel it’s archaic and ridiculous for the officiant to say, “You may now kiss.” (And no way would I ever utter the sexist words, “You may kiss the bride.”) If both members of the couple are above the age of consent, why do they need my permission? But at the end of the brief ceremony, I might remind them that this a a time when couples often kids each other, if they choose to do so.
(5) Although I call this a Ten-minute Wedding, if you’re the officiant you’ll want to schedule at least 15 minutes. You’ll need five minutes to check the marriage license, and get the couple settled down. The actual wedding takes about five minutes. Then another five minutes for you to sign the marriage license, and to have any witnesses sign as well (if your state requires witness signatures).
Finally — yes, I can do a Ten-minute Wedding for you if you need one. Email me to schedule a time to meet in my office. If I don’t know you, I’ll require a minimum $50 donation to LifeMoves, a nonprofit that provides services and housing to homeless people; if you can’t afford $50, let me know and we’ll work out a sliding scale. (Also, if you want anything more than the wedding shown above in blue — that means any customization, including writing your own vows — my fee immediately goes to $500, because customization requires more time from me.)
This morning I walked from Wright Woods conservation land past Walden Pond to Goose Pond. On my way back to the car, I passed by the main beach at Walden. It was a warm sunny day, so as you’d expect the beach was crowded with humanity.
And there, past the buoys that mark the area that the lifeguards watch, was a Common Loon (Gavia immer) diving underwater, presumably for small fish or some other underwater food.
It was surprising to see a loon at Walden Pond in July — twenty years ago when I lived in the town of Concord, you might see a loon during migration, but I don’t remember ever seeing one during summer breeding season. It may be that the resurgence of the beaver population in the area has changed the landscape enough that loons now have adequate habitat to breed; although that’s purely speculation on my part.
Another highlight of my walk past Walden Pond worth mentioning is the Thoreau Society bookstore. They focus on Thoreau of course, but they also stock an excellent selection of books relating to the other nineteenth century Concord authors — certainly the best selection of publications relating to the Concord authors that I’ve seen. While in the store, I chatted with Corinne Smith, a librarian and author. She told me that the “Thoreau Edition,” published by Princeton University Press and currently based at the University of California Santa Barbara, has released preliminary versions of the journals from 1854 to the end of Thoreau’s life (the “Thoreau Edition” has already published print versions of the journals from 1831 to 1854).
My younger sister and I saw this Monarch butterfly in the gardens at Minuteman National Historical Park this afternoon.
I’ve been at a religious education conference for most of a week now. It has been very nice to be able to talk with colleagues in person, face-to-face. But it’s also exhausting. I talk with people for an hour over breakfast, then teach a class where we spend a lot of time talking, then talk for an hour over lunch, and often for another hour after lunch — and then I’m ready for a two-hour nap.
Others at the conference are having similar experiences. It’s really good to be able to be in a big group of people for the first time since March, 2020, but it’s also really tiring.
I’m at a religious education conference at Ferry Beach Conference Center in coastal Maine. They’ve had quite a bit of rain in the past month, and not surprisingly quite a few mushrooms have spring up — like this one:
I’m visiting Massachusetts, and stopped at Great Meadows National w/ildlife Refuge, where I saw this Northern Watersnake:
We’ve been singing “Follow the Drinking Gourd” with campers at our ecojustce day camp. But Tobi just pointed out that we may want to drop it next year. Why? Well, first of all there’s serious doubt whether it’s a traditional African American song. The most familiar form of the song (including the version found in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal) derives from the version recorded by the Weavers. This version is an arrangement by Lee Hays, first published in 1947 in “People’s Songs Bulletin”; let’s call this the Hays version. Compare the Hays version to the first published version, collected by amateur folklorist H. B. Parks between 1912 and 1918, which first appeared in print in 1928 in Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, Number VII:
The 1928 Parks version, with 11 measures and four fermata, does not conform to the conventional structure of Anglo-American folk music. The 1947 Hays version, on the other hand, has 8 measures with no fermata and a more elaborate melody in measures 5-6. You can imagine Lee Hays regularizing and developing the melody so that it better conformed to the standards of an eight-bar chorus of the Folk Revival. The Parks version, with its “irregular” structure, feels more like something that could have been collected in the field from a singer who had no training in conventional Western music theory. (And I admit my personal preference: I like its lonesome sound much better than what I consider to be the sanitized sound of the Hays version.)
But what about Parks’s version? How authentic is it? Here’s how Parks describes first hearing this song (reprinted: H. B. Parks, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” The Best of Texas Folk and Folklore, 1916-1954, ed. Mody Coggin Boatright, Wilson Mathis Hudson, and Allen Maxwell [Univ. of North Texas Press / Texas Folklore Society, 1998], pp. 159-162):
“I was a resident of Hot Springs, North Carolina, during the year of 1912 and had charge of the agricultural work of a large industrial school. This school owned a considerable herd of cattle, which were kept in the meadues on the tops of the Big Rich Mountains on the boundary between North Carolina and Tennessee. One day while riding through the mountains looking after this stock, I heard the following stanza sung by a little Negro [sic] boy, who was picking up dry sticks of wood near a Negro cabin:
“‘Foller the drinkin’ gou’d,
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d;
No one know, the wise man say,
“Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.” ‘
“It is very doubtful if this part of the song would have attracted anyone’s attention had not the old grandfather, who had been sitting on a block of wood in front of the cabin, slowly got up and, taking his cane, given the boy a sound lick across the back with the admonition not to sing that song again. This excited my curiosity and I asked the old man why he did not want the boy to sing the song. The only answer I could get was that it was bad luck.”
Then, according to Parks, “about a year later” (i.e., c. 1913) he happened to be passing through Louisville, Kentucky, he claims to have heard a fisherman singing the same words to the same tune. When Parks asked the man about the song, the man refused to talk with him about it. I note that Parks was not engaged in formal collecting of folklore or folk song on either or these occasions; he was not seeking out informants, sitting down with them and listening to their repertoires, while taking careful notes. In fact, he can’t even remember the exact date of the Louisville encounter. As a result, I’m quite skeptical about these two stories; I’m willing to believe that Parks encountered interesting songs on both occasions, but I’m equally willing to believe that his later recall of the words or music, or both, was inaccurate. It seems so unlikely that two singers, hundreds of miles apart, would be singing exactly the same words and exactly the same music; that’s not how folk music gets transmitted; each singer changes a song a little bit as they pass it to the next singer. If Parks had said he had heard a similar tune with similar words, I would be more willing to believe him.
Parks then describes a third encounter with the song:
“In 1918 I was standing on the platform of the depot at Waller, Texas, waiting for a train, when, much to my surprise, I heard the familiar tune being picked on a violin and banjo and two voices singing the following words:
“‘Foller the Risen Lawd,
Foller the Risen Lawd;
The bes’ thing the Wise Man say,
“Foller the Risen Lawd.” ‘
“The singers proved to be two Negro boys about sixteen years of age. When they were asked as to where they learned the song, they gave the following explanation. They said that they were musicians traveling with a colored [sic] revivalist and that he had composed this song and that they played it and used it in their revival meetings.”
The next part of Parks’ story may be summarized like this: Curious about the song, he asked “an old Negro who had known a great many slaves in his boyhood days” about the song. Why yes, his informant said, he remembered the song, and he remembered that it was associated with a “peg-leg sailor” who was part of the Underground Railroad, and used the song to provide instructions to enslaved persons so they could escape to Canada. After hearing the story, Parks contacted older members of his family, white people from the North who had been part of the Underground Railroad, and they said there were indeed records from the Anti-Slavery Society documenting a Peg Leg Joe “who made a number of trips through the South and induced young Negroes to run away and escape.” Nothing more was known about this sailor, and nothing more was heard of him after about 1859, according to Parks’s relatives.
Below are the words Parks says were sung by Peg Leg Joe. But Parks does not provide a specific informant for these words; he does not say from whom he collected them; he merely says these words “were held in the memory of the Negroes.” This vague attribution makes me doubt the authenticity of the lyrics — more on this below.
When the sun come back,
When the firs’ quail call,
Then the time is come
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.
Chorus: Foller the drinkin’ gou’d,
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d;
For the old man say,
“Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.”
The riva’s bank am a very good road,
The dead trees show the way,
Lef’ foot, peg foot goin’ on,
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.
[Note: Peg Leg Joe reportedly blazed a trail using the marks of a peg imprint and the imprint of a left foot]
The riva ends a-tween two hills,
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d:
‘Nuther riva on the other side
Follers the drinkin’ gou’d.
Wha the little riva
Meet the grea’ big un,
The ole man waits —
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.
[Note: the last two verses reportedly describe a route following the Tombigee River in Alabama north, then across to the Tennessee River, and thence to the Ohio River.]
Personally, I suspect Parks did what so many elite white folklore collectors did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: he used a heavy editorial hand: he may have taken several “floating verses” and combined them; he may have filled out incomplete verses; he may have combined versions from several different parts of the country; he may have added lyrics that interested him to a tune he liked. I don’t doubt Parks’s honesty, but I do doubt his scholarship; while acceptable in his day, today his methodology would be considered slipshod.
Where does this leave us?
First of all, the tune as commonly sung (i.e., the version in the UU hymnal) should probably be attributed as “Music: probable traditional African American, arranged by Lee Hays.” Why say say the music is probably traditional? Because the 1928 Parks article raises the very real possibility that the tune that he recorded and remembered in 1928 was composed by an unknown African American revivalist. If those revivalists traveled widely, they may have spread their tune from North Carolina to Kentucky from 1912 to 1918, thus accounting for Parks hearing similar or identical tunes across six years and a wide geographical range. I don’t think it’s right to obscure the possibility of that revivalist, because if we obscure that possibility, then we erase yet another African American composer from history. I also feel it’s important to acknowledge that an elite white man altered the tune significantly, so the attribution should state that clearly.
Personally, I’d feel much better if we sang the version published by Parks in 1928, rather than the sanitized version recorded by the (all-white) Weavers in 1947. That would also simplify the attribution to: “Music: probable traditional African American.”
As for the words, I don’t doubt that Parks wrote down words that he remembered hearing sung by African Americans. I do have strong doubts as to whether the words he edited and published in 1928 were the exact words sung in the 1850s by African Americans. Assuming the song does in fact date back to the 1850s, what we know of the folk process makes it almost certain that the words changed over time. And what if the song does not date to the 1850s? It seems entirely possible to me that the words were composed by an unknown African American poet in the last decades 19th century, or the first decade of the 20th century. Those decades were a time of incredible innovation in African American music, with the ongoing growth of sacred music and the emergence of blues and jazz. Some of the early blues lyrics are some of the greatest poetry to come out of America. What about a talented African American poet looking back on the stories of his or her parents or grandparents, and creating a story of agency, escape, and freedom? Once again, I don’t want to erase yet another African American poet from history. So I’d suggest an attribution something like this: “Words: African American tradition.” Not “traditional” — but rather from the tradition of African American folk and composed lyrics.
Steve Hassen, a conservative Christian, has written a blog post that explains why conservative Christians should get vaccinated. The blog post is based on a podcast interview with Professor Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:
“I asked Throckmorton for his view on the COVID-19 pandemic and what he thinks about vaccination? He and his family are vaccinated. When I asked him about Christianity and science, he told me Biblical sources provide believers guidance. He pointed out that Timothy, a disciple of St. Paul, had a stomach ailment. He was not advised to pray or just have faith but to take a little wine (that is, treat the ailment). Luke, who wrote one of the Gospels, was himself a physician. God gave us incredible gifts: our minds, intelligence, and curiosity. Certainly, we are meant to use our minds and think and not allow irrational fears to cause harm and death.”
Hassen covers a lot of ground in his blog post. He takes on Trump: “How can anyone [who’s] religious think God is using Donald Trump?” He explains how science and conservative Christian faith are compatible. He critiques Christian nationalism and dominionism, two of the biggest threats to U.S. democracy today. And he touches on the problem of narcissism in the pastors of mega-churches (some of what he says there reminds me of one or two people who used to be ministers of some of our largest UU congregations).
Hassen reminds me of the conservative Christians I used to know back in the day: people whose intelligence, morals, and ethics I held in great respect, even while disagreeing with them on some theological points. Unitarian Universalists who like to demonize white evangelical conservative Christians might want to read this post, and expand their horizons a little bit. If we’re going to stop the threat to democracy represented by QAnon and Trumpism, we need all the allies we can get.
In July, 1969, Jules Siegel interviewed several Black Panthers for an article he was writing. The Panthers he spoke to talked quite a bit about a topic that has been very much in the news over the past year — reforming the police. Field Marshal “D.C.” [Donald Cox] of the Black Panthers laid out the fundamental problem:
“It has been called police brutality. It’s a matter of educating people to the fact that yes, it’s brutal, but the term for it is fascism. Black people already know, because they’ve lived under fascist terror ever since we’ve been in this country. Fascism is the police running amok in the black community.”
“Poison,” a field lieutenant from the Chicago Black Panthers, outlined the Panthers’ solution — community control of police:
“Lots of people don’t understand what community control means. It means giving the people a voice. Right now they have no voice because it is a centralist form of government. Community control of the police doesn’t mean that the community would take over the present pig [i.e., police] department. It means that people will have people from within that community policing that community. If one of these police would commit a crime against the people, he [sic] would have to come home at night. It’s a hard thing to go home if you’ve committed a crime against your own people. Before you commit that crime, you begin to think.”
It’s also important to note that Field Marshal D.C. asserted that the fascism of the police was not rooted in race and racism per se:
“It’s in the interest of the power structure to propagate the idea that it’s a race struggle rather than a class struggle. As long as they can keep people divided into ethnic groups, the masses are not going to join together to form a united front against the exploiter who is oppressing everyone.”
In short, the Panthers saw that the real problem was not the police, but the power structure that the police represented.
The Black Panthers had many problems, including rampant sexism. But I still find much of their vision for society compelling. They saw that U.S. capitalism was upheld by a form of fascism, and that police brutality was one manifestation of that fascism. They wanted to wrest social control away from “the oppressor,” and put that control back in the hands of the people. And they combined grand theory with practical action: by July, 1969, the Panthers’ “Breakfast for Children” program was feeding 50,000 children a week across the U.S. In spite of their flaws, theirs was a grand vision for a more just and egalitarian society. This vision provides a necessary context for their proposals for police reform.
Notes: Interview excerpts from “The Black Panthers” by Jules Siegel, from his book Record (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books/Rolling Stone, 1972). More about the Black Panther Party at the National Archives, including vintage video footage, and brief biographies of prominent women Panthers.
I became aware of feminism as a teenager, back in the 1970s. After some initial resistance, feminism wound up appealing to me not only because it held out the hope of equality for women, but also because it challenged existing gender norms and gender roles. I’ve never been comfortable with the stereotypical gender norms for men in the United States. I’m not the strong silent type. I’ve always liked working with children. I kinda like doing housework (except cooking, I’m bad at cooking). I didn’t know the term “toxic masculinity” back then, but I knew what toxic masculinity was, I knew it was hurting me, and I wanted to change it.
But we mostly remained stuck with the old gender norms throughout the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the 2000s. In 2002, I took a battery of psychological tests as part of my preparation for ministry. On one of those tests, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), I scored well out of the normal range on gender identity. Worried that I had some kind of pathology, I asked the psychologist who administered the test what that score meant. Oh, the psychologist said, don’t worry about that, men going into ministry often test out of the normal range on that scale. I found the psychologist’s reply even more disturbing than the thought that I might have a pathology — because the psychologist’s reply meant that men trained to be empathetic, caring, and group-oriented were considered pathological by society.
So when non-binary gender finally emerged as a viable option, I felt we were taking a step in the right direction. Biological females who happened to be assertive and articulate and willing to talk over men didn’t have to get pushed into a gender role that required them to be deferential and self-deprecating. Biological males who happened to be caring and empathetic didn’t have to get pushed into a gender role that required them to be strong, silent, and unemotional. Non-binary gender gave the promise of allowing a wide range of gender expression, far beyond these two examples.
Non-binary gender is a step in the right direction. It has opened a tiny and fragile space between male and female gender roles. But across the U.S., only a small percentage of people now consider themselves non-binary gender. For most people in the U.S., the old gender norms remain intact. I feel hopeful about that fragile open space where non-binary gender exists. But I’m discouraged that the old gender norms still wall in that tiny open space. I’m discouraged that non-binary gender has to be a matter of individual choice for just a few people, rather than a change in the way society understands gender. I’m discouraged at the thought that as a man, I’d still probably test as pathological on the MMPI. And I’m especially discouraged that non-binary gender people face wide social discrimination.
When non-binary people are discriminated against in much the same way the women are discriminated against, it seems to me that we’re still stuck with toxic masculinity running the show. We have taken a step in the right direction, but from my feminist perspective, it’s only a baby step; I wish we could grow up, and take adult-sized steps.
U.S. Catholic bishops have voted 155 to 55 (with 6 abstentions) to deny holy communion to U.S. politicians who support abortion rights. Elected officials who openly support the death penalty will still be allowed to receive communion, even though the church’s catechism states, “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Elected officials who deny climate change will still be able to receive communion, even though Pope Francis has said, “We need to act decisively to put an end to all emissions of greenhouse gases by mid-century at the very latest, and to do even more than that.” This is typical of U.S. religion today.
I have come to believe that the big divide in U.S. religion these days is actually politics, not theology. Do you support the Republican party line, or the Democratic party line? — that’s how the U.S. religious divide is defined. The U.S. Catholic bishops voting to deny communion to politicians who support abortion rights, yet taking no action on politicians who support the death penalty, may not seem logically consistent. Nevertheless, their stance is entirely consistent with Republican politics.
I’m pretty sure that Unitarian Universalists suffer from the same problem, on the other side of the political divide. Unitarian Universalism is doing its best to stand up against racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism (to some extent), and other forms of systemic injustice. Classism, however, is mostly dismissed or ignored within Unitarian Universalism. Nor does Unitarian Universalism engage in systematic critique of capitalism. Our stance may not be logically consistent, but it is entirely consistent Democratic politics.
Therefore, fellow Unitarian Universalists, before you speak scornfully of the Catholic bishops, first reflect on how Unitarian Universalism hews so closely to the Democratic party line. Instead of speaking of another religion with scorn, we might instead reflect on the words of a wise ancient Jewish teacher who said, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” In other words, I do hope we Unitarian Universalists don’t become merely a special interest group of the Democratic party.
A couple of weeks ago, the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) decided that masks would be required in workplaces, unless all employees in a given area proved that they were vaccinated. Then the business community leaned on Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and the rules quickly changed. Requiring businesses to determine the vaccination status of their employees would hamper the economy, said the business owners. Newsom is facing a recall vote so he quickly agreed, and Cal/OSHA had to fall into line, and now employees who say they’re vaccinated (no proof required) won’t have to wear masks.
Mitch Steiger of the California Labor Federation, AFL/CIO, disagrees with Newsom. Steiger pointed out that workers in rural areas — some rural counties in California have vaccination rates on the order of 25% — will especially be at risk. When the San Jose Mercury News asked for comment, Steiger said, “We will literally have decided to sacrifice workers’ lives in order to spare employers the inconvenience of looking at a vaccination card.”
The state of California just changed the COVID rules again. As reported by Bay Area News Group:
“Under mounting pressure, California’s workplace-safety board on Wednesday voted to drop controversial new rules that would have required many workers to keep their masks on for months — just hours after state officials announced that vaccinated Californians can go mask free in most settings starting next week.”
(The “mounting pressure” was from business groups, who out-pressured employee groups and unions who emphasized the safety of workers. Next time some politician says, “We follow the science,” remember that there are still many things scientists don’t know about COVID, which means that politicians are responding to political pressure as much as they’re “following the science.”)
The most difficult aspect of complying with COVID rules is that they’re constantly changing. Those of us who work with children are going to be dealing with changing COVID rules for at least six more months, assuming the vaccine trials for children aged 5 to 11 are completed by late this year. And those of us who also work with children under age 5 may be dealing with changing COVID rules for another year.
It’s exhausting. You learn one set of rules, and they change. This is inevitable. Our knowledge of COVID keeps changing. Though Americans love to blame people — the Democrats blame the Republicans, the Republicans blame the Democrats — in this case, there are no people to blame. We can only blame the virus. It’s silly to blame an unthinking virus. So there’s no blame.
But it’s still exhausting. COVID rules are changing on a weekly basis. It’s impossible to keep up.
I’ll be leading a workshop on ecological spirituality at Ferry Beach Conference Center in Main this summer. One of the ecological spiritual practices I’m going to explore with participants is keeping some kind of nature journal. Although most nature journals focus on musings and emotions, it’s also possible to keep a nature journal rooted in the practices of field biologists. An example of the first type of journal might be Henry Thoreau’s early journals, where he relates his philosophical musings to his observations of the natural world. An example of the second type of journal might be Henry Thoreau’s later journals (1853 and later), where his close observations of the natural world lead to deeper insights into non-human organisms.
I’ve found lots of books and online resources that tell how to keep the first type of journal, but it’s more difficult to find accessible books and resources that teach people how to keep the second type of journal. So I wrote an eight-page introduction to the topic to share with the participants in the upcoming workshop. Click on the image below to read a PDF of “A Field Journal for Naturalists.”
Two readings in Singing the Living Tradition, the 1993 Unitarian Universalist hymnal, have been bothering me. I’m not sure I believe their attributions.
(1) The first, #607, is a reading attributed to Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi, better known by his pen name Hafiz (or Hafez):
“Cloak yourself in a thousand ways, and still I shall know you, my Beloved.
Veil yourself with every enchantment, and yet I shall feel your Presence, most dear, close and intimate.
I shall salute you in the springing of cypresses, and in the sheen of lakes the laughter of fountains.
I shall surely see you in tumbling clouds, in brightly embroidered meadows.
O beloved Presence, more beautiful than all the stars together,
I find your face in ivy that climbs, in clusters of grapes, in morning sun on the mountains, in the clear arch of the sky.
You gladden the whole earth and make every heart great. You are the breathing of the world.”
I didn’t find this poem searching either Google Books or Archive.org. Admittedly, Hafiz wrote hundreds of poems, so I can’t say that I’ve made a definitive search. However, I did notice that when searching the Internet for specific phrases from this reading, what comes up are mostly Unitarian Universalist Web sites.
I have no idea where this reading came from. It sounds somewhat like Hafiz. But who’s the translator? Where’s the reference to the Persian original? And then when I do a Web search for the final phrase, “breathing of the world,” there’s a lot of Unitarian Universalist sources that turn up. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a Unitarian Universalist interpretation of a genuine Hafiz poem. I also wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be another poem by that most prolific of American poets, Anonymous. Given all this, the best attribution for this reading is probably “Unknown.”
But a big part of the attraction of this poem is that it’s supposed to be a Sufi poem. Many American Unitarian Universalists get their God fix by finding a non-Western author who expresses theistic sentiments; God seems less threatening when it comes from the non-Western world. I have to wonder if some Western religious liberal wrote this, using a pastiche of Sufi-sounding sentiments, to safely express their theism — which sounds like a kind of religious colonialism that I don’t want to have any part of. With that ugly possibility in mind, until someone can prove to me that this is a genuine translation of a Hafiz poem, I don’t think I want to use it.
(2) The second reading which has been bothering me is #419, the one that begins begins “Look to this day!” The hymnal says, “Attributed to Kalidasa.” But should it really be attributed to the ancient Sanskrit poet? The first appearance of this quotation on Google Books appears in the 1895 Cornell University class book; thereafter, it appears in many different popular publications. But a search of Google Books and of Archive.org brings up no instance of this reading appearing in any translation of Kalidasa’s work, nor in any translation of any Sanskrit poems. To me, it doesn’t sound much like Sanskrit poetry, but it does sound a lot like one of those late nineteenth century American verses used as fillers by editors of periodicals.
Here’s the version reprinted in the April, 1911, newsletter of Bullfinch Place Church (Unitarian), Boston:
“Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth—the glory of action—the splendor of beauty.
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well-lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
Such is the salutation of the dawn.”
In the absence of proof that this really is a Sanskrit poem, the best attribution for this is “Anonymous.” With that attribution, this is still a good inspirational reading — no need to dress it up by calling it Sanskrit.
Another look at David’s story, part of a series of stories for liberal religious kids.
Once upon a time there lived a good and holy man named Samuel. Samuel lived in the land of Israel. He knew that Israel needed a good and strong leader. Samuel decided that Saul, son of Kish, would be the best person to rule over Israel, and so he anointed Saul king, and then served Saul as a holy man and an advisor.
Saul was a handsome man. There was not a man among all the people of Israel who was as handsome as he, and he was so tall that he stood head and shoulders over everyone else.
Saul was a likeable man. When he was a boy, he was easy-going and treated his parents with respect. When he became a man, he remained easy-going and friendly.
But even though he was handsome and likeable, every once in a while Saul would fall into a dark mood. It was more than just a bad mood. When Saul fell into one of these dark moods, the light went out of his eyes. When he was in one of his dark moods, he didn’t want to talk with anyone, he just wanted to stay by himself in his throne room. When he was in one of his dark moods, sometimes he would do things that were dangerous or foolish.
One day Samuel sent Saul off to do battle with the evil tribe of the Amakelites. Samuel warned Saul that if he won the battle, he must slaughter all the Amakelites’ cattle. This was because their cattle was diseased, and if Saul brought the diseased cattle back to Israel, all the cattle of Israel would grow sick and soon die.
Saul fought the battle, and he won. But unfortunately, after the battle he fell into one of his dark moods. He forgot what Samuel had told him, and he brought all the diseased cattle back to Israel.
Samuel met him, and cried out, “What is all this lowing of cattle that I hear?”
Suddenly Saul remembered what Samuel had him — but it was too late. The cattle were already in Israel. Sail felt terrible. He worried that Samuel could no longer trust him, and his mood grew even darker.
Samuel saw that Saul kept falling into these dark moods. He feared that Saul’s moods were growing worse and worse, and might some day overcome Saul entirely. So he decided to find a successor for Saul.
Samuel found David, the son of Jesse. David was a shepherd, he was short and cheerful, with red hair and bright eyes. Samuel anointed David in secret, and told David that soon he be the next king of Israel.
Saul knew none of this. But soon he fell into one of his dark moods again. His servants said, “One of your dark moods has come again! Command us to go and find someone to come an play beautiful music for you. The music will ease your pain and lighten your mood.”
One of the servants said, “I know a young man named David, the son of Jesse. He plays beautifully on the harp. He is also a warrior, and he doesn’t gossip.”
“Fetch him here,” said Saul.
So David came to live with King Saul, and his music helped to soothe the king when one of his dark moods came upon him.
But Saul’s dark moods got worse and worse, and they came more and more frequently. Sometimes Saul wouldn’t recognize David, and several times he attacked David.
Finally, it got so bad that David had to leave the king, and go live in the wilderness….
To be continued…
Source: Hebrew Bible, 1 Samuel 10-16, 31; 2 Samuel 1-3. The suggestion that Saul’s dark moods might have been a manifestation of mental illness comes from lectures given by Carole Fontaine, professor of Hebrew Bible, at Andover Newton Theological School in 1997.
Going through my archives, I found my retelling of this classic story. I’m posting it here as part of my series of stories for liberal religious kids.
Once upon a time there was a shepherd named David. His three older brothers went off to fight in the army of Israel, under the command of King Saul. But David stayed behind with their father, Jesse, in the town of Bethlehem.
One day after his brothers had been gone for forty days, David’s father said to him, “Go take some bread and cheese and corn to the camp where your brothers and the rest of the army are — give this food to the captain of their company.”
When David got to the place where the army of Israel was, they were just getting ready to go to battle with the army of the Philistines. A great warrior, a man named Goliath, had just come out of the Philistine camp. He was over nine feet tall. He wore a helmet of brass on his head, he was armed with a coat of mail, and he wore brass armor on his legs and back. He carried a long spear, with an iron tip that weighed six hundred shekels.
Goliath stood in the valley between the two armies, and called out to army of Israel. “Why have you come to set your battle in array?” he shouted. “Am I not a Philistine, and are you not servants of Saul? Choose a man from among you, and let him come down to me. We will fight, and if he can kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him, and kill him, then you shall all be our servants.”
David came up to the camp of the army of Israel right after Goliath had issued his challenge. All the men in the army were talking about it. “Have you seen this man who has come up from the army of the Philistines?” they said. “King Saul has promised that if any man dares to take Goliath’s challenge, and also manages to kill Goliath, the king will give that man great riches, and give him the princess in marriage.” But Saul and all his army were afraid of Goliath.
Eliab, David’s eldest brother, saw David just then. “What are you doing here?” said his brother angrily. “You’re proud and your heart is naughty. You just came down so that you could watch the battle.”
“No,” said David to Elia. “Our father sent me. But now that I’m here,” he went on, “I’m going to go fight this Goliath.”
Saul heard that David wanted to fight Goliath. Since no one else seemed willing to take on Goliath’s challenge, Saul sent for David. But when he saw how young David was, Saul said, “You’re not able to fight Goliath.”
“I have watched my father’s sheep,” said David, “and when a lion and a bear came and took a lamb from the flock, I went after them. I took the lion by his beard and killed him. And I killed the bear. And I can kill this Goliath, too.”
Saul decided to let David try. He tried to give David a helmet made of brass, and a sword to buckle around his waist. But David took off the helmet and the sword. Instead, he took his shepherd’s staff, and he took five smooth stones from the brook, and he took his sling.
When Goliath, the Philistine, saw David, the young shepherd, he laughed. “Come to me,” said Goliath, “and I will give leave you dead for the vultures to feed upon.”
“You come with a sword and a shield,” said David. “But I come in the name of Adonai, the god of Israel. Adonai will deliver you into my hand, and I will leave you dead for the vultures to feed upon.”
Goliath got up and started walking forward to meet David. David put his hand in his bag and took one of the five smooth stones. He ran ahead to meet Goliath, put the stone in his sling, and flung the stone so it hit Goliath right in the forehead. Goliath fell down dead.
When David returned to the camp of the Israelites, the soldiers took him to Saul. Saul adopted him as one of his own sons. And David became best friends with Saul’s own son, Jonathan.
To be continued…
Source: Hebrew Bible, 1 Samuel 18.
The conclusion of the tale from the Ramayana.
Full script below the fold.
Sharpie: We left Queen Yudhisthira at the pool of enchantment, where her four siblings were lying dead.
Rolf: I need to know what happened next!
Edgar/Crane: Do not drink, O Queen, until you have answered my questions.
Sharpie/Queen: Who are you? What do you want?
Crane: I am not a bird, but a Yaksha!
Possum: And the Queen saw a vague outline of a huge being above crane, towering above the lofty trees, glowing like an evening cloud.
Queen: It seems I must obey, and answer your questions before I drink. Ask me what you will, and I will use what wisdom I have to answer you.
Possum: So the Yaksha, who was disguised as a crane, began asking questions that seemed impossible to answer.
Crane: What makes the sun move around the sky?
Queen: The Dharma, right behavior, duty and law, moves the Sun around the sky.
Crane: What is the true nature of the Sun?
Queen: Truth is the true nature of the Sun.
Possum: There were so many questions. Some of the questions concerned the duty of a religious person.
Crane: What is it, that when you cast it aside, makes you lovable?
Queen: When you cast aside pride, you become lovable.
Edgar: What is it, that when you cast it aside, makes you happy?
Queen: When you cast aside greed, you become happy.
Possum: Some of the questions were about philosophy and the meaning of life.
Crane: What is faster than the wind?
Queen: A person’s thoughts are faster than the wind.
Crane: What sort of person is most noble?
Queen: The person who desires the well-being of all creatures is most noble.
Possum: The Queen answered all the questions wisely and well. At last the Yaksha stopped asking questions, and revealed who he was. He was Yama-Dharma, the god of Death — and the Queen’s father.
Crane: It was I who took on the shape of a deer and stole the wood, so that you would have to chase after me. Now you may drink. And you may choose which of your siblings I bring back to life.
Queen: Bring Nakula back to life.
Crane: Why not the other three?
Queen: Nakula’s mother is Madri, and Kunthi is mother of the rest of us. Bring Nakula back so both Madri and Kunthi will still have a child.
Possum: Upon hearing this, Yama-Dharma began to fade away. He said, “You are truly just and wise. Because of your wisdom, love, and justice, I will return ALL of your siblings to life.”
Edgar: So the Crane was both the mysterious Voice, and also Yama-Dharma.
Sharpie: The Queen really was wise, wasn’t she?
Rolf: I’m glad the story has a happy ending.
I recently finished reading Howard Zinn’s memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. In the chapter “Growing Up Class Conscious,” Zinn talks about going to his first political demonstration in Times Square, New York City, when he was in his late teens:
“In the midst of the crowd, banners were unfurled, and people, perhaps a thousand or more, formed into lines carrying banners and signs and chanting slogans about peace and justice and a dozen other causes of the day. I was exciting. And non-threatening….”
Except that expressing such political ideas was not exactly non-threatening to the powers-that-be:
“We heard the sound of sirens and I thought there must be a fire somewhere, and accident of some kind. But then I heard screams and saw hundreds of policemen, mounted on horses and on foot, charging into the lines of marchers, smashing people with their clubs. I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear.”
Zinn quickly learned that the freedom to assemble and demonstrate without fear is not actually a right for working class whites:
“As I absorbed all this, as my thoughts raced, all in a few seconds, I was spun around by a very large man, who seized my shoulder and hit me very hard. I only saw him as a blur. I didn’t know if it was a club or a fist or a blackjack, but I was knocked unconscious.”
This was a key moment in Zinn’s political awakening:
“Those young Communist on the block [where Zinn lived] were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful.”
U.S. Communists were wrong about a number of things, including the Soviet Union, but they were absolutely right about the police and the state. No wonder Communism was made functionally illegal in the U.S. during the 1950s, just a few years after Zinn’s political awakening.
We’re seeing this play out in Congress right now. The people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 did so at the behest of the rich and powerful. The Democrats in the House of Representatives have proposed a bipartisan inquiry into the storming of the Capitol, but the majority of Republicans in the House voted against it. (Not that I trust the Democrats to institute an objective inquiry — they too are the rich and powerful, and their goal is mostly to score political points off their equally rich and powerful rivals.) My liberal and progressive friends like to say: if the people who stormed the Capitol had been black, they would have been stopped pretty quickly. But it’s equally true that if the people who stormed the Capitol had been working class whites, or homeless people, or Communists, they would have been stopped just as quickly.
If you’re an upper middle class white person — these days, that means a white person with a college degree — you probably don’t have worry about police. But three quarters of white people in the U.S. are not upper middle class. True, they don’t have to worry about policing in the same way as non-white people — but as Howard Zinn discovered in the late 1940s, the police are most definitely not on their side.
One final, obvious, point: the problem does not lie with individual police officers. The police officers I’ve know, and know, are courageous, kind, and dedicated public servants. The rich and powerful would love for us to believe that the problem can be solved by disciplining individual police officers. But the problem can only be solved when the state no longer protects the rich and powerful at the expense of non-white and working class people.
The United States is divided so badly that it’s hard to believe. My liberal and progressive friends blame it all on the Republicans. Not surprisingly, the conservatives blame it all on the liberals. No one seems to listen to anyone but the people they agree with any more.
I’ve been blaming this unhealthy division on social media. But in his new book How Rights Went Wrong, Jamal Greene, professor of law at Columbia Law School, argues that the U.S. Supreme Court, and lower courts, are also to blame:
“…The job of the courts in a pluralistic democracy isn’t to please their base. It’s to work to resolve conflicts, to ratchet them down rather than up. Courts should be reminding us of what we have in common. They should be granting just enough constitutional leverage on each side that we have no choice but to sit down across from each other at the table, to look each other in the eye, and to speak to each other….” How Rights Went Wrong: : Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), p. 163
Instead, Supreme Court decisions have become a zero-sum game, with clear winners and clear losers. Rather than trying to work people we disagree with, to find some common ground, we just want to eliminate them. As a result, progressives now hope that some of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court will die so Joe Biden can appoint some more progressive justices. Conversely, conservatives hope that the conservative justices can live another four years.
Unitarian Universalist congregations are supposed to support the democratic process in our congregations, and in society at large. But these days, most Unitarian Universalists have unthinkingly bought into the anti-democratic notion that Supreme Court decisions are a zero-sum game. Maybe it’s time for us Unitarian Universalists to reflect seriously on Jamal Greene’s thoughts — maybe we need to stop hoping that conservative Supreme Court justices will die, and start thinking about how to strengthen democracy.
Rolf, Sharpie, Possum, and the gang decide to act out another story from the Ramayana.
Full script below the fold.
Rolf: I want to hear the story of the Pool of Enchantment!
Sharpie: Oh, yes, the story from the Ramayana. I’ll act out the part of King Yudhisthira.
Possum: The King, or rather the Queen, and her siblings were chasing a deer who had stolen the wood needed to start a Brahmin’s sacred fire. After chasing the deer for a long time, they sat down under a tree, so thirsty they couldn’t go on.
Sharpie: If we don’t find water soon, we’ll die. Nakula, climb this tree to look for water.
Birago: There’s water over there.
Sharpie: Go get some water and bring it back to us.
Possum: Nakula soon found a pool of clear water. A Crane stood at the far edge of the pool.
Birago: Water! I’m so thirsty!
Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you answer my questions.
Possum: Nakula was thirsty, so he ignored the Voice. He drank the cool water, and in a few moments lay dead beside the pool.
Sharpie: Where is Nakula? Sahadeva, you’ll have to go and bring us some water.
Castor: On my way!
Castor: Nakula, dead! I’m so thirsty, I’ll drink before I find out what killed him.
Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you have answered my questions.
Possum: But Sahadeva had already drunk from the water, and also lay dead beside the pool.
Sharpie: Arjuna, find our siblings, and bring us water.
Nicky: I’ll take my bow and arrows, just in case.
Nicky: My two siblings, dead! I’ll find who or what killed them. But first, I’m so thirsty.
Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you have answered my questions.
Nicky: Who are you? Come out and fight with me.
Voice: Bwa ha ha ha. Do not drink, O Prince.
Possum: Soon Arjuna, too, lay dead beside the pool.
Sharpie: Bhima, go find our siblings, then bring water back to me.
[Nods silently.]
Possum: Seeing his siblings, Bhima wondered what evil demon had killed them.
[Looks around in silence.]
Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you have answered my questions.
Possum: When the Queen realized that her siblings were not going to return, she went to the pool herself.
Sharpie: This must be the work of some evil spirit. But I am so thirsty, I will drink first.
Voice: Do not drink, O Queen, until you have answered my questions!
Rolf: They shouldn’t have drunk the water!
Nicky: Who’s that strange Voice that speaks?
Possum: We’ll have to wait until next week to find out….
Dr. Sharpie, Rolf, Possum, and Nicky ask to be told the old story of the UU Flower Communion, or Flower Celebration.
Full script below the fold.
Rolf: Dan, can you tell us the story of the Flower Communion again?
Dan: Don’t you know that story already?
Possum: You tell it better. But you don’t have to tell us that Unitarian churches in the Midwest did flower services starting in 1875.
Rolf: Just start with Maja Oktavec, when she came to the United States from the Czech Republic.
Sharpie: And we already know that she was a librarian in the New York Public Library.
Nicky: And she fell in love with Norbert Capek, and they married in 1917.
Dan: OK, I’ll start there. Norbert was a Baptist minister, but he started to doubt his Baptist beliefs. Maja encouraged his doubts. After they married, he resigned from the Baptist ministry because of his doubts.
Rolf: They sound like Unitarians to me!
Dan: One day, their children wanted to go to Sunday school. Each week, the children chose a church to try. Afterwards, Maja and Norbert asked them what they had learned. It always sounded like the same old religion they had left behind, so they’d ask the children to try a different church next week.
Possum: Until the children went to a Unitarian church.
Dan: And they told their parents that they had been encouraged to wonder and to ask questions. So of course they returned to the Unitarian church. And Norbert and Mája decided that they’d attend the Unitarian services, and then they became Unitarians.
Nicky: Meanwhile, back in Europe….
Dan: The Capeks’ homeland became an independent country. The American Unitarians helped Norbert and Mája to go back to Czechoslovakia to start a Unitarian church in the city of Prague.
Sharpie: And they didn’t want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind.
Dan: In 1923, Norbert and Mája created a new Unitarian ritual that wouldn’t be like anything in any other religion. They called it the Flower Celebration.
Possum: Now we call it a Flower Communion.
Rolf: Yeah, and everybody gets to exchange flowers.
Nicky: Exchanging flowers symbolizes how all we are all connected to one another.
Dan: Soon the Unitarian church in Prague had three thousand members. It was largest Unitarian church anywhere. But next to Czechoslovakia, in Germany, the Nazis had taken over the government. In 1939, the Nazis began invading nearby countries.
Rolf: This is the scary part.
Dan: Maja came to the United States to raise money to help refugees who were escaping from the Nazis. While she was here, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Norbert was arrested because he spoke out for freedom. The Nazis put Norbert into a concentration camp, where he died in 1942. After the Nazis were finally defeated, Mája stayed in the United States. Norbert’s death made her sad, but she watned to keep working to make the world a better place.
Nicky: Now for the good part!
Dan: Maja decided to bring the joyous Flower Celebration to Unitarians here in the United States. What better way to remember Norbert, and all the Czech Unitarians who fought for freedom?
Possum: I’m glad Maja Capek brought the Flower Communion to the United States.
Sharpie: I like the way the Flower Celebration honors the connections between all beings.
Rolf: I like the flowers!
Nicky: Now I can’t wait till next year’s Flower Communion!
The State of California has been updating its COVID regulations over the past three or four weeks. As a religious educator, I have to familiarize myself with three separate sets of regulations: “industry guidance” for “places of worship and cultural ceremonies,” “cohorts for children and youth in supervised settings,” and “daycamps and other supervised youth activities.”
Reading through these regulations is a mind-numbing experience. Many of the regulations start off saying “you have to do thus-and-so” but then refer you to another Web page or PDF which says “you have to do this-and-that,” where the two different sources don’t exactly contradict each other, but don’t seem to be in full agreement either.
And sometimes the rules are vague. In my favorite example, the state rules frequently say that “physical distancing” is required, but then they don’t tell you exactly what distance is required. Are we supposed to assume six feet? But a year ago, some of the physical distancing requirements were greater than six feet, as for example the distance required to be maintained between two stable cohorts of children. And now federal recommendations from the CDC are saying that three feet might be enough physical distancing; is the state trying to be deliberately vague about the amount of physical distancing, so they can decide later whether to adopt the CDC guidelines or not?
And I’m glad I don’t have to deal very much with the “industry guidance” for “places of worship and cultural ceremonies,” because those regulations contradict themselves. Due to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, California is not allowed to have regulations for places of worship that differ from the regulations for other large gatherings. And the first page you hit on for “industry guidance” for “places of worship and cultural ceremonies” basically says to see the guidance for large gatherings, which should make things easier, right? — but then there’s also a link to a PDF with rules from 2020 that are clearly not acceptable under the Supreme Court ruling, but because they’re linked to from the current “guidance” mean that still you’re supposed to follow them — I guess?
I understand that this must be an incredibly difficult time for state regulators and state employees. I’m sure they’re doing their best. But as it stands now, the regulations are so disorganized that I sometimes find it impossible to understand what I’m supposed to do. I sometimes feel like they wrote these regulations assuming we’re all big corporations who can hire full-time staffers to sort through this mass of material. The things is, if you’re a small nonprofit or a small business and trying to figure it out on your own, the staffer who’s trying to make sense out of the regulations doesn’t have hours and hours of spare time because we’re already working overtime trying to deal with everything else the pandemic is throwing at us.
To top it all off, they keep updating the regulations. So I have to figure out if I should put in a lot of time now trying to figure out the regulations, or wait and see if they change things again next week.
My mind is numb.
Religions News Service (RNS) ran a story recently about sermon plagiarism in U.S. Christian congregations — and then, a few days later, they ran a story about why some U.S. Christian pastors feel they need to plagiarize sermons.
And before you say, “Oh those Christians, Unitarian Universalist (UU) ministers would never do that” — UU ministers do indeed plagiarize sermons, and some have been caught doing it.
So why do Christian pastors — and UU ministers — plagiarize sermons? The RNS story suggests a couple of reasons. Well, writing sermons is exhausting and local preachers have other big demands on their energy (pastoral care, raising money, administration, etc.). And then people in a local congregation now get to hear those Big Name Preachers online, and they make it clear that their local preacher just doesn’t measure up.
But on the analogy that church musicians don’t write all the music they perform, the RNS article asks: shouldn’t local preachers be allowed to preach other people’s sermons? (That is, assuming they give credit to the actual writer, so it isn’t plagiarism.) Or at least, shouldn’t local preachers be allowed to rely on third party sermon prompts or outside sermon researchers to help them out? If we want congregations to hear the best, highest quality sermons, it makes sense for preachers to be able to search for, and use, the best sermons they can find.
On the other hand, maybe a sermon shouldn’t be understood as a weekly performance put on by a professional voice actor. In many Christian congregations, the sermon is often considered to be God’s way of speaking to one particular congregation, and the preacher’s sermon preparation includes both time spent ministering to the congregation, and time spent in prayer listening to God. UU congregations will understand this a little differently: I was trained to think of the sermon in a UU congregation as kind of conversation, where the preacher listens to what is going on in people’s lives and connects those personal events and stories to the big moral and existential questions.
I suspect that several pressures will drive UU congregations towards turning the preacher into a voice actor who puts on performances of the best sermons they can find. First, preachers have a limited amount of hours they can work each week, volunteers now have less time to devote to the congregation, so using other people’s sermons can free up the preacher’s time for other crucial tasks. Second, congregation members are increasingly aware of the excellent preaching available online, and this puts pressure on the local congregation to have a preacher who meets those high standards. Third, congregations compete for people’s leisure time in an increasingly crowded marketplace, and the demand for authenticity will not be as strong as the demand for polished production values. Fourth, as more congregations are unable to pay for full-time ministry, there’s going to be less time for sermon-writing and a greater demand for third-party sermons. In short, there are strong — maybe irresistible — economic forces that will change UU ministers from sermon-writers into voice actors.
I still prefer a preacher who writes their own sermons. I just don’t think most UU congregations will be able to make sermon-writing a priority as they budget money and staff time.
My Philadelphia cousin sent me a link to an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer he thought I might find interesting: “Haverford College students launched a strike last fall after a racial reckoning. The impact still lingers”:
“In 1972 … [Haverford’s] Black Student League announced a boycott of campus activities over institutional racism. … Fast forward nearly 50 years: A 2018-19 campus report found that Black and Latino students at Haverford were less likely to feel they had meaningful social interactions on campus and that their academics were well-supported.”
That’s the college where I took my undergraduate degree in 1983. Reading this article makes it look like one thing hasn’t changed since 1983: the student body is still overwhelmingly white. Another hasn’t changed: in spite of its woke rhetoric, Haverford College still hasn’t confronted the systemic racism that was painfully obvious decades ago ago when I was a student.
Sadly, this is probably true of many of the so-called elite liberal arts colleges. As Haverford student Rasaaq Shittu put it in an op-ed piece published in The Inquirer back in July: “Primarily white, outwardly liberal institutions like Haverford have such a long history of talking the talk without living up to it.” Which is another thing that hasn’t changed since my day. No wonder non-white students called for a two-week student strike last fall to protest the systemic racism at Haverford.
However, one thing that has changed since my day is the cost of an education at one of these elite liberal arts colleges. Today’s students at Haverford pay an astonishing $75,000 per year for tuition, room, and board. When I was there, the inflation-adjusted cost was about $17,000 per year, so the inflation-adjusted cost has quadrupled. Thus while I completely agree with the goals of the student strike, I did not agree with one of the strike strategies. The strike organizers asked students to miss two weeks of class, and also to stop eating at the dining center for two weeks, and also to stop working at their campus jobs. If that strike had happened in my day, I wonder if I could have afforded to participate.
And maybe this reveals that another thing has not changed since my time as a student in an elite liberal arts college: as elite institutions, these colleges are pervaded with both racism and classism. Compare the Haverford strike with the Black Panthers, who provided both food and shelter for people in their organization. Or compare the Haverford strike with unions which build up a strike fund so they can give financial assistance to striking workers. This lack of awareness on the part of strike organizers about the financial realities of less affluent students demonstrates the enduring classism of elite liberal arts colleges like Haverford College. Since all oppressions are linked (as we used to say back in my radical days), we should not be surprised that an institution pervaded by unacknowledged racism is also pervaded by unacknowledged classism.
One conclusion: For those of you looking for a college to attend, be wary of elite liberal arts colleges. Very wary. Instead, try looking at community colleges and state university systems, where you can often get excellent teaching (from professors with degrees from excellent graduate schools), in company with a far more diverse student body (from whom you will learn more than from a heterogenous student body), for a hell of a lot less money.
And I will freely admit my bias: My older sister, who is an excellent teacher (I’ve observed her in the classroom and her pedagogical skills are superior to any of my Haverford professors), teaches in a branch campus of Indiana University. Well, maybe that’s not bias, maybe that’s just first-hand information.
I don’t know about you, but I’m relieved that the jury in the Derek Chauvin trial took less than a day to reach a verdict of guilty on all counts. This was such a clearcut case of murder.
But you know Chauvain will appeal the verdict. And there are three more people facing charges in George Floyd’s murder. And there are so many more cases like this out there. This verdict is not the end of the story.
In this week’s video, Dr. Sharpie, Possum, and some friends decide to act out a story from the Ramayana.
As usual, full script is below.
Rolf: Sharpie, I’ve been reading the Ramayana in comic book form.
Sharpie: Ah! The Ramayana, the great book from India, written down by Valmiki.
Possum: I love that book! Let’s act out the story of Sabala the Cow!
Possum: Once upon a time there was a Queen who was so powerful that her neighbors didn’t dare to start wars with her. So her country lived in peace and quiet.
Queen Sharpie: Everyone in my country is happy. But I’m bored.
General Packie: Let us go with your army and tour your dominions.
Possum: They marched until they came to a peaceful grove in the forest where there lived a saintly hermit named Vasishtha. People came from miles away to hear his wise sayings, and to see his miraculous cow Sabala.
Castor-the-hermit: Please be seated on the sacred grass. How is your majesty?
Queen Sharpie: We are well. And you, and your followers, and your sacred fire?
Castor-the-hermit: All is well in this delightful grove. You should stay with us, eat the sweet roots and berries I bring, and sit on the sacred grass and meditate.
Queen Sharpie [aside]: If I stay here, I’d be even more bored. [to hermit]: You speak with words of wisdom. But really, I must be going.
Possum: The hermit insisted, and to be polite the Queen agreed to stay with her army and meditate. Meanwhile, the hermit went to talk with Sabala the Cow.
Castor-the-hermit: My gentle, loving, friend, we owe much to the Queen, who fights wars that allow us to sit here peacefully. Will you please make a feast fit for a Queen, something more than roots and berries?
Rolf-the-cow: Of course I will.
Possum: So Sabala the Cow made a feast appear, with the most wonderful foods for the Queen and her army. This delighted the soldiers. But not the Queen.
Queen Sharpie [to herself]: Why does a lowly hermit get to have such a cow, but not the Queen? [to the hermit]: Queens have a right to everything in their queendom. So the cow belongs to me. Since I’m so nice, I’ll give you a hundred thousand cows for her.
Castor-the-hermit: I would not exchange Sabala for a million cows.
Queen Sharpie: But you need to live simply, and I’m just removing a temptation from you.
Castor-the-hermit: There’s no credit in virtue without temptation. So no, you can’t have her.
Queen Sharpie: I’ll give you fourteen thousand elephants and ten million cows. That’s my final offer, and remember: Queens take by force what is not given to them.
Sharpie: That Queen isn’t very nice, is she? She thinks she can do whatever she wants.
Castor: I wonder what the hermit will do if the Queen tries to take Sabala the cow away?
Rolf: I can’t wait to act out the ending of the story next week!
A recent academic study examined 20,000 United Methodist churches between 1990 and 2010. Most experienced declining attendance from 2000 on.
Except multi-racial churches: on average, their attendance increased. “There’s a rising demand for opportunities to interact in diverse settings,” said [lead author Prof. Kevin] Dougherty [of Baylor University]. And racially diverse churches in predominantly white neighborhoods had the best attendance.
I’m willing to bet this trend holds true for Unitarian Universalism. That would help explain why most UU congregations have been in decline since about 2005. I don’t have access to the full text of the study, so I don’t know the authors’ criteria for determining when a congregation is racially diverse, but I’m guessing we’re looking at 30-35% non-white attendance; there are very few UU congregations with that level of racial diversity.
Assuming your congregation is interested in reversing decline, how can we change our UU congregational cultures to become less white?
Crystal DesVignes is pastor of the United Methodist church “CityWell” in Durham, N.C., a congregation that’s 45% non-white. She points out that you have to embrace an increase in the level of conflict, which can enable people to “come out of our comfort zones” and “be honest and vulnerable with each other.” And then she says you have to be willing to learn: “It’s one thing to say, ‘Come in and be just like us’ [but] it’s another thing to say, ‘Come in and we’re willing and open to be changed by your very presence.’”
Prince Philip, the U.K. royal who died recently, was known for his commitment to environmentalism. Religion News Service reports that in 1990, Prince Philip compared Neo-paganism and the Abrahamic religions:
[Prince Philip said the] “ecological pragmatism of the so-called pagan religions” was “a great deal more realistic, in terms of conservation ethics, than the more intellectual monotheistic philosophies of the revealed religions.”
Though this statement proved controversial at the time, I have to say he was absolutely correct. In fact, I’d say it’s still pretty much true.
An excerpt from a history of early Unitarians in Palo Alto. I haven’t made much progress on this project, due to the long hours I’ve been putting in dealing with the pandemic. With luck, I’ll be able to get back to it.
In November, 1892, the very first issue of The Pacific Unitarian, a periodical devoted to promoting liberal religion up and down the West Coast, declared that a Unitarian church should be organized in Palo Alto:
“The University town of Palo Alto is growing fast. Never was there a field that offered more in the way of influence and education than this. A [building] lot for a church ought to be secured at once, and the preliminary steps taken towards the organization of a Unitarian Society.” (1)
Organizing churches in college towns had been a standard missionary strategy for the American Unitarian Association (AUA) since the denomination had funded a Unitarian church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1865. These “college missions” were seen as “one of the most effective ways of extending Unitarianism,” (2) and many of them resulted in strong Unitarian congregations.
But who had the time and the skills to organize a Unitarian church in Palo Alto? The Unitarian church in San Jose was the one nearest to Palo Alto. In early 1893, the two ministers of the San Jose church, Revs. N. A. Haskell and J. H. Garnett, organized two new Unitarian congregations in Los Gatos and Santa Clara, ignoring Palo Alto. (3) Support for a new Palo Alto congregation would have to come from somewhere else.
Coincidentally, around 1890, Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes, an experienced Universalist minister who had helped found a number of Universalist and Unitarian churches from Iowa to Dakota Territory, began spending winters in California on account of her health. Soon she was hired as the assistant minister in the Oakland Unitarian church. The Panic of 1893 resulted in an economic depression, and by 1894 Oakland had to reduce her position to part-time. The Pacific Unitarian Conference then hired Wilkes on a part-time basis to organize new congregations in California. (4)
Wilkes attended the Pacific Unitarian Conference in San Jose, May 1-4, 1895, as did Palo Altans Minnie and Luna Hoskins. (5) It was a small conference, and surely the three women encountered one another. Had someone already introduced the Pacific Unitarian Conference to Minnie and Luna Hoskins, or to other Unitarians in Palo Alto? On Sunday, May 5, the day after the conference ended, Wilkes became the first woman to preach at the Memorial Church of Stanford University, so perhaps David Starr Jordan had been at work behind the scenes. Later the same week, on Friday, May 10, Wilkes addressed the Palo Alto Woman’s Club. By the autumn of 1895, the Women’s Unitarian Conference was paying much of Wilkes’s salary, and they specifically authorized her to “preach in Palo Alto, assist in Berkeley and elsewhere.” (6)
In November, 1895, Wilkes began conducting Unitarian services at Parkinson’s Hall in Palo Alto, and continued to do so into the new year. Professors, students, and other residents of Palo Alto began attending these services, and on January 12, 1896, John S. Butler hosted a meeting at his house to formally organize a new congregation.
The thirty people present organized the Unity Society of Palo Alto for “the promotion of moral earnestness, and of freedom, fellowship, and character in religion, and which shall impose no restriction on individual belief.” (7) A “Unity Society” was the Unitarian term in those days for a lay-led congregation; they did not expect Wilkes to continue as their minister. Prof. Leander Hoskins was elected president of the new society; Dr. William Adams, a physician, was elected secretary; and John S. Butler, a wealthy man who had retired to Palo Alto, was elected treasurer. Two others were elected to the “committee on executive and finance”: William F. Pluns, a German immigrant and builder, and Fannie Rosebrook. (8) It’s noteworthy that the first board of the first Unitarian society in Palo Alto included a woman.
A Sunday school was part of the new congregation from the start. The Sunday school committee included Minnie Hoskins, Eleanor Brooks Pearson, a teacher at Castilleja Hall, and Anna Zschokke, a Bavarian immigrant with a deep concern for education who has been called “the mother of the Palo Alto schools.” (9)
Unity Society services were held in the parlors of the Palo Alto Hotel at 2:30 on Sunday afternoons; Sunday school began at 2:45. Music was provided by a quartet, and Sunday speakers included Prof. Melville B. Anderson who gave a talk on poetry and religion and read “extracts from different poets in illustration.” (10)
At the time of the April, 1896, meeting of the Pacific Unitarian Conference, Wilkes was still providing some support to the Palo Alto congregation, but she was only interested in starting new congregations, not keeping them going once they were started. (11) Rev. Carl Wendte, the director of the Pacific Coast Unitarians, expressed his opinion that “the two San Francisco churches should make this Palo Alto movement their peculiar care, aiding it by ministerial service, money contributions, and general supervision and help.” (12)
If the San Francisco churches did provide support, it was not enough to keep the Palo Alto Unity Society going. The tiny congregation continued in existence for another eleven months, until March, 1897, after which no record of it can be found. (13)
The Unity Society was gone, but there were still Unitarians and Universalists in Palo Alto. When the California Sunday School Association took a census of the town in November, 1898, 21 people who were parents of school-aged children declared themselves to be Unitarians, and five declared themselves to be Universalists. Most of the Unitarian and Universalist children were probably attending Sunday schools in other churches, which may have made their parents long for a liberal church in town. (14)
On Monday, March 26, 1900, one of the Palo Alto newspapers reported that a Unitarian service had been held the previous day, with Rev. B. Fay Mills, minister of the Oakland Unitarian church, preaching on the topic of “the claims of liberal religion upon the modern world.” These Unitarian services were projected to continue indefinitely:
“A series of religious services will be held in Palo Alto every Sunday afternoon at Fraternity Hall, under the auspices of the Unitarian church. Cards pledging support are circulating that the members recognize the need of a religious organization in Palo Alto that shall represent the thought of our age, and leaving unquestioned the theological belief of its members, shall make its bond of Unity the Fellowships of the Spirit, and the Service of Man.” (15)
The following Sunday, April 1, Rev. Nahum A. Haskell, minister of the San Jose Unitarian church, preached on “Self-Sovereignty.”
Haskell had previously helped organize small Unitarian congregations near San Jose, and it seems probable that he, not Mills, intended to be the minister supporting the new congregation. But the San Francisco Call reported that at the April 10 annual meeting of the San Jose Unitarian church, Haskell faced opposition due to that congregation’s declining membership. (16) The conflict in San Jose dragged on for years, (17) no doubt serving to distract Haskell from whatever responsibilities he may have hoped to take on in Palo Alto. (18)
The second attempt at starting a Unitarian congregation in Palo Alto probably ended in April or May of 1900. On May 31, Haskell officiated at a double wedding in Palo Alto for Alice and Florence Emerson, Stanford students and daughters of a wealthy lumber tycoon. But there is no evidence of any further Unitarian activity until 1905, when the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto was organized.
1 Pacific Unitarian, Nov., 1892, p. 18. The university in question is Stanford University.
2 George Willis Cooke, Unitarianism in America (Boston: American Unitarian Assoc., 1902), p. 215.
3 Debra N. Dietiker, A History of the First Unitarian Church of San Jose, California, Master’s thesis, San Jose State University, 1966, p. 16.
4 Rebecca Hunt, “Eliza Tupper Wilkes,” Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, uudb.org/articles/elizatupperwilkes.html accessed Aug. 14, 2020.
5 Pacific Unitarian, June, 1893.
6 Palo Alto Times, May 10, 1895, p. 2; Pacific Unitarian, June, 1895, pp. 246-247; Pacific Unitarian, Nov., 1895, p. 6; Douglas Chapman, “Dakota Territory’s Eliza Tupper Wilkes: Prairie Pastor,” Dakota Conference on History, Literature, Art, and Archaeology, May 25, 2000, Augustana College.
7 “News from the Field,” The Unitarian, ed. Frederick B. Mott (Boston: George Ellis), February, 1896, p. 142.
8 Palo Alto Times, January 30, 1894, p. 2.
9 Margaret R. Feuer, A Walk Through History: Women of Palo Alto (Palo Alto, Calif.: PIP, 1994), p. 85.
10 Palo Alto Times, January 30, 1894, p. 2.
11 Cynthia Grant Tucker, Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990, p. 45.
12 “News from the Field,” The Unitarian, ed. Frederick B. Mott (Boston: George Ellis), June, 1896, pp. 284-285.
13 The extant records of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, now in the possession of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, contain no records of either the Unity Society or the 1900 attempt to start a congregation. It may be worth searching contemporary newspaper accounts for additional information.
14 Palo Alto Times, Dec. 9, 1898, p. 1.
15 Palo Alto Live Oak, March 26, 1900, p. 1.
16 San Francisco Call, April 12, 1900, p. 3.
17 Debra N. Dietiker, p. 20.
18 Haskell was born on a farm in Harvard, Mass., in 1849, and converted to Unitarianism as a young man. He attended the Divinity School of Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.), and served the following Unitarian congregations: Nantucket, Mass.; Hubbardston, Mass.; Vineland, N.J.; Camden, N.J.; Denver, Colo.; Dubuque, Iowa; San Jose, Calif.; and Fresno, Calif. He died in 1906, not long after he began serving the Fresno church. “He was a preacher of more than ordinary power and sometimes very profound.” —Obituary, Christian Register, Feb. 8, 1906, p. 163.
I’m following the story of how workers in an Amazon warehouse in Alabama are currently voting whether or not to join a union. The management of early twenty-first century Amazon warehouses sound a lot like the management of early twentieth century cotton mills: speed up work until the workers break, fire anyone who raises safety concerns, do anything to keep the unions out.
A BBC article on this story quotes Peter Romer-Friedman, a civil rights lawyer:
“The key question in America at the moment is are we going to have fair treatment of workers in the businesses that will dominate our future? … The concept that workers get a seat at the table is a radical concept for people in Silicon Valley.”
In fact, the assumption that workers should not have a seat at the table is a cornerstone of the Silicon Valley business model. Tech firms have been leaders at offshoring, outsourcing, using “contractors,” and requiring their few actual employees to put in 10-12 hour days as a matter of course. So why would they give workers a seat at the table?
The problem for workers: if you don’t have a seat at the table, then you’re on the menu.
Gospel singer Deitrick Haddon has released a new single in which he takes on pandemic deaths and grief. Listen to Haddon’s soaring, swooping gospel voice over a compelling trap backing track: “Sick World” by Dietrick Haddon.
What I especially like about this song is that Haddon gets the way grief is additive. All the grief we’ve experienced since the pandemic began gets added to all the grief we’ve experienced from COVID deaths and COVID-related deaths. Haddon specifically mentions Kobe Bryant’s death, and the official music video references the insurrectionists storming the Capitol building: these and many other events get added to the people we know who’ve died because of COVID. Here are some of the lyrics:
We’ve got kids killing each other in Chicago,
Detroit just ain’t the same no more,
And it ain’t getting better on the West Coast —
Tell me why we treating each other so cold.
People would rather put faith in a vaccine
Than wearing a mask, keeping their hands clean,
And this will all go down in history
That thousands have died cause we cannot agree, yeah.
Living in a sick world, but I’m praying you are well,
We can’t stand to lose nobody else,
Can’t stand to lose nobody….
I don’t listen to much gospel or hip hop, but the powerful lyrics and the high level of musicianship make this song worth a listen. And yes, I am praying that you are well.
Possum, Rolf, and Nicky, want to hear the story of Palm Sunday — although Dr. Sharpie and Muds are skeptical of that old story. So Dan gives them the Unitarian Universalist version.
The full script is below the fold.
Possum: Sharpie, Dan didn’t tell the Palm Sunday story last year.
Sharpie: Don’t you have that old story memorized by now?
Rolf: I like hearing people tell stories that I know by heart.
Muds: But that story is two thousand years old, so we don’t even know if it’s true.
Nicky: We want to hear it anyway.
Sharpie [sighing]: Dan, can you tell us the unscientific story of Palm Sunday?
Dan: I’d be glad to.
Rolf: We already know about the rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth who lived in the land of Judea and went from town to town teaching about religion, so you can skip that part.
Possum: And we know Jesus wasn’t an official Jewish religious leader, like the Pharisees, but many people listened to him because he treated everyone with respect, even people who were poor or homeless or sick.
Nicky: And they liked him because he said religion was simple: he said to love their God with all their heart and mind, and treat other people the way you’d like to be treated.
Dan: OK, I can take it from there. Jesus did most of his teaching in the countryside, but at last he and his followers decided to go to Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus and his followers were Jewish, and they wanted to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem, the most holy city for Jews.
They began to walk to Jerusalem. There were no cars or anything in those days, so they had to walk all the way. Jesus had been teaching and traveling for a long time, and he was tired. As they got close to Jerusalem, he asked his followers to find an animal for him to ride. They borrowed a foal, a young horse, for him to be able to ride.
Crowds of people were walking on the road to go to Jerusalem for Passover. Many them had seen Jesus before. Some of these people thought Jesus was the greatest religious teacher around. They began to point at Jesus, and call out to him.
Meanwhile, someone began to sing a hymn that seemed to fit what they were doing, and other joined in. They sang: “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, And into his courts with praise.”
People were in a happy, festive mood. They gathered flowers, and picked leaves from palm trees, and carried them along. They sang: “Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.”
All these people singing and walking into Jerusalem together! Some of the people who thought Jesus was a great religious teacher gave him flowers, and waved palm leaves over him.
At this point, Jesus was probably growing uncomfortable. He didn’t mind that people liked him, and thought he was a good religious teacher. But the singing, and the people giving him flowers and waving palm leaves over him — those were the kinds of things that people did for new kings of Jerusalem, back in the olden times, hundreds of years before Jesus lived.
Rolf: Uh oh, here comes trouble!
Sharpie: Shh!
Dan: But in Jesus’ day, the Romans ruled over Jerusalem. The Romans did not want anyone to question their authority. Treating Jesus like one of the kings of olden times was a way to question their authority. Could some of the people hope that Jesus would lead a rebellion against the Romans? Jesus knew that it was dangerous for them to even think about such things. So Jesus rode into Jerusalem, with the people waving palm leaves over him. And he wondered what the Romans might want to do.
And if you want to know what Jesus did in Jerusalem, and what the Romans did, I’ll tell you the rest of the story next week.
Possum: Arg! We have to wait a whole week to find out what happened!
I’ve hated YouTube for a long time, but they finally went too far. I’m going to start moving the videos I make for kids to another platform.
What was the final straw that’s causing me to ditch YouTube?
I created a children’s video for this Sunday’s online worship service. I was careful to use either my own content, or public domain content (e.g., music), or Creative Commons content (e.g., sound effects) I have a great respect for the rights of authors and creators, and I don’t want to violate copyright.
YouTube has a new process whereby when you upload a video, they scan it for copyrighted material. Fair enough. The scan of my latest video claimed to have found copyrighted material on my video. That’s not fair, but that happens because YouTube relies on machine algorithms instead of humans to review copyrighted material, and they give free access to the algorithms of known copyright trolls. So while it’s not fair, I can deal with it. I’ve dealt with it before — you submit a claim showing why the copyright claim is incorrect, wait seven days, and it goes away.
But as it turned out, this time not only did I get a message telling me that there’s a claim, but for the past two hours there’s been another message freezing the video because, so they say, they were still scanning for copyright violations. The effect of this is that YouTube has given me no way to contest the claim. Which is utter bullshit. And don’t tell me to contact customer support. YouTube is notorious for having no customer support at all — because, hey, we’re not customers, we’re the product they’re selling (or more precisely, our data is the product).
There are plenty of other reasons why I hate YouTube. I know they’re collecting unbelievable quantities of user data and using that data for purposes I don’t approve of. I don’t mind so much for myself — I’m going into this with my eyes open — but I’m making videos for kids, and I simply do not trust YouTube with kids’ data. Plus YouTube video compression sucks, producing inferior audio and video quality. Remember, their business model is to provide the absolute minimum of quality, with the least amount of paid human time, while selling the absolute maximum amount of data to advertisers and others; their sole goal is to make tons of money, with no apparent effort to provide any redeeming social value. By saying this, I don’t want to denigrate their workers, who work incredibly long hours and work software engineering miracles; but YouTube’s corporate management is, at best, amoral.
Do I need to add the fact that, as is true of all Big Tech employers, YouTube has insufficient numbers of women, people of color, and people over the age of 40 working at the company? The Big Tech firms are notorious for their sexism, racism, and ageism; YouTube is no exception.
I’ve known for some time that I need to move the children’s videos I make to a paid hosting service. So I finally bit the bullet and opened a Vimeo account. That’s where I’ll be posting all future kid’s videos that I make. Eventually I’ll move older videos there, though that will take time.
It’s been a relief to take this step. I’ve long been uncomfortable with YouTube’s exploitative business model. I’m glad I can stop feeling morally compromised.
Possum and friends tell another Jataka tale, of the huge hound (you can find my text version of this story here.)
As usual, full text of the script is below.
Rolf: Sharpie, can I help act out one of the Jataka tales?
Sharpie: Yes, Rolf. I’d like you to help with the story of Queen Usinara and the Huge Hound.
Sharpie: One day the Buddha’s followers were talking about how he left his life in a palace to go and do good in the world. The Buddha said to them, “In all my previous lives, I also tried to teach goodness.” And he told this story.
Possum: In the land of Queen Usinara, the people had given up doing good, and did evil instead. Sakka, ruler of the gods, saw this and decided to come to earth as a hunter with a huge hound.
Castor: The world is doomed to destruction!
[Rolf howls.]
Queen Sharpie: Oh! What a horrible sound! Can’t you stop your hound from howling?
Castor: Mm. My hound is hungry.
Queen Sharpie: Get food for the dog.
Hedgie: Yes, your majesty!
Possum: So they brought a huge meal for the huge hound, but he ate it all in one gulp and kept howling.
[Howling in background]
Queen Sharpie: This is no ordinary hound. Why does this hound come here with you?
Castor: The hound comes to eat my enemies.
[Dramatic music]
Queen Sharpie: And who are your enemies?
Castor: People who are smart and educated, but who use their skill only to get money.
[Dramatic music]
Castor: People who betray friends or spouses. People who pretend to follow religion, but who actually do whatever they want.
[Dramatic music]
Castor: People who allow others to go hungry while they have enough to eat.
[Dramatic music]
[Rolf growls and howls.]
Queen Sharpie: No, no, don’t let your hound go! We will go back to being good again.
[Triumphant music]
Possum: So Queen Usinara and all the people saw how they must stop doing evil, and return to the ways of doing good. They must stop doing evil, or the huge dog would remain hungry, and keep on howling!
Sharpie: Then the Buddha told his followers that he was Sakka, ruler of the gods, in a previous life.
Rolf: I like the way the huge hound howled whenever he saw wrong-doing.
Castor: Imagine if there really were a huge hound, and every time he saw somebody hungry, he howled.
Possum: I think this story is telling us to speak out when we see injustice.
Finally, thanks to Maribea, a fellow admirer of Fred Rogers’s puppeteering, who gave me the pin that Queen Usinara wears in the video.
Photos from our trip to Point Reyes National Seashore:
The question of the day in today’s middle school class was “What’s your favorite joke?” This unleashed a spate of jokes. We all laughed (and groaned) a lot, and I realized that during the pandemic I don’t hear jokes much any more. Below are some of the jokes I can remember from today’s class; add more (clean ones preferred) in the comments.
Why is pi the loneliest number?
No one talks to him because he goes on forever.
A goat, a drum, and a snake fall off a cliff.
Baa, dump, tss.
What do you call a cow with no legs?
Ground beef.
Why did the whale cross the road?
The chicken was on a break.
An article published in the journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Jeremy N. Bailenson reviews existing research to try to understand why Zoom meetings can be so fatiguing. The article’s title, “Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue,” summarizes what Bailenson perceives to be the primary cause of Zoom fatigue: it’s the nonverbal elements of Zoom that are so tiring. In the article’s abstract, Bailenson also states the limits of his paper:
“The arguments are based on academic theory and research, but also have yet to be directly tested in the context of Zoom, and require future experimentation to confirm.”
Bailenson outlines four “possible explanations of Zoom fatigue”:
“Excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze, cognitive load, increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself, and constraints on physical mobility. All are based on academic research, but readers should consider these claims to be arguments, not yet scientific findings.”
Bailenson then suggests small changes to the user interface of Zoom. Smaller default size of heads in the Zoom window reduce the load of “close-up eye gaze.” Cognitive load may be reduced by making audio-only calls the default. Using the “Hide Self” feature in Zoom does away with the problem of staring at one’s own video feed. Finally constraints of physical mobility can be handled by hardware solutions: “Use an external webcam and external keyboard that allows more flexibility and control over various seating arrangements.”
Note that Bailenson firmly states that all his suggestions need to be confirmed by further research. I already disagree with Bailenson on at least one point. I don’t use the “Hide Self” feature on Zoom because it’s too easy to go off camera; instead I prefer the user interface of Google Meet which shows a tiny thumbnail view of oneself, too small to see details, but just large enough so you can see if you’re going off camera. Bailenson also points out some interesting possibilities for further research. For example:
“Very few psychology studies on mediated interaction examine groups larger than two or three people, and future work should examine the psychological costs and benefits of video compared to audio in larger groups.”
As I think about Bailenson’s article, here are some changes in the way I use Zoom that I’ll implement for myself:
One big problem with any video platform, from my point of view as a religious educator, is that a lot of what I do is social-emotional learning. And a big chunk of social-emotional learning is about using nonverbal communication in a way that simply isn’t possible on video calls. So I’m also going to remain aware that videoconferencing has definite limitations, and I’m not going to expect it to do things it cannot do.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on improving our uses of videoconferencing.
Dr. Sharpie takes Possum back in time to 2011, to Oakland, California….
As usual, full script is below the fold.
Castor the Beaver: Going back in Sharpie’s time machine again?
Possum: Yeah, she promised to show me more protests from the past.
Castor: Just watch out your fur doesn’t get stuck on the duct tape.
Possum: Sharpie, can you show me a protest that’s not so far in the past?
Sharpie: In 2011, Occupy Oakland protesters set up tents in front of Oakland City Hall to protest against unfair conditions for 99 per cent of all Americans. The top one percent of Americans kept getting richer, while everyone else was losing money.
Possum: Did they sleep in those tents?
Sharpie: Yes. They set up a real community. They welcomed homeless people to join them. They started gardens, and they had a library where people could borrow books. People of all races and genders joined the movement.
Possum: Mm, it looks like kind of a nice place to live.
Sharpie: They ran everything by democratic process. On November 2, they organized a general strike in Oakland. They shut down the Port of Oakland to support the workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Those people weren’t getting paid enough. But the owners of big businesses kept get richer.
Possum: That’s not fair.
Sharpie: I know. Then on December 12, Occupy Oakland joined together with other protesters up and down the West Coast. They shut down the Port of Oakland again, demanding better pay for the people working there.
Possum: It seems like you shouldn’t have to protest to get paid enough.
Sharpie: A century ago, it was worse than that. Big businesses made people work 12 hours a day. Children had to work in factories. And there were no paid vacations. It was only by protesting that people got 8 hour days, paid vacations, and no child labor.
Possum: What happened to Occupy Oakland?
Sharpie: The city of Oakland got tired of them. So they sent in police to chase everyone away. They tore up the gardens and threw out the library books.
Possum: Are things getting better for working people now?
Sharpie: Unfortunately, no. During the pandemic, even though rich people are getting richer, they don’t want to pay fair wages to ordinary people.
Possum: So the protests didn’t work?
Sharpie: They helped. But you have to do more than protest. You have to organize.
Possum: I learned that protesters stopped child labor, and got people paid vacations.
Castor: Mm. That’s good. I like vacations.
Possum: I also learned that protesting isn’t enough. You have to organize.
Castor: Uh, oh. Dude, you hate organizing.
Possum: I’ll just have to learn, I guess. Sharpie’s going to show me one more protest next week.
When Castor the Beaver asks Possum why he’s protesting, Possum decides to ask Dr. Sharpie why people protest. Sharpie fires up her time machine, and together they look at some protests from the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t quite what Possum was expecting….
Full script below; this week the script has not been corrected, and may diverge from the video.
Possum [carrying sign]: I’m protesting!
Castor: Why are you protesting?
Possum: I want to make the world a better place.
Castor: But how will your protest change anything?
Possum: Let’s go ask Sharpie. She’ll know, she knows everything.
Possum [still carrying sign]: Sharpie, how will my protests change anything?
Sharpie: This is a good time to ask, because we’re celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday.
Possum: He’s the person who led all those protests to stop racism, right?
Sharpie: Right. Let’s use my time machine to look at some of the protests from the Civil Rights movement.
Possum: Your time machine is held together with rubber bands.
Sharpie: All good scientists use rubber bands.
Possum: Are we going back in time?
Sharpie: That takes too much energy. We’ll just look at the past. Ah, here we are. 1956. Rosa Parks protested racism.
Possum: I remember! She refused to go to the back of the bus, just because she was black.
Sharpie: So she was arrested. Watch….
[time machine shows image of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted] Her arrest was part of a careful strategy to test the law about busses in court.
Possum: So their protests were carefully planned?
Sharpie. Yes.
Possum: And you can get arrested for protesting?
Sharpie: Yes. Protests can even get violent. Like this….
[show image of Freedom Riders] The Freedom Riders protested laws about busses, and sometimes they were beaten up by white people.
Possum: That’s horrible!
Sharpie: Yes. And sometimes white people who liked racism held their own protests. Like this….
[time machine shows image of angry white people protesting] In 1963, these white people protested school desegregation in Arkansas.
Possum: I guess anyone can use protests, even people who are wrong.
Sharpie: Just like when armed protesters invaded the Capitol building on January 6. Protesting can be used for good or evil.
Possum: You were going to show us Martin Luther King.
Sharpie: Right.
[time machine shows image of Martin Luther King, Jr., in a protest march] Here he is in 1963, during the March on Washington. But remember, he did much more than just protest. He and thousands of others worked for years behind the scenes to change racist laws. The protests were only a small part of what they did. And their work still isn’t finished.
Possum: Wow. Protesting is more complicated than I thought.
Castor: Are you going to give up protesting, then?
Possum: No, but I need to learn more. Sharpie says she’ll show more about protests using her time machine next week.
There’s no doubt that today’s armed insurrection was driven by white supremacy. The well-publicized photo of a white man smiling as he carried a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol building makes that clear, if we hadn’t already figured it out.
There’s also no doubt that today’s treasonous actions were driven by the idolatrous heresy known as Christian nationalism. This New Religious Movement — maybe we should use the pejorative term, and call it a cult — followers of this cult of Christian nationalism believe that their god is somehow specially aligned with the United States.
The white supremacy, and the heretical idolatry, helped drive these white terrorists. But I think economic desperation is also driving the broader movement that thinks the election was stolen from their populist hero Donald Trump. There’s too much economic desperation, and that desperation is increasing as the pandemic drags on. There’s a growing number of people who can’t work from home, whose businesses have gone under, whose jobs have disappeared. The divide between the haves and the have-nots has been getting bigger for decades; the pandemic has accelerated this trend.
If we’re going to turn our country away from the treasonous armed terrorists, we absolutely have to address white supremacy. We absolutely have to address the idolatry of the cult known as Christian nationalism. And we also must deal with the economic desperation in the U.S.
Let’s hope today will be the end of Trump’s influence. But even if Trump goes away, the underlying problems will still be there. We have learned that white supremacy, idolatry, and economic desperation are a toxic mix, and we must address all three.
It was a strange Christmas Eve. We did the usual Christmas Eve candlelight service in the Main Hall of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA) — but the only people there were Amy, the senior minister; Paul, the camera operator; and me. The music all had to be pre-recorded, and I set up my laptop next to my lectern (Amy and I each had our own lectern, about twenty feet apart from each other) so that I could join the Zoom call and be able to hear the music. The strangest part was not being able to see anyone: the whole point of Christmas Eve for me is seeing being able to see people, including the young adults who come back to Silicon Valley for the holidays.
Yes, it was a strange Christmas Eve.
But something that happened in the afternoon made the rest of the day bearable. I was taking a break from checking email, and walked out to the edge of UUCPA’s campus to look down into Adobe Creek, which is routed into a large concrete channel for the last mile or two before it reaches the Bay. By fall, there’s always sediment that has accumulated during the summer, when not much water flows through the channel. This year, there was a luxuriant growth of what was probably water cress, and the last rain had been enough to cut some winding channels through the greenery, without washing everything down stream. The usual Mallards were paddling around, and then I noticed a Snowy Egret crouched behind a thicket of greenery; it lashed out with its bill, and appeared to spear something from the water.
I know Snowy Egrets are good at finding food anywhere, but I was a little bit surprised to see one in that particular urban channelized stream. There must have been enough prey to make it worth the bird’s time and effort; it’s a fairly sterile environment, so perhaps it was finding organisms washed down from upstream. Whatever drew it there, it certainly gave me a lift to see it.
The gang go back in time to find out about Judah Maccabee.
As usual, the full script is below.
[Scene: the present]
John: I’ve just been reading about the history of Hanukkah.
Sarah D.: And what did you find out?
John: It all started when the Selucid Empire invaded the independent country of Judea. They went into Jerusalem, and took over the great temple of the Jewish people.
Sarah K.: John, we have an idea.
Emma: Let’s go back in time and see what happened.
Greg: Great idea! Let me turn on my time machine….
[Scene: 2200 years ago]
Soldier 1 [evil laughter]: It’s great being a solider in the Selucid army.
Soldier 2: We get to invade other people’s temples, and set up statues of Zeus.
Soldier 3: And the food is good, too. Ham for dinner tonight!
Soldier 1: Yum, ham! And you know what?
Soldier 3: Pigs are considered unclean here in the land of Judea.
Soldier 2: So eating ham in their temple is especially evil!
Soldier 1, Soldier 2, and Soldier 3 [evil laughter]: Mwah-hah-hah-hah!
Captain Greg: Captain Greg and Captain Dan reporting, Judah Maccabee, sir.
Captain Dan: The soldiers of the Selucid Empire are in the middle of eating dinner.
Judah Maccabee: This is our chance. Get ready to attack!
Captain Dan: Come on, troops, we’re going in!
Judah Maccabee: For Judea!
Captain Dan: For freedom!
Captain Greg: No more ham in the temple!
Soldier 2 [in the middle of eating]: Did you just hear something?
Soldier 1 [in the middle of eating]: It’s just your imagination.
Soldier 3 [in the middle of eating]: No, it’s Judah Maccabbee and her soldiers!
Soldier 1, Soldier 2, and Soldier 3 [terrified]: Ahhh! Run away, run away!
Judah Maccabee: Hey, we won!
Captain Dan: Look at these disgusting pig guts they left behind.
Captain Greg: Oh no! The flame on the eternal light has gone out!
Judah Maccabee: You two clean up. I’ll go find some holy oil for the eternal light.
Captain Dan: You clean up the pig guts. I’m going to get rid of this statue of Zeus.
Judah Maccabee: Uh oh, there’s only enough holy oil for the eternal light for one day.
Captain Greg: And it will take eight days to make new holy oil.
Captain Dan: Let’s light the eternal flame and see what happens.
[Scene: the present]
Emma: So what happened after that?
Greg: It was a miracle, the holy oil burned for eight days.
Dan: And that’s why Hanukkah lasts for eight days.
Sarah D.: So Hanukkah is really a celebration of religious freedom.
John: And it’s a reminder that sometimes we have to fight for our religious freedom.
WWUUD stream 