Category Archives: Unitarian Universalism

Beloved Community: It’s hard to describe!

February 26, 2023 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

So this project turns out to be harder than I thought. I’ve gone back to Josiah Royce and am one-quarter of the way through with the book in which he coined the phrase and the concept. I’ve also done some digging in Howard Thurman’s and Martin King’s writing.

The one thing I’m confident in saying is that all three of them thought of Beloved Community in very big terms. Royce equated it with the Commonwealth* of Heaven on earth. Thurman thought of it as a feasible better society. King considered it an end to be attained.

I’m not sure any of them would be comfortable with the idea of plural Beloved Communities. Maybe I’m wrong.

*Yes, Royce said Kingdom.

Unitarian Universalism, UU 102

Beloved Community: What is it?

January 2, 2023 John A Arkansawyer 1 Comment

Like most people of my generation who know the term Beloved Community, I know it through Martin King’s writing and speeches. It’s got a longer history than that, stretching backwards and forwards. It’s important on its own terms, not just to understanding King’s thought.

As a project, I’m summarizing what I know and have read about Beloved Community over the next few days.

There’ll be definitions (and attempts at definitions) and other references, not leading to single conclusions about what the term means today. The hope is instead to do justice to the scope of meanings people have given Beloved Community in various contexts, and to identify those contexts.

First up: Josiah Royce.

Politics, Technology, Unitarian Universalism, Writing

Doc., Nr., Emt.: Should Medical Professionals Have Special Forms Of Address?

December 13, 2020 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

A recent piece of odious tripe in the Wall Street Journal obscured a serious question: Should there be special terms of address for medical professionals which distinctly mark them as people trusted with matters of life and death?

Academics and those who write for them say no, that anyone who has an Xy. D. degree should be called Doctor. That’s the standard style for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the leading ruling class publications of left and right: If you have a doctoral degree in anything whatsoever, you are referred to as Dr. Whoever because you wrote a dissertation on hotel management for pimps or getting away with dishonest marketing or particle physics. It’s all the same. A doctorate is a doctorate and it all goes on the resumé.

Those of us who spend significant time outside the academic bubble know better. No one ever yells “Doctor!” because they need an explanation of Keynesian economics or a case study in stripping local municipalities of assets through charter schools.

People ask for a doctor because they are in danger of dying. That’s it.

If I say, “I need a doctor,” and you send me a Nobel Prize winner in physics, you are a jackass.

Further, the only doctors people outside a very narrow world encounter are medical doctors of some sort. GP, surgeon, osteopath, chiropractor–even a veterinarian. I’ll take a DVM over a Ph.D. in biochemistry if my kid is sick and those are my choices.

This should be a learning moment for academics: Your terms of art are not meaningful to most people. Your use of them in public discussions is careless at best and deceptive at worst. When you also use them for self-aggrandizement, you should be ashamed.

Which wouldn’t change anything, even if you were.

So instead, let’s talk about something useful: Reserved titles for medical professionals. What is the proper title for someone who must answer when you call from a child’s sickbed? I can think of three such professions: Doctor, Nurse, EMT.

The obvious titles are Doc. for doctors, Nrs. for nurses, and Emt. for EMTs. I don’t like Nrs. for nurses, because it reminds me of when women in college were said to be there “to get their Mrs. degree”. Maybe that’s far enough in the past to be okay now. I don’t know.

I do think medical professionals, whose public responsibilities are greater than any other degree-holding class, should advocate for specific titles that mark them separately. What they do is qualitatively different from what the rest of us do.

Humor, Personal, Unitarian Universalism, Writing

A New Definition: Yourination, also spelled You’reination

June 23, 2020 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

Yourination [yur-in-A-shun], also spelled You’reination

(noun)

The act of peeing on someone else’s fun because of variant spelling and grammar contained therein.
Bless your heart.

Note: Both spellings are equally correct, even though one of them looks weird as hell.

synonyms: priggishness, tightassedness, triviality

Devils, Satans, and Lucifers whose reality Unitarian Universalists must acknowledge

June 13, 2020 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

I have met this Devil, many times. The song remains the same:
Satan introduces the worship of crosses and crucifixion through empire:
Lucifer arrives via an unintentional blood sacrifice and does a little good at an unconscionable cost:
The Devil anticipates Stephen Strange telling Victor Von Doom, “I think you should be afraid, old friend.” Kind of:
Constantine teaches the Devil’s Disciples to hide behind desks in gaudy uniforms and click down the halls of power in pantsuit and heels:
Even when the Devil is dogging you down into the grave, he is still no more than a man, and you can still get your licks in on him while you go, even if all you can do is call attention to you as you are drowning, not waving, but drowning with a knee on your throat:

I know there’s more. This is what I have right now. If you have one, lay it on me!

Unitarian Universalism

Who is the antagonist in the church?

May 23, 2020 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

It’s hard to know and important to know.

Kenneth Haugk’s classic Antagonists in the Church: How to Identify and Deal with Destructive Conflict gives us this guidepost:

What is church antagonism? It is that disruption in a congregation caused by an antagonist…

Antagonists are individuals who, on the basis of nonsubstantive evidence, go out of their way to make insatiable demands, usually attacking the person or performance of others. These attacks are selfish in nature, tearing down rather than building up, and are frequently directed against those in a leadership capacity. (Emphasis Haugk’s in the original, with italics.)

Those are important phrases:

nonsubstantive evidence
go out of their way
insatiable demands
selfish in nature
tearing down rather than building up

When you’ve checked three of those off, you’ve got an unhealthy situation. But what do you do about it?

Haugk explains tactics for dealing with a church antagonist. Many of them look a lot like how sophisticated, socially adept antagonists with power attack their victims. When you start stepping through the process of actually coping with someone using those means, which are at best only relatively kind and gentle, you start looking into the abyss of your own will and ability to impose something unpleasant on another person against their desire. Sometimes it may bring back memories of how and when it was done to you.

If you have to use the tactics of an antagonist against them, how are you different from that antagonist? How do you stay different? Are you the antagonist? Are you perceived as the antagonist? Do you function as an antagonist, whether you want to or not?

Haugk doesn’t throw the word “evil” around casually in his book, but it’s in there. I know the evil that breathes in your ear every time you fight fire with fire. I also know the evil that tells you to see no, hear no, and speak no, so someone can get away with murder.

I don’t have any wisdom (other than Haugk’s), except maybe you should be tough and strong both. I’m working on the strength part.

Personal, Unitarian Universalism, Writing

A Literary or a Scientific Answer to a Human Question?

May 12, 2020 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

The current issue of UU World has a lovely long meditation on mortality and John Keats, “Loss, poetry, and the ballast of faith“, by Kathryn Hamilton Warren. Go on–read it. It’s not long and it’s worth your time. Then I’ll put a small tile on her mosaic.

Kathryn Hamilton Warren isn’t the only one of us who finds answers to deep human questions in art, especially the written word. I find them there, and chances are you do, too. I also find answers in science. So do you, probably, and so does Kathryn Hamilton Warren.

But what of my mother’s spirit, her energy, the person and the presence brought into being by that utterly contingent constellation of atoms? This, of course, is the great question, about which science says this:

There’s another way of answering this question, by going back to John Keats and one of his last works–“This Living Hand“:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

It’s built to be read aloud. The meaning falls into place after a time or two. Most criticism takes this to be Keats expressing fear of mortality, which is true enough, and goes on from there into considerably darker interpretations. Everyone’s a critic, right?

But that’s not how I read it. This poem says:

I am alive now (line one)
I will be dead soon (lines two and three)
You’ll think about me (line four)
You’d do anything to have me back (lines five and six)
It’s okay (line seven)
I’m still here (line eight)

That’s where Keats’ spirit went. It went onto paper and into the people he knew and out into the world generally while he lived. Now that his body is gone, he is still reaching his hand out to us to freely give us what he can:

And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

We don’t have to make our “own heart dry of blood” for Keats, any more than he died for us. Keats lived, and reaches out to us today.

That’s where I figure my mom’s spirit is, and my dad’s, and someday mine. Holding my hand out, what’s left of me in the world, offering.

Unitarian Universalism

Things Many of Us Believe and Practice

February 29, 2020 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

What is the basis on which Unitarian Universalists can act together for the good of the religion and the world?

This is one such set of ideas:

Unitarian Universalism is an emerging religion, distinct from its sources. It is a sufficient religious identity in and of itself.
Unitarian Universalism is humanistic in the sense that it holds human problems require human actions in response.
Unitarian Universalism contains multiple theologies which hold similar attitudes toward the world and how we are to act in it.
Unitarian Universalism contains many, often conflicting, ideas about ultimate and transcendental questions.
Unitarian Universalism requires covenantal relationship but it does not require congregational membership.
Unitarian Universalism requires action in support of belief by both groups and individuals.
Unitarian Universalism is more important than the organizations which support it. (Added shortly after first publication.)

Music, Politics, Unitarian Universalism

Sermon or Song? Kesha’s “Here Comes The Change”

April 27, 2019 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

In a sexist world, a woman who attempts an equal partnership with a man is likely to be shortchanged. Even a strong woman. Even a feminist woman. It can be done, but the odds are against her.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, like Nancy Pelosi, like Liz Warren, chose to partner with good men who put her career first. They were lucky to make a good choice young.

Kesha, like Tammy Wynette, like Tina Turner, chained young to shitty men who put her career last, chose to break those chains at great personal and artistic cost, for greater personal and artistic freedom.

So ends the lesson of today’s Sermon or Song?

Music, Politics, Unitarian Universalism, Writing

Donald Trump Understands The Constitution. The 9/11 Killers Understood Airport Security.

April 25, 2019 John A Arkansawyer Leave a comment

It’s really this simple:

Building on fire

If you have a can of gasoline, you understand architecture just fine.

If you have an atomic bomb and the plane to carry it in, you understand Hiroshima well enough.

If you can aim a gun, you understand human anatomy splendidly. And if you aren’t any good with a pistol, there’s always a shotgun.

Complaining about Donald Trump being stupid and ignorant while he’s kicking your ass shows he understands playground rules better than you do. Who do you think is going to save you from the bully if there is no teacher on the scene?

I don’t care for horror movies. I don’t watch them. But I read about everything, and I know they teach this lesson:

When the call is coming from inside the house, no one can save you but yourself.

Don’t take that too literally. Horror movies set it up so that the heroine–that’s you, in the current horror show–are stripped of your friends, your family, all the cloud of support around you. That’s how moral fiction works, stripped to the essentials to teach a lesson.

In This Real Life? You have friends. You have family. You have the kindness of strangers. You have human solidarity, one of the three foundations of my own spirituality. Thanks to all that, you have agency and power. You’d best use them.

Or lose them. It’s up to you. It’s always been you, my love.