Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.    

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035329/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/07-25-21-audio.mp3

Sage Hirschfeld and Bear W. Qolezcua's sermon delivered on July 25, 2021. In a world where trusting others feels harder each day, remembering lessons of trust and letting them guide us is an act of revolution. Join our RE Intern, Sage Hirschfeld, and Director of Communications, Bear Qolezcua, as they explore the topic of trusting in others and ourselves.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035307/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-07-25_When_Trust_is_Hard.mp3

"Summer Musings" (July 25, 2021) Worship Service

If we are lucky summer affords us some of the spaciousness it did as children. Time to wander in body and spirit and let things bubble up, fall away, clarify. Let's make space for such musing this Sunday.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Daniel Jackoway, Worship Associate; The Harmony People: Anjalisa Aitken, Gary Garrett; Asher Davison, song leader; Bill Ganz, pianist

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

Order of Service:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x5Qg48-bVgg5SEt9K0FgHiC46pSz3FV2/view?usp=sharing

LIVESTREAM:

https://youtu.be/hDUscggUaaU

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035246/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210725VRSSermon.mp3

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, July 25, 2021.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035151/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210725.mp3

Cat Heath’s new book Elves, Witches & Gods is grounded in what we know about the practices of the ancient Norse and Anglo-Saxons, adapted for contemporary Heathens. It strives to be authentic, but it insists on being effective. Mainly, it’s magic that works.

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Paul Wienpahl is in the white, short-sleeved shirt to the right of the tree trunk & Herbert Fingarette (whose words give this blog and podcast its title) is standing next to Wienpahl to the left of the tree trunk A recorded version of the following piece can be found at this link

We continue this series, “Walking with Paul Wienpahl” by looking at paragraphs 9 to 15 of his “Unorthodox Lecture” from 1955. You can find links to Wienpahl’s lecture in the episode notes to this podcast or in my associated blogpost.

Let’s begin this episode with Wienpahl’s comment which I left you with last week. It’s taken from paragraph 15, the last paragraph we’ll be exploring in this week’s episode. You will recall Wienpahl noted that he thought paragraphs 5 to 15 were “cryptic statements of the revolt against idealism.” An important question we need to ask at some point is, therefore, what does he mean by “idealism”?

Well, basically, idealism refers to any doctrine which holds that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual in nature. Another way of stating this is to say that idealism is opposed to the naturalistic belief that mind should be understood as being a product of natural, material processes. Therefore, in revolting against idealism Wienpahl, even as he wants to take seriously things like poetry and a certain kind of mysticism, wants to ensure he does this by remaining firmly in the world and close to things, perhaps most of all close to himself as a complex material thing wholly intermingled in a world of material things.  

Back cover of A Zen Diary

In the introduction to his book, “A Zen Diary”, published in 1970, he helpfully offers us his own brief definition of idealism and this helps us gain a clearer idea of what it was in these paragraphs he was revolting against.

So, he’s against: 

          (1) the idea that the real (world) is rational, i.e. that it is spirit, 

          (2) Cartesian dualism that says the mind and the body are distinct substances, 

          (3) Platonism that claims there exists a supernatural realm of becoming, or being, or essences, 

          (4) that philosophy will make all, rather than just some of, the difference in life,  

          (5) that if we look long and carefully enough we will get the truth about our world, i.e. all our questions will be answered. 

Now, in addition to this, he thinks idealism has two problematic tendencies. They are: 

          (1) the obliteration of the distinction between the subjective and the objective (the I and the Thou), 

          (2) to “intellectualism”, by which I take him to mean the tendency to privilege abstract theory over practice, i.e. of preferring blueprints to footprints.        

Now I realise that lists like this can be hard to take in the first-time round but I hope you can see that, basically, Wienpahl is revolting against any way of thinking and living which tries to take us, our ideas and words, away from the things of the world. 

So, with this thought firmly in mind let’s now turn to paragraph 9.

§9 There seem to be two ways in which a person becomes an individual. He grows; and he looks back through himself. The one way is obvious and the other is not, and so it is easy to describe the one and difficult to describe the other. I think that the second process of growth is what has been called the development of self-awareness. In so far as psychoanalysis can be considered non-pathologically, this second process of growth is psychoanalysis. Or perhaps we should say that the tools which the analysts have produced can be of use in this second process.

In this paragraph, Wienpahl is noting that we grow into the kind of creatures we are in two ways. The first way is, as he says, obvious, it is our physical growth from a small child into a much larger adult. But there is another kind of human growth, namely, one involving self-awareness and, as was particularly common in the intellectual circles of the 1950s in which he moved, psychoanalysis was thought to provide some key tools to aid this growth. It’s key founding figure was, of course, Sigmund Freud but, today, it owes at least as much to Freud’s students Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.

Naturally, in this piece, I can’t explore with you all the controversial ins and outs and pros and cons of psychoanalysis but I can draw your attention Wienpahl’s belief that the development of some kind of practice of self-awareness was vital to human growth and for him, this practice was primarily the kind of philosophy encouraged by Wittgenstein, a philosophy which, as Wienpahl came increasingly to realise, displayed many connections and overlaps with existentialist and Buddhist thought. Following Wittgenstein’s lead, Wienpahl thought that, like psychoanalysis, this kind of philosophy could be therapeutic and could genuinely help us to develop the kind of self-awareness we needed to grow and live a good life. At this point in proceedings, it’s worth recalling from episode 1 that for him philosophy was not simply a scholarly, academic discipline but, much more importantly, it was “a spiritual discipline of personal liberation.” This thought leads us naturally to paragraphs 10, 11 and 12. 

§10 Philosophers see and show us things about themselves and others which we do not ordinarily notice. They do not provide us with theories and their utterances are not theories; their utterances are far more like a poem or a painting than they are like a theory. So the philosopher’s utterances are not to be taken literally as one takes a theory or a statement of fact. This is one reason why philosophers are difficult to understand, particularly nowadays when people tend to take everything literally.

§11 Perhaps philosophers should talk only and not write. For the philosopher has nothing to say. He has only something to see and to show, because he is concerned with particulars as particulars and not as members of aggregates as is the scientist. The prevailing reliance on scientia or knowledge makes us interested in aggregates instead of ourselves.

§12 Nor is this to disparage knowledge. It is just that there is something more, many things more than knowledge. And there are other ways than the rational for coming into contact with these things. Philosophy is one of these ways.

These paragraphs serve to re-emphasise Wienpahl’s earlier thought that, in order to grow, we need to develop a certain kind of self-awareness and awareness of things in general. It is vital to hang on to this insight and, as Wienpahl insists, not to begin thinking that philosophy is supposed to, or even can, provide us with theories and scientia (that is to say knowledge based on demonstrable and reproducible data about the world) in the way the natural sciences can. As Wienpahl makes clear the utterances of philosophy “are far more like a poem or a painting than they are like a theory.”

For Wienpahl, the true philosopher only “has only something to see and to show” and this is why he suggests, despite the fact that he has written this lecture, that perhaps “philosophers should talk only and not write.” In Weinpahl’s opinion the role of the philosopher and, therefore, philosophy is, to help keep us existentially aware of the particular things of the world and to help us better and more fruitfully to grow, live, move and authentically have our own individual being with them and not letting ourselves be seduced back into idealism. Given Wienpahl’s clear interest in poetry, I’ve long thought that in this essay he is consciously echoing a key idea of the modernist poet William Carlos Williams, namely, that there are “no ideas but in things.”

But, be that as it may, Wienpahl can see that philosophy, like poetry and painting, helps us come into contact and intra-act with the world in ways that are simply not possible through scientific theories or the possession of knowledge based on demonstrable and reproducible data about the world. As Wienpahl clearly states, he does not disparage knowledge but he is now acutely aware “that there is something more, many things more than knowledge.” However, in 1955, as paragraph 13 reveals, despite his awareness of this it was still hard for him to admit this publicly.

§13 I find it hard to relax and admit that there is something else than knowledge. For it gives my friends the chance to say that I am becoming mystic. And what I don’t like about this is that it seems to say that I disparage knowledge. I don’t. I simply now see that knowledge is not everything. And this seems so obvious a thing to see that one wonders why it should be remarked.

Writing this in 2021 as a philosophically inclined minister of religion who has publicly stated for many years their own commitment to a species of free-thinking mysticism with hands I can only express my own astonishment that, sixty-six years later, it remains extremely hard in our culture to relax and admit that there is something else than knowledge. This remains something that still needs to be remarked so I will make the point again. Along with Wienpahl, 

“I simply now see that knowledge is not everything.”

Now, whenever knowledge ceases to be the be-all-and-end-all of human existence a person necessarily enters into the world of faith and it is this fact which leads Wienphal to write paragraph 14.  

§14 Kierkegaard wrote that the secret of modern philosophy which stems from the cogito-ergo-sum lies in the identification of thought with being, whereas Christianity identifies being with faith. John Dewey wrote that the philosophic fallacy lies in hypostatizing concepts.

Again, this is not the place, and nor do I have the time, to dive into the thought of René Descartes, Søren Kierkegaard and John Dewey. But, in a nutshell, what Wienpahl is gesturing to here is a recognition that he knows the way he must proceed is a way of faith and not belief. 

Dewey’s thought is that philosophy goes wrong whenever it takes an abstract concept and treats it, or represents it, as a concrete reality — that’s what the word “hypostatize” means. Most of us are aware that it is perfectly possible to believe in an abstract philosophical concept — for example “God” — and to imagine it exists. But, as we all know, thanks to our human limitations, we can never know whether or not it is assuredly true. Descartes, in his “Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated”, thought his cogito-ergo-sum helped him achieve just that kind of assurance. However, today, as Wienpahl humorously points out in his “Zen Diary”, no first-year student would succeed in a philosophy class were they to hand in Descartes’ “Meditations” as a term paper (p. 3).   

Faith, on the other hand, is what can help us know how to go on voyaging when our abstract, theoretical beliefs have proved either to be wholly inadequate and/or wrong and we have, so to speak, run aground. Kierkegaard’s philosophy is one such philosophy of faith. Along with Kierkegaard, Wienpahl has realised that to live well and most fully one must have faith in something or some method that cannot be demonstrated securely and cannot be possessed like scientia. 

Here we are here talking about living faithfully by what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”, namely the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” It’s perhaps also worth remembering at this point that, as the scientist J. B. S. Haldane thought, we must find a way to accept that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose (Possible Worlds and Other Papers, 1927, p. 298).

Anyway, the whole of Wienpahl’s “Unorthodox Lecture” is his first attempt to articulate a philosophical faith that can survive the loss of philosophical belief.   

And so we now come back to where we began this episode and with the words of paragraph 15 we’ll conclude.

§15 These are cryptic statements of the revolt against idealism, a revolt which is a search for reality outside thought. As I see it, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself. (Tautologies are, after all, true.) If you wish to persist by asking what reality is; that is, what is really, the answer is that it is what you experience it to be. Reality is as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it. And it is a multifarious thing. 

In the next episode, we’ll look at paragraphs 16 to 20 in which Wienpahl intimates that all the foregoing might help us to get out of our minds and into the world.

Rev. Karen Scrivo is one of my colleagues in Unitarian Universalist ministry, a friend, and a former client. She and I have shared many of the ups and downs of community ministry, including what it means to be an entrepreneurial minister in a system built around bricks-and-mortar congregations. She remains devoted to social justice and the particular needs of her area — Prince Georges County, Maryland (just outside DC). Her connection with other religious leaders outside Unitarian Universalism is notable and necessary. Several years ago, I had the privilege of coaching Karen through her Ministerial Fellowship Committee preparation, as well as delivering the Charge to the Minister at her ordination. I so appreciate not only her work, but her ways of being in the world. I give you the last of the July guest series, written by Rev. Karen Scrivo!

Catharine calls Reflections, her weekly “love letter” to those of us who have found the inclusive and affirming community she created here at The Way of the River. This week’s Reflections is a love letter to my dear friend and spiritual companion Catharine, who is taking some much-needed time off to tend to her health and prioritize her own healing.

I’m honored to fill this space today as we wrap up a month of moving Reflections by members of the WOTR Community. Oscar Lewis Sinclair shared about his own “being laid low” and the importance of presence. Sara Goodman reminded us of “the interdependent web of community” and how critical it is for our wellbeing. And Jack Mandeville invited us to walk with him “along the ledge of the roofline” and allow “something new to grow…”

Each of these authors capture a part of what is at the heart and soul of Catharine’s spiritual presence and her work: being fully present, supporting the spiritual growth of others and creating a nurturing and inclusive community. She does this through Reflections, Beloved Selfies, her annual Going into the Dark virtual retreat, spiritual accompaniment for individuals and groups, shepherding aspiring Unitarian Universalist ministers through our complicated credentialing process, creating and leading rituals, and so many other ways.

Like many here, I have been blessed by Catharine’s spiritual ministry. I met Catharine in 2010 at a year-long Healthy Congregations training for lay leaders. She had just been accepted to Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC and I had just started as a low-residency part-time student at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley (California) and working as an interim religious educator at a Maryland congregation.

I’m now an ordained UU community minister focusing on justice and education in the DMV (District, Maryland, Virginia) area. Before that, I was a journalist, Montessori elementary teacher, a religious educator and a manager for a State Department study program bringing international journalists to the United States.

Soon after our paths crossed, Catharine and I began meeting for breakfast at a local café. We shared our hopes and dreams, successes and disappointments and wonderings along the way. After she moved to Portland (Oregon) for her ministerial internship and decided to stay, we continued connecting through online chats and Zoom conversations.

We’ve supported each other through seminary, internships, the UU credentialing process and our own entrepreneurial ministries as well as the ups and downs of our lives and relationships – including our own.

Neither of us have congregations in the traditional sense but we’re both pastors in the communities we serve and spiritual companions to those we journey with and whose paths we cross. I’ve witnessed and cheered on many of Catharine’s ministerial dreams. And I’ve even been a beta tester for some of them.

When Catharine began formal training to become a spiritual director and needed clients, I signed up and stayed on long after she received her certification. Catharine often gently reminded me to be truly being present to the moment I’m in. Not easy for someone with a monkey mind who’s often jumping several steps ahead. She also encouraged me to accept myself as I am – imperfections and all. I’ve also become more faithful to my daily spiritual practices, as a result of our time together.

It was during one of our sessions that I wondered out loud if she’d help me prepare for my final interview with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, the UU credentialing body. This involved writing volumes about meeting their requirements and preparing for the interview that included an opening reading and preaching a short homily. Catharine said ”Yes!” and read through my many-paged application, listened to my homily, offered clear, actionable feedback and cheered me on throughout the process including the day of the interview. I was welcomed into the fellowship of UU ministers and this was the beginning of her successful MFC Coaching practice.

In 2015, Catharine launched her The Way of the River blog that grew into Reflections, a website and the creation of this caring community. Her Reflections have reminded me of the rich contemplative practices of my Catholic upbringing, my love of liturgy and ritual and my need for daily doses of music, beauty, poetry and art. Her deep sharing of her personal journey has helped me become more aware and inclusive of those whose lives are different than my own. It’s a weekly spiritual repast that replenishes and renews my spirt.

I also look forward to Beloved Selfies, Catharine’s Monday morning call to “notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature.” I so enjoy seeing everyone each week. I feel more connected to this incredible on-line spiritual and caring community. As someone who’s more comfortable behind the camera, it’s been harder to post my own picture each week no matter how I feel or look. But it’s been a gift that helps me accept my whole and imperfect self.

At the end of the year, I try to participate in Catharine’s Going into the Dark virtual retreat. It is such a welcome pause during this hectic time of year. It gives me the space and time to reflect on the passing year and plant seeds for the new one. I’m also learning to embrace the dark rather than running from it. For this is where unseen and often silent beginnings occur.

Throughout the years, I’ve also enjoyed participating in Pagan celebrations Catharine has created for Samhain (Oct 31-Nov 1), when the veil between the world of the living and the dead is the thinnest; Imbolc (Feb 1-2), that pays homage to Brigid and celebrates increasing daylight, and others. I know I have been changed for the good for having known Catharine and being part of The Way of the River Community. It’s hard to imagine where I’d be had our paths not crossed. I give thanks often for the day they did those many years ago. And I am so saddened by the health challenges she’s currently facing. While I can’t be there physically, I’m sending her the words to “Sending You Light,” by Melanie DeMore.

“I am sending you light, to heal you, to hold you
I am sending you light, to hold you in love
I am sending you light, to heal you, to hold you
I am sending you light, to hold you in love.

No matter where you go
No matter where you’ve been
You’ll never walk alone
I feel you deep within

I am sending you light, to heal you, to hold you
I am sending you light, to hold you in love
I am sending you light, to heal you, to hold you
I am sending you light, to hold you in love …”

I hope you’ll join me in sending Catharine light. And if you get a chance, send her a love letter too!

This is not a post about the “right” name for this holy day or even the “best” name. Just choose mindfully rather than sticking with whatever you heard first. Rather, this is my story of Lughnasadh, and my story with Lugh.

Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.    

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035129/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/07-18-21-audio.mp3

A Q&A with Leigh Patel

An inconvenient truth lies beneath the promises of opportunity and prestige that higher education degrees offer. US academic institutions are built upon legacies of stolen labor on stolen land. Through history, this settler-colonial foundation has trapped us in history and perpetuated race, class, and gender inequalities on campus. Social protests, often led by youth, have fought for equitable access to education and continue to do so. But as Dr. Leigh Patel argues in No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, it’s high time for these institutions to reckon with their legacy. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Patel to chat with her about her book and how we see these structural inequalities take place today.

Christian Coleman: Tell us about what inspired you to write No Study Without Struggle.

Leigh Patel: As someone who has a deep love of learning and teaching, places of formal education have often brought me some amount of heartbreak. We have absolutely stunning teachers because they are also learners, and students who teach as they continue to learn. However, much of education, and glaringly so in higher education, has been shaped by mythologies of who is smart, intelligent, deserving, and more recently in higher education, what to do to bring in money. I often say to my students that they have been told lies about society in their K-12 education and that they’ve come to love those lies. In this book, I hope that readers will join me in tracing how often those lies and those mythologies have been challenged through the closely intertwined and historical struggle to study.

CC: You write that naming the problem of racism in higher education is necessary but insufficient. Why is settler colonialism a more comprehensive framework for explaining how marginalized communities experience harms and barriers to higher education?

LP: With all the inequities in society, a key question is: How do I look at or frame this inequity? What does this approach allow, even obligate, me to know? What does it leave out? Racism is undeniably the bedrock to this nation’s formation. However, racism is not often discussed in relation to the ongoing attempt to erase Indigeneity. We lose track of this vital component that continues to manifest itself. In higher education, where property rights are central as an asset and as an arm of the government, the framework of settler colonialism allows and obligates us to do better. It might be a good and important move to take down the statue memorializing an eighteenth-century enslaving man, but what do we learn about the relationships to land and Indigeneity where that statue stood? For the white students in universities who are not taught about the stolen land that required stolen labor in this nation’s creation, higher education is doing them a disservice and prolonging the harm that is done to Indigenous, Black, disabled, and poor people.

CC: You also write that settler colonialism is continuous as a process and a structure, not just a distant historical event that can be glossed over with the narrative of education as the great equalizer. Why was it important to make this point?

LP: Most people are in touch, emotionally and psychically, with the idea of education as the great equalizer as well as a constant reflection of their worth. Who hasn’t received a low grade or a rejected paper and felt that it was a reflection of their intelligence? This individualism is a largely shared belief system that says if you work hard, play by the rules, and are a good person, this country will open opportunities to you. It’s the myth of meritocracy that blurs population-level inequities and places all the responsibility in one person’s lap. It also alleviates the ongoing practices of the ongoing enclosure of Black and brown people’s bodies and spirits, denying them the ability to thrive, as Bettina Love writes about so eloquently. Settler colonialism has the potential to remind us that education often comes out of a political economy that is deeply interested in wealth accumulation for a few rather than well-being for all, including land as a life form. The ongoing structure of settler colonialism offers us, again and again, the opportunity to be in right relation with historical accuracy and to act. Reading land acknowledgements is a start but has not moved many institutions to, for example, fly the flags of the Indigenous peoples whose land the college occupies.

CC: There’s a part where you identify the gift economy as part of the settler colonial structure. It’s devised to make students and faculty of color feel indebted to universities, to make them feel they owe gaining entrance to colleges to some great benefactor. Would you say this invokes the white savior complex in university gatekeepers to absolve them of reckoning with the inequalities they uphold on campus?

LP: This is a fantastic question. There are lots of labels that have been uttered, more frequently in the past years and months following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, including white ally, white co-conspirator, and white savior. All of higher education has engaged in gatekeeping. Even the legislation that created the first historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) included gatekeeping of separatism and financial stability. What HBCUs have done with the lesser gift is shape transformative leaders, including Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Julian Bond, and Toni Morrison. So, when we understand that universities, still overwhelmingly led by white administrators and faculty who don’t share many lived realities as their first-generation students of color, use gift-like awards and scholarships, it can also blur the fact that universities often exploit labor. Students are made to feel like they are indebted to the university or that one professor who gave them an override into a full course, when all the time our role as university educators is to serve students and their learning to transform society.

CC: As someone who spent years mired in student loan hell, I felt vindicated seeing how you address and indict student loan debt as part of the settler colonial structure. What tipped you off to include it in your argument?

LP: I wish I could topple over the horrible and intricate reality of student loan debt! Addressing the rapidly rising rates of student loan debt has always been central to me. Because I love learning, it feels odd to me, if not offensive, to charge people to learn. To be even more plain about it, universities are often charging people for a credential, an opportunity to build social networks, and sometimes they learn important histories or ways of knowing in the process. Looking at student loan debt through race, class, gender, and parents’ or caregivers’ education gives us a better understanding that, as with all institutions in the United States, there are tremendous differences in not only how much loan is carried by Black and Latinx students but also how likely they are to secure employment in a society that questions their intelligence at every corner.

CC: How do you see this book in conversation with your previous books, Decolonizing Education Research and Youth Held at the Border?

LP: I very much see this book in relation to both of those books. Across all three books, I dig deeply into the national narratives that we are told and how different those narratives are from the intertwined realities of colonialism, racial capitalism, and wealth and wellness for a few. Across the ways that migrant youth encounter national, racial, gender, sexuality, and cultural borders, the ways that graduate students are taught research that has often been extractive to their home communities, to the study groups that have demanded better from higher education, I am consistently tracing the logics of oppression and the important struggles from students for higher education and the nation to do better.

The fantastic news for colleges who are confronting settler colonialism in their policies and practices is that there are innumerable examples of collectives coming into formation to study in order to act. Learning is much bigger than school, college, or university. Reckoning with settler colonialism is an invitation to destabilize who is an expert and who is need of an expert. Reckoning helps us to tell the truth and realize that there are openings and invitations for us to work, to study, and to struggle together for a society where schools are not warehouses or fickle distribution bureaucracies of credentials.

CC: And lastly, do you consider Cornel West’s resignation from Harvard as exemplary of the issues you unpack in No Study Without Struggle?

LP: This is a great example of what else we can see if we widen our lens from racism to settler colonialism. The public coverage of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s and Cornel West’s treatment by two of the most heralded universities in this land animate settler colonialism.

In Hannah-Jones’s case, it was the impact of wealthy alumni calling a member of the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees and taking issue, purportedly with Hannah-Jones’s approach to journalism. Settler colonialism claims knowledge as property, as well as land and some people. UNC lost one of our most impactful journalists to an HBCU because UNC deferred to wealth and what money told them was valid.

In Cornel West’s case, he is one of five faculty who are Black and/or scholars of color who have spoken and written about US imperialism. All were denied tenure. A settler colony does not like being reminded that it is actively occupying land and materially sustaining that practice in other places in the world, including Israel and Palestine. Were these racist practices? Yes. Without an analysis of setter colonialism, though, we might collapse it into a problem of racism in hiring and processes. It’s much deeper and wider than that.

 

About Leigh Patel 

Dr. Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, an educator, a writer, and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She works extensively with societally marginalized youth and teacher activists. Patel is a recipient of the June Jordan Award for scholarly leadership and poetic bravery in social critique and is a national board member of Education for Liberation, a long-standing organization dedicated to transformative education for and by youth of color. She is the author of Youth Held at the Border and Decolonizing Educational Research. Connect with her on Twitter at @lipatel.

We enjoyed a wonderful soft re-opening of the church on Sunday, July 4, 2021.

“[T]ales of natural emergence [are] far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us.”—Ursula Goodenough, scientist and religious naturalist The words “witness butterfly metamorphosis at home” leapt off the educational catalog into my imagination in April. We had begun homeschooling, and I impulsively decided we should get a butterfly garden. It was the end of a long winter; our house felt small as three of us occupied the space twenty-four hours a day. My partner was […]

The post Emergence appeared first on BeyondBelief.

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Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on July 18, 2021. We live in a culture that often encourages us to project an air of invincibility. Yet research by Brene Brown and others in the social sciences indicates that the opposite may be the key to living whole-heartedly. Being willing to embrace and express our vulnerability may be the source of authenticity, human connection, and empathy, as well as the ability to both love and accept being loved.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035047/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-07-18_Sacred_Vulnerability.mp3

Sunday, July 18, 10:50 AM, Worship Service

"Crisscrossing Humanity"

Meg McGuire and Carmen Barsody, preaching

From Cathedral Hill to the Tenderloin, from one side of the city to the other, the many moments where our paths cross are invitations to discover and re-discover our common humanity. Bringing in lessons from the vision and work of the Faithful Fools Meg McGuire and Carmen Barsody reflect on the practice of encountering one another, and the healing, celebration and community that comes from it.

Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern; Carmen Barsody, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, organist & handbell choir director; Rita Fabrizio, flute; John Thomas, tubaist; Asher Davison, song leader

Eric Shackelford, camera; Steven Kroeger, sound; Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035024/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210718Sermon.mp3

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, July 18, 2021.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034930/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210718.mp3

 

Last night, I came home after an intense couple of days. Spoiler: I’m fine, my mom’s fine, no need to read further unless you want to share in some processing about aging and life in general.

I have been given an amazing gift that I never take for granted. My mom is 90, healthy “for her age,” sharp, and at the moment, living independently in her own home. A few years ago, she and my father moved from a state away to be 15 minutes from my house. My siblings supported the move, which I’m grateful for. I am 16 and 12 years younger than each of them and have always been a bit jealous that in the end, they would have had that many more years with our parents than I. So I figure I’m getting more “quality of time” now.

The pandemic made things a bit harder, of course. All efforts were on keeping Madame safe, so no one went in her house, and she didn’t come into ours. I met her for our thrice-weekly walks on her sidewalk, and we’d visit in her backyard. My sister, who lives about an hour away, would come for short visits (no using her bathroom!) in her backyard, and when it was cold, they sat, masked, in my mom’s garage. My brother once drove straight through from Missouri to stay in a motel and come over for backyard visits. Longer visits were coordinated with 2 week windows of scrupulous quarantining on both sides. I probably don’t have to tell you – you’ve done similar with your family.

But we made it through and are all vaccinated. Madame and I revel in being in each other’s homes again, grandkids (all vaxxed) soak up time with her. She and I have begun slowly making our way out into the world, masked, but going in stores and such.

And then, Thursday, I got a call from my 16 year old who had spent the night with Madame. “She said to tell you she’s confused and can’t understand things.” I asked if she could smile with both sides of her mouth (she could), then jumped into the car. Picked her up and we shot over to the ER near her house, the ER we have visited at least 4 or 5 times this past year for a fall (tip: sit down before pulling a tshirt over your head), high blood pressure, those kinds of things.

They ran her through the tests – CT, blood, ekg – to see if she was having a stroke or heart event. The doctor explained it was most likely a TIA and advised her as to the set of tests she would need to have over the next couple of weeks, or, we could go to a full-service hospital and get them all done at once. Which would also be a little safer, as she’d be under their observation. Mom is always one for efficiency, so she chose the latter.

(Insert boring but stressful details involving my dear sister-in-law who was already on her way for a pre-scheduled visit thankfully, parking lot exchanges of checkbooks and cell chargers, gripes about medical personnel not communicating well, a million texts between family members, my spouse racing back from being out of town, and 2 pugs. Life is messy.) The hospital was not fun, no surprise. We got through it. There were arguments about me staying with her (Madame does not live up to the title I have jokingly given her – she hates being treated like a queen and despairs at being a burden.) I work very hard to make sure that we honor her right to make her own decisions, literally turning my head down when doctors come into a room so they talk to her, not me, but as I explained to her, me deciding to stay with her was in my dance space and unless she kicked me out, I was staying. She admitted to being grateful, especially when her night nurse turned out to have a strong Russian accent, and that combined with a mask was just beyond Madame’s ability to comprehend her speech, so she appreciated me serving as interpreter.

Some notes specifically about “when someone you love, maybe-but-they-can’t-tell-and-probably-didn’t” have a stroke: if the person was on high blood pressure meds, they will stop that, as the high blood pressure could actually be helpful at moving a clot. And they will come in every 4 hours not only to take vitals, but also to lead the patient through a series of tests involving describing what they see in a picture, speaking certain words, lifting up legs and arms, touching nose, answering questions, etc. Even at 4 in the morning, they will do this. “I’m not sure my mom could do that at 4 in the morning even on a good day,” I said doubtfully, but Madame succeeded, albeit with a rather annoyed tone of voice. She has never been a morning person, a trait shared with her youngest daughter.

Ageism is an issue starting much younger than she, but let me tell, the ageism on a 90-year-old is pervasive and infantilizing. Medical professional after medical professional would come into her room, commenting with amazement at how good she looked! And she still lived alone??? She was independent???

“What is that like, on your side, receiving those ‘compliments’?” I asked her.

Madame doesn’t roll her eyes, I’m not sure if she knows how to, but she communicates the feeling with a simple direct look.

(Please do not treat our elders like freaks of nature because they’re still living their lives and looking good while doing it.)

We finally got the golden ticket to go home, hopped (okay, carefully climbed) into my pickup, and took a quaint backwoods trip home, with Madame trying to direct me, and me insisting that we “trust the machines, Mom!” aka follow my GPS, which kindly avoided traffic and gave us an enjoyable hill country drive. She admitted “the machine” did a good job.

I left her in the capable care of my dear sister-in-law and the two pugs. As I said goodbye, she repeated her constant refrain of the two days, that I just couldn’t know how much she appreciated me.

In one of those moments back at the hospital, when she was feeling frustrated and a little low, I tried to explain. “I guess this is just the price we’ll pay for you being 90 – but it sure is worth it, at least to me.” All of this is new to both of us. My dad died 5 years ago, and her own mother died in her 60s. Neither of us has experience, firsthand or secondhand, of going through one’s 90s. We are, each in our own way, going through it together, figuring it out together. With every new experience, we debrief together afterwards about what we’ve learned. (Key learnings from this episode: keep a small “go bag” with toiletries for her and me, snacks, and a cell charger. Insist on better communication from doctors. Insist that when an ER doctor agrees to a plan, that the nurse in charge come into the room so that everyone is on the same page.)

And BY GOD, you’d better believe this is worth it. I know so many people who lost beloved parents far younger who would give anything to have this. A few times a year, dealing with a medical event in exchange for getting to share in the life of a loved one who is still enjoying life? Pretty slick deal, if you ask me.

She’s the only one who can decide if it’s worth it to her. We talk often about what it’ll be like when the bad days outnumber the good. She’s still in the driver’s seat and her kids will never ask her to suffer for us. But for now, she’s choosing to keep up our walks, meeting twice a week with a physical therapist (“and doing those mmph! exercises”), eating her vegetables, taking her meds.

Because living is worth it.

Paul Wienpahl is in the white, short-sleeved shirt to the right of the tree trunk & Herbert Fingarette (whose words give this blog and podcast its title) is standing next to Wienpahl to the left of the tree trunk

A recorded version of the following piece can be found at this link

We continue this series, “Walking with Paul Wienpahl”, by looking at paragraphs 5-8 of his “Unorthodox Lecture” from 1955. You can find links to Wienpahl’s “Unorthodox Lecture” in the episode notes to this podcast or in my associated blogpost.

So let’s begin this episode with paragraph 5.

§5 There is ambiguity in the word “voyage.” So a man may be interested in the voyage of another without being interested in the physical details of that voyage. And one can voyage without leaving home. Terms like “physical” and “spiritual,” therefore, have a use. And one can speak of the spiritual without being mystical or other-worldly.

Following his introductory paragraphs, Wienpahl begins here the main part of his lecture by intimating that he is setting out on a voyage. This means that the philosophical reflections he is about to offer us are not a set of final philosophical claims or conclusions about an already known domain of reality or mode of being-in-the-world but, instead, an introductory set of reflections aimed at helping him travel as attentively and open-mindedly as was possible into, what was for him, unknown philosophical, religious or spiritual territory. 

As we begin to voyage with him, remember that in paragraph 3 he has already told us because “something else” had slipped into his life he now realises his usual rational and logical ways of thinking are not going to help him most fully understand either what that “something” else is or in what consists the true fullness of his life and, by extension, the true fullness of any life. Of course, perhaps necessarily, in leaving behind his old ways of thinking the rational he has quickly found himself in what he describes as turgid and opaque waters.

It’s important to realise this because, at least as far as I understand it, a central aim of his “Unorthodox Lecture” is to place before his audience a set of philosophical tools and a certain general attitude or demeanour that he thought might genuinely help begin to clear, and to some extent still, those same waters for those of us tempted to make a similar voyage of discovery.

However, as Wienpahl notes, there is an ambiguity in the word “voyage” that pivots for him around the terms “physical” and “spiritual”, or what we might also call “outer” and “inner.”  I take it that in this paragraph he is reminding us that, although he, Paul Wienpahl, a UCLA graduate, Professor of Philosophy with wartime experience as a tank commander in Europe, has experienced a very particular “physical”, “outer” voyage through life—the details about which we may (or may not) be not particularly interested in hearing—he has also experienced a parallel, “spiritual” or “inner” existential voyage that he thinks can also be travelled by at least some members of his audience without them needing to “leave home”, i.e. without leaving behind their own, very particular, “physical”, “outer” voyages through life.

Additionally, as Wienpahl is very keen to observe, “one can speak of the spiritual without being mystical or other-worldly” and that, therefore, terms like “‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’. . . have a use.” Here, Wienpahl is making a key point also made by Wittgenstein—whose work was well-known by Wienpahl—namely, that “meaning is use” (PI §43). The important point to grasp here is that, for Wienpahl, words like “spiritual” or “inner” should not be understood as referring to the actual existence of some other, supernatural, non-material or physical world, realm or place beyond our world but as tools, tools which can help us better become aware of, pay attention to, and be mindful of the many phenomena that make up human existence. We’ll return to words as tools in more detail at the end of this episode in connection with paragraph 8. But, let’s now turn to paragraph 6.

§6 About writing and living. Writing can be and living is a creative act. Seeing them this way helps to see that neither can be forced. They come into being, and grow out of themselves. But this does not mean that they must be formless. It means only, I think, that the form which they have must develop within them. It can not be impressed from without. Nor, on the other hand, does it seem to me now that creative writing and living can be without some sort of conscious direction. For, if they were, they would lack form.

One thing that Wienpahl wants to draw our attention to here is the phenomenon experienced by all of us at one time or another, namely, that the creative act is often felt to be uncanny, queer, or what in the German language is called unheimlich. This word is derived from heimlich which means “homely” in the sense of being something familiar and not at all strange. Unheimlich speaks well, I think, of that strange “something” which has “slipped into” Wienpahl’s life and his former safe philosophical home but which is simultaneously concealed or withheld from him in some fashion. It’s something which is mysterious and ineffable and this is why Wienpahl and, indeed, Wittgenstein, is, at times, prepared to call it “mystical.”

The uncanny, queer, “mystical” nature of creation, whether in the form of music, the poem, the sculpture, an ethical demand, or whatever, is that to the artist it seems to “come,” or to emerge “from,” something “other” than ourselves and, often, this “coming” occurs unbidden. As the poet Wallace Stevens has the guitarist say in his poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, he has no choice but to play “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”. By extension the poet utters words, the sculptor makes sculptures, the painter makes paintings, the photographer takes photographs that are beyond them but which, uncannily, are yet themselves. Wienpahl wants us to suggest that the same is true when it comes to living our lives. As we move into new projects, i.e. as we pro-ject ourselves into new possible futures, we too, are uncannily always-already living beyond ourselves but in a way that is still ourselves even as throughout, we are being changed by the unfolding process into radically new kinds of beings. 

We are all aware that the most successful poems, pieces of music or other works of art—including the art of ethical living—are those which are not forced and are things which, as Wienpahl says, have come into being, and have grown out of themselves. They are works which embody a quality we often call “naturalness”, or what the Shin Buddhist scholar Taitetsu Unno calls, “made to become so by itself” (The Tannisho, Chapter 16).

But, as we all know, despite recognising this uncanny or queer feeling—that the poem, the piece of music, the ethical demand etc. comes to us from some “thing” or some “inner” or “outer” “place” other than us— we are all aware that creative activity cannot be without some sort of conscious direction because, if that were the case, it would lack form. This thought leads directly to paragraph 7.

§7 If this were not true (that creativity contains some conscious direction), why should sustained creative acts be so difficult? Of course, they do seem, just to “come.” And it may be this element of the spontaneous about them which leads us to suppose that there is no direction about them. No work involved. But it is a different kind of work from physical work which is present. Creative action is the sort of action that Spinoza called “actions as opposed to passions,” actions in which the source of the action is within rather than without.

The truth is, despite the fact that the poem, the piece of music, or the ethical demand does just seem to “come” to us, we are simultaneously aware how damnably hard it is to continue to be creative in a sustained way.

The question Wienpahl is raising here is the seemingly paradoxical one which sits at the centre of the Shin Buddhist tradition, namely how can properly or appropriately use “self-power” (jiriki) creatively to direct things so as to be able spontaneously radically to let go of that same self-power and so allow “other-power” (tariki) spontaneously and creatively to come, or slip, into our lives?

Although Wienpahl doesn’t use the term, not least of all because it didn’t exist in 1955, in paragraphs 6 and 7 he seems to me here to be getting close to articulating what the physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad calls “intra-action.”

Given that “intra-action” sounds so close to the word “interaction”, often when I use it lots of people think I’m simply mispronouncing the word “interaction.” But the difference between them is really, really important. The prefix “inter” means “between” (i.e. the action is something happening between two things) whereas “intra-” means “within” (i.e. the action is something happening within a thing). When two things “interact” they are believed to be maintaining a level of independence. Each thing is understood to exist independently (and essentially unchanged) before and after the encounter with the other thing. But when things “intra-act” they are always doing so co-constitutively—they are always-already changing the other as the other is changing them and so whatever a so-called individual thing is it is always-already emerging through “intra-actions.” Consequently, the very ability to be and act as this thing we call an individual with some kind of “self-power” is only possible because we are, simultaneously, “intra-actively” dependent on “other-power.”

Wienpahl is here struggling to express the intuition that what it is to be a self, an individual human being (or an individual anything), is not to be a discrete thing apart from all other things, only “interacting” with them, but, instead, it is to be something always-already “intra-actively” enmeshed in the world, that is to say in the cosmos, in a local ecosystem such as our planet earth, in a culture and a language game and so on, ad infinitum. 

In short, Wienpahl is beginning to intuit that all of life and existence is a co-creation that is always-already emerging “intra-actively.” There is a direction to this but it is a direction that emerges “intra-actively”, and the direction it takes is not, nor ever can, be directed solely by any individual, whether Wienpahl or you and me. We are always-already playing a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

With this thought in mind Wienpahl then moves to paragraph 8. 

§8 Words and ideas are tools. My life, and it may be, the life of any intellectual is troubled because of living only with the tools—and without using them. I am like the miser who forgets what money is for, and has only the money.

In this short paragraph, the last we’ll be looking at in this episode, Wienpahl returns to the Wittgensteinian point I made earlier, namely, that the meaning of words is to be found in their use (PI §43). 

It seems to me Wienpahl is here reminding himself and, therefore, us, not to let words like “spiritual”, “physical”, “inner”, “outer” or “mystical” go on holiday. Now this idea of words going on holiday is also drawn from Wittgenstein (PI §38) and by it, he meant that philosophical problems only arise when we try to look for the meaning of words outside the context (or the language game) in which they are actually being used. Wienpahl was becoming acutely aware how easy it is for us to hear words like “spiritual”, “physical”, “inner”, “outer” or “mystical” and straightaway think they are all speaking about the actual existence of some other, supernatural, non-material or physical world, realm or place beyond our own. This phenomenon is known as “reification.” Alas, this picture of another world all too easily keeps us captive and stops us from being aware of how these kinds of words can simply be used as this-worldly tools to help us identify certain existential phenomena we all experience and then to share with each other helpful reflections about them. These days, to counter the strong tendency to let these kinds of words go on holiday we need to bring into play a term like “as if”. So, for example, we talk about ideas seeming to “come” to us “as if” they were “spiritual” rather than “physical”; about creative action springing forth “as if” from an “inner” or “outer” source other than ourselves; about certain intuitions that “come” to us without immediate recourse to rational types of thinking and so appearing “as if” they were “mystical.”

In all cases, Wienpahl had become aware that he, and we, all too easily forget that words and ideas are this-worldly tools to be used and, instead, we send them off on metaphysical holidays again and again. When it comes to words Wienpahl has realised that we are all, all too often, like misers who have forgotten what money is for, and who now only have the money.

In the next episode we’ll look at paragraphs 9 to 15 which, along with the paragraphs we have just explored, he describes as being “cryptic statements of the revolt against idealism.”

Jack Mandeville is a faithful comrade at The Way of the River and can be found during nearly every week’s Beloved Selfies in one of his many dapper blue shirts! He, like some other members of our crew, identifies as Christo-Pagan. This multireligious identity is enthusiastically welcome at The Way of the River, especially because Jack brings an open heart and searching mind to our community. Thank you, Jack!

Stay tuned for next week’s Reflections—including the words of Rev Karen Scrivo—the last of our July guest writers. She’ll be tying our series up with a bow!

An excerpt from “The Night House” by Billy Collins

This is about my journey : The unseen child that grew up to be a man who still loves the unseen light – the light that no one pays attention to. This is me, on top of the roof at night, in shadows soaking up the magic of the night sky, free and loved by the earth, free from judgement, free from worry, free from my small town world. Well, I mean, not really, only in my imagination, actually I grew up in a VERY orderly household, where I was watched very carefully – probably because I was a dreamer, and a baby mystic. I got invited to Boy Scout gatherings that I promptly ignored or pretended to forget about, football camps, fishing tournaments, card games, the list goes one, I was totally NOT interested in these. My parents, however, were on a MISSION to successfully insert me into the life they wanted me to live – and they were GREAT parents, and they only wanted what was best for me.

AND….

By age 10, I was hanging out in graveyards (straddling the ridge), when the moon was full, I thought they were places of safety and quiet. I would sit there and imagine all the lives of the people long buried there. Who did they love? Did they live a happy life? What did they believe? I wanted to know ALL THE THINGS. I am from the east coast so there are still many many graves from the 18th century still intact – and I loved those the most! I did grave rubbings as a teenager – and my parents would just shake their heads. Why wasn’t this boy playing ball with all the other little boys – but that wasn’t me.

As odd as that seemed to the usual observer, I was actually very much in love with church, I was there whenever I could be. I don’t think I missed a Sunday for many years, IN FACT, I would go to church when my parents did not! I can remember wondering in amazement when my Methodist minister would say the words of institution over the elements of bread and wine (during communion) and me wondering in amazement how this was any different than a spell? After all, “this is my body” is translated as “hocus pocus.” Right? Google it. I later learned as an adult how much Christianity had sought to compete with pagan holidays by inserting their own elements, by inserting Christmas and Easter alongside them, by mimicking the characteristics of pre-Christian gods and goddesses and turning them into “saints.” Honestly, this is really where I got started, in earnest investigating my multi-faith journey as both Pagan and Christian.

What I am saying is that I can’t remember a moment when I wasn’t being asked to “remember.” Remember your manners, remember your relatives, remember your ancestors, remember your friends, remember your family, remember to brush your teeth, remember to write a thank you note, remember to make the right kind of friends, remember to be “straight,” remember to go to church, remember to respect everyone (almost everyone), remember, remember, remember. Remembering the past and my connection to it was a kind of sacrament that was required to move on to the next reality that was created for me. And yet, remembering is a key component of Christianity, we are asked to consume bread and wine in “remembrance” that Christ died for us. The church calls this anamnesis; in which Christians recall the faithful sacrifice for humankind.

So why is memory and context important for me when living out my spiritual practice? BECAUSE It’s important to sift through those occasionally to remind myself where I came from, what got grafted to my current journey, what stuck to me and/or what I left behind. And it’s not a static practice, I still sift and keep and toss – even today. My journey is an active one, I haven’t just stopped “listening” to the new ideas and ways that God is offering up to me. The United Church of Christ (UCC) a cousin to the UUA had a famous tagline many years ago that said “God is still speaking” and I really love that – it resonates with me.

As I said earlier, we can thank early Christianity for silencing and co-opting many of those stories because they didn’t fit the narrative that was desperately wanting to be written. I mean, I was attending church in the morning and playing with my cauldron that had belonged to my great grand mother-casting “spells.” Of course those are memories of a young naive child – but I still believe they are indicative of my early love for paganism. It’s important to point out that this was instinctual, I was not influenced, I was drawn to magic naturally. And so I held that tension of my Christian upbringing and this shadow side of an unnamed belief.

I could go on and on about my journey but what I want you to walk away with is that remembering is a good thing, walking the ledge of the roofline (metaphorically speaking of course) and allowing something new to grow in is OK! Even WITH the traditional, privileged upbringing that is my story, I am a thankful, magical creation of the Universe – and I would have it no other way. My charge to you is that if you are feeling cozy for moonlight and need to stretch your legs, maybe it’s time to take a walk in the dark, if you are feeling sad and want to listen to the trees, maybe it’s time to take a walk in the dark, and finally, if you want to feel your life, your humanity, dirt underneath your feet to know that you are alive, it might be time to take a walk in the dark. Blessed Be and may you find your own unseen light. And remember, at The Way of the River Community, there is room for all people and spiritual expressions or none. We have drawn the circle wide!

― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

One of the projects I'm involved in as part of Gentle/Radical is “Doorstep Revolution” a project to collect stories of Riverside during the pandemic. This has been a fascinating and rewarding project. It's such a privilege when people let you into their lives and tell you their stories. One of the themes that has come out of this work is the importance of connection, the connections that have

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By Philip Warburg

The cryptocurrency rush is on. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs now offer Bitcoin as an investment option to preferred clients, and electronic payments giant NCR will soon be offering cryptocurrency services to customers of some 650 smaller banks and credit unions.

As they open cryptocurrency to clients, these and many other stakeholders seem utterly unconcerned about the mammoth energy waste associated with this emerging industry. Cryptocurrency leader Bitcoin consumes nearly three times Switzerland’s total electricity and about a quarter of Germany’s total power use—roughly 0.4 percent of the world’s electricity. This is especially appalling when one considers that all data centers worldwide, excluding those used for Bitcoin, account for about 1 percent of global electricity. 

A twisted variant of pay-to-play is responsible for Bitcoin’s energy gluttony. Would-be buyers must expend enormous amounts of computer power—and money—solving hugely complex mathematical riddles that serve as the gateway to earning, or “mining,” Bitcoin. These computational gymnastics and the energy they consume make it prohibitively expensive for attackers to undermine the integrity of the Bitcoin ledger.

Chris Larsen is executive chairman of Ripple Inc., which markets another leading cryptocurrency asset called XRP. He makes a point of distinguishing his own company’s modest energy demand from other cryptocurrencies that rely on Proof of Work, the energy-devouring validation method used by Bitcoin. Instead of setting costly computational hurdles, XRP operates through a network of peer-to-peer servers that secure their transactions with collateral. According to Ripple’s estimate, XRP uses an average of 0.0079 kilowatt hours per transaction, in striking contrast to the 952 kilowatt hours of electricity needed to transact in Bitcoin. Over the course of a year, Larsen claims that “low-energy” cryptocurrency providers like Ripple consume about as much electricity as fifty average US homes.

Not all cryptocurrency proponents are ready to take on Bitcoin’s outsized energy appetite, preferring to focus instead on the type, rather than the amount, of energy consumed. Elon Musk’s erratic messaging of recent months is emblematic. In February, he purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin; in May, he signaled that Bitcoin could not be used as payment for Tesla vehicles because of its outsized carbon footprint; in June, he put cryptocurrency back on the Tesla table so long as the electricity used to “mine” it comes from renewable energy.

According to a recent survey across 59 nations, 39 percent of the power fueling cryptocurrency comes from renewable sources, but that still leaves a huge share of the industry’s energy coming from conventional sources that pollute the environment and endanger our global climate. To meet this exploding demand, fossil fuel dinosaurs like the idled coal-fired Hardin Generating Station in Montana and the Greenidge coal plant in Dresden, New York, are being retooled to serve the industry. Greenidge, which has been converted to natural gas, is already powering nearly 7,000 Bitcoin data servers, or “mining rigs” as the industry calls them, and that number is expected to quadruple in the years ahead.

In an attempt to mitigate the industry’s environmental downsides, an alliance of cryptocurrency purveyors, financial technology firms, and the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute are now working to advance a Cryptocurrency Climate Accord. This voluntary agreement seeks to shift all “blockchains,” or cryptocurrency ledgers, to 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. It also targets net zero carbon emissions for the industry as a whole by 2040.

These may sound like laudable goals, but they fail to address head on the cryptocurrency sector’s stratospheric energy use. We already face a colossal challenge in converting our power sector to renewable energy—a transition whose magnitude will certainly grow as we shift to electric vehicles and all-electric buildings. Every increment of electricity wastefully consumed will only make the switch away from fossil fuels harder to achieve. 

Another summer of extreme heat, wildfires, drought, and habitat destruction reminds us that the ravages of climate change are already upon us. In our eagerness to hop onto the cryptocurrency bandwagon, let’s not add fuel to the fires of global warming.

 

About the Author 

Philip Warburg is the author of two books published by Beacon Press, Harvest the Wind and Harness the Sun.  He is a Senior Fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.

When you get wound up about what somebody said on Twitter or – Gods forbid – on TikTok, ask yourself “who is this person?” and “why should I care what they think?” If their ideas are good, stick with them. If not, just hit the skip button and keep moving.

Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.    

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034749/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/07-11-21-audio.mp3

Wildflowers alongside Fleam Dyke

A couple of people have asked me about the two poems I read over the last two weeks in the Morning Service of Mindful Meditation and so I post them here. They both struck me speaking about something related to a thought I hold dear that was expressed by Nietzsche in the fourth aphorism of his “The Gay Science” and so, for what it’s worth, I add that after the two poems.

I should note that when I read Borges’ poem in the service I silently added a few feminine third-person singular pronouns to the text. I would like to think that, had Borges been writing today, he would have done this himself quite naturally as they clearly need to be there . . .      

The Just

Jorge Luis Borges

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.

[S]He who is grateful for the existence of music.

He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.

Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.

The potter, contemplating a color and a form.

The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please

     him.

A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.

[S]He who strokes a sleeping animal.

He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.

[S]He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.

He who prefers others to be right.

These people, unaware, are saving the world.

(Selected Poems, trans. by Alastair Reid, ed. by Alexander Coleman, Viking 1999, p. 449).

The Escape (c. Oct 1923)

Ivor Gurney 

I believe in the increasing of life whatever

Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . . . . .

Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never

Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles

Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done

Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight

Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed

Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.

.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . . the stars on the edge of night.

(Selected Poems, ed. George Walter, J. M. Dent, 1996, p. 46). 

Aphorism No. 4 from the “The Gay Science” by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff)

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words — in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial — out of profundity! And is not this precisely what we are coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of current thought and looked around from up there, looked down from up there? Are we not just in this respect — Greeks? Worshippers of shapes, tones, words? And therefore — artists? 

(The Gay Science, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 8-9)

"Relinquishment" (July 11, 2021) Worship Service

As many of you know, John was Senior Minister at UUSF from 2014 until his retirement in 2017. He had earlier been President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, 1993-2001, among other posts in religious leadership. He first began pondering relinquishment as he gave up thousands of books before moving the West Coast. He was helped by his witty wife Gwen observing, “I’ve never yet seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul!” Yet some of our most difficult relinquishments are not about things – but about less material attachments. This continues to the very end. Still, we are spiritually wiser if we start the practice earlier.

Rev. John Buehrens, Guest Minister
Dennis Adams, Worship Associate
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Giacomo Fiore, guitarist
Maria Roodnitsky, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Shulee Ong, camera
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design
Stephen Kroeger, sound
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Judy Payne, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Order of Service:
https://bit.ly/20210711OS

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034714/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210711JBSermon.mp3

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, July 11, 2021.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034654/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210711.mp3

the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 11th July 2021. Rev. Bridget Spain is the minister at Dublin Unitarian Church

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034632/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/110721-address.mp3

a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 11th July 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev. Bridget Spain, minister of Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Kathryn McGarvey, Dennis Aylmer and Josh Johnston

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034611/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/110721-mor1.mp3

Perpetual growth is not possible. Better that the birth rate comes down because people are choosing to have fewer children than because of mandatory population controls – or because there are too many of us for the Earth to support. Those who preach against falling birth rates are not your friends.

Please join us this Sunday (11 July 2021) at 11:00 AM for “A Place for the Spirit of Faith” by Rev. Barbara Jarrell.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

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

Our July 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is Shreveport Green.

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

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

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

Please join us on Sunday (11 July 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

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

Continuing our focus on living into the Eighth Principle, we will have a conversation about what our group will do next.

Bring your ideas for books, videos, or other resources we might employ to deepen our knowledge and understanding of systemic racism and how we work to dismantle it within our institution, our wider community, and ourselves.

We will also watch part 2 of a video interview with Ibram X. Kendi.

Please join us at 11:00 AM on 18 July 2021 for our worship service where we will be honoring Breka Peoples and Omari Ho-Sang as our 2021 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Recipients.

We will be presenting this award during our Sunday worship service using Facebook Live video.

We are honoring their work from the Summer 2020 organizing the 45 Days of Action Campaign in Shreveport / Bossier City, Louisiana along with their continuing work to dismantle systemic racism and create beloved community in Shreveport / Bossier City.

All Souls presents the Emerson Award each year to an individual, group, or organization in the wider community who best exemplifies Unitarian Universalist principles and the values of liberal religion.

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break on 11 July 2021.

Please check our social media and web site for future announcements on our next children’s religious education event.

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

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

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

You can find the 4 July 2021 worship video here.

Rev. Sara Goodman is an Associate Minister at White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. Rev. Sara finds the presence of the most Holy where people gather in community for celebration witnessing, and support. What follows is an excerpt of one of her sermons on the importance of an interdependent web of community, especially in these times. Welcome, Rev. Sara! Please enjoy her contribution to this week’s Reflections.

Some of my earliest memories are of presence, of place. My very first memory is of the inside of the YWCA swimming pool – all classic brickwork and echoes.

Some of my earliest memories are of the sounds of a place that was mine: listening to new age music from my fort under the massage table in my dad’s office, the thhwang the wires holding it together made when I plucked them like guitar strings. And in retrospect, not the most relaxing sound while my dad gave massages to clients.

A memory of a place that was mine: Listening to the waves crash at the beach for hours, running my fingers through the warm sand; and then suddenly the waves were TOO LOUD and it wouldn’t feel like mine anymore. Hearing my mom cry in another room in our house, going to her, hugging her as she wept.

I listened a lot. When I was a kid, growing up an only child with divorced parents, I spent a lot of time with adults and a lot of time alone. I got very familiar with doing my own thing while the adults around me were talking or working. Folks now call it parallel play. Two people in the same space, doing their own thing, but together. I got really good at it, and still enjoy it to this day.

I would sit, lonely, in my dorm room sometimes – until my friend down the hall would invite me to her room to do our homework together. She would be painting and I would be reading. We just enjoyed being in each other’s presence.

One of the things I learned over my early life, is that presence – the physical or emotional presence of someone I trust makes all the difference to my wellbeing. If I could hear the sound of my mom’s voice on the phone, I’d be OK. If I could sit and watch a movie with my friends, or write our sermons in a coffee shop with a classmate, or watch our children play from the same bench at the playground. I would be OK.

Let me just say, this pandemic is so lonely. I am so fortunate to have my best friend, my co-parent: my husband by my side through this time. We support and care for each other every day. But I am acutely aware of the isolation and loss so many people are experiencing. The presence of others is so important to our wellbeing. Loving physical touch is vital to human wellbeing. And too many of us are not able to get those needs met.

We need to be reminded of our interconnectedness, our inter-dependence within the web of existence.

We are a community, a community of care and compassion. We are connected, interconnected, and sometimes all we need to remember that is presence. The presence of another’s face on a screen. The presence of another’s voice on the phone line. The presence of letters arriving in mailboxes. We can and must be present to each other, this year more than ever before.

We are, some of us, struggling. Some of us struggling with loneliness, some of us struggling with working while parenting and educating our children, some of us are struggling in relationships that aren’t built to be in such close quarters for so long. Some of us are struggling with job loss, some with too much to handle. Some of us, many of us, are struggling with the election, and what the outcome could mean for our country.

Some of us are struggling with the death of loved ones, the ending of relationships. With grief that is so heavy on our hearts, like swallowing the weight of a teaspoon of neutron star on earth, as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer wrote in her poem:

Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking

In times of distress and struggle, it is easy to get caught up in the stress and strain of our lives. It is easy to drive too fast, or react too angrily when met with a new struggle. It is easy to break down crying in the middle of the grocery store. It is easy to think that we are alone.

We need to treat each other with great tenderness. We don’t know what anyone else has swallowed.

We are a people who need one another’s presence. We are a people who need to be held when grief overwhelms us. We are a people who need to sit by someone’s bedside as they’re dying, who need to gather in grief and joy, we are a people who need to be together. And when we can’t be physically together, we need to find other ways.

In my training for pastoral care, I have again and again learned the lesson that presence makes all the difference. Presence in this case means deep listening, deep caring, deeply seeing the other person. Treating them as whole and holy. This presence is just as important on the phone or over zoom as it is being in person. Bringing someone a book of poetry they love, or singing some of their favorite songs with them can be some of the more meaningful experiences with someone who is suffering.

I know that many of you are from a culture where you are told to suck it up and do the thing yourself. But now more than ever we have to examine that belief. Now more than ever we need to be able to reach out to someone and ask for help.

An update on The Book of Cernunnos, and a request: if you submitted anything for the anthology, please contact me privately.

If you want me to speak at your conference, convention, festival, Pagan Pride Day, or other event in 2022, get in touch and let’s see what we can work out.

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Since the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II has been championing the Third Reconstruction to dismantle racist policies and structures in a sweeping effort at the level of federal government. And just three years ago, he stepped down as North Carolina state chapter president of the NAACP to join the new Poor People’s Campaign to advocate economic justice for all across the racial spectrum. Now his calls to reimagine US society for the betterment of us all has gained traction over the last year. This passage from The Third Reconstruction, which he wrote with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, not only lays out the blueprint for movement building but also lays out the issues the moral movement advocates for. This is where it all began.

***

As I’ve traveled to share North Carolina’s story, I’ve seen how a reconstruction framework can help America see our struggles in a new light. Everywhere we’ve gone—from deep in the heart of Dixie to Wisconsin, where I saw water frozen in waves for the first time—I heard a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls and recognizes that the attacks we face today are not a sign of our weakness, but rather the manifestation of a worrisome fear among the governing elites that their days are numbered and the hour is late.

Sharing the story of North Carolina’s Forward Together Moral Movement, we’ve had the opportunity to drink from tributaries that run toward the great stream of justice throughout America—whether in the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, I Can’t Breathe, and Black Lives Matter movements; the fast-food workers’ Raise Up and minimum wage movements; the voting rights and People Over Money movements; the women’s rights and End Rape Culture movements; the LGBTQ equality movements; the global movement to address climate change; or the immigrant rights, Not One More movements. Within the framework of a Third Reconstruction, we see how all of our movements are flowing together, recognizing that our intersectionality creates the opportunity to fundamentally redirect America.

Within two years of our first Moral Monday in Raleigh, we saw Moral Mondays movement coalitions come together in fourteen states, not only in the South but also in the Midwest, New York, and Maine. Even as our North Carolina coalition partners organized over two hundred events, rallies, and protests across the state, the Moral Mondays movement was taken up and extended in other states, growing beyond our ability to keep count. Ours is a movement raising up leaders, not an organization recruiting followers.

If we refuse to be divided by fear and continue pushing forward together, I have no doubt that these nascent movements will swell into a Third Reconstruction to push America toward our truest hope of a “more perfect union” where peace is established through justice, not fear. This is not blind faith. We have seen it in North Carolina. We have seen it throughout America’s history. And we are witnessing it even now in state-based, state-government-focused moral fusion coalitions that are gathering to stand against immoral deconstruction. Ours is the living hope of America’s black-led freedom struggle, summed up so well in Langston Hughes’s memorable claim that although America had never been America to him, even still he could swear, “America will be!”

Despite the dark money, old fears, and vicious attacks of extremists, we know America will be because our deepest moral values are rooted in something greater than people’s ability to conspire. All the money in the world can’t change that bedrock truth. This is the confidence that has sustained every moral movement in the history of the world.

In 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled in its Dred Scott decision that a black man had no standing in America’s courts, Frederick Douglass said:

In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet this decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.

The whole history of the anti-slavery movement is studded with proof that all measures devised and executed with a view to ally and diminish the anti-slavery agitation, have only served to increase, intensify, and embolden that agitation.

He was right, of course. But he was speaking a long eight years before the end of the Civil War. Only as we reconstruct this moral movement mentality can we begin to shift the conscience of the nation. But we know as surely as Douglass did in 1857 that we will. We’ve not won yet, but we are gaining ground. When we started Moral Mondays in North Carolina, most of the issues we supported didn’t have majority support in the polls. But after we shifted the public consciousness by engaging in moral critique, 55 percent of North Carolinians oppose refusing federal aid for the long-term jobless and the unemployed. Fifty-five percent of North Carolinians support raising the minimum wage. Fifty-eight percent of North Carolinians say we should accept federal funds to expand Medicaid. Sixty-one percent of North Carolinians oppose using public funds for vouchers to support private schools. Fifty-four percent of North Carolinians now would rather raise taxes and give teachers a pay raise than cut taxes. Sixty-six percent of North Carolinians now don’t agree with the North Carolina legislators’ strict limits on women’s reproductive rights. Only 33 percent agree with cutting funding for prekindergarten education and child care. Fewer than 25 percent agree with repealing the Racial Justice Act. Seventy-three percent favor outlawing discrimination against gays in hiring and fi ring, and 68 percent of voters oppose cutting early voting and favor an alternative to voter ID.

After the 2014 elections, when the extremists held on to power and succeeded in sending their leader, Thom Tillis, to the US Senate, some suggested we had failed by not running Forward Together Moral Movement candidates who would champion our agenda. But a reconstruction framework helps us to see that we will not win by starting a third party. We will win by changing the conversation for every candidate and party. To be sure, we’re not there yet. But if we reconstruct a movement mentality that begins to create a public consensus about what is acceptable, then we will see a reconstruction of the legal and statutory protections that establish justice and ensure the common good.

Indeed, this is already beginning to happen. At home in North Carolina, we’ve seen local people’s assemblies emerge in “conservative” districts, changing the conversation in places that are bright red on any political strategist’s map. When we educate people about how our state’s refusal to expand Medicaid is closing rural hospitals and killing white people just the same as black people, they don’t follow the party line. They see how their own health is tied to the well-being of others.

As we’ve walked with service workers, framing their life-and-death struggle as a moral issue, we see living-wage campaigns becoming a ballot issue. When public opinion gets ahead of the party line, we need to put the question directly to the people.

Likewise with education. We’ve seen that we have to expose the connections between “community schools” or voucher programs and resegregation. Fully funded public education is a bedrock of multicultural democracy. In North Carolina, our constitution has provided legal grounds for this argument. But it is an essential moral issue in every state.

As our coalitions move from a new moral consensus toward legal and statutory changes, we know we have to put faces on the issues that our partners care about. We cannot be abstract. Directly affected people must lead the way and we must support and stand with them. While we continue to petition for Medicaid expansion in North Carolina and in a score of other states, we are convening People’s Grand Juries to hear testimonies of citizens who are suffering because their elected officials are failing to uphold their oaths of office.

Even as we focus on real people’s lives and stories, we must work to help people see how their issues are connected. Constitutional marriage amendments and so-called “religious freedom bills” must be exposed as a cynical political ploy to exploit religious convictions to divide gay folks from black folks. When any of us suffer, all of us suffer. We must stand together.

The same is true in our criminal justice system. The Third Reconstruction must abolish the death penalty in America on grounds of its unjust application. But this cannot be narrowly defined as an abolitionist struggle in which convicted killers are pitted against victim’s family members. We must end the death penalty instead as a first step toward dismantling America’s system of mass incarceration, which has rightly been called a “new Jim Crow.” We cannot do this without reexamining three-strikes-you’re-out laws and a broken plea-bargaining system in which prosecutors elected by a white-majority electorate in counties have unchecked power in over-policed inner-city neighborhoods.

Because political power is a democracy’s chief safeguard against injustice, we must continue to engage the voting rights issue after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed protections against voter suppression in Southern states that had been in place for half a century. This fight is, in many ways, bigger than Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That expansion of voting rights fifty years ago was a concession to the civil rights movement. We didn’t get all we were asking for. Now, fifty years later, we’re fighting to hold on to the compromise. What we really need is a constitutional amendment to guarantee the same voting rights in every state. This must be a cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction.

 

About the Authors 

The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is the president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. A visiting professor of public theology and activism, Rev. Dr. Barber is also the author of The Third Reconstruction.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is cofounder of the Rutba House for the formerly homeless and director of the School for Conversion. His books include Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (with Shane Claiborne) and The New Monasticism.

Ndidi Achebe

Continue reading "Belonging"

The Morrigan is a Battle Goddess and I’m glad people take Her seriously. But I worry that some are holding themselves back due to unnecessary fear. It’s good to be reverent and respectful. But the Morrigan didn’t call you up just so She could smack you down.

Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.    

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034527/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/07-04-21-audio.mp3

Dear friends,

I’m writing this column as a guest of my dear friend Catharine, who is currently having a well-managed health crisis. However well-managed such things are, they can be a surprise, and this one was, so the community of The Way of the River is coming around to help. One of the ways I can help, as a congregational minister, is to write contemplative words. So I have the pleasure of offering the following piece. The prompt I received for this piece was to ‘write about being laid low.’ And Catharine knew this would be a piece I know something about…

This is fertile soil for me. While I live in the world as a straight, white, cis-gender man, happily married, employed, with a picket fence, a toddler, and a black lab in Lincoln Nebraska (how my younger self might have shuddered at that description), the most important moments of my life have not been successes caught up in privilege. Rather, they have been the moment when, despite every expectation to the contrary, I was laid low by life. Times that had me quoting from Star Trek “Commander [Data] “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.”

I applied to seminary from a hospital bed in Baltimore. Three years earlier as an idealistic college graduate, I joined the Peace Corps, thinking that I would do some good in the world and decide whether to be a minister or not. I served in Southern Africa at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in a not-fully developed position, in an isolated part of the country. In the last months of my service, a friend of mine was shot and killed in an attempted mugging. I arrived in Baltimore laid low by life- heartbroken at what I felt as the loss of idealism, and angrier than I had ever been. Seminary was out of the question. “If God’s up there he’s in a cold dark room” as the songwriter Josh Ritter put it “…bent down and made the world in seven days/And ever since he’s been a’walking away.” I was also, though I did not know it at the time, very sick.

Seven months after I closed my Peace Corps service, I was diagnosed with Nodular Lymphocyte Predominant Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I spent half a year in chemo, and much longer than that recovering. For as many times as I have told this story, I don’t know that I have ever been able to capture the feeling of the thing- the terror, but also profound weariness. I had passed my breaking point a year earlier, and it just felt like more was stacked on every day.

Around the same time, I had started attending the Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Baltimore. And on a Sunday in the midst of all of this, I found myself weeping almost uncontrollably on the portico in front of the church. We had just sang a hymn, and while there are problematic images in it, Carolyn McDade’s recasting of words from Amos and Isaiah rocked me to my core:

We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken.

We’ll build a land where the captives go free,

where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.

Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on July 4, 2021. For over a year and a half, we have all been on an often challenging journey together, but we are still here as a religious community. As we contemplate an upcoming return to in-person church activities, our journey will change course again. What might we need to consider to smooth the potential bumps and avoid potential roadblocks when we begin that new journey?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034504/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-07-04_We_are_still_here.mp3

"Time to Slow Down" (July 4, 2021) Worship Service

These are urgent times. They long have been. And yet, there are powerful voices, many at the center of justice work, urging us to slow down. We’ll engage this paradox and the spiritual and practical lessons it might offer to us.

Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Daniel Jackoway, Worship Associate
Larry Chinn, jazz piano
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Mark Sumner, bass
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design, drums
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Judy Payne, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034444/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210704MMSermon.mp3

“Tolerance” used to be one of the unifying principles of our faith. Is it still? (Originally streamed on May 2, 2021.)

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034422/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMEzwtZKYtI&feature=youtu.be

Most family trees contain some outlaws or skeletons in the closet–people we might wish to forget or hide away. What do we lose when we cut off part of our heritage? We can find lessons about who we are today, and how we can be ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034340/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr4Xom3AluA&feature=youtu.be

Welcome Friends! The Church remains open in many ways during the pandemic. We remain together in our hearts and minds, as we carry on in a community of compassion and inquiry. However, the church building remains closed until further notice, and our meetings are virtual.

We need to do our part in caring for our community, especially the most vulnerable, and all signs point to strict adherence to social distancing to be the most effective possible step in preventing an overload on our health care system at this time. No one else should be in the building for any reason until further notice. The only exceptions at this point are staff, essential volunteers for worship, board members with check-signing authority, and any strictly necessary grounds care in groups of five or less.

• We have Remote Worship on Sundays now at 10:30 AM.
  • Check the Live! page for this content or we will post specific links. See also the latest YouTube content.
  • Sign the Virtual Guest Book and use our Virtual Prayer Book to light a virtual candle and include a message for the next online service.
  • Sign up for a Sanctuary at Home Box.
  • Other pastoral and religious education programming will be conducted over our ZOOM channel
• The Board would like to inform UCLA members and friends that we will initiate a “soft” re-opening of the sanctuary for video Sunday services starting July 4, 2021 @ 10:30 am. Attendance, including volunteers, will be capped at 50 for now.
  • To ensure that we don’t exceed this limit and have to turn people away, we have set up a reservation system. To reserve a seat or seats in the sanctuary for an upcoming service, please use the link shown at the top of the main page or included with the Service Description, labeled “Reserve Seats in the Sanctuary”.
  • Reservations need to be submitted by 8:00 AM on the day of the worship service. Services will still be available online as they are now. Virtual services (viewing the services on the sanctuary wall) will continue through the end of October when Rev. John returns. The Worship Committee has scheduled some fabulous speakers during that time.

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, July 4, 2021.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034234/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210704.mp3

a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of Sunday 4th July 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Will O'Connell, a congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church led the service on behalf of Rev. Bridget Spain, the minister who was unable to attend at short notice. Rev. Bridget wrote the script for the service. Additional contributions from Peter White and Josh Johnston

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034208/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/040721-mor1.mp3

the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 4th July 2021. Will O'Connell, a congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church led the service on behalf of Rev. Bridget Spain, the minister who was unable to attend at short notice. Rev. Bridget wrote the script for the service.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034146/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/040721-address.mp3

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

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

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

You can find the 20 June 2021 worship video here.

Paul Wienpahl is in the white, short-sleeved shirt to the right of the tree trunk & Herbert Fingarette (whose words give this blog and podcast its title) is standing next to Wienpahl to the left of the tree trunk A recorded version of the following piece can be found at this link We begin this new series, series three called “Walking with Paul Wienpahl”, by looking at the four, introductory paragraphs of his “Unorthodox Lecture” from 1955. You might also wish to listen to the introductory bonus episode available here.  So let’s begin . . . §1 THE following remarks, which I have with misgivings called "philosophical" reflections, will appear disconnected. They will not flow from one another as sentences in rational discourse s...

Please join us on Saturday (3 July 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

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

The group is free and open to all.

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

Are energy and spirits the same thing? Does energy have a spirit? Is energy a spirit? The question is far deeper than you might think.

Kimberlee Anne Tomczak Carlson

Continue reading "Emergence"

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” – Hamilton

You have lived through an epoch. Now it’s time to begin putting together our individual and collective stories of this time.

Live Oak is honored to welcome attendees of the Southern Region’s virtual “The Point” summer conference ... read more.

Attached media: https://www.liveoakuu.org/podcast-download/7732/a-collective-narrative-of-resilience-possibilities-perseverance-and-empathy.mp3

Societies have used public censure and shunning to punish social transgressions for thousands of years. Today, our instant communication has added a new twist to this. But after someone is shunned for bad behavior what comes next? How do we, as members of society, leave ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111034042/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuGc05nP6Zs&feature=youtu.be

The myth of the glorious Phoenix, the Firebird, rising from the ashes of its former self or from the flames of devastation is attributed to ancient Egypt. It was thought to be a sacred bird associated with the sun god.  In subsequent centuries other cultures—Greek, Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Hindu among others were drawn to the symbol and brought different meanings to it, but rebirth or regeneration dominate.  The pandemic caused world-wide devastation and now it is our challenge and opportunity to determine how our individual Phoenix rises.

Barb Rausin first came to Live Oak on its first day in the El Salido location and soon realized that she had found her first ever church home.   She came looking for community, not religion, because she had already adopted principles of zen, wicca and pacifism. What a joy to have these and so many others honored by this loving congregation.

Barb’s family is small but precious: daughter Jen, son Eric, his wife Krista and their children Arielle and Kai. None of them are local but always close at heart. Barb has lived in many places and has a widely diverse work history, starting at age 16 in Pacific Tel & Tel, l7 years in the fashion field as a retail copywriter, advertising manager, reporter for WWD. Then 12 years as co-founder, co-manager of Exportations,  15 years with diverse roles in a Fortune 500 computer corporation, years as a realtor in 3 different states…and the list goes on.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033957/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL1Ilri7f0s&feature=youtu.be

Live Oak Members Joel Bercu, Oliver Goss, Cindy La Greca and Carmen Rumbaut, share their thoughts about changes that could be made in the United States so that we might better live into the promise and potential of this nation.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033912/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_aChsg2Co&feature=youtu.be

Today is the 13th anniversary of Under the Ancient Oaks. On June 29, 2008, I published my first post on BlogSpot. I had no idea I’d still be blogging 13 years later, much less that along the way I’d write two books and start a series of online classes.

This will be our second summer with our favorite global party-crasher, the pandemic. (Leave already, Pandy! We want to get on with our lives.) Seems like a lifetime ago when this started, huh? Except this season, the rollout of vaccines is making outdoor time under the sun a little freer and a little less fraught with worry. Although still nowhere near the comfort and safety level we need, some of us may make to the beach. Others may make it as far as their backyard. Wherever you set your beach blanket or beach chair, vaxxed and masked, we have some audiobook suggestions for the occasion.

First off, we are so stoked about our audio rerelease of Kate Bornstein’s memoir, this time narrated by the gender outlaw herself with a new epilogue! A Queer and Pleasant Danger is as outrageous as it was when it first came out. Listening to it in Kate’s own voice makes it all the more delicious. From nice Jewish boy to Scientologist to the lovely lady she is today, her story is unforgettable and wickedly told. Just in time for Pride Month, too!

 

“I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man. That’s the part that upsets the pope—he’s worried that talk like that—not male, not female—will shatter the natural order of men and women. I look forward to the day it does.”
—Kate Bornstein

Listen to a selection.

Summer is also the season for blissing out to bops and jams. We selected some choice memoirs and biographies on music and musicians from our catalog for you to cue up on your playlists, four of which are perfect for Black Music Month! You may even discover some new tunes to carry into the fall and winter. (I know: Let’s not think that far ahead into the year yet. We need to enjoy what we can of months coming up.)

 

In a rocking debut that Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “a spellbinding odyssey,” G’Ra Asim pens a survival guide to his younger brother, Gyasi, for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a punk rock mixtape.

Listen to a selection.

 

An AudioFile Earphones Award winner and selected as an AudioFile Best Audiobook of 2020! Ian Zack brings the legendary singer and Voice of the Civil Rights Movement back in the spotlight in her first in-depth biography. So many folk roads lead back to Odetta. Where’s her Grammy?

Listen to a selection.

 

Leslie Uggams, Shawn T. Andrews, and Anthony Heilbut lend their vocal talents to narrate Gayle Wald’s biography of America’s first rock guitar diva, 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was the Woman Who Rocked before Women Who Rock.

Listen to a selection.

 

The late pop music critic and culture journalist Rashod Ollison had such an ear for music and such acumen for laying out the cultural context in which it was written. In his memoir, he described how music was his refuge during his tumultuous upbringing, especially soul and R&B, as he came of age Black and gay in 1980s’ Arkansas. 

 

What’s left unexamined in many Woody Guthrie bios is how the bulk of his work delves into the importance of intimacy in his personal and political life. Gustavus Stadler dismantles the man we’ve been taught to reveal the overlapping influences of sexuality, politics, and disability on his art.

Listen to a selection.

 

If you get through these as fast as you get through a tall glass of lemonade on a hot day, look no further than our bestselling audiobooks! They cover a wide range of subject matter—asexuality, abolitionist teaching, fat justice, white fragility, embracing life and meaning in the face of stark hardship—to tide you over through the season. 

 

Aces today are not concerned with how to have sex, but we are not anti-sex either. We don’t ask people to stop having sex or feel guilty for enjoying it. We do ask that all of us question our sexual beliefs and promise that doing so means that the world would be a better and freer place for everyone.
—Angela Chen

Listen to a selection.

 

Abolitionist teaching stands in solidarity with parents and fellow teachers opposing standardized testing, English-only education, racist teachers, arming teachers with guns, and turning schools into prisons. Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.
—Bettina L. Love

Listen to a selection.

 

Regardless of our size, working toward fat justice will call upon our most honest, compassionate selves. It will require deep vulnerability, candor, and empathy. Together, we can create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.
—Aubrey Gordon

 

Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.
—Robin DiAngelo 

Listen to a selection.

 

The rules of the game of life . . . do not require us to win at all costs, but they do demand from us that we never give up the fight.
—Viktor E. Frankl

Listen to a selection.

Put on your shades, pull up your umbrella, and jack in those headphones.

Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.    

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033807/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/2021.06.27.mp3

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on June 27, 2021. So much of our experience of life is influenced by things we can't control. Weather, illness, coworkers, friends, family. They say we can control how we respond to things, but that does not always feel true. Mostly, Buddhism teaches, we control what we do. Our actions are what we own in the end.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033732/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-06-27_Stream_of_your_life.mp3

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, June 27, 2021.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033644/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210627.mp3

a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of Sunday 27th June 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Tony Brady, congregation member of Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Will O'Connell and Josh Johnston

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033618/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/270621-mor1.mp3

the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 27th June 2021. Tony Brady is a congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033556/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/270621-address.mp3

Sometimes we need help. Not advice, not instruction, not even wisdom. We need someone – or many someones – to stand behind us, or beside us, or occasionally in front of us. How do we find this help in an era of solitary practitioners?

Please join us on Sunday (27 June 2021) at 11:00 AM for “Until Love Wins” presented by the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis MN.

This is the 2021 Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly Sunday Morning Worship and will be streamed live through YouTube.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-VLMTPyE_U?feature=oembed&w=840&h=630]

All Souls members in Shreveport and Unitarian Universalists across North American and around the world will be watching this live-streaming worship service.

The order of service (PDF) for this worship service can be found here.

Our June 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is Louisiana Trans Advocates.

Watch our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.

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

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

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

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break for 27 June 2021 while our religious professional staff are attending the 2021 Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly.

Please check our social media and web site for future announcements on our next children’s religious education event.

Please join us on Sunday (27 June 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We will resume our White Fragility book study group with Susan Caldwell and Barbara Deger (using the book by Robin DiAngelo).

This week we will concentrate on Chapter 12 — “Where Do We Go From Here?”

This final chapter in the book looks at the ways we can use what we’ve learned as we move forward in the work of antiracism.

Please join us next Wednesday (30 June 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

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

Greetings to you all.

As in all previous weeks, I trust things remain as well as can be expected with each one of you.

Firstly, thank you to all those who helped run the Sunday morning Service of Mindful Meditation whilst I was on leave, especially Joy, Patrice, Andrew (Bethune), Brendan and Stephen (Watson). Much appreciated indeed. 

Thank you, too, to the twenty-four people who attended the important Life of the Church congregational meeting on Wednesday 23rd June. It was a very helpful gathering and conversation characterised by a gentle and genuinely positive mood. Most encouraging indeed. Anyway, whilst remaining open-minded about other things we might do in the future we now have agreed to keep the Service of Mindful Meditation central to our morning worship in the coming period of our life together and to find ways to frame this in ways that work well both for those attending either face-to-face or joining us online and whether in lockdown or not. In the next couple of months we’ll be buying various bits of kit to enable us to run hybrid live-streamed services and then trying to figure out how that all works. COVID-19 restrictions allowing, the hope is that we’ll begin to meet face-to-face and live online from September onwards.

We also talked about setting up a church Slack site to facilitate easier communications between us all. I've now started a basic site so if you'd like to join this to help me get it working well before sending out a general invite to the whole congregation please email me and I'll send out an invitation to you directly.  

WEDNESDAY EVENING CONVERSATIONS RESTARTING 

Wednesday 30th June, 7.15 for 7.30pm

In addition to the morning service of mindful meditation on Wednesday evening we also talked a bit about how best to continue to encourage and practice the critical, enquiring, freethinking, intellectual side of religious life that has always been so important to the Unitarian tradition in which this community stands. To this end on Wednesday 30th June, 7.15 for 7.30pm, we’ll be restarting our Wednesday Evening Zoom Conversations. As with our Sunday service provision, the way we used to do things seems clearly to be in need of some change. In a blogpost/podcast written and recorded during April 2021 called: “Adopting the role of umpire and letting the role of player go . . .” I talked a little about what, from my perspective, I thought the fundamental change should be. It seems not inappropriate, therefore, that we might usefully restart our conversations by thinking and talking about some of the things that this piece contains. Please click on the link above either to read the piece or hear a podcast version of the same.

Here’s the Zoom link for the meeting:

Topic: Wednesday Evening Conversation

Time: Jun 30, 2021 19:30 London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82230453501?pwd=ME9obFIwWGJjSjJiNytBeER0VkNuZz09

Meeting ID: 822 3045 3501

Passcode: 676471

FREETHINKING MYSTICS WITH HANDS

It seems to me that if, over the coming year, we can slowly, patiently and gently begin to settle into a new routine of the Sunday Morning Mindful Meditation and a Wednesday evening Conversation we’ll be well on the way to making real the four-and-a-half-century old aspiration to be a community of “freethinking mystics with hands”. As the Unitarian Universalist minister Tom Owen Towle notes in his book with the same title we 

“. . . are freethinkers: unfettered pilgrims in search of governing truths. We are mystics as well: spiritually attuned to marvels of the universe and awake to omens of the divine. We are also blessed with hands outstretched in praise, resistance, and caring embrace” (p. 5).

Taken together, the Wednesday Evening Conversations and the Morning Service of Mindful Meditation provide (or at least I have some realistic hope that they can provide) us with a balance in motion as we walk together into the future, alternating between the right step of reason which, as Towle notes, “brings a clarifying, steadying influence in a world that prizes the impetuous and flamboyant” so we are not “tempted to glide on the wings of the latest mindless fad” (p. 2), and the left step of the heart which knows there is “so much we do not know that remains mysterious” and that we “are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without” (p. 3). Absolutely importantly, this freethinking, mystic walk is designed, not to wander around endlessly in an abstract garden of thought but to “consummated . . . through the employment of our hands” (p. 4), i.e. in acts of hospitality, justice-building and peace-making. Hence, freethinking mystics with hands.

Aside from all the foregoing, please remember that if you would like to speak with me during the week simply reply to this email and we can arrange a suitable time to talk properly either by telephone, Zoom or on a socially distanced one-to-one walk/talk. More people are getting in touch with me to arrange this kind of thing so please do be in touch if you’d like to do this.     

And, lastly, as always, if on reading this you decide you would like to join us for the Sunday morning service of mindful meditation and time of conversation following and do not have the necessary Zoom link then please either reply to this email or contact our Church Secretary, Brendan Boyle, via the contact page of our website. Just look through the dropdown tabs to find "Secretary":

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/contact/

Please log in between 9.45 and 10am. The meditation starts at 10am sharp, and finishes at about 10.50. There will then be a short break to allow you to stretch your legs, compose your thoughts, or put the kettle on. The ‘Time for Conversation’ will start at about 11am, and if you aren’t taking part in the meditation, feel free to sign in during the break for the conversation. 

To get the most from the meditation, you will find it helpful to either print out the order of service, or display it in a second window. Here is the link: 

Order of Service for the Mindful Meditation:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Evening-Service.pdf

You might also wish to have a small candle or tea-light to hand to light at a certain point during the meditation.

A representative recorded version of the service is available for download via my podcast site here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1378024/7314817

A homespun video introduction to the service can be found on YouTube at this link:

With love and best wishes as always,

Andrew

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Please join us on Saturday (26 June 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

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

The group is free and open to all.

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

The townspeople have clutched their pearls and fetched their pitchforks to raise hell against the new boogeyman du jour allegedly stomping the horizon. Do we dare speak its name? That boogeyman is . . . Critical Race Theory. White conservatives don’t want its antiracist agenda infecting children’s minds. During a Newsmax segment, even political commentator Dick Morris went as far as to call Critical Race Theory a “cancer” and suggested that teaching it to children in schools could “reinforce the Oedipal notion all kids have of wanting to kill their father and marry their mother.” Honestly, there are wilder conspiracy theories that make more sense. The backlash is no different from the time when our former white supremacist in chief called for teaching “patriotic” histories.

Amid the hubbub, President Biden signed a law, making Juneteenth a federal holiday. But you can’t appreciate the celebration and relevance of the holiday without knowledge of the US’s original sin and its overarching reach in our policies today. In response to this, we reached out to some of our authors to weigh on all the sound and fury. Here’s what they had to say.

 

The recent decision of the Biden-Harris administration to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday coincides with widespread efforts to pass new laws restricting voting at the state level and renewed attempts to limit the teaching of diverse histories in classrooms across the country. These developments are connected and serve as an important reminder that symbolic gestures, while meaningful, fall short of addressing systemic racism in American society. Making Juneteenth a federal holiday does nothing to dismantle racism or its legacies. It should, however, serve as an impetus to reaffirm our commitment to building a more just and equal society—one that truly encapsulates the spirit of Juneteenth.
—Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

 

This is less a backlash against Critical Race Theory—a set of rigorous, theoretical concepts that obviously very few of the current CRT critics have read—and more a blow against the global Black Lives Matter movement. We are in an Empire Strikes Back moment when elements of the ruling class are trying to crush movements for policing reforms, historical truth, and working-class power. 

The people inside of the vibrant social movements today have developed a new understanding of this nation’s past as well as its potential. They are on the cusp of major breakthroughs. The millions of people who have marched, organized, and have attended city council meetings across the country in support of BLM are moving toward creating the conditions for dismantling mass incarceration and creating a universal health care system. Above all, this is what the enemies of Critical Race Theory fear. They fear the power of a people awakened to their potential and they tremble at the vision of a truly antiracist and democratic society. We must push ever harder to bring a new world into existence.
—Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

 

For an educator like me, the federal observance of Juneteenth brings up a familiar and well-historied divide between word and deed that has worked, for centuries, to perpetuate contorted versions of US history. In the same week that Biden signed into law the national holiday observing Juneteenth, four states had voted in laws forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, and similar bills were in process in nineteen other states. Critical Race Theory is a multi-faceted legal theory with evidence that asserts that racism is enshrined in the nation’s laws. Some states, such as Iowa, are extending this McCarthy-esque ban to higher education. Iowa House Bill 802 “prohibits the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation or racial discrimination . . . ”

It is literally impossible to teach the accurate history of Juneteenth without referring to slavery as an economic system that enslavers in Texas simply refused to cede until Union soldiers came to Galveston to enforce the then two-year-old Emancipation Proclamation. Interestingly, these white supremacy-fueled backlash bills and laws do not forbid teaching about the ongoing project of erasing Indigeneity.

Like the struggle to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday an observed federal holiday, Juneteenth is surrounded by watered down references that blur historical accuracy. However, the long-standing antiracist teaching parses out these contradictions and lifts up accuracy and facts.
—Leigh Patel, No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

 

The current controversy over Critical Race Theory is a reflection not of the American Right’s cultural strength, but of its waning ideological influence. Under the eras of Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush, when conservatives controlled the bipartisan policy conversation around cutting taxes, going to war, and neglecting racial inequality, terms like freedom, equality of opportunity, and democracy were used, without second thought or much philosophical elaboration, to support right-wing initiatives.

Now, as the Right is unable to win national elections through the popular vote and is forced to confront a cultural landscape where—after the George Floyd protests of 2020—antiracism is a mainstream idea, it resorts to increasingly technical attacks on racial justice through demonizing an academic discipline like Critical Race Theory. In doing this, the Right is playing on the home turf of the scholarly journals and elite law schools that it claims to despise and showing that it can no longer control the narrative around race in the US. The Right no longer is confident that populist terms like “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” are winning slogans, like they were in the early 2010s. The Right can’t brazenly invoke the idea of colorblindness like it used to, effectively, in the 1990s—not after public attention on mass incarceration and police brutality. So, instead, it tries to say “Critical Race Theory” is dangerous and anti-American. Doing this might be fine for playing to the Right’s hardcore Fox News watching base, but it isn’t a strategy for seizing the US cultural vocabulary.

And yet, as the Right watches from the sidelines and seethes around the culture’s shift on antiracism, the young interracial activists on the ground are doing just this. They’re not just taking about Critical Race Theory; they’re already putting it into practice: running for office, organizing in their communities, and unapologetically advocating for policies to end racism.
—Alex Zamalin, Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility

Pursuing endless wealth is a recipe for obsession, overwork, and a generally miserable life. But poverty is no way to live either. How do you structure your work so that you have both the time and the money to do the things you’re called to do?

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Erica Baron

Continue reading "Covenant and Conflict… At the same time?"

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A Q&A with Aviva Chomsky

She really said that, didn’t she? During her visit to Central America, Vice President Kamala Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come” because “the United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.” There is a lot to unpack, namely the US’s history of interventions in Central America and the cycle of its neocolonial policies implemented there, which caused the migration crisis we see unfolding today. That’s missing from her statement. Historical amnesia at work. Aviva Chomsky delves into this suppressed history in Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration. Our publicity assistant, Priyanka Ray, caught up with her to chat about it and about Harris’s visit.

Priyanka Ray: In Central America’s Forgotten History, you argue that the US interventions of the 1980s and 90s set the stage for violent unrest and neoliberalism in Central America. How did this, in turn, lead to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today? How else has the US been complicit in creating migration?

Aviva Chomsky: The United States has tried to remake Central America in its own (US) interests and in the interests of US corporations, time after time. During the 1970s and 80s, Central Americans rose up in protest against a system that dispossessed peasants from their land in favor of big plantations and export agriculture enforced by US-supported militaries and police. Nicaraguans won their revolution in 1979, toppling the US-supported Somoza dictatorship. In Guatemala and El Salvador, popular movements and armed guerrilla forces also fought to overthrow the system that left foreigners and small elites in control of their countries’ politics and economies.

The United States intervened savagely to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution and to crush the movements for social change in Guatemala and El Salvador. By the 1990s, a US-supported government was elected in Nicaragua and peace treaties signed in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the path was clear for a full-fledged neoliberal assault. The Central America Free Trade Agreement followed in the footsteps of NAFTA, basically “opening” the economies to US imports, foreign extractivism and megaprojects, maquiladoras (export-processing plants), and tourism.

What makes most profit for foreign investors is exactly the opposite of what the poor in Central America need. Investors want low wages, low taxes, easy access to land, no environmental regulation, and a strong, armed police presence to make sure that workers and peasants don’t get ideas about trying to fight for their rights. That’s basically the neoliberal project.

Central American refugees from the US-sponsored wars started coming to the United States in the 1980s. But neoliberalism is another kind of war against the poor.

PR: You write that, in Central America, “forgetting is layered upon forgetting.” And in the US, we have the “privilege of forgetting” our culpability in producing many of Central America’s crises. What is the “politics of forgetting”? And how has “forgetting” shaped both US and Central Americans’ conceptions—or misconceptions—about Central America’s history? 

AC: People in the United States are taught that our country is essentially good and innocent, and that we go around helping people around the world. When we hear facts that contradict that narrative, we dismiss those as errors or exceptions.

Most people in the United States don’t even know—that is, they have the privilege of forgetting—how many times the United States has invaded Central American countries, how many times we’ve overthrown democratically-elected governments there, how many war criminals and death squad leaders we’ve trained and armed, how many peasants our corporations have displaced, and how much our corporations have profited from US “aid” to Central America and from their investments there.

Biden and Harris claim that they want to address the “root causes” of migration, which they’ve defined as poverty, violence, and corruption. But those aren’t the “root causes”—they are the result of over a hundred years of US imposition of our policies and our goals in Central America.

We can’t go back and undo that history. But if we want to change course, we need to begin by confronting honestly what we’ve done rather than pretending that Central America’s poverty, violence, and corruption have nothing to do with us.

PR: On her recent trip to Central America, Vice President Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come,” warning them that the US will “continue to enforce our laws and protect our borders.” How do these statements reflect the “politics of forgetting”? 

AC: Harris takes it for granted that “our laws” treat people fairly and “our borders” are something that should be “protected.” But our immigration laws are unjust and discriminatory, and our border was created by colonialism, conquest, and genocide. The militarized border serves to “protect” stolen privilege, stolen resources, and stolen labor on stolen land.

PR: Given the US’s role in creating much of the violent conditions that Central Americans are forced to flee, you point to the need for accountability and restorative reparations. What should restorative reparations look like? And considering Vice President Harris’s controversial statements, do you think the Biden administration will actually take steps towards meaningful accountability? 

AC: Biden has made it clear that he has no interest in accountability. His Plan for Security and Prosperity in Central America emphasizes militarization and foreign investment, and its prime aims are making profits and stopping migration, not helping Central Americans.

Given how much harm the United States has caused in Central America, it’s kind of the height of arrogance to think that now, suddenly, we’re going to come up with the “right” solution and impose it.  But I do have some ideas about ways we could be thinking about restorative reparations.

One.) There is something very concrete that Central America needs from us right now: vaccines. That one’s simple: we have them, they need them. And not, as Biden-Harris have insisted so far, with strings attached, like requirements that Central American governments up their enforcement of US immigration policy.

Two.) We could undo the provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement that privilege corporations over the Central American people. Some aspects of this are very straightforward, like removing the legal privileges the agreement gives to corporations that invest there, or to US agricultural companies that want to dump their products there.

Three.) Central America, like other poor regions, is ensnared in unpayable debts that undermine governments’ ability to carry out progressive social policies. We need to have a debt jubilee.

Four.) Central America, again like other poor regions, is suffering inordinately from the effects of the warming planet. Think drought, hurricanes, floods. And who is responsible for the climate crisis? More than anywhere else, we need to look in the mirror. The United States bears, by far, the greatest responsibility for cumulative emissions—the amount of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere.  We need to stop burning fossil fuels.

Finally, we could open our borders, remove restrictions on working, and raise the minimum wage. That would allow Central Americans to travel freely, increase remittances (one of the most effective forms of foreign aid), and reduce inequalities between the United States and Central America. The purpose of the closed border is to turn the United States into a kind of gated community, hoarding resources and keeping the poor out (while continuing to exploit their resources and their labor).

 

About Aviva Chomsky 

Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books including Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!”, Chomsky has been active in the Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for over 30 years. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Is it better to structure rituals carefully or just go with the flow? There are advantages and disadvantages either way. If it doesn’t matter where you’re going, any path will do. If you need a specific outcome, best to know where you’re going and how to get there.

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Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on June 20, 2021. Getting through challenging times like this, working for justice, building the Beloved Community all require serious contemplation, hard work and allowing ourselves to feel the painful emotions that may come up. We must remember also that play, fun, and humor are necessary to sustain us. We must allow ourselves moments of joy. Love is our ultimate source of resilience, and one of the ways we express that love is through playfulness.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033450/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-06-20_Playfulness.mp3

"Raising Hope" (June 20, 2021) Worship Service

For Father’s Day, we’ll take a deeper dive into what it means to be hopeful. Tom Wyman, author of Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster, and soon to be a first time father, believes that – despite the despair – now is not the time to give up on hope. Rather, we need to cultivate it and keep it alive.

Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Mari Magaloni Ramos, Worship Associate
Gregg Biggs, Small Group Ministry
Bobbi Kovac, Small Group Ministry
Rev. Millie Phillips, Small Group Ministry
Andrés Vera, double bass
My-Hoa Steger, pianist
Brielle Marina Nielson, mezzo soprano
Jon Silk, drummer
Mark Sumner, pianist
Ben Rudiak-Gould, lead
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Lyle Barrere, sound
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design, drums
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Athena Papadakos, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033406/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210620AJSermon.mp3

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, June 20, 2021.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033309/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210620.mp3

a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Favourite Readings Service of Sunday 20th June 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev. Bridget Spain, minister of Dublin Unitarian Church with readings and musical contributions from 10 congregation members

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111033243/https://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/200621-mor1.mp3

One morning just after dawn, a bobcat made its way through a Texas suburb. A passing Druid saw it and stopped to observe. The bobcat was doing bobcat things. And now it’s time for humans to do human things.

Please join us on Sunday (20 June 2021) at 11:00 AM for “From Generation to Generation” with John Allen and Steve Caldwell.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

Two fathers from the All Souls community will speak on the the important things they hope to pass along to their own children and how that relates to the way they were parented.

Our June 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is Louisiana Trans Advocates.

Watch our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.

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

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

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

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break for 20 June 2021.

Please check our social media and web site for future announcements on our next children’s religious education event.

Please join us on Sunday (20 June 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We will resume our White Fragility book study group with Susan Caldwell and Barbara Deger (using the book by Robin DiAngelo).

This week we will concentrate on Chapter 11 — “White Women’s Tears.”

The chapter explores not only the history of white women’s tears as potentially damaging and even deadly to black men but also looks at the more current political issue of white women crying in multi-racial settings — once again diverting attention and comfort to themselves and centering whiteness.

Please join us next Wednesday (23 June 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

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

Please join us on Saturday (19 June 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

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

The group is free and open to all.

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

Hello, my dears –

What follows is a version of the piece I did in 2019, slightly updated. It was such fun to write, and it got such good conversation started, that I thought I’d bring up the topics again:

Happy LGBTQ* Pride month! I should say, happy LGBTQQIPA Pride! That’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Queer, Intersex, Pansexual, Asexual Pride! Happy month for us! For all of us, especially those of us whose queer identities may not be apparent, those of us whose identities are around the edges, just out of sight, happy, happy, happy month. May we remember the ostentatious, flamboyant, unassimilated ones who’ve helped to create a world in which we can come to understand our own complex, sometimes hidden stories. While this piece is largely about dancing in the streets, literally and figuratively, it is also very much for those of us who don’t or can’t.

I’m a Gen-Xer priestess and minister who came out when I was 17, during the AIDS Crisis. Please consider my words in light of that part of my identity.

The movement once described as “Gay Liberation,” has grown to include people who use words like non-binary/Enby; demisexual; gender nonconforming; cisgender; and aromantic. To some of us, all this new language can feel overflowing, overwhelming, even frustrating and flooding.

But queer culture has always been about finding out who we are and how to tell its stories, even if we can’t explain them. It’s always been about multiplicity in unity. There have always been people of Male, Female, Both, All, and No gender. There have always been people who were asexual (not just celibate), polyamorous, same-sex/same-gender-loving.

There has always been queerness.

For example, in ancient Greece, the priestxes of Cybele were ecstatic drag singers and dancers, the Galli. The Galli are, in many ways, the forebears of some of queer culture’s most daring, reviled, marginalized, and magical, sacred, people—transwomen and drag queens. These holy forebears, the Galli, danced through the streets generally making a ruckus, with painted faces and flowing gowns, jingling their sacred tambourines.

The Galli are the ones whose magical, sexy worship we invoke in Pride parades.

Pride parades are an opportunity for contemporary queer people to dance in the streets as our worship. To walk, roll, dance, chant, and watch as ecstatic celebration. As rejection of the toxic prison of the closet—a place so many of our queer kin still live.

While the parades are not for all of us—some of us prefer other kinds of events, or don’t really celebrate this month at all, and that is our prerogative—the Pride parade is still one of the quintessential expressions in the constellation of queerness.

Pride parades are chances to pull out all the stops and make room to be just as countercultural as some of us are, just as flamboyant, just as glittered, just as sexy, just as threatening to heteronormative hegemony as we are.

Queer people have been recognized for millennia as magical beings. Cultures with three to seven genders acknowledge that gender expression is complex, mysterious, and even touched by the Divine. We have been acknowledged as travelers between the upperworld and underworld. For example, in the Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, it is two “genderless beings” who bring her the Water of Life and the Food of Life to save her after her invasion of the Underworld realm of Her sister-self, Ereshkigal.

And in 1978, queer, world-traveling magic would find a new expression: Gilbert Baker designed the first rainbow flag. Baker included eight stripes, each one a different color. He assigned a meaning to each stripe, an expression or aspiration for the “gay” community. Bright pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, dark blue for serenity, and violet for spirit.

The flags were an overnight sensation, and eventually groups like the 32 volunteers who dyed and sewed the first flag couldn’t keep up with demand.

Enter mass production.

Mass production that of course changed something that had been the work of a few, dedicated, invested human hands.

The first big change was that large lots of hot pink fabric were unavailable; the stripe signifying sex was lost.

The second change, made to accommodate hanging the flags in municipal areas, was to eliminate the turquoise; the stripe signifying magic was lost.

So now we have the six-colored flag we see all the time. And six qualities, no longer including sex or magic.

What I mean to get at, though, is that the loss of sex and magic—sexmagick—may have been the work of mass production, may seem benign, may look like happenstance…but as a priestess, I look at the symbol of those losses and know that losing the celebration of sexmagick as essential to queer identity contributes to marginalizing our own kin and impoverishing our own liberation.

I think of the dozens of transwomen murdered in the US each year, mostly women of color, often sex workers, usually killed by someone they know. These vulnerable women are shapeshifting, magical, sexual people whose talismans have been lost in the rainbow flag. The fuchsia stripe celebrating sex and the turquoise stripe recognizing magick told a story of queer power that Pride celebrations have been losing for years.

These days, our extravagant Pride celebrations are most often supported by corporate sponsorships. And corporate sponsorship, like mass production, transforms something created by the work of devoted volunteers into something overseen by bigger and bigger money and more and more assimilation and respectability.

People fuss over whether the Dykes on Bikes (often the leaders of Pride parades) are too threatening, too dangerous, too obviously sexual to be the heralds of the parade. Queer leatherpeople are looked at askance, and their more assimilated queer kin ask each other, “Why do they have to be so out there?” A drag queen of my acquaintance was discouraged from wearing anything so revealing.

As if.

The whole point of Pride parades is to be revealing. They are our time to reveal being just as we are in our hearts of hearts. They are our time to celebrate, to dance in the streets with Galli ancestors.

Pride parades are our time to reveal that queerness can indeed be a threat to so-called “traditional family values,” by showing that it is the freaks among us who are family to one another. However we engage our sexuality, from asexual to polyamorous pansexual, how we are sexual is part of Pride, and part of queer family.

It is no coincidence that “family” has been a word used by queer people to identify one another. We have been family to one another when no one else has.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a nice, white married lady with two cats. I live in the suburbs with my wife, who looks like the Girl Next Door. Two kids would make us the ultimate lesbian-appearing family. (PS – kids love Pride parades. What’s not to love about a bunch of grown-ups in costumes?!)

But my household and my families by birth and marriage are not my only family. I’m family to the boi walking on a leash in the parade with their Dom. I’m family to my asexual kin whose relationship with sexuality may be utterly different from that boi and his leash. I’m family to my kin who have visible and invisible disabilities that keep us from parades but who are nonetheless part of my Pride.

All part of my sex magickal family.

And it is that sex magick, the stripes taken from our original rainbow flag, that terrify those who would eradicate us from Earth’s face.

No matter how much or how many of us assimilate to a straight-looking image, there are still people disgusted by what they imagine we do sexually behind closed doors and therefore (?!) disgusted by our very existence. For example, just this week, an Alabama mayor wrote openly on social media about killing queer people. And queer women have been called out for being witches for-fucking-ever.

Sex magick, I’m telling you.

Pride is our time to be magically sexy and to reclaim what was lost from that first eight-striped flag.

It is time to fly—all together—the flags of the Radical Faerie families, of the pansexual leather families, of the nonbinary families, of the families of Girls Next Door, and most certainly, of the families of drag queens and transwomen of color who have been at the front of the fight for our inclusion from the beginning.

Remember that during the Stonewall Riots, the 50th anniversary of which we commemorate this year, it was people like Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two transwomen of color, who legend says took off their high heels and threw them at the police who raided the Stonewall Inn. This cisgender white woman owes my liberty and perhaps my life to trans women of color.

I am proud to call the queens and dykes of the Stonewall Inn, and of all the other raided bars across the decades, my queer ancestors. And if you are queer, you can too. Let us give thanks and praise to our Ancestors who have fought the good fight, the fight for pride and inclusion. And let us give thanks and praise to our Descendants, may they live in liberation.

Blessed be your Pride month, my dears. Blessed be.

~Catharine~

By V. P. Franklin

This essay appeared originally on youngcrusaders.org.

In the fall of 2019, award-winning actress and political activist Jane Fonda felt compelled to launch a campaign of civil disobedience to call attention to the climate crisis facing current and future generations. Atmospheric greenhouse gases had reached their highest levels that year, and the Trump administration was not only denying the climate crisis but was also engaged in striking down federal regulations aimed at mitigating the impact of fossil fuels.

On Friday, October 11, 2019, Fonda spoke before a small crowd of political activists near the Capitol and declared, “We have to ensure that the climate crisis remains front and center, and that’s why we’re here.” The “climate strikers,” following the lead of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, had drawn international attention to the climate emergency, and high school students in countries around the world organized “Fridays for Future” with marches and rallies beginning in August 2018. “I’m standing here with the young people,” Fonda announced, because “our house is on fire. And so we’re calling these rallies Fire Drill Fridays.”

Over the next fourteen Fridays, weekly teach-ins, along with the rallies, were held by representatives of Greenpeace, Climate Action Network, Friends of the Earth, Poor People’s Campaign, the Sunshine Movement, Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity, Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Women’s Earth Alliance, Women Environment and Development Organization, Veterans for Peace, New York City’s WE ACT, the Environmental Justice Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Green Latinos, and others. At the end of the rallies, Fonda and her supporters marched toward the Capitol building, chanting “The fossil fuel industry will not bury us. We will live to bury them . . . . Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”

As they approached the Capitol steps, a police officer gave them a warning: “Move back, people. Move all the way back!” When they refused, the police grabbed them and secured the hands behind them with plastic zip ties. Fonda had been arrested before, so she was not afraid. “As each of us were taken by an officer to the waiting vans, people cheered, clapped, and chanted in support. It felt good.” They were taken to the station, placed in cells, and after three hours were processed, fingerprinted, and paid the $50 fine. Upon leaving the station, friends were waiting and provided food, water, and other types of “jail support.”

Afterward, Fonda convinced many other celebrities to join the Fire Drill Friday rallies and teach-ins—Lily Tomlin, Sam Waterson, Ted Danson, Sally Field, Gloria Steinem, Joaquin Phoenix, and others. “And for every one of our fourteen Fridays that involved arrests, rain or shine or frigid weather, jail support was always there.” And when Fonda could no longer risk another arrest, “I would be part of it myself.”

In her book, What Can I Do? My Path from Climate Despair to Action (2021), Fonda recounts her experiences and those others who joined her. She includes broadsides and speeches from those who participated in the protest. The speakers addressed the Green New Deal, “Women and Climate Change,” water pollution, food, agriculture, and climate change; environmental racism, health and employment outcomes; and most importantly, the damage to people’s lives, the environment, and our children’s future carried out by the fossil fuel industry.

Hundreds of children from the local public and private schools attended the rallies, and speaker after speaker emphasized the need to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage it has done. “My advocacy as an environmentalist,” declared Robert Kennedy Jr., “is about democracy, is about fairness, and about equality and justice.” With the assistance of the political establishment, “These corporations are commodifying the commons.”

Addressing the global COVID-19 pandemic, however, became political leaders’ main preoccupation in 2020 after the Fire Drill Fridays ended. The deceased use of fossil fuels during the lockdowns allowed people in many locations to experience what their lives would be like without the unrelenting pall of pollution. However, the oil and gas companies merely raised their prices to make up for the loss of profits during the pandemic. The Biden administration has promised to move the economy toward greater use of renewable energy, but the billions of dollars in subsidies to the coal, gas, and oil companies continues, as well as the practice of fracking, the extraction process that pollutes the air and water and damages the health of those living nearby.

In answering the question, “What Can I Do?” Jane Fonda describes the importance of marches, rallies, teach-ins, and civil disobedience. However, the most effective weapon in the arsenal of nonviolent direct action protest—the boycott—is not discussed. The profiteering before and during the pandemic must be challenged, and environmental and racial-justice groups and organizations that participated in the Fire Drill Fridays and other protests need to come together and target a gas and oil company for a nationwide boycott. The situation for future generations is becoming more and more perilous, and something must be done before 2030. If the adult leaders and organizations do not organize the oil company boycott, then the young people in the Sunrise Movement, Black Lives Matter, and March for Our Lives must take the lead because they are the ones who suffer the economic and physical burden of environmental destruction.

Eighteen-year-old Abigail Leedy described what it was like for her and other children growing in South Philadelphia near an oil refinery. Large numbers of children suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases due to the pollution, where fossil fuel explosions release tens of thousands of pounds of hydrofluoric acid into the air. So Leedy decided to defer going to college and founded the Sunshine Movement because “in Philly, people die because of fossil fuels.”

 

About the Author 

V. P. Franklin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

Any time I see the word “Pagan” or “witch” in a news article I read it carefully. Are they talking about us? Or are they taking these terms out of context and using them as scare words? More often it’s the latter.

A Q&A with Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Dr. Lauren Wadsworth

It’s common for the phrase “Did that just happen?!” to cross the minds of employees from marginalized communities. Be it because of a microaggression (“you’re so . . . articulate!”); a misguided marketing campaign (Barnes & Noble’s 2020 Diverse Editions gaffe); or a short-sighted diversity statement (an online post in solidarity with Black lives with little or no follow-through internally), people from marginalized identities have witnessed and experienced incidents that leave them uncomfortable at best, and at worst feeling unsafe to be authentic in their jobs. With their book Did That Just Happen?!: Beyond “Diversity”—Creating Sustainable and Inclusive Organizations, clinical psychologists Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Dr. Lauren Wadsworth invite professionals at every level, in companies, schools and nonprofits, to reconsider common “diversity landmines” and how to manage them. They also bring their expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work at various companies and their own experiences to the book. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with them to chat about it.

Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration for writing Did That Just Happen?!

Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Dr. Lauren Wadsworth: As people who hold marginalized identities, we often have been the “only” or the “pioneer” in our workplace. As a result, we frequently experienced not only identity related aggressions but consistent requests to train those around us on how to be more culturally aware and responsive. Neither of us started our careers aiming to be “diversity experts,” but like many with marginalized identities, we continued to be called upon, and eventually embraced the role. Over the years that we worked at the same institution, we found solace and support connecting over this experience. One day while walking the campus, both a bit burnt out and tired from recent identity-related events, Lauren turned to Stephanie and said, “Maybe we should just write a book about all of this!”

We found the book a powerful place to channel our pain, experience, and voices. We poured everything we could think of into it: examples, strategies, terms we’d coined in our trainings. Our hope was that we could write a book that could not only help leadership who want to do better but also to validate those who had been harmed, giving them a book packed full of skills to anonymously slip under their boss’s door in hopes of creating change while keeping them safe.

CC: Both of you are clinical psychologists. Tell us a bit about your backgrounds and how you bring your expertise to your work as co-founders of Twin Star – Intersectional Diversity Trainers.

Drs. SPA and LW: As psychologists, we know that trying to force people to change can often backfire. We also know the power of empathy in inspiring change. So instead of writing a book about why diversity and inclusion are important, we opened each chapter with a real-life story about something going wrong in the workplace. Our hope was that the reader could connect to and care about the characters, and from that place, get curious about how they could reduce and recover from harm in similar situations.

We also realize that self-efficacy is key if someone is going to keep trying something hard (for example, work against their racist socialization). We wrote the book to be accessible, with takeaways on every page, so that the reader can feel smarter and more skilled as they read along and try the simple and complex skills in their interactions across identities.

CC: That brings me to a question about the book’s structure. As you just mentioned, each chapter begins with an individual/s’ real-life story/ies and then moves onto a diagnostic of what went wrong and a section on what to do about it. How did you decide on this format?

Drs. SPA and LW: In our experience, books on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can be dense and textbook-like. One of our goals for the book was to keep it interesting, trying not to lose the readers who might be on the fence about the whole DEI thing. We thought that breaking each chapter into these repeated three sections would make each chapter appear more “bite size.” The reader knows what they’re getting into in each chapter and can see goal posts ahead of what’s coming. We thought this would feel more approachable. Also, we thought this would be a format that would lend itself to being shared in smaller chunks. For example, an employee might relate to a particular example and choose to just share that chapter with their team. With this format, each chapter can stand alone or flow from and to the chapters surrounding it.

CC: The terms “diversity” and “inclusion” are often used interchangeably in daily lingo. Why was it important to make a distinction between them in the book?

Drs. SPA and LW: The distinction is important because grabbing for diversity without inclusivity is counterproductive, costly, and painful. In the book, we refer to this as putting “the cart before the horse.” A company might quickly hire new BIPOC and queer staff, trying to “do the right thing.” This is the cart. The horse is the skill set people need to communicate and work well across identities. Try to visualize the cart going before the horse. Now, picture the cart going before the horse while climbing a steep incline. We all know it’s not going to end well, and yet this is what we do over and over again in the workplace. The goal is to create environments in which people feel welcomed, seen, heard. We want people to know that they can bring their full selves to work and relationships and be rewarded for doing so. Put the horse in front of the cart and it might actually take flight!

CC: Last year, you wrote for us an essay on Barnes & Noble’s Diverse Editions gaffe. Are there any examples, current or old, of organizations that have been successful at sustaining diversity and inclusion in the workplace that have caught your attention? Or better yet, any examples of organizations that have learned from their gaffes?

Drs. SPA and LW: We want to encourage individuals and organizations to shift their view of what success looks like in this realm. There is no such thing as a “D&I Seal of Approval.” Gaffes are inevitable because no one can be perfect in this work 100 percent of the time. What we can be is committed to ongoing growth and learning. Companies that are doing the best right now are those that have committed to investing (financially and emotionally) in ongoing DEI trainings and skill development. We can name bias and oppression when we see it. We can commit to change. The companies that are moving toward sustainable, inclusive organizations are learning how to do these things. As we discuss in the book, the growth is not linear. As organizations commit to doing better, people will feel empowered to share their truths. We need to be prepared to hear them, express gratitude for the feedback and recommit—even when it hurts. 

CC: Now that we’re in the full swing of the new admin though still in the throes of repeated injustices against marginalized communities, what would you like readers to take away from the book?

Drs. SPA and LW: We would like readers to walk away from each chapter, and the book as a whole, with increased hope. We would like them to feel like they have new words to label and describe injustices in their day-to-day lives and be able to pull from a large toolbox of new skills to address each injustice (if they so choose). We hope that readers will use the book as a road map to navigate complex issues and feel inspired to build new relationships across identities and feel the incredible benefits that follow.

 

About the Authors 

Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker is a clinical psychologist and Harvard Medical School professor committed to achieving multicultural excellence in organizations. As founding director of McLean Hospital’s College Mental Health Program, she has consulted with numerous institutions on diversity and inclusion. She is also the cofounder of Twin Stars Diversity Trainers, a consultation company offering diversity and identity-related trainings for organizations. Dr. Pinder-Amaker currently serves as the McLean Hospital-Harvard Medical School’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer.

Dr. Lauren Wadsworth is a clinical psychologist passionate about furthering diversity and inclusion efforts. She serves as a senior advisor on the Anti-Racist, Justice, and Health Equity team at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. She is the founder and director of the Genesee Valley Psychology (GVP), a clinic providing evidence-based treatment to the Rochester, NY, area and specializing in OCD, trauma, DBT, and a newly launched Racial Trauma and Healing center. She is also the cofounder of Twin Stars Diversity Trainers, a consultation company offering diversity and identity-related trainings for organizations and leadership. Finally, she is a clinical senior instructor in psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Running away is one of humanity’s primary survival strategies – “fight or flight.” Why do so many of us feel threatened… and what can we do about it?