Daily Archives: August 3, 2008

Faith and Spirituality

This Whole Enterprise Needs A Rethink

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71  bar rises 29.77  0mph N dew-point 64 sunrise 6:02  sunset 8:37  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon
This website + $100, 000 will get you your very own jetpack.  Advertising says it can fly for  30 minutes.  Almost enough for the commute, but how will you refuel? 

When I quit writing at 5:30 pm today, I had four single-spaced pages done and I had not gotten off the east coast in this story of the move west.  This may be a two-part presentation.  As I said below, for me, context is everything.  Nothing happens without relationships.  In this case understanding the planting of liberal religion in Minnesota requires an understanding of interreligious conflict in the midterm past:  the Reformation and the long term past: say, Abram and the voice of YHWH facing down the Gods of Chaldea.  The near term past, the history of colonial America, the young United States and the westward expansion have their own threads to weave in this story.  It may be that the mid and long term past will require one Sunday and the near term a second.  Not sure yet.

As I wrote the above, I kept thinking about Buddhism in which the now is everything.  We are not, in Buddhist thought, the same self from moment to moment so how arrogant is it to lay out patterns over millennia?  Maybe a lot, but it is a contradiction I’m willing to risk.  If I can talk about it, this narrative has some meaning, even if, in the end, the now is all that matters.

My hope is that by the end of this work I will be able to illustrate five things.  1.  The conflict of orthodoxy and heterdoxy goes back at least as far as Abraham in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.   2.  The expansion of liberal religion had as much, if not more, to do with religious freedom guaranteed by the first amendment and spawned directly by the Reformation than it has to do with liberal religious thought in Europe.  3.  The westward expansion of liberal religion created a nurturing climate for its increasing radicalization, partly due to accidents of history and partly to the nature of the frontier.  4. Liberal religion in the west has a long and distinguished record of support for heresy.  5.  In the end all the conflict outlined in this presentation has at its roots the question of religious authority.

I have ended up in an odd place.  In the late 19th and early 20th century liberal religion in the west took risks, challenged both religious and cultural norms, but it feels to me like the latter part of the 20th and the early part of the 21st find us in trough.  Our faith does not quicken hearts, nor does it create much change.  It seems to me we fail on both important measures of a faith tradition, i.e. the ability to nurture the inner life and the power to affect change in the culture.  This is a finger of blame not extended from my hand or wagging in shame, but curved back at me and the leadership of this generation that I represent.

This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, World History, Writing

Onion Drying, the Next Stage

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72  bar steady 29.81 1mph NE dew-point 65  sunrise 6:00  sunset 8:37  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

A writing day so far.  I have started writing Heresy Moves West.  It will take a bit longer than I imagined, maybe quite a bit, because I have this propensity to place things in context, deep context.  In this case for example I have established the Protestant Reformation as the sine qua non of the development of Unitarianism and its westward expansion, at least I have established that to my content.   Not too much further along I intend to swing back to Abraham who listened to YHWH and left his Canaanite Gods for monotheism.  Since you can not just go back into the past and then jump into the present, the intervening time takes a paragraph or two (at least) to describe, and all this in service of the actual topic, the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota.

Why do I do this?  Sheer cussedness in part.  Simplistic explanations that ignore real historical paths irritate me.  I do not like to emulate them.  That means rooting my thesis about U-U expansion in Minnesota in the soils from which it sprang.  They have lots of topsoil, gathered from diverse times and places.  The process is sort of like archaeology.  In order to explain the top, most recent layer of artifacts requires continuing to dig down, down, down until the physical culture either stops or changes to something completely different.

Anyhow, all this means I’ll be writing for some time, maybe as long as 2 or 3 days.  That eats into posting time.  So, for the next few days it might be a little sparse here.  Might not.

In the past week AncienTrails had 2100 unique visits, about 300 a day.  You are not alone.

Kate and I carried the old sliding door screen into the front shed.  We had to take all the onions off it to get it inside, then move the onions back on it.  In addition I had to remove the remaining stalks so my hands smell like onions.  The onions must remain in the shed for two to three weeks, then they will go in tangerine crates.  Once in the crates the onions will await their turn in the kitchen on an old book shelf in the furnace room.  The garlic hangs not far from their future home.

When dead heading the last of the Lilium today, I found one that had bulbils.  These form at the junction between stalk and leaf.  They are another means of propagating lilies.  I will cut this plant down and use the bulbils inside to create stock for next spring.