I confess I’m obsessed with this depressing recession. It results from, and brings out, some of the worst aspects of our people and society. And yet, it is an opportunity to see and actualize some of the best. When I was born in 1945 a single man could support his whole family on his average income of $2,400 while living in a house that cost about twice that. Mom, like most moms then, stayed home as homemaker. I was the first of five children born…
Speaking to the young graduates of Harvard’s Divinity School in 1838, Emerson said this of Jesus: “One man was true to what is in you and me.” However, he also lamented that because Jesus was seen as the Christ, one of the three persons of the Trinity, his portrait grew to be as “the vulgar draw it.” He wanted the young graduates to themselves come alive fully as persons. “Always the seer is a sayer,” he said, and that, “only he [or she] can give…
My usual rant against conservatives needs corrective balance. I do for them here what I wish they would do for us – understand. Why? Our country has grown dangerously divisive, though we are and must be a single society. In our society and in our liberal congregations, conservatives deserve support both as persons and for their useful perspectives. Finally, we are more whole by knowing both ways in our being. Over two decades ago, when I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Conservative,” his appreciation…
Many religions have one thing in common: each believes it has the best truth. It is bold or predictable for me to preach on why our religion has the best truth? I suspect many UUs would resist such an attempt. Everyone has the right to their own way, we believe. What works for some wouldn’t work for us, yet we’re glad that others have their ways. We’re not evangelical. We don’t proselytize. We’re a “live and let live” religion. Meanwhile other religions insist…
“It doesn’t make an iota of difference,” goes the phrase meaning it couldn’t matter less. That phrase comes from an old theological fight over the letter “i”. The homousians and the homoiusians had it out over whether the iota should be there. One side claimed Jesus was of the same nature as God. The other claimed he was of the same substance. For this iota of theological difference, hundreds were killed. More important than an “i” in a word is the “I” in you. …
Having not read The Da Vinci Code, as has some sixty million readers worldwide, I felt professionally obliged to see the movie. It did not shock me, but I’m used to these ideas. (I favor the more radical possibility that Jesus not only loved Mary Magdeline and fathered a child with her, but survived his crucifixion (with her and his mother’s help) and lived on to be a father of children in northern India, where he is buried.) In the Da Vinci Code, she left…
Deeper than any scriptural roots are the cosmic substances that make life possible. Our western religious roots reach deep via old scriptures, but other roots were cut off, defined out, declared heretical, just as our ways have been treated. Along side the New Testament books are the adjacent but banned Gnostic texts of that early Christian era. In them, we find our liberal religious ways align with the ways of Jesus and his early followers better than Christianity’s orthodox approach has, especially in terms of…
It is interesting how a small population from a limited area during a narrow period of history shaped the essential religious and social concepts of our entire western civilization. In an area smaller than our western Oregon, the Jews, Romans, Greeks, and others mixed in a cauldron of clashes, generating ideas that would shape our basic view of history and set into us assumptions so familiar we don’t often notice them. We also don’t notice is the context in which these ideas were adopted while…
Was it happenstance or deliberate that the date of the attack would be our code for emergencies? Who would that emergency call be to? What synchronistic meaning should we see? Out of the clear blue sky, our own airplanes allegedly commandeered by Islamic militant terrorists, smashed into the twin trade towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and into a field in Pennsylvania. While Americans may have had a somewhat disdainful attitude towards those two boxy towers above the Manhattan skyline, both for their…
From Texas to Tehran, societies scurry to placate the power of those posing as pious – instead of affirming and advancing inherent intelligence and integrity. Modernity fears its own success. Instead of claiming and furthering the steady progress of science and the Enlightenment, it falls prey to those resentful of both. Fundamentalist advices to “have faith” or to “submit” turn us from knowledge, freedom, and responsibility, towards gullibility and obeisance. Decent souls, questing for what is good, flock to church and mosque only to be…