UU World put up a good article yesterday about the move from districts to regions. If you don’t know, the country is divided into 19 regions now, and it looks like we’re headed to merging them together to come up with five regions instead. What I’m wondering is who loses in the move from districts to regions.

Districts provide a lot of program consultant-type services, put on regional events, and do other good things that are tough for congregations to do for themselves. The idea is that regions will be able to do all this better than districts primarily because regional staff can specialize better than district staff because of the economy of scale. There’s a lot to be said for that.

The UU World article mentions that “most staff” will stay on in the new order of things, but I find myself wanting more specifics laid out on what sorts of cuts will be made in the transition. Even as a district board member, I’m fine with those decisions being made above my pay grade—we’re a program, not governing, board, in my district anyway—but I’d still like to have a better idea of what the reorganization will look like administratively.

In this day of webinars and Skype, will regions have regional offices, or will they be diffused across several time zones? I imagine it’s pretty certain that 19 ten-hour-a-month accountants across the country will be losing their jobs, but what happens to district execs and their assistants? What happens to all the district RE staff, when most districts have their own RE program consultant? And is there enough work for all the program consultants that are currently employed by districts to remain employed under regions? I could see this last question in particular easily going either way.

More details please…

I just finished up The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Zizek, the so-called wildman of philosophy. And I keep going back to a passage on the very first page of the intro.

In it, Zizek says that religion in our current day of global empire is limited to two functions, the therapeutic and the critical. Therapeutic religion strives to help people adapt to the stresses of living in global empire. The feel-good prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen seems a classic example. But any spirituality that accepts the global order as it is and helps people find happiness within it goes the therapeutic route.

Critical religion points out what is wrong with the global order, and it may even take on the role of heresy. I wish Zizek had gone into this more, but all he gives us is half a paragraph. If you use the link above, click on “Look Inside” and search for “therapeutic,” you can read the passage for yourself. (My copy of the book is at home or else I’d blockquote it.)

What I keep thinking about is what critical religion operating as a full blown global heresy would actually look like. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are probably examples. The Latin American base communities of liberation theology fame, if they’re still around, are another. I’m thinking of groups connected to specific locales with nonstandard practices and beliefs that interrupt the regular goings-on of global empire in those locales.

What I can’t keep from asking is which of these is Unitarian Universalism—therapeutic religion, critical religion, or full blown global heresy? I think we can rule heresy out. We’re just not that severe or different.

With our anti-oppression work, critical religion seems the next place to jump. But I don’t think Zizek would go along with that. He regularly skewers liberal academics for how they do liberal politics as a way to hide from themselves their complicity with and privilege in the global system. Writing a paper doesn’t do much to actually alleviate oppression, and neither does shopping at Whole Foods. Joining a commune or a co-share community feel much more critical. Picketing safely in a government-recognized protest is therapy masquerading as critique. If a bunch of politicians are there too, it’s probably not critical religion at work.

Which isn’t to say something delightfully critical—and transformative—can’t happen at that protest. Anytime a gift economy or community of reconciliation arises, no matter how small, we’re encountering successful critical religion providing an alternative to empire. Without those two markers—gift and reconciliation—we’re doing the middle-class liberal version of therapeutic religion. And I’d like to think we’re called to more than that.

This week’s art—a stylized Ten Commandments—and theme—righteous judgment—really threw me off. I was expecting a legalistic selection of texts highlighting, once again, the trope that God punishes you when you sin. Instead, it was a nod not just to avoiding judging others but to our inability to judge each other, rightly, in any case.

2 Samuel 12:1-10. We miss David arranging for the murder of Bathsheba’s husband so he can marry her, coming in just as the prophet Nathan is confronting for his sin. Nathan tells David the story of a rich man who steals a poor man’s only lamb for dinner instead of killing one of his own, enraging David with the injustice of it. Then the turn: Nathan tells David that he is the rich man who has stolen Bathsheba, the poor man’s lamb. His family line is cursed to live by the sword as a result. But isn’t living by the sword in the job description of a king? And I’d love to know how Bathsheba felt about being turned into a sheeple.

Psalm 139. One of the best psalms in the book and an early move toward the doctrines of God’s omniscience and omnipresence. This one’s a favorite of pro-lifers for its “you knitted me in the womb” language. So much of inward-looking Christian spirituality has roots in this chapter. I’ve read this one several times over the years, but I was still surprised by the sudden turn to a call for vengeance and admission of “total hatred.” The psalmist asks God to correct him if he’s wrong, but clearly he thinks his hatred is right.

Romans 12:12-21. More evidence that Paul was familiar with Jesus’ ethical teachings, not just Good Friday and Easter. Judge not, the passage urges, even hate not. Let God take care of taking revenge, Paul says.

Luke 18:9-14. Jesus tells the story of a Pharisee’s self-righteous, and public, prayer and a tax collector’s humble prayer. God accepts the prayer of the tax collector, not the Pharisee. He closes with the cosmic reversal: the great will be humbled and the humble exalted.

I’m troubled by the teaching that only God is capable of judgment. I’m more than willing to admit that we are less than capable of perfect judgment, but aren’t we capable of good-enough judgment? Maybe I hung around ethicists too much, but I think that it’s good and necessary to make ethical judgments and to put the force of law behind them in many cases.

This need to let God be the final judge is the driver behind the doctrine of the Last Judgment. But I’m much more inclined to Miroslav Volf’s that what’s needed at any day of future arbitration isn’t judgment so much as reconciliation. Perfect reconciliation is of course not possible for us, and often even imperfect reconciliation is impossible. I understand the longing for a day of Last Reconciliation and see Volf’s thought as an ultimately hopeful turn on one of Christianity’s more despairing doctrines. But I don’t know that that makes it true.

I’m taking some time to follow along through the Christian year using the new Mosaic Bible, which has several biblical and extra-biblical selections for each week of the Christian year.

I’m taking some time to follow along through the Christian year using the new Mosaic Bible. This week’s readings for Pentecost Week 25: Nehemiah 9:5-37, Psalm 13, Romans 13:8-14, John 21:15-19, Romans 8:31-39.

An extended speech we start with in Nehemiah is yet another god-smites-when-you’re-bad remake, this time by the lead priests who may be the ones who wrote and then “discovered” Deuteronomy, convincing King Josiah to convert the country to what was probably it’s first real historical commitment to monotheistic worship of Yahweh, lest Yahweh punish them with conquest, exile and/or slavery yet again. No more worship of Ahserah back in the hill country for these guys! But is every week’s Hebrew Bible reading going to be “YAHWEH SMASH!!” I’m weary of the threats to fly right or get clobbered. Whatever happened to time out?

The Psalmist has the honesty to complain about unanswered prayer—how many evangelical ministers have the courage to do that from the pulpit?—and ends by offering God an improved reputation if he answers the psalmist’s prayer. He’s trying to bribe God! Click to continue reading “Unconditional Love”

I’m taking some time to follow along through the Christian year using the new Mosaic Bible. This week’s readings for Pentecost 24: Exod 3:1-22, Psalm 106-107, Acts 7:2-50, Luke 4:1-13, and Deut 8:1-20.

This week’s theme is wilderness, and the readings include the burning bush, a recap of the entire Exodus story in both Psalms and Acts, and Jesus’ tempting by the devil. And I can’t help but find myself perplexed and pissed.

It’s a thin thread that runs through these readings. In the Jesus story, we find a rejection of power, place, and even raw human biological need. But in the Psalms recap of the Exodus story, we find the worn deuteronomistic embrace of power, place, and human want—if you do what Yahweh says, you will enjoy power, place, and more, but if you don’t…

Stephen’s recap is interesting though. Click to continue reading “The Wilderness”

Last week I did something I haven’t done in years—I bought two new Bibles!  So far, I think I like them both quite a bit.

The first one, and the one getting all the press, is the new Mosaic Bible.  I’ve been calling this my new liberal artsy fartsy Bible, though the translation is the solidly evangelical TLIV.  The front several pages preceding the actual biblical text are devoted to the Christian liturgical year.  Each week has a theme—this week it’s “wilderness”—listing a lectionary-lite sampling of biblical passages from throughout the Bible, some killer contemporary and historical artwork, and meditations and essay excerpts from all centuries and continents.  I used to love the challenge of putting together a good “prayers of the people” based on the conversation between the week’s lectionary texts, so it’s nice to listen into that weekly conversation again, which can be pretty contentious at times.  It’s a beautiful Bible, no bones about it. I’m going to be blogging my way through each week’s readings, but more about that in a sec.

The second Bible is The Books of the Bible, a chapterless, verseless presentation of the TNIV translation. It’s aim is to focus on the actual literary units the Bible was written in—books, not chapters or verses.  It’s been a different experience reading Genesis with no chapter numbers to make me feel like I’m reading a lot or a little, or to make me wonder what the point of this chapter is versus that chapter.  The are still textual notes about this or that translation issue, but they’ve been moved to end notes so that footnotes won’t make it feel more like a term paper than like literature.  Some books, like Luke-Acts and Samuel-Kings, have been recombined to reflect the original literary unit they were writte in, and in the New Testament the books are grouped by tradition, such as Mark and the Peters or all of the Johns. The format and presentation are so easy and accessible that if I were teaching a year-long intro to the Bible as literature, I would use this edition. If you’ve never read much of the Bible, I recommend starting with this one. Plus it comes in blaze orange, so it’s ready for deer season!

Now as to blogging the Christian year…  You can read a first take at what I have in mind over at a side blog I never quite got going. My question for you is this: Would you rather read me struggle with the Christian year over there or over here?  And one other question: Anybody interested in reading along with me?