Hiding out in North Carolina

So Tuesday night, just as the snow was starting, theCSO and I got the car out and I headed down south to the liberal arts school where I went to college. I'm crashing with my Smart Friend Pam, who teaches there, and am making an effort to get some homework done despite the fact that it is not at all clear that any of the reading I'm doing will ever be discussed as people are arranging their schedules.

It's been nice to hang out with Joe-the-Math-Guy some. My favorite thing about being on the campus of a liberal arts school is that I can just pop by and ask a biologist if I have a biology question and I've gotten to do some of that.

So. anyway, that's what's up with me. It's not much, but it beats being stuck in the house. TheCSO is headed to an anime con back in Virginia. So everybody's good.

CC

I'm so teaching my dog to do this before next football season

Awesome.

CC

Ps. You only need to watch the first ten seconds or so. It doesn't move on from there.

I got nothin' today

So let's look at a picture of Uma Thurman as Medusa.

I'm trying to figure out a topic for a paper for my Supreme Court seminar and generally moping because it looks like I will be snowed in this weekend. I don't respond well to being snowed in.

Anyway, expect pouting and complaining and feel free to cheer me up.

CC
who, were she Medusa, would stay away from stuff that could be used as a mirror, such as the little apple on the back of a first-gen Iphone.

Hmmm...Tim Burton show at MoMA

Sounds promising, but I'm wondering if it would be too crowded to really experience anything. I don't get as much out of art when I have to experience it in a big crowd. Hmmm... Will think about it in a month.

CC

Who dat?

While I lived in New Orleans, there was a really hilarious sportscaster named Buddy Diliberto. Once, he announced that if the Saints ever went to the Superbowl, he would parade down Bourbon Street in a dress.

Diliberto died in 2005.

For the first time in 42 years, the Saints are headed to the Super Bowl, and few days ago, 80,000 people kept Bobby's promise. For a city famous for parades, the results aren't visually impressive. But it moved me to see so many having a great time doing something ridiculous for the team they love.

When I lived in New Orleans, I didn't like it. I felt like it was an insulated community and if you hadn't been born there, you didn't matter to anybody. I was honestly happy to leave. But between Hurricane Katrina and the Saints going to the Superbowl, I've come to realize that the place really got under my skin. New Orleans still matters to me.

The economy sucks, Haiti is still a mess and we don't have universal healthcare so it is probably stupid to care about football.

But I love a good triumph over adversity story.

(And I haven't forgotten Indiana stealing the Colts from Baltimore.)

Who dat!

CC

Church and Diets

A friend of mine used to say "religions are like diets, everybody always wants to talk about what works for them."

Lizard Eater looks at that theme in more depth in a post today and I really like what she comes up with.

CC

Ps. Criminal Justice *headdesk* of the day. And it's really just the tip of the iceberg where Sheriff Joe Arpaio is concerned. My favorite story is the "County detention officer steals a file from a defense attorney right in the middle of a trial" one." Some of the upshot of that is reported here and you can see the video here.

Epilonious' take on boycotts

is really great. I tend to agree with just about everything he has to say here, despite my boycott of the entire City of Atlanta until they make it not suck to drive there.

CC

Ps. Criminal justice *headdesk* of the day.

January's Book I don't expect to like: The Road

On January 6, I announced that my New Year's resolution was to read some books I didn't think I would like and write about my reaction to them. I'm going to try to read one a month. I gave a large list of categories of books I wouldn't normally read and asked for suggestions, but truth be told, I already knew what January's book would be. At Christmastime, my father-in-law had mentioned that Cormac McCarthy's The Road was one of his favorite books (he might have said his favorite) and said he'd be interested to hear what I thought of it if I ever read it.

For those keeping track, The Road is a travelogue of sorts and it fails the Bechdel test*, and yes, it's the sort of book I generally would not expect to like. I have what I think are good reasons for not liking what I don't like. I don't expect every book to grant me an epiphany about how wrong I was to dislike its genre, though I won't be surprised if that happens once or twice. Mostly, I'm going to read with an open mind and see what I discover.

____

In college, I took a class where we had to watch 2001, a Space Odyssey and write a reaction paper to it. I wrote in my paper that I thought that Kubrick was very clever to put the space-ballet-like scenes of outer space with lovely classical music in and have them go on for so long. Surely, I thought, the viewer who was sitting in a movie theater watching this would be at first transfixed, then as the minutes passed find their attention fading until even the beauty was monotony. The would shift in their seats and reach uneasily into the popcorn bucket, waiting for the dragging loveliness to end.

I allowed as to how if there's a better brief introduction to what years of space travel must feel like, I haven't seen it. I recall getting a rather nasty comment in the margins of that paper. Apparently the professor didn't share my interpretation.

One of the reasons I don't like travelogues is that often the journey is treated as all one needs for a plot structure. It's a wire on which the story's sometimes interchangeable events can be neatly strung. Like 2001, McCarthy has characters on a journey, and like 2001, the story's very monotony gives a vivid sense of what the journey must be like, though "vivid" seems like a strange word to apply to a novel that is so fundamentally bleak. It's not a long novel. I read 3/4 of it in a Starbucks while my husband made an especially lengthy trip around Home Depot. But that time passed very slowly.

The Road is about a father and son who are walking across what seems to be to be the southern part of a post-apocalyptic America, though I'm not sure the geography actually fits unless their journey is much longer than the book makes it seem. The apocalypse, whatever it is, has taken the lives of almost everyone in America and left a thick cloud of dust and ash blocking out the sun. Almost all forms of life are gone and the father and son survive by scavenging. They are walking toward a better life that may or may not exist and trying to avoid cannibals. Stuff happens to them. Sometimes they find food, sometimes they don't.

They spend a lot of nights shivering and holding each other in ways that might have seemed maudlin if this book were about a mother and child, but work given the father's manly stoicism. Somehow he's allowed more melodrama than would have worked with a mother character. Which is not to say that I appreciate what happened to the mother. I don't and I think this otherwise fine book deserved a better written characterization of her. But I don't have to like the way gender is used to understand that it is used effectively in this case. The dynamic of youth vs. maturity is also used well as the father saves the pair's bodies over and over, but the son saves their souls, constantly asking why the pair can't help every desperate person they find on their trip. It's a question that hangs in the air as one reads, yet the father's pragmatic point of view is perfectly understandable.

It felt like I barely took my eyes off the book. McCarthy's lyrical prose reduced my world to the book's. I've read a lot of books where a main character's victories have not brought me nearly the delight or relief that I felt when the father and son find a few cans of vegetables. But the book strongly implies, at least, that every can of vegetables consumed takes the human race a few steps closer to extinction. The father and son do not actually consume other people, but the book doesn't shy away from the fact that their survival almost certainly comes at the cost of the next people to venture down that road and search those cabinets.

Yet at the end, there's a bit of hope.

I started The Road expecting not to like it. Now I'm asking myself if I did and finding the question superfluous. It's like asking oneself if the Rocky Horror Picture Show is a "good" movie.

Sometimes the simple questions just cease to apply.

We will see what February brings.

CC

*The Bechdel test, usually used for movies, is

1. There must be at least two women
2. Who have a conversation
3. About something other than a man

Random thought on Elizabeth Edwards

I made the mistake of reading about how longtime Edwards aide Andrew Young has written a book what goes on about how Elizabeth Edwards kept an obsessive controlling eye on her husband's movements, was mean to his staff, and was "crazy."

For anyone who requires translation, that means ""Elizabeth Edwards kept an obsessive controlling eye on her CHEATING DOG OF A husband's movements, was mean to his staff, the same staff that was LYING TO HER FACE ABOUT HER CHEATING DOG OF A HUSBAND'S AFFAIR AND KEEPING A SECRET PHONE JUST FOR HIS MISTRESS, and was "crazy," BECAUSE HER CHEATING DOG OF A HUSBAND WAS SCREWING AROUND WITH ANOTHER WOMAN AND RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT WHILE SHE WAS DYING ON CANCER AND TRYING TO RAISE HIS KIDS.""

There. Hope that clears things up a bit.

CC
So annoyed that Elizabeth Edwards' popularity rating is down 15 percent in the last couple of months. We really do expect famous people to be perfect.

Awesome

Not so much into the bible study or the Founding Father study

I am not so much a fan of the first couple of weeks of law school. It's a little hard to get back into my routines and all, but mostly, I blame the Founding Fathers. Like 2/3 of my law school classes begin with the history of the subject I'm learning about, often with what the Founding Fathers thought about what the law should be. I realize there are often important clues to how we got where we are legally there, but I find the topic dull and am always itching to get to the part where we study cases about real people who had real disputes with one another.

I like the concepts. I'm just more interested in what happens when the concepts are applied in actual religious discrimination cases. This is as opposed to the similarities and differences between what George Mason and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson thought about the ideal wording for a religious discrimination statute.
In a week or so, we will be on to studying cases (that will reference the Founding Fathers' opinions at times--this stuff is important) and I won't have to exclusively study the Founding Fathers for another semester.

I like the theoretical aspects of law very much, as long as they are solving actual problems. When it is entirely theory vs. theory, though, I get kinda bored.

On the way home the other night, I started thinking about UUism and how some people want principles to cling to and interpret. Yet a lot of us are focused on our religion in the here and now. Living an unambiguous life in an ambiguous world is the focus here rather than the philisophical musings of an ancient text.

For me, it's a good fit.

CC

Ps. Criminal justice *headdesk* of the day.

Toyota Fundmentalism

Just because my husband and I last bought a SmartCar doesn't mean we aren't Toyota fundamentalists. We're just bad at fundamentalism. And yes, our Smartcar is cute and fun to drive but it eats tires and has had way too many problems for a new car. Every time the ChaliceMom drives it, CC thinks "If she totals it, we'll get a Yaris."

That Toyota is voluntarily stopping sales until they figure out the sticking-gas-pedal-problem, only increases theCSO's and my fondness. We essentially agree with the lady I heard on the news this morning, who said of the deadly problem "The only real surprise is that it's a Toyota."

CC

Ps. Added later: Criminal Justice *Headdesk* of the day.

Two interesting things that came up in my class on Religious Discrimination.

1. In UUism particularly, we tend to think of everything in a Christians vs. everyone else, or a theists vs. everyone else paradigm. Actually, because the United States is so protestant-dominated, the real issues have often been protestants vs. everyone else. For example, public schools used to offer "silent bible reading time." The professor said that the protestants in the positions of power were so entrenched in protestantism that they found it difficult to imagine why any Christian could object to their child having a bit of time every day in class to silently read the bible. But Catholics aren't really into people interpreting the bible for themselves with no priest there to help them out, so they ended up siding with the Jews and the atheists and everyone else who tried to stop the practice.

2. In a discussion of homeschooling, someone brought up that she had a friend who works at a historic site for the War of 1812. Like most historic sites, it gets a lot of visits from homeschooling families. One mother asked the tour guide whether the War of 1812 was World War I or World War II and refused to take "Neither" for an answer. I've always supported homeschooling, though I wonder about the parent-teacher's ability to learn enough about all those subjects to teach them. I hadn't realized that standards are so low, at least in that state.

CC

I hate to say I told you so, No, wait, I Iove to...

Remember the Dude who did those "Pimp and Ho Party" stings at ACORN whom I claimed was a weasel all along? He was arrested by the Feds for his part in a scheme to bug Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone.

And people say DEMOCRATS are stuck in the 1960s. I don't see the 1970s as an improvement.

CC

A sign of how nuts I am when it comes to art

When I read about the woman who fell and tore the Picasso, my first thought was "If I ever accidentally tore a Picasso, I would feel like I had to sell off all of my stuff and become a Mother-Theresa-like nurse to the poor to EVER repay the debt to society that I had just incurred."

Also, I thought "Whoa, there's a Picasso show opening at the Met in April! Ye Gods, I have to go!"

Any Chalicesseurs want to meet up in NY in May/June? I am notoriously bad about scheduling meetups, and weirdly shy about meeting people I've only known online, but in this case we will have amazing art to distract you if I'm not as interesting as you expect.

Anyway, when a major Picasso show came to DC, I had to visit on three separate days to get through the whole show because really excellent art tends to fill my brain to capacity, but bus tickets from DC are cheap and theCSO and I will probably do at least one weekend at Mary-who-Dances' house.

So anyway, Picasso lovers within traveling distance of NY, give me a holler. DC folks who are my friends in real life who happen to be reading this blog are also welcome.

CC

Ps. Criminal justice *headdesk* of the day

Wonder how long it will be before the witness gets arrested

Remember the guy I posted about a few days ago who got arrested after giving an off-duty police officer guff about parking in a fire lane? Witnesses are backing up his side of the story.

CC

Ps. Criminal Justice *headdesk* of the day.

Well, that's good.

One breed-specific dog ban down about a billion to go.

CC

According to this...

Male birds who are pale, stressed out, don't eat their vitamins and work really hard have fewer chicks.

Not too many of you have met theCSO, but suffice to say it's nice to know that accidental pregnancy would not be in my future if I were a bird.

CC

If we were a peaceful country, would Haiti be more screwed?

Before the quake, Haiti's airport handled about three flights a day, some estimates are that its total capacity was around 30.

Now? 180 flights worth of food, supplies, peacekeepers and aid workers are landing per day.

How had this turnaround occurred? The Air Force has a whole bunch of engineers who are trained to rebuild airports for combat purposes, the theory being that they can rebuild the airport of a decimated city America has invaded so planes can be landed and the conquered city can more quickly become a military foothold.

Port-Au-Prince was a decimated city. So the Air Force sent its engineers there to rebuild the airport. Over 1000 planes landed in the first week.

On the radio in DC this weekend, there was a big fuss over the fact that the US Navy Hospital Ship Comfort had been getting maintenance and didn't get underway until Sunday. How dare they take so long? The military must be a bunch of jerks! One of my naval engineer readers (and I do have two at least sporadic ones) can answer this better than I can, but my guess is that getting a Navy hospital ship out of maintenance, fully staffed and on its way to Haiti in a few days is pretty good.

The ship is there now, and treating patients.

Another UU blogger asked recently if serving in the US Armed forces is honorable. I think that's a stupid question. To me it's obvious that pretty much any profession can be honorable or dishonorable depending on the way it is performed. Many would say that prostitution is not an honorable profession, for example, but as Heinlen put it, "It is possible that the precentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.*"

Anyway, being a member of the Armed forces who is keeping the peace and distributing aid in Haiti? Honorable.

Sitting at home and sniping at the military as if they never do anything good? I'd say less so, even if you did write a check to a charity that bought supplies and put them on a plane that couldn't have landed without the US military's help.

There will always be UUs who want UUism to be a peace church and want the US to be a peaceful nation unprepared for war. But I have to say that when another country has a disaster and the Americans can fly in and make a bad time better, it makes me proud.

I don't fundamentally have an objection to cutting the defense budget, but we should be careful as we do so. Not every trade off is going to be one we want to make.

CC
who gets that, theoretically, the US could be a really peaceful nation that just keeps a giant disaster relief program around for an occiasion such as this one, but I don't think that's really going to happen. But my experience with pacifists has been that most of them might as well preface their idealistic visions with "If human nature were completely different then..." so I don't really expect much in the way of rational argument from them. Thus, it was probably pointless to bring that up.


*Sorry, Linguistfriend

CC's lips are constantly chapped in the winter

And I came home to find this on the counter.

Amazing how little stupid stuff can make one feel loved.

An open letter to the YRUUer who reads the Chaliceblog "religiously"

Hello.

When you father told me on Sunday that he skims the Chaliceblog, but you read it religiously, I was mildly horrified. Firstly, for years I was able to maintain the polite fiction in my head that my blogging and church lives were separate. This has never been true, so no doubt it is a healthy thing for me to be facing that my online life and my real life have a lot of overlap. Further, we youth leaders strongly believe in there being some separation between our personal lives and our youth leader lives. But I've given that a lot of thought over the past few days and I think I'm OK with this.

The logic behind this separation is that you guys aren't supposed to be our best friends. We aren't supposed to lean on you for help, we're supposed to be available for you to lean on us. My impression is that you're not so much a leany sort of person, but we're there for you no matter what and you should never feel like it is your job to be there for us. It's not.

Other than that, I really don't mind you knowing the same amount about me that any other reader of the Chaliceblog knows, maybe a bit more in that you have a little more context. It doesn't bother me that you know, for example, that on Sunday I had to suck it up and be enthusiastic and lead a youth group meeting about the MMDT when I had just found out about the death of a family friend. I suspect you get that part being an adult is having to do stuff like that. It sucks, but it beats the hell out of being a teenager. I promise.

Anyway, reading this blog, you're going to hear that people within Unitarian Universalism don't always agree about the proper way to do things or the proper next steps for the church and sometimes don't particularly like each other. I had the benefit of an Aunt who was very much caught up in the politics of the Presbyterian church when I was a kid so I was raised on this stuff. Plenty of UUs seem to sail through their religious lives without really thinking through the conflicts that go on under the surface of the denomination. I have mild concern that I am warping you in some sense by putting this stuff in front of you, but I don't see you as a surface-sailing sort of person, so I think it's a warping that has probably happened anyway or would have eventually. My one worry for you is that when you care about this stuff, people start telling you that you really should go to seminary because "only ministers care about these things." I think that's a polite fiction some ministers have themselves. If I can hazard a bit of unsolicited career advice, I don't think ministry is the path for you. Goodness knows I'm not suited for it.

So in many senses, I'm going to think of you as just another reader. If you were just another reader, I wouldn't need to write this, though. If you don't mind, I would like to make a some requests.

1. Take me with a grain of salt. Part of expressing yourself through writing, and personal narrative writing at that, is sometimes you go overboard. I don't really write about our church all that much, so I'm not so worried I'm going to rant about that, but if I am particularly ranty about something else, it's probably just a mood and I'm going to get over it. And sometimes I'm just plain wrong. You don't strike me as the sort of person who believes a blog, even one written by someone you like, as gospel truth, but I wanted to emphasize that. Check the facts yourself, draw your own conclusions and feel free to take me to task in the comments when I'm wrong. As you've no doubt observed, nobody else around here has any compunction about doing so.

2. I have been considering instituting an "if you're insulting another commenter, then you're talking about something other than the content of the post. Off-topic comments deserve to be kicked" policy similar to the one that televisionwithoutpity.com used to have. If I've got youth reading this blog and commenting, then that makes me even more inclined to do that. Anonymous commenting is always allowed at the Chaliceblog so you may post anonymously any time you want, but I invite you to talk to me about it if you would like to start commenting. Intellectually, I would put you up against just about anyone who comments here, but I have a youth leader's Mama bear desire to make this a safe place for you anyway.

3. Never, ever, let yourself feel responsible for my feelings. A "Hey, I'm sorry to hear about your friend" is fine, but beyond that, if my life sucks and I feel bad about it and write about it, I'm probably venting and I'm really fine and above all, I have it handled. I don't write many posts like that anyway, but I used to do it more and you never know what's going to happen.

4. If anything here ever bothers or upsets you, feel free to talk to me or talk to Jana-who-creates or TogetherBeth or someone else you trust about it.

That's a lot, but these issues are complicated and I wanted to lay all that out. It doesn't surprise me that some youth eventually found my blog and started reading it. Goodness knows that's what I would have done when I was your age. And yeah, if I can talk down to you for one more second, you do remind me a lot of me at your age.

God help you.

fondly,

Chalicechick

Ps. See you Saturday, if not tomorrow night. I will e-mail TogetherBeth cleaned up scripts by tomorrow and I will bring the costume piece I promised you tomorrow if I can.

Tales from the Repo man

A childhood friend of theCSO's is a repo man, or at least has worked as one. We once had an amusing evening where he recounted his adventures in that actually fairly exciting profession. He was full of advice like:

"Both crackheads and rednecks have guns. But if you get to choose, repo the crackhead's car, because rednecks can actually shoot"

May that never come in handy for any of us.

Anyway, in all this guy's repoing days, I bet he never accidentally kidnapped anyone.

CC

RIP, Nancy Lee

I write about my life here and the people in it. So in a stupid way I feel like I'm just keeping you updated, because this isn't going to be long enough to count as really processing anything. I just found out that the ChaliceRelative's best friend died yesterday morning. Mary-who-Dances is visiting and we will go over this evening to hang out with the ChaliceRelative and talk things over.

Nancy Lee was the one I wrote about here. She was a really good person and the world is a darker, sadder place today.

CC

CC reviews "the Lovely Bones" and saves you eleven bucks.

Spoilers within if you have no idea what this movie is about, but that shouldn't matter because you shouldn't go to this movie*

For the love of God, do not see this movie. I am, uncharacteristically, almost at a loss for metaphor. But I'm going to try. It's like if, oh George Balanchine, working with a heretofore undiscovered piece of music by, oh, say, Mozart and it was one of those ballets where Cezanne painted the sets, and then Balanchine picked for his dancers, oh, say, KISS.

There are many elements of awesomeness, perhaps brilliance in that hot mess, but it wouldn't fucking work.

The Lovely Bones has some really wonderful elements including the hardest working actors in the history of film. Remember how Hitchcock* essentially tortured Tippi Hedren for a week by doing stuff like tying live, angry birds to her and filming it as they pecked her half-revealed flesh through they clothes they had already torn? Probably a better experience than working on "the Lovely Bones."

If there were Oscars for effort, Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan would deserve them. And Susan Sarandon chews the scenery like you wouldn't believe in a role where that's clearly what she's expected to do in a Falstaff sort of way. Ronan's role is mostly about wandering around looking amazed, with the occasional scream of anguish, but the few moments when she's allowed to have a personality, she evokes that personality very well. Wahlberg's character is kind of a loon, but you understand why he is the way he is and Wahlberg gives good loon.

The cinematography keeps you watching long after you wish you could stop. It cuts back and forth between different threads of story so much it is impossible to lose yourself in the movie even though you're not sure you want to. You never get the chance to get caught up in the thing, so if you're me you sit there and analyze it. And this movie does not stand up well to analysis.

The directing is so bad that you know exactly what you're watching every second and what the directer is trying to hamfistedly make you feel. You know thirty seconds into the movie that the girl is going to get killed and the tension is built up so slowly and clumsily that by twenty minutes into the movie, your brain is BEGGING the movie to fucking kill her already and destroy this perfectly sweet family because the buildup to that killing and destruction is unbearably plodding and meticulous. I had not been previously aware that I could be that anxious and that bored at the same time.

The last Peter Jackson movie I saw, King Kong, made it clear that Jackson has no clue what to do with tension, a problem I don't recall him having in "The Lord of the Rings" or "Heavenly Creatures." In King Kong, Ann is in constant danger for like 45 minutes of movie while Kong fights off dinosaurs. One assumes that it is inconceivable to Jackson that 45 minutes of Kong wailing on dinosaurs might be a tad excessive. He has the same self-restraint problems here in that there are several situations that should be tense and exciting but go on so damn long that it just gets irritating.

Jackson's CGI-rendered and brightly-colored vision of heaven is, erm, not mine and includes a Magical Asian because, one assumes, Morgan Freeman had other commitments.

Anyway, y'all get the idea.

CC

*To make it absolutely clear, I am NOT advocating a boycott of this movie or ordering you not to see it in any way that you should treat as a command. I am expressing my extreme distaste, not a political agenda. Also, I ain't your Momma and I don't expect you to listen to me just because I say so.

**After finding out that Hedren would not, in fact, fuck him, at least according to Hedren herself as told to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto.

Asking an off-duty cop why he's parking in a fire lane is also not illegal.

Inform your local constabulary

CC

One more on Martha Coakley

Ok, I won't say that Dorothy Rabinowitz is my best friend but I think she has a point about Martha Coakley. Mind you, I still want you to vote for Martha Coakley. After all, she's probably fine on issues that aren't criminal justice related, and more importantly, I do want the Ds to retain the majority in the Senate.

But please, people, vote more carefully in the primaries next time.

CC

Ps. Oh, and Ugh.

Pinch nose, hold breath, Vote for Martha Coakley

If I lived in Massachusetts, and I don't, this would be one election that I would be dying to sit out. The reasons to not vote for Martha Coakley are legion and I discuss some of them in this post and its comments.

Or you can read Politico's version. Wherever you get your facts, it's clear to me that Massachusetts seriously fucked up in making her the nominee.

But as Hello Ladies reminds me, this is a very important race as far as Senate balance is concerned and it is, gulp, the best thing for the country if Martha Coakley wins yet another election.

There, I said it.

Now pray that no one you love ever needs strong pain medication, or gets falsely accused of a politically fashionable crime or places something that looks nothing like a bomb in a major city.

CC
who needs a shower and was slightly cheered by this.

Best dream ever.

TheCSO and I were about to have dinner in a beautiful restaurant on a small cliff facing the ocean. We were in nice clothes and it was clearly an expensive restaurant. Unfortunately, our dining companions were very disagreeable. There were a large group of them and when we were seated at a long table facing the ocean, several of them complained that it would be too hot with the sun coming in.

TheCSO and I liked the view and how you could look out the window into the water three or four feet below the floor of the restaurant, so we weren't inclined to complain. When everyone else at our table got up to complain to the maitre'd, we just sat there talking. The group of surly folks returned and said we were staying at this table, but they had gone ahead and ordered for us. I remember saying something about how ordering for us wasn't nice and got a sneer for my efforts.

The food had started to arrive when theCSO looked out the window and said "A sea turtle!" A large sea turtle was right in the water outside our window. Our companions are uninterested but theCSO and I run up to the windows.

"Let's get a picture!" I say.

We head outside the restaurant and stand next to the water, but the sea turtle has turned away a bit. He and I look at each other, smile, hold our cellphones up above our heads and jump down into the water, getting salt water on our nice clothes. We run around taking pictures of the turtle and each other and smiling and laughing.

And at some point I woke up.

CC

Bad science is dangerous.

The study finding that Anti-depressants don't really work on people with mild to moderate depression has only been famous for a couple of weeks. It has inspired countless conversations, a few of which I've been a part of about how these drugs don't work and are just a scam by drug companies. Most recently, I had facebook argument with someone essentially claiming that psychiatrists are quacks and don't know anything and people with mental illnesses are really just people who choose to behave differently who are punished by our society for their different choice of behaviors*.

Sigh.

Anyway, now that the hippies are all convinced that the man is just cheating them and depressive people are emptying their pill bottles out, it comes out that the study really wasn't all that great and the science behind it was actually pretty bad.

I'm guessing THAT story will get less attention and in some cases the damage is already done.

Now THAT'S depressing.

CC


*Note that the DSM's basic approach is "sure you have symptoms, but are they bad enough to screw with your life?" So someone who is choosing to be depressed, obsessively clean, drink eight bottles of wine every day with no negative consequences for or impact on their life, would not be diagnosable under that standard.

Stuck this up on Facebook awhile back

But it deserves to be here too. What your favorite author says about you

The F. Scott Fitzgerald entry is genius and the Hunter S. Thompson one made me laugh out loud.

You should probably take this is the same spirit that you took the What your favorite drink says about you thing I linked to a couple of years ago.

CC
whose favorite author Robertson Davies isn't listed.

My new least favorite opinion piece theme

"People on Facebook are posting updates with their bra color to get people talking about breast cancer. Even if I don't say it explicitly, you can tell by my derisive tone that I think this is foolish and silly and will never work. Also, I shall quote people saying that it won't work. But while I'm writing an article in this national publication about this thing that my publication only cares about because people are talking about it, I will go ahead and mention lots of stuff about breast cancer. But yeah, posting your bra color to get people talking will never work"

*Headdesk*

CC


Salon's version

Newsweek's version

Politics Daily's Version

The Houston Press' version

The Washington Post's Version (Somewhat more balanced)

the London Telegraph's Version (Someone balanced if you read all the way to the end, but gets its shots in)

Forbes' version

And there are MANY more...

Another sign that we're not a close family

ChaliceMom: Hello-o!

Chalicechick: Hi Mom.

ChaliceMom: So have you graduated yet?

Chalicechick: Um...no. I would have told you.

ChaliceMom: Oh, well, you know we don't talk very much.


CC
somewhat dispirited when Mom was like "So you have a WHOLE 'NOTHER YEAR?" Actually, being able to graduate in three and a half years from a four year part time program is pretty good, I thought.

Awww...

More on prayer, petitionary and otherwise

As far as I can remember, I've only really attempted three kinds of petitionary prayer on my own since childhood:

1. The "please help me find my keys" prayer that mostly just calms me down enough to remember where they were

2. The "I am desperate to fall asleep after hours of insomnia so I'm going to lie here with my eyes closed and ask God to bless literally everyone I can think of" prayer where I try to list every person I've ever known until sleep comes.

Neither of those remotely qualify as turning to God without turning away from self and unless there is some dark consequence to me finding my keys, they don't seem to apply to the question I asked last night about one's responsibilities when asking God for something*.

3. Sometimes, when I'm passing a scene of an accident or something, I find myself thinking "Please let that person be OK" but that's almost a reflex, not a thought out and considered sort of prayer, so I don't know that it counts. Yet for all I know, a serial killer is in that ambulance, so I can't say that it's entirely divorced from these issues.

I've also been known to pray a "Hey, if there's anyone out here who can hear this, thank you so much for what just happened, I am so very grateful for all the wonderful gifts in my life," though I don't do that one often enough. I sometimes attempt more contemplative sorts of prayers, though I worry that my short attention span will be a problem. If there is a God of the prayer-listening variety, I hope God is understanding about prayers than begin meditative and wander off into earthly concerns and just plain thinking over things.

CC

*The concept of "blessing" is, I think, sufficiently diffuse and open to God's interpretation that I don't think any harm can come of it, should it be answered.

Petitionary Prayer and Snow

Prayer is petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation; great saints and mystics have agreed on this definition. To stop short at petition is to pray only in a crippled fashion. Further, such prayer encourages one of the faults which is most reprehended by spiritual instructors — turning to God without turning from Self.
-Robertson Davies


A long time ago, I worked with a young woman who was a serious conservative Christian. One day when snow was expected, she told me that she didn't want to come to work the next day and that she would be praying hard for snow. The next day there was a huge snow dump over the entire East Coast.

I would later read in the paper that the large scale snowstorm killed 14 people across several states. (The American south is not much used to snow and gets it so rarely that being really ready for it is prohibitively expensive.)

To me, this woman praying for a deadly snowstorm raises a few questions, questions that assume, as they very concept of petitionary prayer does, that prayers can be answered:

--When we pray for something, do we have a duty to think about the consequences of what we are praying for? Or is that God's job?

--If the consequences are God's job, then what is the point of petitionary prayer in the first place since God is likely to endorse the best course of action no matter what you ask?

CC

Read a book this year that you think you won't like...and write about it

Over at Salon, the book critic writes that one of her New Years Resolutions is to read a book or two in a genres or with subjects that she doesn't usually like. I think this is a great idea. Part of reading is broadening your mind, right?

So this year, I resolve to read a couple of books that I don't think I will like*, and because I like to write about things, though I don't usually write about books much, I'm going to write about them here. When I do, I'm going to keep in mind that I don't know as much about the subject/genre as most readers.

I'm open to suggestions. Here are some types of books that I almost never read:

Political screed...Chick Lit...written before 1900 and not by Jane Austen, Shakespere or George Eliot...Western...Travelogue...Vampire...Biographies of political/military figures...Romance...Unlikely to pass the Bechdel test**...Historical novel...Memoir by someone who wasn't an old Hollywood movie star...Self help...book originally written in a language other than English that had to be translated and isn't Don Quixote...fantasy***...military...anything that reminds me of Raymond Carver...a memoir about anyone finding themselves...books about music...books about illegal drug use...books about a religion other than Christianity...Young adult that isn't Harry Potter...philosophy..."I did this strange thing for a year just to write about it" books...anything Nora Ephron wrote or would be tempted to make a movie out of.

Anyway, yeah, Suggestions welcome.

CC

*When I think about the subject "Books I won't like," the first thing to come to mind is that the "Eat, Pray, Love" woman has written yet another book about dealing with her first world dramas in a third world setting. She totally needs a cameo in the next "Avatar" movie. Anyway I'm not sure I'm ready to subject myself to reading her actual book.

** The Bechdel test, usually used for movies, is

1. There must be at least two women
2. Who have a conversation
3. About something other than a man

*** I read some Sci-fi though, and the line isn't always clear

Yet another sign of the coming apocolypse

That post about Philo

Got an email from LinguistFriend the other day. I shall reprint it in its entirety, sans salutation and signature:

You need to post a salute to Chris on the demise of his blog, while acknowledging gratitude for his continuing contribution in a different form, as editor of UU World and gray eminence in the blogging world.

While I prefer my suggestions for blog posts to come to me phrased as questions, I had to concede that LF was correct. At the time, I wrote LF back to say that a lot of people had already written about the demise of Philocrites. But not enough people have, so here goes.

Philocrites was a great UU blog. Indeed, it was the blog that really got me started blogging. I had been posting on beliefnet for awhile and its current admin and I didn't get along, so I was primed to leave. I read Philo's blog and thought "Hey, I could do a funnier, less informed version of that." Then one day I was posting a comment to Ministrare and literally created a blog for myself by accident while trying to just create a login for myself. But reading Philocrites put me on that path.

It's funny how even with this memory, I can go back and read something of Philo's and be blown away by how thoughtful and wonderful it is, but I totally can. Philo's reflection on the transformative nature of Evangelical faith and how we don't really do that, for example.

Philo was always very direct and forthcoming with challenging ideas like "By acknowledging that there are parts of my personal religious life that take place outside of Unitarian Universalism, I'm not suggesting that Unitarian Universalist congregations and institutions can't serve or promote genuinely satisfying religious lives. I think they can. In fact, they do. But I am saying that UU congregations operate within an increasingly post-denominational world in which people bring a range of expectations and needs that a single institution may not be able to fulfill. I always found that wonderful and admirable, especially in a man who works for the UUA and might have to deal with an annoyed reader in person first thing in the morning.*

He was kind of the silverbacked monkey of UU bloggers and was treated as such by other UU bloggers for years. I have several times written him with questions like "What's the UU World's policy on...?" "Have you heard of this crazy person who is writing me..." and what to do about various issues arising in the blogosphere. His response was unfailingly polite and quick and thoughtful and reasonable.

I really don't think the UU blogosphere would be what it is without Philo's early contributions and he will be missed around here. IMHO, you can best honor the legacy of Philocrites by reading his blog, thinking about what you find there, and writing about it on a blog of your own.

CC

*Whether I am blogging or reviewing a play, I hate dealing with people I've written about. Last summer, I found myself physically hiding from someone whose work I had very positively reviewed in the DC City Paper. Philo never really had that choice, and still he didn't pull punches.

Sigh.

I hate it when the cops lie to protect their own. It really does seem to happen all the time. Sometimes, it's a matter of interpretation where an agency reads what appears to be a straightforward policy in a way different from how the public does. I can live with that, especially when a policy is vague.

But in this case, there was evidence on video all over the internet from multiple sources that the police were just plain lying about what happened, and they kept telling those lies in the face of it.

CC

Snerk

Not to imply that those of my ethnic background are generally bad lovers,

but it's kinda funny that The British can't find the G-spot.

Seriously. Keep looking, boys.

CC

Yes, it is useless.

And yes, I want one.

CC

I totally don't get why anyone would want a homeowner's association

Man, they suck

CC
who loved the X-files about the homeowner's association.

It's New Years Eve and I'm blogging

Yep, I'm at the yearly New Year's Eve party at Forties Girl and Cerulean's house. Actually, all the usual suspects are here, though everyone but me is watching a movie upstairs.*

So, your attention-span-deprived hero is downstairs, typing and thinking. Christmas was stressful though everyone involved really did their best to make it not so. My generous and wonderful in-laws really went all out this year. This weekend, I'm going to try to get the Murder Mystery dinner theatre written.

And now TheCSO wants to play scrabble. I wish all of y'all a Happy New Year, full of friends who don't mind your eccentricities.

CC

*Someone was talking to me and then said "well, I'd better go socialize" and went upstairs to silently watch the movie. I really don't understand the dynamics of movie parties.

Narcissistic Yearly Reflection: 2009 wasn't that bad.

It wasn't a great year either.

I traveled more than I usually do. I got to go to Vegas and Boston, I saw Montreal. The job market has been a world of suck, which makes things more anxious for me as I get out of school in either one year or a year and a half depeending on the job market.* I've had some big dramatic internet fights, but not as many as I used to.

I got a great puppy, my sister-in-law got married to a guy who jumps into lakes, ZombieKid is now eleven and the Gnome is nine.

Things are marching on.

CC


*I'm technically in a four-year program, but I like to take classes in the summer, so I should be able to finish early. But it doesn't make sense to do so if there's no job waiting for me.

Response to TK - CC's stab at Church Polity for UU Noobs

A new reader named TK has taken the wind out of my self-righteous snit by being a perfectly reasonable and kind new UU who came to us from a conservative religion. Or if he/she is not, he/she totally has me fooled.

TK writes, in part:

I'm a new UU, myself, having signed the book only 9 mos ago, read only one short book about the theology/history, attended one district conference, and read some blogs and papers. (I come from a very conservative background.)

Somehow, I got volunteered to be on the Board of Worship (BoW) actually before I signed the book, so now I'm in a leadership position, planning Worship meetings, for a church that I only moderately understand the theology and even less understand the polity.

I'm just trying not to step on toes. Of course, as we're a "Society," I keep accidentally saying "church" and I see a couple people wince when I do so. It's just a habit, not a policy decision.

Anyhoo, that's my situation. Please have some sympathy for those of us who have great deal of energy and enthusiasm and are trying to bumble our way through.

It would be wonderful if you more experienced UU's wrote some stuff, say, here, about the relationships between the laity and the minister and other relationships within the church.

TK,

Honestly, that you are approaching this in the way you are suggests to me that you're doing pretty well. I've been a UU for a third of my life and say "Church" all the time. Nobody winces at my church, but I know that's not universally true of all churches. Anyway, a lot of what you need is common sense and it seems like you have that. There's a world of difference between presenting an idea like it will be the savior of UUism and simply asking if something like it has been done before and I suspect you know that the asking route is always the reasonable one when you're new.

Trying not to step on toes is always good. Listening is good.

The exact relationship of the minister and the board should be outlined in your bylaws, but here are a few general points, which I type with great anxiety as the Chaliceblog has the attention of people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I trust any missteps will be corrected in the comments. If I screw this up, don't tell Katy-the-Wise*

-The minister serves at the pleasure of the congregation and the congregation votes to install or fire him/her. Policies of the church are set by either the congregation or the Board, which is elected by and from the congregation**

-Therefore, the congregation does, or at least should, have a great deal of sway over what goes on in churches. We come from a congregational tradition, meaning that our churches are, at least theoretically, independent entities that are loosely united by a connective body. Our connective body is the UUA. In theory, at least the congregations should have approximately the unity of NATO. Other Congregational churches are the UCC and the Baptists.*** It is not uncommon for UU churches to vary a great deal and most people fit better in one sort of church than they do in others.

Conversely, some other churches/religions/denominations are more like France in their organization. In France, just about everything is run out of the Federal government. One has a federal driver's license. I call these churches "Federalist" churches because I'm a law student and that's how we talk. Mormonism and Catholicism are both pretty Federalist, which means folks who come from Mormonism and Catholicism often have very Federalist expectations for churches and get pissy when they aren't met.

-That said, all things tend toward the center and UUism has gotten more and more Federalist as time has passed. Since at least the civil rights era there has been debate about various issues relating to polity, with "Does being a free religion with a commitment to that polity mean a congregation has the freedom to not allow black members?" being a question that kept some good people up at nights**** and caused a division in the church for awhile.

While few would argue that the UUA is unreasonable in not allowing congregations that discriminate on the basis of race to join the association, the philosophical line between the UUA setting reasonable ground rules and the UUA bossing the congregations around for their own good is continually debated and moved around. I tend to want the congregational polity to remain as pure as possible and take a dim view of a lot of UUA initiatives that other people think are ok.

For example, and I apologize to long time readers since I've used this example a lot in the past, the UUA thinks it's just wonderful when a church becomes a "Welcoming Congregation," meaning that it has done a bunch of training and is certified by the UUA as a congregation that has doors wide open to potential Gay and Lesbian members. First off, I think that's pandering and would be disinclined to attend a church that was so proud of themselves for accepting me were I a lesbian. But more to the point as far as polity goes, in this rural congregation, the members were not at all used to homosexuals or homosexuality, and a lot of them felt that the church just wasn't ready. That notwithstanding, the board pushed the program through in response to UUA cheerleading. So now they are a "Welcoming Congregation" and can advertise themselves as such, but the actual members who weren't ready and had this thrust upon them likely aren't going to be especially welcoming to homosexuals who respond to the promised welcome and come through the door. Even more disturbing, this is a college town where new homosexuals who show up to the church are likely young and probably really need that welcome, so to be promised a welcome and not get one is a pretty nasty thing. The local church knew they weren't ready, and the UUA's attempt to coerce them into the 21st century didn't actually do anyone any good I'm guessing.

So anyway, arguments can and do happen all the time about the proper role of the UUA in encouraging churches to set their agendas certain ways and when letting local churches be local is a better idea. The Chaliceblog was more or less at one-sided war with the UUA Washington Office for awhile when they were doing stuff like encouraging ministers to preach on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Alito. They've become a lot less inclined to do stuff like that and I don't have a problem with them at this point.

-- Last year, the UUA kicked out a vast number of "affiliate groups" and they no longer have official status with the UUA. These groups ranged from political causes (UUs for Animal Rights) to organizations of UUs with particular spiritual tendencies in one direction (e.g. UU Buddhists). Most of the spiritual groups were let back in, most of the other ones weren't. There's lots of debate within UUism still today about whether that was a good idea. I wish it had been done with a little more finesse, but I certainly recognize that the affiliates were spending a lot of time lobbying the UUA for stuff and the UUA is supposed to be responsive to the congregations, not the affiliate groups so I ended up supporting the decision in the end. LinguistFriend disagrees and his post about why is linked here.

- A lot of people will tell you that the problem with Unitarian Universalism is that is has no center and no core of belief. In my non-religious-professional opinion, that's bullshit. But Katy-the-Wise says it better than I do when she writes of the center of our faith: "That unique gift is as it has always been a commitment to freedom of belief, of thought and of conscience. Those who confuse freedom with license misunderstand that to mean that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything at all. On the contrary, true freedom means that we are responsible for our own beliefs rather than subject to an outside authority, which puts the burden of truth directly on the individual. The bottom line is that you cannot believe that for which you have no evidence in experience or that you have not examined carefully and tested with integrity. At first people think it is very easy to practice a religion that doesn't tell you what to believe or what to think or what to do. Soon they find that taking the responsibility that freedom requires is a spiritual practice that takes all our strength and courage."

--Just because we're free doesn't mean we're alone. Indeed, that's the point of having an association. We make a deal with each other to support each other and help each other along in our spiritual journeys. We make that deal with other folks in the congregation and the congregations make that deal with one another. Katy the Wise says that the combination of these two ideas-- The we are free and in covenant with one another, is the true center of UUism.

By being in association with each other, we form a national UU religious identity and we strengthen the concept of free religion. NATO makes each of its members stronger by uniting the membership and giving the term "Member of Nato" meaning. So, as independent as we are, and UU churches can be quite independent if they want to be, this connective body is still really important. That said, the UUA is an organization of congregations much like NATO is an organization of member states. If an American wants a change in American policy or a new program to start in America, they aren't supposed to appeal to NATO, they are supposed to start it in America. So for individuals to lobby the UUA for stuff doesn't make a lot of sense as far as structure goes and the age-old new UU question "Why doesn't the UUA do X?" is better phrased as "Why isn't MY CONGREGATION doing X and how can I help us start?"

Anyway, I'm sure I'm leaving out things about the contemporary perspective on this stuff. I KNOW I'm leaving out the historical roots of some of these ideas, mostly because I'm not confident that I know them as well as I should. Fausto from socinian.blogspot.com is a busy man these days, but he's the layman I know who knows the most about this stuff from a historical angle.

Further perspectives on polity stuff are welcome in the comments. Questions also welcome, if I don't know the answer I will do my best to find it for you.

CC


* Katy-the-Wise is CC's favorite UU minister. She's thought about most things more than CC has. Including church polity, perhaps especially church polity. If you know who she is, feel free to address her as "Katy the Wise" when you meet her. Apparently she gets a kick out of that, kind of.

**CC heard through a friend about a congregation where a member wrote to Garrison Keillor and asked him if he would like to be their minister. As this illustrates, most UU churches don't in the strictest since need to hire ministers to be their minister. This is not to say that hiring an untrained minister is a good idea, especially if said minister is Garrison Keillor.

*** Non-Southerners often talk about "Baptists" when they mean "Very conservative Southern Baptists." In reality there are tons of different kinds of Baptists. I was buddies with a Liberal Baptist minister in South Carolina once and it was educational about how one could be liberal and yet very Baptist. He and I met and became instant friends the day he gave a prayer service on an anniversary of 9-11 that mentioned as an aside that all people, be they believers or unbelievers, were affected by this day. It nearly had me in tears because as he was the first person in town I'd heard talk of "unbelievers" like they were human. I don't think I did cry, reporters aren't supposed to, but I was close.

**** To me the reasonable answer is "Yes, technically you do, but doing so makes no sense in a tradition whose center lies in the integrity and freedom of conscience of the individual within the community." The UUA's answer is that a church with that rule would not be allowed to be a member of the UUA.

Unreal Presbyterians

My dad used to come home from session* meetings and loudly complain that other people on the session or in the church "might be Christians, but they weren't Presbyterians." What he meant was that loving Jesus was one thing, but understanding the Presbyterian polity, the balance of power between the session and the minister and the role of the Presbytery was what being a Presbyterian was really about and to be a real Presbyterian you had to understand those distinctions. And yes, it takes a lot of real Presbyterians to run an effective church.

I would never call UUs who don't understand UU polity "not UUs", if only because my voice would give out before I got through saying that to half the people I've met who deserve to hear it.

But maybe we need to get back into teaching some of that stuff. The amount of ignorance about it is embarassing.

CC
who freely admits that Steve Caldwell can kick her ass on the minor details, but has a good idea of the basics and wishes most other UUs had a Chalicechick if not a Caldwell level of understanding.


*the Presby equivalent of the board. Yeah, you probably knew that.

This is awesome.

Truly great film criticism makes one think beyond the picture itself to how a good movie is actually put together. When someone recommended this 70 minute youtube review of 'The Phantom Menace' I thought they were crazy, but I actually learned a lot about the craft of moviemaking from parts of it and really enjoyed the rest.

CC

Beauty in Weird Places

Richard Simmons: Annoying? Awesome?

In an interview, Susan Powter said of Richard Simmons "He needs to put some trousers on and stop it."

CC, who thinks Susan Powter's fifteen minutes are well and truly up, finds Richard Simmons sweet and endearing on a non-ironic level and just hilarious in general. She remembers fondly the time Simmons had a vegetable steamer with him on the David Letterman show and said steamer exploded and how for years afterwards, Simmons would randomly show up every couple of months and David Letterman would chase him away with a fire extinguisher.

TheCSO frequently confuses Simmons with Carrot Top and annonced after viewing a yotube clip of one of Richard Simmons' appearances on David Letterman that he was one of the more annoying people TheCSO had ever seen.

Opinions welcome.

CC

Sermons that rock.

Mary-who-Dances learned this weekend that she is mentioned on this blog sometimes. I told her that her nickname was "Mary-who-Dances" and she said that at the place she goes to dance, she's known as "Preacher Mary." I explained that there were actually far more preachers in my social circle than dancers. Anyway here's one of her sermons. It reads well, but I'm sure loses something on the page. Mary is amazing at most things she sets her mind to and she can deliver a sermon like a sumbitch. If she were arguing in front of the Supreme Court, she could make Justice Thomas look up from his magazine.

Also, RevRose's take on Garrison Keillor is really awesome, though I'm kind of embarassed that the man actally merited a sermon from us. Shudder. As a bonus, RevRose includes a photo that makes Keillor look like Dwight Schrute*.

Go, my children, and drink in the Schrutiness.

CC
Who, oddly enough, was planning to go to RevRose's church this Sunday and would have seen this sermon live, except that she ended up among Presbys. Ok, actually, circling a block in Brooklyn for an hour, hanging out with Presbys then digging herself out of a snowbank. I keep mentioning that I was in Brooklyn so you will think I'm cool.

*Comparison of Keillor and Schrute totally stolen from somebody on Facebook.

Stupid Questions, Stupid Answers

CC: "Who would win in a light saber battle, Walt Whitman or Ernest Hemingway?"
TheCSO: "Us all"

CC

Postscript to the Keillor Matter

Sunday night, I went to a Presbyterian Church's Christmas party. We gathered around the piano and the choir director sat and played many of the well-worn holiday classics.

When he came to the UU-written "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" several people in the congregation dutifully sung the altered lyric "And Peace on Earth, goodwill toward all." The irony there is complete enough, but later that night, the minister and I (who are old friends) talked for a while and I told her about being a little kid standing in the pews with the ChaliceRelative, both of us singing the hymns but changing the male references to God to female ones. Keillor's fundamentalism about hymn texts wouldn't allow for such a thing, of course. But singing about God the Mother was that little kid's introduction to the idea that just because God was traditionally referred to in the masculine, it didn't have to be so.

Some traditions suck, you know. UUs get that. Presbyterians get that. Keillor does not.

CC

Church Podcast bleg

Hey, I've got a minister friend who is thinking about podcasting
sermons. Is there anybody currently doing that who could answer some
questions and talk her through that process?

Sent from my iPhone

To do before I leave for New York City tomorrow

1. Wash clothes
2. Pack
3. Download law lectures for drive
4. Outline paper for completion in New York
5. Clean out car
6. Pedicure
7. Acquire wardrobe of high quality and tasteful designer clothes accented by vintage pieces and a scarf picked up from a street vendor in Dupont Circle
8. Finish J.D.
9. Lose weight until I am shaped approximately like Drew Barrymore.
10. Develop sophisticated hobby, like reading depressing novels in the original Russian.
11. Fill house with the works of undiscovered artist. Arrange for artist to be discovered.
12. Grow thicker, prettier hair
13. Write bestselling satirical novel
14. Accept that an old friend will still love you, even if so far you haven't reached the potential you had when you were 17.

The usual UU excuses for listening to Garrison Keillor

For years I've been saying that Garrison Keillor sucks and we shouldn't listen to him. I now expand that to say we shouldn't read him either.

The factual issues in his recent piece Don't Mess with Christmas speak for themselves. I'm sure plenty of other UU bloggers with better religious educations will cover them better that I could. And there are bloggers far more suited than I am to deconstruct Keillor's comments about Jewish guys and how their music makes the shopping mall impure. (What the fuck?)

When he misunderstands Emerson's comment "To be great is to be misunderstood," it's hard to take it as a compliment to Emerson. Mostly, it just makes me think that Keillor's a dumbass.

Let's review the usual UU excuses for listening to this clown:

He likes us! He says UU women are sexy
I'm pretty sure he means "UUs will do the freaky stuff the Lutheran girls won't."


But he's FUNNY
You mean when he parodies songs? Because he sure can't take it when people parody him, or change the words to Christmas carols he likes.


The piece in Salon was satirical. He doesn't MEAN it...
Have you read the piece? It was not satirical in tone at all and pretty much no one has taken it that way.


He uses gentle satire to make fun of self-important people.
Not really. He trades on his ignorant hominess the way Ann Coulter trades on her sharp-tongued conservatism, and I don't think the effects are any better. You may smile and laugh along, but keep in mind when Garrison says bigoted things like:"I favor marriage between people whose body parts are not similar. I’m sorry, but same-sex marriage seems timid, an attempt to save on wardrobe and accessories," or "The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control," everyone else is still laughing.

And that's not funny. Even if he apologizes and claims that all his friends are Unitarians and Jews and he didn't realize that outside of Hollywood, Unitarians and Jews are given a rough time (which is what he said about gay people), I won't believe it and you shouldn't either.


At heart he's a liberal...he's just being funny.
No, he's a man who writes "I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them, and I could tell you about how good that is for children, and you could pay me whatever you think it's worth." in a column that trashes "serial monogamy"

Meanwhile, he's had three wives himself. He's just a plain old hypocrite in the exact mold of conservatives who blather on about defending marriage without addressing which of their multiple marriages they wish to defend. And I don't mind hypocrites when they actally have something to say. He doesn't.

I've heard much more bigoted humor. Keillor's is pretty mild.
I got this excuse multiple times last time I wrote about him and I don't understand it in light of having examined Keillor's actual words. Ignore the folksy "I'm kidding" tone and look at what Keillor actually says. It is NOT Wanda-Sykes-style "Black people drive like this, white people drive like that" cultural observation. He is straight up saying gay people shouldn't be parents because the sort of monogamy he can't handle himself is better for kids and that UUs shouldn't be allowed to celebrate Christmas our own way becase his way is better. That is not funny. Don't let the homey tone fool you. The underlying messages are nasty stuff and a LOT of people are nodding along.

Quit nodding.

Quit listening.

Quit reading.

CC

Somebody on Facebook asked what my favorite poem was

And I realized that I had put other poems up here before, but never this one. I have this memorized and it has come in handy repeatedly, most frequently in youth group when we need a reading and nobody feels like looking it up. When I recite it, though, I usually have a word or two off, so I looked it up again for posting purposes.

Anyway:

The Fiddler of Dooney, by Yates

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

Required viewing

This is made of win y'all.

CC

The UUism vs. Your Old Faith Problem

I've mentioned before that I think former liberal Prostestants make the best UUs. They generally don't have that creepy distate/hatred/snottiness about their old faith that new UUs who come from conservative religions have and they don't have the somewhat paradoxical yet equally annoying desire to make UUism like their old faith*.

Liberal Christians get that you don't necessarily expect the UUA to make all sorts of decrees about the way UUism is done because most liberal protestants are used to a fairly congregational structure. They are more likely to get that what spiritual attachment they had to their old faith took time to develop and so they don't get pissy when they've been a member for a brief time and have not begun birthing spiritual inspiration like a sexed-up rabbit.

A couple of ministers who have posted here before have mentioned they have a "transitions from other faiths" support group to help people deal with their anger and other residual emotional stuff and move on. I've also heard really good things about an adult RE Curriculum called "Owning Your Religious Past: The Haunting Church" on the same topic. I don't love the title, but I know people who have taken it have found it helpful.

I'm thinking more churches could use this stuff.

CC

* "I love the freedom of UUism. But I think UUism needs more charismatic ministers who will tell us about our freedom and then tell us what we should do with it." is a rough paraphrase of something I have actually heard somebody say in a UU church in a heavily-Evangelical area.

"I love how UUism doesn't make a bunch of political stands I disagree with like Catholicism did, but what we really need is for them to make some moral stands about political issues that I DO agree with." is also a very common sentiment.

Gah!

I've often pointed to laws barring atheists from holding public office, unconstitutional but still on the books, as indicators of how far American society has to go as far as acceptance of atheists is concerned.

I really didn't think anybody would ever enforce one. Ok, I didn't think that because I assumed the prejudice against atheists was sufficiently strong that few places would elect an atheist in the first place. But still, I'm surprised.

CC
who feels that atheists often take the wrong path toward getting their rights by being insulting and annoying, which pretty much never works. But the fact that I don't agree with their strategy for getting rights doesn't mean that I don't agree that they deserve those rights in the first place.

LinguistFriend: "PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN" IN THE CHRISTMAS SEASON

In both Christian and Unitarian-Universalist congregations, it is very common for services or songs at or around Christmas to include the short song of the heavenly host in Luke 2:14. In the King James Version that is often quoted, this reads "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men". Many churchgoers have other variants from Christmas carols and other sources floating in the back of their heads.


In an earlier discussion on this blog, I made the point that the traditional forms in which this verse is usually quoted, including the KJV, do not correspond to the text which should be read on the basis of the best early Greek manuscripts. The passage is not found in the early Greek papyrus texts of the NT from the first three centuries AD, but it does occur in the early capital-letter (uncial) Greek manuscripts of the NT. Based on them, in the modern New Revised Standard Version, the text is correctly translated

"Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors." The "heaven" is not explicit in the Greek text, but is a reasonable interpretation. The understanding of the word "peace" requires separate discussion; in this context, some understand it as approximately equivalent to salvation. The last phrase is more literally "among men of favor" or "among men of good will". The difference between the KJV "peace, good will toward men" and the NRSV text depends mainly on whether the Greek noun translated as "favor" or "good will" is read with a nominative case (case of the sentence subject, found in late Greek NT manuscripts and the early printed editions of the Greek text, from which it entered early translations such as the KJV and Luther's Bible) or in the genitive (literally "of good will", "of favor", etc.), as in the most important early Greek uncial manuscripts and in modern scholarly editions. In my library, the form with the genitive is found in scholarly editions of the Greek NT from that of Tischendorf (1869) to the modern ones of Nestle and the United Bible Societies from recent years.


The NRSV provides an accurate interpretation of the Greek text, but misses a great deal relevant to its interpretation, even in fine study editions such as those of Walter Harrelson (2003) and the Society of Biblical Literature (2006). The Greek text suggests a Semitic original; both Hebrew and Aramaic predecessors of the Greek text were hypothesized by scholars even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, both Hebrew and Aramaic forms of the last phrase, literally "among men of favor" in Greek, have been found in the Dead Sea texts from Qumran. This has the effect of confirming the reconstruction of the Greek text in Luke 2:14, as discussed by Bruce Metzger in his commentary on the Greek text of the NT (1994).


The early Latin translations of the gospels revised by Jerome provide a translation "pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis" which could be translated as "peace among men of good will" with the understanding that some men deserve and receive peace because of their good will. On the contrary, the interpretation of the Greek text by some earlier (survey in Plummer ICC 1901) and most modern scholars is that the good will or favor in question is that of the deity towards men. God's favor is understood to be granted to his covenant people. Thus the earliest form of the Greek text does not indicate that any general good will exists towards all human beings; rather, peace is considered to be limited to those who participate in the covenant with God. In a Jewish context, peace is thus conferred upon Jews; in a Christian context such as that of Luke, peace is conferred upon Christians. Others are not included. This is close to the opposite of the modern popular understanding of such phrases as "good will toward men" when it is sung in Christmas carols, where "men" is generally understood to refer to all human beings. Paradoxically, I suspect that most UUs would favor the popular inaccurate interpretation based on a corrupt text. The clear brief discussion of this passage in Luke by Stuhlmueller in the first (not the second) edition of the Jerome Biblical Commentary (1968) is particularly useful; so is the fine commentary volume on Luke by I.Howard Marshall (1978).


This is one case of many in which UUs have taken over a popular and misleading understanding of a text which is well known in Christian circles. Such a practice may place in question the concept of UUism which is implied, because it can produce an interpretative problem or contradiction which is commonly overlooked. In using and interpreting such texts, many UUs take over or bring with them the degree and type of understanding of historical Christianity and its texts which is current in lay Christian circles. Others who profess UUism value Christian and Jewish traditions, but advocate that they need to be considered with more care.


Speaking from a membership point of view, there is not really a choice in the matter. If such ideas are not considered carefully, they remain in the mind as part of the unconsidered baggage left over from previous devotion to some form of Christianity, and as potential time-bombs in the adaptation to UUism. For this reason, I have long advocated that one important aspect of the orientation to UUism should be a reconsideration of aspects of historical Christianity and Christian texts, which cannot be comprehensive but at least can teach habits of analytic and historical thought which can be extended to other material as the need arises.


This issue extends to many components of tradition other than religious texts and sayings. For instance, Western attitudes towards sexuality, rarely considered in introductions to UUism, are generally based on legends which have developed into a politically explosive part of a popular ethical system (e.g. Elaine Pagels "Adam, Eve and the Serpent", 1988). They are fragments of the ethical aspects of an ancient and convoluted religious tradition, which should be considered with the same care and respect as the modern religious successor forms of this tradition. Without understanding of the earlier forms of these traditions, their modern forms are unintelligible, and trip up those who wish to move on from them.

WTF moment of the day

The New York Times has a special gift guide for people of color.

I am 95 percent offended at the concept of this guide to gospel cruises and products for "problem hair."

Five percent of me wishes that I were of hispanic origin because those "Wise Latina" t-shirts are pretty awesome.

CC

Ya know that website I link to sometimes

that is constantly prophesizing that the rapture will happen on a specific date, and every time the date on the website passes, the creator just picks a new date?

The current prediction is for Monday.

I have an exam tonight, and I have to say I have mixed feelings on the idea of the rapture showing up on Monday.

CC

What the hell, Massachusetts?

If you people wanted to elect Martha Coakley to statewide office and kiss your own civil rights goodbye, that's your business.

But I LIKE mine.

United States Senator Martha Coakley? Seriously?

Anyone who has ever used the words "my thorough review of all the evidence, including that which is often taken out of context and deemed 'exculpatory,”* is not someone I'm voting for, and I don't get why y'all did either.

CC
who is pleased that the parole board also deemed the evidence exculpatory in that particular case, but wants to know why y'all want to choose between someone like this and handing the Republicans more control in the Senate.

*This was in the case of a man who had already spent fifteen years in prison for Satanic Ritual Abuse. The entire case against him is widely believed to be a hoax.

Mary and Joseph kicked out of Target with their baby.

I wouldn't normally bother to write about a woman illegally getting kicked out of a business for breastfeeding, but when the couple is named Mary and Jose and it's Christmas time, it becomes so bloggable.

Smooth move, Target.

CC

Survey on folks raised UU

This is a survey for folks who grew up in YRUU/LRY. Please answer it if that's you.

CC

I will actually defend the celebration of Kwanzaa

But people who want to celebrate Chalica are seriously on their own.

I'm wondering why the UU World felt the need to write about it since it sounds like almost no UUs are celebrating it. They found one congregation who had embraced that concept, but it looked like that was it. The article mentioned that Chalica's facebook group has 1,000 members. But that really doesn't mean much since lots of people join hundreds of facebook groups and never look at them again. Indeed, the facebook group "I read the group name, I laugh, I join, I never look at it again" has 700,000+ members.

IMNERHO, we are not celebrating it with good reason since it smacks of embarrassingly obvious appropriation and it, let's say it together, treats the seven principles as a creed. The creator of Chalica tells the UU world "If you notice some similarities to other December holidays—Hanukkah and Kwanzaa—they’re not intentional." Really? Had the theology student who created it never heard of an African American secular holiday where people exchange handmade gifts or a Jewish religious holiday where you light candles for more than six but less than nine nights?

I get that people and religions appropriate ideas from each other all the time and to be truthful, I think we're WAY too oversensitive about the practice. For one thing, sometimes an idea is sufficiently obvious that multiple people think of it*. For another, some traditions resonate with people for a reason and I don't think there is anything wrong with adapting some traditions for UUism provided we take a respectful approach to doing so, which admittedly we sometimes don't. That said, I do feel like the creator of Chalica is insulting my intelligence there.

And yes, in case you're brand new to UUism and don't know, the seven principles are not a creed. Using them, as Chalica does, as a sort of spiritual checklist, is not how one is supposed to treat them.

CC

*One of the people who likes "Chalica" made a Chalica-themed parody of Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song" several years ago. Robin Edgar made one last year. I really doubt Robin Edgar stole the idea from the guy who did it first, I just think it's a really obvious idea that two people who like to make parody music had the same idea that these hockey fans did in 2007 or this atheist did last November. For my money the Hockey one is the best of the lot.

Bridge-design churches.

A few years ago, my church needed to build a new building to house our ever-expanding RE program*. After much architectural squabbling, we went with the "bridge" design where there's a bridge with a roof and glass walls connecting the two buildings.

If you ever have the chance to stand on one of those in the snow, do it. I did yesterday and the view was breathtaking. I was warm and comfortable and snow was falling down all around me on both sides, piling up on cars and making the entire world look clean and bright. I sat there for at least twenty minutes, breathing in the lovliness of it all.

CC

*If you write about how UUism is dying and you hear a loud guffaw from the general direction of Northern Virginia, this is why.

Oh, and while refusing to hire someone based on their political affliation is not illegal in all states

The Ethicist doesn't like it. CC doesn't either.

CC

Taylor Swift and feminism

I read some feminist blogs, though what I read there doesn't always make it back to The Chaliceblog. But it has been interesting to watch a slow backlash to the popularity of pop singer Taylor Swift creep across the blogosphere. It started with this post a month or two ago, and it appears to be picking up steam. CC-favorite blog The Sexist wrote about Swift this week.

On one level, I totally get it. Swift writes about hating the girl who is dating the guy she likes, how a friend of hers felt totally humiliated and ruined after she slept with a boy who turned out to be a jerk* and about wanting her boyfriend to rescue her by marrying her so she won't be alone. None of those themes delight me either. Actually, I'm sort of embarrassed to think of them.

Because I remember those feelings. I was very worried that no boy would want to marry me ever and I remember desperately wanting someone to want me enough to want to marry me. (I ended up turning down the first marriage proposal I got.) I know of at least one woman whose under-duress though not exactly date rape "first time" really REALLY screwed with her. (She's ok now.) And yes, I really owe a completely innocent girl an apology for my bitchiness to her because a boy I liked at 14 or so preferred her. (I ran into this boy awhile ago and he is WAY less awesome than theCSO.)

I have listed to some Taylor Swift songs, and while I don't adore the implicit social messages, I certainly don't see those messages as at all original to Swift. What's original to Swift is pop music that might not be your taste, but is well-written great stuff and the work of a 19-year-old. If she's reflecting things about our culture that we don't like, maybe it's time to change the culture, or at least sit down with our favorite teenage girl and have a talk about these sorts of cultural messages.

Anyway, I get really sick of people letting TV raise their kids then whining about it when TV screws up.

CC


*It says something that when Buffy the Vampire Slayer slept with a boy who literally TURNED EVIL, this was regarded as more or less symbolic truth and I don't recall any feminist critiques of the matter.

Odd Conversations CC has had recently

Making a restaurant reservation over the phone

CC: Hi, I'd like to make a reservation?

Maitre'd: For how many?

CC: Eleven

Maitre'd: All right, for when?

CC: Seven o'clock Saturday night.

Maitre'd: I'm sorry, we don't make reservations for Saturday night.

CC: Oh?

Maitre'd: But I'm sure we will be able to seat your party when you arrive.

CC: Umm... I'm a little concerned. Since my party is so large, could you possibly set aside some tables for us so when we arrive at seven we won't have to wait?

Maitre'd: Certainly. I can do that.

CC: Wonderful!


At the church bazaar.

Guy: What's this?

Me: It's a footbath. You put warm water in it and some epsom salts and then you plug it in and it makes bubbles and stuff. You put your feet in it and it's really comforatable. I gave my dad one two Christmases ago.

Guy: Would your Dad like another one?

Me: I don't think that's necessary. After all, he only has two feet.


CC

Read about Tiger Woods in spite of myself

Saw that his wife, Elin, called the mistress. When the mistress picked up and asked who it was, Elin said "You know who it is. You're fucking my husband."

I, for one, would have responded "I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more specific."

CC
who also notes that Elin is staying with Tiger, but has insisted that the prenup be revised. I like this woman.