• Tag Archives liberal II

  • A Rite of Spring

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                    Full Awakening Moon

    Liberal II:  The Present is now on the website.  Executive summary:  We live in a world dominated by liberal tendencies and that are, therefore, best understood and managed by a self-consciously liberal politics and faith.

    Let the games begin.  The rite of spring has struck 7 Oaks.  We have received the breathless call:  One of your dogs is out!  Rigel.  Again.  Her more substantial sister, Vega did not follow her.  Kate went out in the truck to hunt her down while I walked the perimeter.  Again.

    A circumstance I have hoped to avoid has come to  pass.  Rigel had dug herself out underneath the fence.  Denied the opportunity to belly over the chain link she has now decided to burrow out under the bottom.  This presents its own problems.  Electric fencing is more difficult close to the ground because weeds will grow up and short it out.  I guess the only answer this time is wiring boards to the bottom of the chain link, something I’ve done around much of the other 1/4 mile of fence, but not the part that Rigel chose for her daring, WWII attempt.

    I know she loves us, but like many star-crossed tails, she has the wander lust.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • A Light Week Ahead

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

    Out the door to the grocery store.  It must be Saturday.  Finished revising the presentation for tomorrow morning and I’ll post it later today.

    Kate’s off at work, a now unusual Saturday for her.  She’s begun experiencing the old aches and pains, the ones from before the surgery that were brought on by too much physical effort over too long a time.  The good news is that when she slows down the aches and pains do, too.

    I have a quiet week coming up. No legcom meeting since the Legislature is in recess and no tours on Friday.  I do have a night meeting on Monday with the Sierra Club, something called strategic communications, whatever that is.  I’ll find out.  The night after that I start a three evening course on healthy eating taught by Brenda Langston, former owner of Cafe Brenda.  This is yet another stab at the great goal of eating only as many calories as I need.  I’m looking forward to it.

    The lighter week means I’ll have time to get in some work outside like cleaning up the yard outside the orchard and the vegetable garden.  It has a plethora of sticks, plastic objects, wire, fence posts that have been moved around over the course of the late fall, winter and early spring by Rigel and Vega.  They remain eager and energetic, digging deep holes here and there, running, jumping, barking, having a good doggie time.  But what a mess!

    I also have to get some work done on the beehive, not a big deal but I need to check it and feed them.  Note to self:  use smoke and wear bee suit.  I also need to get the old machine shed completely out and prepped for its conversion to a honey house.  All that can happen while we wait for planting season to begin.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Bees Dogs Faith and Spirituality Garden 📎and tagged

  • Liberal II

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

    A writing day.  I put in several hours in a row on Liberal II:  The Present.  I was going to include the future, but in the end it took all I had to finish with the present.  The story, the present, is a difficult one to tell to liberal audiences like Groveland UU because the reality is that liberalism is victorious.  We live in a modern world that has liberal ideas as commonplace beliefs:  individual liberty, equality, the rule of law, government by the people, an openness to change, a market economy.  When I finish editing Liberal II, I’ll post it, but the hard to convey message is that more folks are not Unitarian because the worldview we embrace is widely shared.  Strange, huh?

    I also worked a bit on Latin.  During this time Kate got outside and pruned the fruit trees in our young orchard.  She’s in charge of pruning and assembling woodenware, so I went out later in the day and complimented her on her work.  She did Latin in the morning.

    I love these kind of days where a focused task gets completed.

    After I finish the first draft of Liberal II, I also took on trying to get my networked computer in the study to share a printer with the other computers, like a nice computer should.  It took a while, but I got them all clicking together. Felt like a victory to me.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Garden 📎and tagged

  • Working In the Head

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

    A day with my head in the books, The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe, for the most part.  I’ve also reviewed notes from my first research for Liberal I:  roots and branches.  My goal in liberal II is to tease out the social and inner context in which liberalism makes a difference, focused this time more on the inner life of the person in the liberal faith tradition and the political liberal in the outside world.  In addition I want to say a few words about the future of the liberal idea as modernity warps and changes, yet remains, in its social dynamics, much the same.

    Let me open that up just a bit.  Alan Wolfe makes the point that liberalism has been and is the perfect vehicle for managing modernism, but that modernism itself created the world in which liberal ideas can flourish.  Modernism grew from the enlightenment emphasis on reason pushed into the political arena first by the American and then the French Revolutions.  Their mutual synergy with the Industrial Revolution created a political climate in which different political and social concepts had to sort out their differences.  Liberal democracy, of the sort enshrined in the American constitution and somewhat later changes in Europe and Great Britain, was and is the best vehicle for doing so. Liberal procedural law takes into account differences by its very design.  Consider how an authoritarian regime would handle substantial differences in citizen’s beliefs.

    The same holds true for civil societies with multiple strains of religious belief.  In this case, too, the liberal temperament’s willingness to be flexible, to change and adapt has the best hope of creating a culture in which differences breed debate and discussion rather than suppression and violence.

    Technological and scientific advances also create turmoil in the culture as does a dominant capitalist economy.  Here again the liberal core values of individual liberty, freedom and equality shave off the roughest edges of this chaotic change so a culture can sustain itself intact.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Work Humanities Politics 📎and tagged