SteveCaldwell’s post on the Wikipedia article on UUism—“Who speaks for UUism on the web?”—got me thinking. So I went and checked out the Wikipedia article.
In the section on politics, I found these two sentences:
Individual Unitarian Universalists are involved in opposing the death penalty, supporting environmental protection, peace, feminism, gun control, free speech, safe and legal abortion, and animal welfare. Others work to end homelessness, racism, domestic violence, homophobia, sexual assault, and HIV/AIDS.
How is this relevant? Or more to the point, how is this list relevant to an article on Unitarian Universalism? It’s not a comprehensive list, and there are UUs who oppose some of these causes. (Thinking death penalty, gun control, abortion, etc.) Click to continue reading “Are our individual causes relevant?”
Don’t know what to make of this. A rabbi working for a Christian church, as a rabbi? The folks at Get Religion aren’t the only ones wondering if he’s more Christian than Jewish. I’m smelling a faint whiff of token diversity-ism too.
Beautiful video a woman made of herself responding to Oprah and “Autism Speaks.”
So here I was, set to write a brilliant post about Empire and the isolation of the self in the Axial Age, when Barbara Ehrenreich goes and writes a long article saying that our modern melancholy began in the sixteenth century, coinciding with the advent of modern theater and the disappearance of carnival.
Got that? Me neither. (Pretty highbrow there, eh, Barbara?)
Now before this I had always connected the birth of our self-reflective “selfs” with the beginnings of the classic religions, the period known as the Axial Age.
Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Zoroastrianism—these are humanity’s first responses to the first occurences of large-scale Empire. When we moved from having our lives centered in tribe and clan and city-state—when we were swallowed up by Empire and our hometown gods defeated—we found ourselves spiritually adrift. Karen Armstrong does a great job laying all this out, especially in The Great Transformation.
Once it sunk in that the hometown gods were broken, folks started to panic. Click to continue reading “Playing at being real?”
Kinsi asks if you’re a “pop-UU,” a Unitarian who watches American Idol and Jerry Springer. Be not afraid, lowbrow Unitarians. You are not alone.
Not to turn this into a discussion about eyebrows—I’ll let Peacebang get that one—but let’s turn this into a conversation about eyebrows. Well, brows, anyhow. Whatever a non-eye brow is.
There are three non-eyebrow brows to know. Highbrow and lowbrow, of course. But also the oft forgotten middlebrow.
What’s middlebrow? Saying things like “oft forgotten,” for starters. If lowbrow is Idol and Springer and highbrow is season tickets to the opera and membership to the modern art museum, then middlebrow is NPR and the Sopranos. And talking about going to the opera and the modern art museum. Or, as one Urban Dictionarista puts it, “conspicuous consumption of Starbucks coffee or The New York Times.”
To put it in bookstore terms, lowbrow is Books-A-Million. Middlebrow is Borders and Barnes & Noble. Highbrow is some musty specialty bookshop in Harvard Square. (Next to Herrells, the highest browest of ice creams.)
There are two problems with middlebrow: Click to continue reading “Browbeating lowbrow Unitarians”
Did you know that when Christianity got the nod from Emperor Constantine in 325 or so, Christians were less than a third of folks in the Roman Empire? Or that in 300 they were only 10%? And in 200 less than one percent? Though the Mormons are likely the ones who will cover this tune, isn’t it fun to imagine where Unitarianism might be 300 years from now?
