Later, one African American witness to an incident of alleged racism shared a letter in response that has revealed the story is more complicated than it originally appeared.

Now, the trustees of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago have issued their own strongly worded letter in response to the allegations and sent it to the UUA board, Bill Sinkford, the GA Planning Committee, UUWorld, and their local district.

First we state, simply and strongly, that we will never tolerate racism within our denomination and we urge the Unitarian Universalist Association to make anti-racism and multicultural unity a firm pillar of our faith. Further, we commit to diligently identify and aggressively root out racism wherever it might emerge. Specifically, in response to events reported from the Fort Worth General Assembly of 2005, we declare that the coupling of race with youthfulness, maleness, unfamiliar clothing styles, or modes of expression never justifies a racist response. If racist behavior occurs within our church or in other UU settings we will publicize them, express our outrage, communicate our distress to those responsible, and remind them that such behavior is unacceptable and we must resist. If the behavior continues we will seek a review through existing congregational or denominational 'right relationship' processes. In short, we believe that the UUA and its member congregations must recognize racism, constantly address it, and strive to eradicate it in all forms, both personal and institutional.

The full text of the letter can be read in the congregation's newsletter.

What do you think about this statement? Does it seem to be a proportionate response to the allegations? How has your own congregation responded to allegations of racism at GA 2005?

For me, this letter raises several interesting questions. To what extent, I wonder, are institutions responsible for acts of racism (real or perceived) on an individual level? It seems entirely possible to me that the GA organizers could plan an event using anti-racist and multicultural values and it wouldn't necessarily prevent an individual from mistaking a black youth for an hotel employee, for example. At what point do we say that an institution has done a reasonably good job in fostering equality?

One of the professors at my seminary has pointed out that anti-racism can sometimes be used as a bludgeon within our institutions. I think that idea is what I find a little worrying about the part of the First Unitarian of Chicago letter that says the congregation intends to "diligently identify and aggressively root out racism wherever it might emerge." On the surface, this sounds righteous, but what does it mean in practical terms? How could racism have been "rooted out" of GA 2005 without resorting to "rooting out" actual people?

I'd feel a lot more comfortable about this kind of aggressive anti-racism language if it were clear what we mean when we talk about racism. As the GA 2005 allegations demonstrate, it isn't always cut and dry. Is a UU racist if they don't support affirmative action? Is a UU racist if they abandon public schools and choose to home-school or privately educate their children? Is opposition to reparations to descendants of slaves a racist stance? Is a UU racist if they support mandatory drug sentencing? These are controversial issues about which I believe reasonable people might disagree, but they are all issues that I've heard equated with racism in UU contexts. Would a commitment to becoming an anti-racist institution mean there is no longer room for disagreement on these issues?

Finally, are we really sure we want to root out racists in our movement? Maybe they are better off were they are. I've always enjoyed the story about James Luther Adams (who, incidentally, was involved in anti-racism work at the First Unitarian Church in Chicago) in which Adams describes a heated meeting about race and institutional policy. One church board member was holding out and the minister, exasperated, asked what he thought the purpose of the church was, anyway? To everyone's surprise, the man said, "To change people like me." Rather than attempting to create an ideologically pure community by rooting out racism (and presumably racists), I hope that the congregations of the UUA will opt for education and transformation.

While working at the leaky and sadly dilapidated library at my seminary, I came across a little publication filed away in the forties and promptly forgotten. It was an open letter to Unitarians written by a minister named Edward Ohrenstein. He had been leading Starr King School for the Ministry and the experience was apparently not a good one. Ohrenstein was a Unitarian who believed his religion could only stray so far from its Christian roots and still lay claim to theological and historical continuity. A group of secularists, he warned, was trying to take over Starr King in order to turn out ministers of a "pseudo-religious cult." He believed there was a fight going on over the identity of the Unitarian faith and its relationship to Christianity, and it wasn't being waged so much in our congregations as in our institutional leadership and seminaries.

I came upon this story at just about the same time that I was hearing about another migration, this time of Unitarian Universalist humanists. A former president of the American Humanist Association came to lecture at my seminary and he talked about the way many humanists, unreconciled with an influx of New Age spirituality and an uncritical embrace of the supernatural, were no longer at home within member congregations of the UUA. His contention was that their numbers swelled the ranks of non-attending UUs who mysteriously show up in national surveys of religious identification. I wasn't sure if this was true, but it was clear that there had been a change in attitude toward humanism within the seminary. For a start, I was surprised to realize I was the only person who identified as an atheist during a school retreat. My school used to be notable for innovations in religious humanist theology. We used to be at the forefront of efforts reconcile science and religion; now, visiting scientists reported that seminarians lacked basic scientific education. Humanist was a word often used in a derogatory sense in my UU classes and it was more often than not preceded by adjectives like "old", "crusty", "corpse-cold", "bloodless", and "unfeeling." It was creepy to hear people use expressions like, "the congregation is waiting for the old humanists to die off before it changes the order of service." It was more popular among students to be a Universalist (in a romanticized, ahistorical sense) than a Unitarian, a feeler than a thinker, a prophet than a pastor, a theist than an atheist, and anything but a humanist. Was history repeating itself? To be sure, there were still humanists on the faculty and in the student body, but the writing on the wall didn't look so good.

Once I started to think about it, I realized that the history of our religious movement, from the Unitarian Controversy onward, can be seen as a series of theological conflicts resolved, not with tolerance and persuasion as we would like to believe, but by institutional struggles over who gets the right to define what our religion is about. Why should our future be any different? One of the biggest fears related to the "language of reverence debate" is that articulating our faith will really mean consolidating institutional authority to redefine Unitarian Universalism in a way that will leave some of us with the unhappy choice of either going on the defensive as the loyal minority or voting with our feet and leaving the Association. If this seems an overly dramatic assessment, consider Sarah Lammert's homily at the Friday worship service at the General Assembly. She relegates old liberal religious values (freedom, reason, and tolerance) to the past, while articulating "a new way of framing our free faith." Referencing a poem by Mary Oliver, she acknowledges that this reframing may result in not everyone in our churches fitting into the new picture of Unitarian Universalism, but indicates that the people we lose are not as important as the people we will gain when she closes by saying, "Seven may rise from their chairs and leave the room as we struggle together to find the language which expresses the good news, while seven others lean forward in their chairs, and seven more feign indifference. But seven and seventy and 700,000 more will walk in our doors and stay when they hear us claim our saving words…" There, in a nutshell, is what is debatable about the language of reverence debate.

All religions must cope, to one degree or another, with theological change. Even the most stable historical faith communities cannot entirely isolate themselves from a changing world. Unitarian Universalists, I contend, experience unusually rapid and localized theological change. A number of factors contribute to this. Without creedal tests, it is hard to challenge the beliefs of anyone who wants to identify as a UU. Tradition holds little authority for us and, with the majority of UUs coming from other religious traditions, our sense of history is sketchy and distorted. New members "identify" with a community that reflects who they already are; there is not an expectation of conversion or transformation. We attract religious liberals, but we don't teach people how the practice the method of religious liberalism. We used to say we were on a quest for truth; now, we often relativize the statement by saying we search for "our truths." We rarely in congregations or as an association endeavor to explore how we know what we know is true, or just what constitutes the "responsible search for truth" we enshrine in our Principles. As a result, our faith is less like a beacon or an anchor than a kite blown here and there by demographic shifts and religious fads.

No wonder there is anxiety attendant upon discussion of UU theology! We talk a lot about the value of being part of a religious community but we spare little concern for people who feel they are becoming unwelcome in their own religious home. UU leaders dismiss people concerned about losing their place at the table as whiners and complainers or themselves complain about the tyranny of the minority. I just don't see it that way. If the liberalism of our way of being religious (a good thing overall, in my opinion) means that we experience a higher rate of theological change, shouldn't we recognize the fact and respond to it with a correspondingly higher level of concern for the negative effects of change upon our community? At bottom, I think this is a pastoral issue, whatever theological minority is at stake.

That is why I am so very grateful that the COA acknowledges the pain of theological change. There was a wonderful quote in the book and in the General Assembly presentation that sums up the problem:

[UU Christians] understand exactly what [the humanists] feel, because their sense that 'I am in the process of being thrown out of the house that I built,' that's where we were--we understand that completely…The question is to somehow change the system so that…it doesn't hold that possibility anymore…We tell the story of the increasing tolerance always, but we don't say, "And people lost their church."

I have to admit I was streaming a few tears while I was watching my streaming video. I thought about Edward Ohrenstein and I wondered if he stayed as angry and bitter as he was in 1947 or if he finally found a measure of peace in his new religious home. I considered my own fears for the future and just let them go for a moment. It was a wonderfully validating experience to know that other people cared about this issue, too.

I think any discussion of UU theology should be grounded in the knowledge that we aren't really talking in the abstract; we are talking about who is welcome within our beloved community. It makes sense to me, therefore, to start the discussion of Engaging Our Theological Diversity by defining the boundaries of fear and pain we should be conscious of pushing each other toward. Hopefully, we can have a conversation where diverse points of view are welcomed, agreement is not an expectation, and no one is left feeling they weren't heard.

My question to you, then, is where is your tipping point? What are the circumstances in which you'd feel you no longer belong in your own religious home?

Getting behind the wheel wasn't easy for me. I want to be a minister, in part, because I'm trying to live a life consistent with my beliefs. What can I learn from the fact that student ministry required me to give up practicing one of my most cherished principles? I'm still processing that, but I did learn a couple things right off the bat.

First, my principle isn't absolute. After all, I've never been too principled to accept a ride from a friend. (Hey, I'm just helping them to carpool!) I've also always understood that not everyone could make a similar commitment to a car-free lifestyle, and I've known that there would be circumstances when it probably wouldn't be possible for me. I don't think I've appreciated until now, however, the frustration that comes from feeling powerless to enact one's principles. I know what I believe and I know what is best for me, but I couldn't convince people for whom a car is a necessity that I could live without it and I was afraid to turn down the offer from SLUUC when ministerial students outnumber internship sites. I started to wonder if in the past I have been too quick to judge people for whom ethical consistency is sometimes a luxury they cannot afford.

But am I really as powerless as all that? As I continued to reflect on my dilemma, I realized that by making One Big Sacrifice, I was often absolving myself from less dramatic changes. I've started looking for ways to offset the environmental consequences of my choice to drive. I'm also looking forward to once again being car-free. Until then, I try and stop whenever I see mothers with children sitting at the bus stop. I put up a ride-share notice at my tenement. I've met some interesting people while looking for pedestrians willing to help me carpool for a change.

Stuart painted a number of Unitarians, including a gently smiling Joseph Priestley and a really remarkable elderly John Adams, whom I hope someday to resemble.

Currently, the American National Gallery of Art is offering an exhibition of Stuart's portraits, which runs through the end of July. For those of us too far from the National Mall to convieniently see the exhibition in person, the Gallery has a great online version. After you check that out, you might also like to listen to National Public Radio's story about Stuart's portraits of Washington, which examines why the portraits are distictive and how they reflected the values of the new American democracy.

Thanks to Frank Schulman, whose This Day in Unitarian Universalist History reminded me that Stuart died on this day in 1828.

Judging, therefore, on standards of efficacy as curative literature, I would say that Karen Armstrong's new memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, is an excellent book for late bloomers and anyone else who is convinced they haven't yet found their proper place in life. Interestingly enough, Armstrong herself turns to literature for help and her book's title is a reference to T. S. Eliot's poem Ash-Wednesday. Eliot's poem uses the metaphor of ascending a spiral staircase on which the protagonist must turn again and again in blindness and without hope as he seeks a spiritual union. He struggles against "the devil of the stairs", renounces hope, accepts futility, desires integration. For Armstrong, this poem was a kind of medicinal literature, too. Long after she left the convent and came to a place in her life when she thought religion had nothing to offer her, she had a transcendent and life-altering experience while reading the poem.

The Spiral Staircase recounts the turnings in Armstrong's life which, like the steps of a spiral staircase, seemed to come from all different directions but in fact combined to make progress around a central axis. She is candid about times in her life that were apparent failures: renouncing her vows, failing to achieve academic recognition, losing a teaching job, failed relationships, even the failure of the first book she tried to write about entering secular life after leaving the convent. Despite these endings, her life continued, and she was able to discover new meaning in her life and even share what she has discovered with others, adding meaning to their lives, in turn.

I came away from the book with a dose of what I can only describe as a kind of faithfulness to the truth of our inner knowledge. Many of Armstrong's failures were the result of trying to conform to other people's ideas of who she ought to be. Again and again, Armstrong trusts people whom she believes know her better than she knows herself--sometimes to tragi-comical extremes, like the hours she spent going through the motions of sewing because she thought a nun was trying to teach her humility by not acknowledging her request for a needle. Or how symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy were first dismissed at the convent as attention-getting hysteria and later, at the psychologist's office, as a manifestation of her denial of sexuality and femininity. She is repeatedly misunderstood, stereotyped, and pigeon-holed, and her memoir might be considered a record of her attempt to gain self-knowledge in spite of the fact that she is sometimes convinced by the low estimation others have made of her.

Armstrong's story is unusual and colorful enough to be absorbing reading, but her struggle is universal. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who feels their life is going nowhere, anyone whose potential is as yet unrecognized (perhaps even by themselves), and anyone coming to the realization that they are their own best interpreter. As it happens, these are also the reasons the book was strong medicine for me.

At Boy in the Bands Scott Wells is talking about how apolitical gay pride week in DC has become. Not so directly UU-related, but I was interested.

Call and Response is writing on Christian Communism.

Facilitating Paradox is talking a bout the nature of enlightenment.

Jeff Wilson is a contributing editor for Killing the Buddha How cool is that?

Left-Coast UU has an essay on child-rearing.

Chutney is bored. Come on, people. Amuse Chutney.

Greg has neat stuff to say at Revoluutions

Roland has started an Art blog. Spiff.

Just saw the Star Wars movie late last night. As Star Wars movies go, it was pretty good, but it still left many plot holes and questions unanswered.

You know how sometimes you see a movie and you're still thinking it through for days afterward?

My look at this week's blogs starts out with a charity worth supporting.

So is Yoda a buddhist-ish Jedi, or are all Jedi buddhist-ish and Yoda is just the most vocal on the subject? And if Yoda is the only Buddhist-ish Jedi, and the only Jedi alive at the end of the second trilogy other than Luke, who learned from him, does that mean that all future Jedi will be buddhist-ish Jedi?

Debitage is mentioning that as much as scientists can figure out, the clitoris serves no evolutionary purpose. Not to go all Natalie Angiers on y'all but it seems to me that anything that makes people want to have sex more is an evolutionary bonus. I mean, it encourages reproduction and all. But that explanation is so simple that I'm sure that the scientists who see no purpose to the clitoris have discussed and dismissed it. Still, interesting article.

Does the fact that I think one must understand evil to be really good, and indeed don't believe that knowledge in itself can be evil, only what one does with it, make me a Sith? If so, I'm OK with that I think. I look cuter in black anyway

Ibeth wonders about telephone operators. Can't say I ever did... until I read what she had to say.

So why is it that the Sith have faith that good people can fall, but the Jedis assume that Anakin has fallen forever and Obi Wan leaves him for dead? Are Siths in their own funky way more Universalist? Again, I think I may be a sith.

Just Another UU blog has a neat bit about Isaac Asimov up.

Why is it that none of the Jedis could sense the betrayal? Or sense who the Sith lord is, FWIW? If everybody can sense Anakin's anger, why couldn't they sense the Sith lord?

MyIrony is making a subtle point.

I'm still wondering that why it is that Amidala is pregnant for the whole movie and right at the end Obi Wan is like "Is the kid Anakin's?" Like, she hadn't even bothered to come up with a good lie about it to tell everyone, the identity of the father had just never come up. You show me a female Senator assumed to be single who gets pregnant and nobody even asks who the father is until 8 months and 29 days into the pregnancy, I'll stop thinking that's quirky.

The Socinian has a neat article about Pentecost.

Is it just me, or are the droids slaves? Know any other movie that gets away with the heros having happy slaves? I don't even 100 percent have a problem with that, it's just weird.

Paul Wilczynski quote Sinkford on the filibuster. Sinkford proudly talks about the diversity of political opinion within the denomination as he speaks for us all politically.

Sigh.

CC
who is totally in favor of the filibuster and thinks Frist completely sucks, for the record.

And she totally wonders what the Empire's version of OSHA was doing with its time, because there was not one safety railing in the entire movie. Not on the balconies seemingly miles above the city, not helping you get on the airplane, not even in the factories. They must lose more storm troopers that way.

Oh, and this is a UUism blog, so maybe if you want to comment on Star Wars, you should but your comment on the version of this post at my blog. Thankee.

Give Scott the whole commedia dell'arte, kids.

And Unity points me back there to a really good conversation on ordination

This weeks "CC twists a lock of hair around her finger" award for a post I totally didn’t get goes to Facititating Paradox.

Someone in Ibeth's neighborhood freaked out over a slightly overgrown lawn that looks a little messy when I think about it, but that I could probably have walked past twice a day for months and never noticed.

Jess' Journal is all about mediocrity and how the school system is stifling her children's brilliance.

Just Another UU blog is talkin' Covenants

Left Coast UU looks at Christianity. Unity does too.

When she's comparing us to Nero, you know Peacebang is Breakin' Out the UU Fire and Brimstone

Jeff and Peacebang are having a chat over at Transient and Permanent. Just about what it means to call someone UU. Check it out

the UU enforcer is applying the "mystery worshipper" concept to UUism. CC has been seriously considering starting to review UU services in her area for some time. Anybody else interested?

Oh, and damn.

General questions belong here — things like, How do I find out how many people are visiting my site?, or, How do I decide which blog software to use? If you have a flash of insight, a solution to share, or a general tip you think others would find useful, tell us about it in the comments (or via trackback). Over time, we'll add some of them to the entry itself as a generic Frequently Asked Questions & Answers file.

We've set up Resource Forums for Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, and WordPress. If you're using another kind of blog software, feel free to post your questions or tips to this entry.

(During the tour of our host congregation's beautiful sanctuary, I remarked that the two dozen of us made up a larger congregation than 10 percent of UU congregations. After I got home, I wondered how wildly I had exaggerated: Lo and behold, 82 of the UUA's member congregations reported two dozen or fewer members, which is just under 9% of the congregations that reported membership figures this past year. Of course, I was counting the six kids, too, but 5% of UU congregations reported 18 or fewer members. The Rev. Arthur Reublinger's $2.1 million bequest last week to support small congregations in New Hampshire and Vermont clearly comes at a good time.)

Represented at the festivities: The Chalice Blog; Debitage; Paul Wilczynski's Observations; PeaceBang; Pericles; Philocrites; Prophet Motive; The Socinian; Transparent Eye; and Unity.

Consider this post an open forum about the picnic. Was it fun? Awkward? Surprising? The best thing ever? And how about that potato salad?

One thing that emerged from our after-lunch discussion: Many people wanted an easy way to share tips and ask about blogging tools and techniques, so we'll set up some UU blogging-specific forums here at Coffee Hour where people can ask questions and share answers related to Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, and WordPress, which are the dominant blogging platforms among UUs at the moment. The forums will be beginner-friendly but will also allow people to share tips for adding more advanced features.

I'm looking forward to the next UU blogger get-together at the UUA General Assembly in Fort Worth, Texas. We haven't set a time or place yet, but I know at least a half dozen bloggers who plan to be there -- and it would be wonderful to hear from people who would like to meet with other UU bloggers at G.A.

Blogger Help — Always the first place to look.

Movable Type Support — Focused on users of Version 3.0 and up. The User's Manual and Support Forums are the places to visit first.
Learning Movable Type — Elise's very helpful blog about MT.
Movable Type Style Generator — Arvind Satyanarayan's amazing design tool.

Advanced Resources:

Phil Ringnalda's MT Hacks — Code to do all sorts of things, especially useful to all of us still using Version 2.6x.

TypePad Support — Start with the Frequently Asked Questions, move on to the User Manual, or submit a customer support request.