Coffee Hour

Is UUism broke? Can it be fixed?

By chutney

A friend at church came up to me at coffee hour absolutely insisting that I read The Almost Church: Redefining Unitarian Universalism for a New Era by Mike Durall. Durall recently visited our congregation to do a Saturday workshop on the book, and I couldn't attend.

It's a quick read with some chewy thoughts. Durall points out several things that are wrong with UUism and suggests several fixes to boot.

Among the problems:

• We're stuck in the 1950's when it comes to church organization. (Read: Those damn committees.)
  
• The UUA is addicted to off-putting, costly, and ineffective cause-ism.
  
• We're unfriendly.
  
• As members, we're stingy with our money.
  
• As churches, we don't expect much of our members.
  
• We don't stand for much (aside from cause-isms) for fear of offending.
  
• We don't plan for (or do any) outreach.
  
• Clergy are viewed chiefly as service providers.

Continue reading "Is UUism broke? Can it be fixed?"

A coffee hour prayer

By Chris Walton

Found at Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie:

Let us pray:

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.
It maketh me to wake in green pastures: it leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses.
It restoreth my buzz: it leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction, I will fear no Equal™: for thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.
Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of Sleepy Time tea drinkers: thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.
Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the House of Starbucks forever.

Perhaps now would be a good time to share some classic irreverent prayers. Add yours in the comments!

CC the cranky blog reviewer

By Chalicechick

OK, back off kids.

CC’s in a pissy mood this week because this chick she knows dissed CC’s wedding invitation.

So she will be extra mean tonight.

Well, maybe not.

But it sure would be nice if some blog would come along and cheer me up.

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Queen Latifah’s song U-N-I-T-Y was not her best work.

On a completely unrelated note, Adam Tierney-Eliot’s blog Unity, is not a bad blog, when it is updated. Which it isn’t often. But reading Tierney-Eliot’s post this week about the fall season in his church makes me want to show up one Sunday and check it out.

See? That was nice?

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Rick’s Rants has a short post eulogizing Kilgore Trout, a fictional character created Kurt Vonnegut whom Kurt Vonnegut has now declared dead.

Ironically, no UU blog I’ve seen so far has mentioned the death of famous dead UU Christopher Reeve. So now one has.

(If I missed your mention of Reeve, I apologize.)

In an unrelated side note, I do have my issues with William “Polity? What polity? I even get to tell y’all how to talk” Sinkford. But anybody who can write a statement on Reeves’ death without mentioning Superman has to be something of a class act.

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Respectful of Otters puts me in a difficult position as I consider myself a reviewer of liberal religion blogs and it really isn’t one. So if you’re looking for a religion blog, you don’t have to go.

But I suspect most if not all UUs like a snarky politics blog every now and again, and Respectful of Otters is a fine example of the breed. From its first sentence “If you're going to try to pull off a slimy election trick, you need to do it right,” it had me reading, if only because I was worried that they were writing about one of my clients.

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Unfortunately, every other blog I looked at tonight was about politics.

Reading them, I get the sense that sometimes, you kids don’t like the president. Fair enough. But all people deeply in love sound alike and all people complaining about Bush sound alike. So the folks that I mention whose words have stuck with me are the exception, not the rule

If you’re in the mood for politics and Respectful of Otters wasn’t enough, MyIrony has a nice take on John Stewart taking “Crossfire” to task.

Bonus points to Chutney for using the word “bitchslapping,” which really should appear in more religion blogs.

CC
who is actually feeling somewhat better, thanks for asking.

Introducing ChaliceChick

By Chalicechick

ChaliceChick thinks she is exactly as qualified to judge blogs as she is to judge the pig competition at the county fair.

As in, not.

She still thinks she will be pretty good at it, but she’s just saying.

She’s been a Unitarian for about five years now, having it discovered it through a UU minister’s very well-written sermons, and she takes her faith quite seriously. She labels herself a “cranky humanist,” but believes that any belief that can be arrived at through reason should have a home in UUism.

She is a great lover of good writing. Her favorite authors include Robertson Davies, Lisa Alther and Richard Russo. She likes trashy mysteries, good biographies and anything by Miss Manners. She used to be a reporter and has had a novella published by her college press. No, you can’t have a copy. It’s really sort of lame.

She doesn’t have a blog but pretty much uses the UU debate section of Beliefnet as a blog. There, she has deemed her future husband, “The Chalice Significant Other” or “TheCSO” for short. Her favorite UU minister is sometimes referred to as “Katy the Wise,” but should absolutely not be held responsible for any crackpot ideas CC may have.

Her primary hobby is good conversation, and she sees blog reviewing as a chance to stimulate conversation among UUs. She likes thoughtfulness, good writing and a focus on UUism or theology. If your UUism blog is really a politics blog, if you have more style than substance, or if you update less often than Donald Trump changes mistresses, she will complain.

Planning fundraising parties for members of the US House of Representatives pays her bills. She sort of looks like Velma from Scooby Doo or Meg from Family Guy. She’s a Cancerian, an INTP and the former president of Girl Scout troop 980. She was raised liberal Presbyterian and maintains affection for her former faith.

All that having been said:

I'm a bit wedding-obsessed these days, what with my own trip down the aisle less than two months away. Philocrites and Boy in the Bands are feeding this nasty obsession with a discussion of secular weddings.

Personally, I can at least partially agree with Scott's approach of having a set wedding for everybody. I was at one point a professional writer and I would not DREAM of writing my own vows simply because in every wedding I've ever been to where the couple wrote their own vows, the vows seriously sucked. (If my college roommate is reading this, I'd just like to say "Melani, I mean 'sucked' in a good way.")

Katy-the-Wise's approach strikes me as quite reasonable. She sent the CSO and I a "wedding file" full of a dozen-or-so introductions, a dozen-or-so readings, a dozen-or-so sets of vows, etc. We get to pick and choose from a set list of choices and there's a fair amount of variation in the choices. Thus we will be in some sense setting the tone of our wedding, but at the same time, the limited choices serve as a check on the self-conscious wackiness some couples might find appealing.

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I do politics all day and am less interested in politics than faith. Besides, let's face it, those who write about their distaste for Bush to a UU audience are preaching to the choir in a fairly literal sense. That having been said, UUs will write about politics. It's in the nature of the sort of people UUism attracts. And when they do write about politics, may all of them do as nice a job as Tom Schade does in Prophet Motive's latest post where he looks at character issues in the current US presidential race.

Great job, Tom.

Now get back to writing about liberal religion.

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Phil's Little-Blog-on-the-Prarie, which features a scary-looking picture of Phil that makes him look like he's thinking that the viewer might taste good with catsup, takes a look at "Lifespan Faith Development" this week.

I'm thinking that the principles of "Lifespan Faith Development" should seem pretty self-evident to UUs who have been in the faith for awhile. Indeed, the fact that UUism allows for change is, in my opinon, one of the more appealing things about our faith.

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Presbyopic Myopia takes a look at Islam that Charles Krauthammer would largely approve of.

That's not a compliment.

I'd write more, but Marcus' commentary on beard-trimming and sentences like "All of the government and religious officials seem so scared of offending Islam or God that they just knuckle under to any kind of crazy shit fatwa that some self-proclaimed Muslim authority decrees" speaks for itself.

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Debitage wins the prize for frequent updates as he has commentary on the Kerry-Bush debate up and that debate only concluded three hours ago.

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Measured Extravagence had a spiffy bon mot about saying grace.

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I love Beliefnet, and I hang out on Beliefnet as do some really spiffy UUs. But Beliefnet is not giving us love in return.

In their recent article The Twelve Tribes of American Politics, UUs are not mentioned at all, even under the section devoted to the "Religious Left."

Bastards.

Now leading tours of the Interdependent Web...

By Chris Walton

There was a time — ah, nostalgia! — when "blog" meant less than nothing to me. Back in those halcyon days, Unitarian Universalists fraternized on-line using such quaint technologies as newsgroups and e-mail lists, which is how I got my start back in 1994, staying after work at the University of Utah Marriott Library to write messages to UUS-L and soc.religion.unitarian-univ. (Wouldn't you know, many of those s.r.u-u messages are still lurking in far corners of the Web, although the UUS-L archives began after I took an extended hiatus from the Web to concentrate on divinity school. Most of my contributions to that forum have vanished into the ether, which is probably for the best.) But times have changed; the modes of online communication have evolved; the diversity of the Interdependent Web, you might say, has grown more glorious.

Among UU geeks, of course, there were all sorts of intriguing ways to organize information on the Web: Some learned HTML and made their own Web pages, but in many cases their sites, once constructed, just sat there — static as the unmoved Mover (but not nearly so generative). A few enterprising souls, like Jone Johnson, not only mastered the technical side of publishing on the Web but also generated new content and made the Web a genuine addition to UU publishing. But most of us had neither the time, talent, nor technical skill to bring significant Unitarian Universalist content to the Internet: We stuck with our e-mail lists and unvisited personal Web pages.

But something has shifted significantly in the last three years. I won't try to give a more comprehensive history of liberal religion on the 'net — I've almost exhausted my meager knowledge as it is! — but I do want to point to a handful of major developments. One is the rise of LiveJournal, which provided many people — especially young people — with easy-to-use on-line journals and yoked them together in communities of people with similar interests. The Unitarian Universalist LiveJournal community crackles with teenage and young adult energy in a way that soc.religion.unitarian-univ never did.

Another is the rise of blogging. Easy-to-use self-publishing services like Blogger brought all sorts of non-geeks onto the Web. Why, you hardly needed to know how to do more than log in to Blogger, type out an entry, and click post! I turned Philocrites, my unvisited on-line collection of sermons, essays, and hymns, into a blog using Blogger during my 2002-2003 Christmas vacation, and soon started looking for other Unitarian Universalist bloggers. At the time, John Rakestraw's onReligion.com was the only one I could find. Now there are dozens! I try to update the annotated guide at Philocrites and the list here at Coffee Hour, but blogs come — and go! — faster than I can keep up with them.

Which brings us to the point of this essay.

I am very pleased to welcome another contributor to Coffee Hour: our first official Blog Reviewer, Chalicechick! She comes to us not as a blog-keeper herself but as one of the most consistently interesting contributors to the Unitarian Universalist discussions at Beliefnet, the supersite of religion Web sites. The UU discussions at Beliefnet are essentially her blog, and she's been a regular there for years. (Here are my two favorite Chalicechick contributions: the truly hilarious "Fictional UUs" and the essayistic "Liberal Christian Convert," which asks whether UU converts from liberal mainline churches face distinctive issues.)

Beliefnet represents yet another on-line development: the rise of public community forums. Beliefnet is the best-known community of UUs on the Web, but younger UUs have also created their own distinctively UU community. FUUSE functions like a Web extension of a YRUU or C*UUYAN con. (If that sentence evokes deep feelings of joy in you, FUUSE is probably for you; if the string of acronyms and jargon mystifies you, you'll find the site exclusive and quite possibly strange. "YRUU" is the name of the Unitarian Universalist Association's denominational youth movement; "C*UUYAN" is the Continental UU Young Adult Network, a denominationally-affiliated network of 18-to-35-year-olds. A "con" is a conference.)

Chalicechick knows a thing or two about building an on-line community from her years as a gifted conversationalist at Beliefnet. One of my hopes for Coffee Hour is that we will grow it into a community center for UU bloggers, perhaps even an inspiration for you to add your voice to the Interdependent Web of which we bloggers are a part. Welcome to Coffee Hour, CC!