Philocrites

Summer 2009 issue of 'UU World' now available.

The Summer 2009 issue of UU World is in the mail, but you can browse the magazine's contents online right now. In this issue: the amazing story of Unitarian Universalism's rapid growth in Africa; my end-of-term interview with outgoing UUA President William G. Sinkford and Sinkford's farewell column; the story of John Murray's conversion to universalism; Third Unitarian Church of Chicago's unique murals celebrating "liberal saints"; and much more.

My "From the Editor" column mentions UU World's nomination for a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award; this past weekend, Utne Reader gave the award for "spiritual coverage" to Geez Magazine. (Congrats, you fine hipster Christians!)

My column also breaks the news that UUA budget cuts are bringing down the curtain on uu&me!, the four-page children's insert produced by the Church of the Larger Fellowship that has appeared in the center of UU World since 2004. The UUA's Lifespan Faith Development staff is currently developing a new insert for families to replace it.

The print edition also includes candidate statements (pdf) for the June 2009 UUA elections, which you can find online at UUA.org/elections.

Vote to send preservation dollars to UU sites.

Surely you're reading The Interdependent Web, the UU World blog that highlights the best of the UU blogosphere each week. (After all, it's the only place I've been blogging lately.) But I'm crossposting something I wrote there because I think you'd want to help some historic UU sites in Massachusetts get a piece of $1 million in historic preservation funding.

Two Unitarian Universalist churches in Massachusetts are among 25 nominees for $1 million in preservation grants from the American Express Partners in Preservation program: the "Old Ship Meeting House" of the First Parish in Hingham (the only early Puritan meeting house still standing and the oldest wooden religious structure in use in the United States) and the United First Parish Church in Quincy (the "Church of the Presidents" where U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams are entombed). Vote for your favorites once daily through May 17.

Other UU-related sites include the Perkins School for the Blind (see UU World, Jan/Feb 2005), Mount Auburn Cemetery (see UU World, Spring 2007), and Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House (see UU World, Summer 2007).

Photo (cc) by Timothy Valentine.

Psst, I'm preaching next week, not tomorrow.

For the benefit of my email subscribers, I am not preaching tomorrow, April 22, at King's Chapel (as I had erroneously written yesterday in a post that went out by email Tuesday morning), but am in fact preaching there on Wednesday, April 29. You'll be welcome at the noontime service either week, of course.

(Note to self: Double-check your calendar before clicking "Publish." Your baby-addled brain needs all the help it can get these days!)

Philocrites in the pulpit, April 29, King's Chapel.

I'm preaching at the 12:15 midweek service at King's Chapel in downtown Boston on Wednesday, April 29 — my first time in a pulpit since Gregory was born eleven months ago today.

'UU World' a finalist for Utne Independent Press Awards.

Utne Reader announced today that UU World, the magazine I edit for the Unitarian Universalist Association, has been named a finalist for the 2009 Utne Independent Press Awards. UU World is one of eight religion and spirituality magazines nominated in the Spiritual Coverage category, alongside venerable titles like Tricycle, Image, and Parabola and spunky upstarts like Geez. I was proud of my eight-person staff and small team of regular contributors before, but their stock has now gone even higher in my estimation. Way to go, team! (UU World is the only denominational magazine among the nominees.)

The winners will be announced in May and publicized in the July/August issue of Utne Reader.

Harvard's Daniel McKanan on building liberal institutions.

Daniel McKanan, Harvard's first Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, will be giving his inaugural lecture in the Sperry Room at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., May 7 at 5:15 pm. His topic: "Unless a Seed Falls: Cultivating Liberal Institutions." McKanan studies religious movements for social transformation. For the last few years, he has also convened UU scholars from diverse disciplines at the annual convention of the American Academy of Religion and is doing a great job raising the profile of contemporary UU religious scholarship.

Minns Lectures: Unitarian kinship with Judaism, Islam.

I'm pleased to announce the 2009 Minns Lectures. Historian Susan Ritchie, visiting professor of Unitarian Universalist history at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif., and minister of North Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Lewis Center, Ohio, will be discussing early Unitarianism's relationships with Judaism and Islam in five lectures in Boston in April and at the UUA General Assembly in June. Here are the details:

Lecture 1: Children of the Same God: The Early Unitarian Theology of Relationship to Judaism and Islam

Tuesday, April 21, at UUA Headquarters, 25 Beacon Street, Boston — 6:30 pm reception followed by 7:00 pm lecture

European Unitarianism was formed in large part through the desire to honor Christianity�s close kinship with Judaism and Islam. Convinced that Christians, Muslims, and Jews were a part of the same religious family, Unitarians emerged as Christians who resisted theologies of God that could not be freely shared across traditions. This lecture explores the earliest theological expressions of this multi-religious vision.

Lecture 2: Children of the Same God: European Unitarianism in Creative Cultural Exchange with Ottoman Islam

Wednesday, April 22, First Church in Boston, 66 Marlborough Street, Boston — 6:00 pm reception and 6:30 pm dinner ($10 fee for dinner), followed by 7:30 pm lecture

We begin with how Unitarianism�s commitment to and articulation of religious tolerance arose from actual exchanges between sixteenth-century Transylvanians and Ottoman Muslims. From there, we explore the intentional efforts of European Unitarians to reach out to Muslim communities throughout the centuries.

Lecture 3: Children of the Same God: European Unitarianism in Relationship to Judaism

Monday, April 27, King�s Chapel House, 64 Beacon Street, Boston — 6:30 pm reception followed by 7:00 pm lecture

While waves of European anti-Semitic persecutions troubled this identity, a strong affinity for Judaism distinguishes European Unitarianism across the centuries. For some Unitarians, this meant adopting Jewish practices; for others it meant establishing relationships with Jewish communities.

Lecture 4: Children of the Same God: Resistances and Possibilities in the North American Unitarian Engagement with Islam and Judaism

Tuesday, April 28, Andover Newton Theological School, Wilson Chapel, 210 Herrick Road, Newton, Mass. — 7:00 pm reception followed by 7:30 pm lecture

While the European Unitarian tradition was formed through creative engagement with actual Islamic and Jewish communities, the North American history in this regard has not been as rich. This lecture explores the racial and class identity of American Unitarianism that led it to not fully embrace kinship with Judaism and Islam in spite of many suggestions of affinity and connection.

Lecture 5: Children of the Same God: Unitarianism in Kinship with Judaism and Islam

Saturday, June 27, UUA General Assembly, Salt Lake City, Utah — 5:15 pm

Unitarian identity in Europe emerged as a defense of the inherent kinship between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This lecture examines the early theology of this relationship, and then summarizes the actual, creative encounters it engendered with Jewish and Muslim communities. The invigorating possibilities of re-engaging this multi-religious vision from within contemporary North American Unitarian Universalism are explored.

The Minns Lectures are sponsored by King's Chapel and the First Church of Boston, two of the UUA's oldest congregations.

UUA Board meets in Boston, April 17-18.

Observers are welcome to attend the meetings of the UUA Board of Trustees and its working groups and committees, April 17-18 in Boston. Among the agendas and reports now available on UUA.org are a few related to the UUA's financial condition (previously reported by UU World), including a four-page memo from Treasurer Tim Brennan detailing the cuts in the FY2010 budget (pdf) and a table showing individual budget lines (pdf).

Also noteworthy in the April board packet is the document offering final recommendations for the UUA's new approach to youth ministry (pdf), which was been in development for several years. (Here's UU World's coverage of the Youth Ministry Working Group, which produced the recommendations.)

Keeping comments open, if only briefly.

On second thought, I'm going to try keeping comments open for one week after I publish a post.

Spam, alas, brings comments to a halt.

I'm sorry to announce that I am closing comments here at Philocrites for the simple reason that I can no longer stay on top of the flood of spam comments. In one 24-hour period last week, my blacklist caught more than 5,000 attempts to post spam comments — but several dozen made it through. With the very limited time I have to dedicate to maintaining the blog, spending 30 minutes or more twice a day clearing spam off the site is not sustainable. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to upgrade my customized installation of Movable Type to take advantage of the comment moderation features in newer versions, and so we're just stuck in this situation.

If you would like to comment on one of my posts, please send me email and I may post your comment manually. I've always been grateful for the insight and good will that characterized comments here. To each of you who has shared your good sense with me and my readers, my deep thanks. I'm sorry the conversation has trickled off, and I'm very sorry to have to close comments down.

Economic recession brings downsized UUA.

In case you're not keeping up with UU World's weekly coverage of Unitarian Universalist news (RSS; email newsletter), I wanted you to be aware of the magazine's story about the UUA's budget cuts for the fiscal year beginning in July. Where the denomination had a total budget of $26.7 million in 2009, the UUA has cut its 2010 budget to $22.7 million through the elimination of the equivalent of 13 full-time staff positions, the reorganization of the Congregational Services department, cuts in travel and events, curtailing the printing and mailing of several periodicals (InterConnections, The Religious Leader, the monthly Congregational Bulletin, and the annual Directory), and reduced staffing at the General Assembly, among many other cuts.

Here is the article in the final printed edition of InterConnections that describes the newsletter's transition to an entirely digital publication.

Audio of Spring UU World now available.

Audiorecordings of the articles in the Spring issue of UU World are now available at uuworld.org. Recorded by audiobook actor Dick Hill and produced by Peter Bowden, the .mp3 files can be played in a web browser or downloaded for playback in your iPod or other .mp3 player. (If you missed them, recordings are also available for the Winter 2008 issue.)

Officers' endorsements in the UUA presidential race.

On the UUA's Election-L email list, dedicated to discussing the 2009 denominational elections, a number of people have expressed concerns about Moderator Gini Courter's endorsement of Laurel Hallman as president. Unnoted, however, is Financial Advisor Dan Brody's endorsement of her opponent, Peter Morales. Courter and Brody are running unopposed for second terms.

Meanwhile, Hallman counts four current UUA trustees among her supporters — Charlie Burke (youth trustee-at-large); Burton Carley (Southwestern Conference); Roger Comstock (Northern New England); and David Friedman (St Lawrence) — along with youth observer Nick Allen, who is running unopposed for the youth trustee-at-large position.

Three current trustees have endorsed Morales: Lyda Adair (Mountain Desert); Jose Ballester (trustee-at-large); and Anna Olsen (Thomas Jefferson).

Disclosure: As a UUA employee, I will not be expressing any personal opinions about the race or about individual candidates on this site or elsewhere, nor will this site accept paid advertisements related to the elections. You, however, are very welcome to discuss the race.

Spring issue of UU World now available.

The Spring 2009 issue of UU World went in the mail last week, but you don't have to wait for the magazine to arrive in your mailbox to read it. Browse the issue online, sign up for weekly email updates from uuworld.org, and share articles with your friends.

In this issue, William Murry celebrates the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on liberal religion; Anthony David asks whether Unitarian Universalist aspirations for a peaceful world are well-grounded in our biology; Christine Robinson urges UUs to take spiritual risks; Kimberly French profiles Mark Morrison-Reed, whose new memoir describes growing up black in Unitarian Universalism in the 1960s; Chuck Collins recommends forming "common security clubs" to cope with the economic crisis; President William Sinkford reflects on his visit to the African slave port at �le de Gor�e; Victoria Weinstein celebrates the intimacies of the theater; Doug Muder rejects the notion that religion is a collection of true-or-false beliefs; and Stephen Shick recounts the history of the UU Peace Network.

In my "From the Editor" column, I invite professional illustrators and artists who are also UUs to let the magazine know about their work. I also round up highlights from the UU blogosphere for the quarterly magazine's "On the Web" column.

Your letters to the editor are always welcome. Please include your city, state, phone number (not for publication), and any congregational affiliation.

Members of congregations affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association receive a subscription to UU World as a benefit of membership. Others may subscribe for only $14 a year in the U.S.

Knoxville gunman: 'I hope others do the same.'

The four-page "suicide note" Jim David Adkisson left in his car on the Sunday morning last summer when he took a shotgun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church in Knoxville was finally released yesterday after Adkisson pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder. It's a thoroughly depressing read: a desperate man's pastiche of paranoid right-wing talking points about the evils of liberalism.

Adkisson attacked Unitarian Universalists because he saw them as liberal activists. He wrote, for example:

Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate, & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the Mainstream Media. But I knew these people were inaccesible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same, it's the only way we can rid America of this cancer/this pestilence!

I hope he doesn't get his wish.

By the way, I'm sure some enterprising student of right-wing radio will soon analyze Adkisson's manifesto to show exactly where each of the text's phrases and delusional charges against liberalism originated.