PeaceBang

Gee, Sounds Like a Few Ministers I Know

Culinary school students aren’t the only ones who rack up a whole lot of debt and can’t find high paying jobs, kids.

I’ll be paying back my div school loans until I’m 50, myself, and I’m one of the lucky ones with a full-time parish position in a financially secure church.

Like my mother and father always said, “Make sure you have a back-up!”

One More Paper

It’s hard to believe I only have one more class (maybe two?) to go in my doctoral program. After that comes the sabbatical (I hope) and my project. Whoo. In this semester, I have one more paper to write and I really need to get it done tomorrow.

It’s one of those papers that would be really enjoyable as a seminar discussion but that’s going to feel like pulling teeth to write in an academically appropriate manner.

I’ve been reading lots of books on the subject but a lot of what I’m learning from them falls under the category of “yeah, I knew that, but you’re saying it in a fancy, organized way so I guess you’re the big expert.”

The thing is, I just don’t like theory. I kind of hate it, in fact. I hated it when I was in college studying to be a high school teacher and we had to study pedagogy and administrative theory and that sort of thing, and I just wanted to stick pins in my eyes. To me, there is nothing interesting or even very useful about studying how to do something that you’ve just got to get in there and DO and then go back and talk about and dissect. Case studies in books bore me to tears. Case studies presented by people I KNOW — well, that’s an entirely different story. When it’s real, I’m very invested. When it’s hypothetical, it’s so hard to engage.

Also, I’m just plain into content. I’m not so inspired by books about the best way to train ministers. I’m very inspired, however, by books by ministers that say, “Here’s what I know and here’s how I learned it.” I’m even more inspired by groups of ministers sitting around hashing through issues together, and I’ve loved my seminar this semester for that reason. The best thing about this degree program is getting to think about what ministry is as I’m doing it. I can’t say that I feel like I’m becoming some great high-level scholar of ministry, though. If anyone calls me “The Rev. Dr.” when this is all over I’m going to have to pinch them. It seems so ridiculous. Maybe after I sweat it out through my project I’ll feel differently and go walking around saying, “Please… it’s The Reverend DOCTOR Weinstein.” And then you can pinch me.

Well anyway, I’ll muddle through. I feel like the Holy Spirit finally, finally bopped me on the head this morning and gave me a hook, and I’m grateful as anything for that, because man, was I at a loss for a subject for a long time.

The question is, what do I do after I’m done with the doctoral program? Because I’m basically addicted to taking classes and feel very shriveled up and dry when I don’t engage in some kind of organized study on a regular basis. Also, I’m terrible at researching and studying on my own in any systematic fashion, so there’s no hope there. At any given time, I have six books going on completely different subjects, and I have terrible retention of material. Hopeless.

Let’s Try This Again: For the Ermengarde-Deprived

It seems that the photos from my computer always download as too large, resulting in the SCARY HUGE CAT phenomenon that startled so many of you.

So now I’m going through Flickr again, which consistently gives me the option to save photos in various sizes before publishing them on the blog. I’m not sure why WordPress, which has this handy-dandy feature that allows us to pop photos right in, isn’t allowing me to edit the photos into smaller size before posting them.

Anyway, here’s my little feline psych nurse who actually petted me on the back through a night of very restless sleep.

Unitarian Universalist Response To the Militant Atheist Movement

It seems almost daily that I see some big article on the “missionary atheist” movement like this one in the Wall Street Journal.

Reading this sort of thing, I think that Unitarian Universalists are — or should be –in a perfect position to speak to the possibility of reverent skepticism and the celebration of critical engagement in the discerning of religious truths. We’re uniquely poised to speak of our experience that religion is not a system of doctrines, but a way of being together in the search for truth and meaning.

Many UUs — especially Christian holy rollers like myself– stand in the particularly head-smackingly frustrating position of being equally irritated by the excesses of the fundamentalist right and of the atheistic far left.

But we have had a long history of strong atheistic involvement in our religious communities– people who can say with sincere conviction that one can be a non-believer and still benefit greatly from full membership and participation in church life. Their voices need to be heard, as the media features more and more stories on those who are so angry at religion that they’re actually joining organizations (gasp!) that mobilize against it.

In my sermon today, I said,

The Church is regarded by a good number of intelligent people as an entirely archaic institution, a nasty, stubborn old man wrapped in an afghan and coughing out his last days, and good riddance.

(I just had to share that, ’cause I think it’s a good line!)

Stephen Colbert did a brilliant Word Of the Day segment on the inevitable ends of the militant atheist organizations: passing the plate to support the effort, big, special hats for the leaders so that they can be more easily identified (showing a photo of Richard Dawkins or another famous atheist with a mitre on his head), and so on. It was a funny commentary on the way history tends to morph radicalism into traditionalism despite the radicals’ best efforts to stay something entirely set apart.

Again, where are our prominent Unitarian Universalist theologians to make statements on this issue? Should ministers be doing it? How? And if we try to, will we be stymied by the inevitable complaints that we are Not Allowed To Speak For All UUs? Unitarian Universalists are perfectly poised to emerge at this moment to write articles and editorials in praise of postmodernist religion — and to evangelize for our own faith tradition– but we’re too busy fighting amongst ourselves about how often one may invoke God in a worship service — or which theological or identity subgroup among us is more oppressed — to bother, or to risk it.

Perhaps if we stopped our incessant warring over permissible language and ideology and recognized that we have a gem of a tradition to which millions of seekers might be drawn if they only knew where to find us, we could make a contribution to this important cultural moment. But we need to change our approach from “We’re the snarky people who are better than all those dumbbunnies in the regular churches” to “We think we may have actually figured out how to live together in religious community while abiding with serious theologically difference…we feel that we may have found a common ground where love and care can flourish in an environment of mutual support and inquiry, and we genuinely hope you will join us in this effort.”

In other words, we must re-orient ourselves from arrogance to humility. We must change our tone from one of snide superiority and rejection of what “other people think” to one that communicates our sense of awesome responsibility that we may have actually found something that could nourish millions of souls.

I read that The Atheist Manifesto is a best-seller in France, Italy and Spain and my own missionary zeal goes into high gear. Jaume, what do you say? What can we here in the USA do to help establish opportunities for Unitarian Universalist congregations or fellowships in Europe?

Learning Curve

Mi gente,
Wow.
I’ve been blogging for two years, and it’s amazing how hard it is to navigate new systems. My brain just shuts down when certain things come up, like “how do I close this window?” and “Gee, without my blogger bookmarks to click right to, how do I even get to my own site?”
I have no idea how to post photos yet, and I’m totally overwhelmed by Gmail’s helpful archiving of conversations that appear in light font up above the incoming mail. It’s hard to tell what’s going in and what’s going out, and I’m scared to delete things yet, as I seem to be deleting entire strings of conversations with one press of a button, rather than single e-mail messages.

I will be moderating comments for both blogs now (a practice I may or may not continue), and I’m still working with three MSN e-mail accounts and a verizon account (where I send most of my junk).

My plan is to ease out of MSN altogether (what a buggy and terrible browser!), start re-setting all my online business transactions through my verizon.net address, and gradually morph over to using Gmail exclusively.

However, I did float into the Apple store today in my nearby swanky mall and salivate over the i-books. My heart yearns to rejoin the world of Mac, and I may do so and sign up for a mac e-mail address. I like the fact that Mac’s software is all integrated, unlike my Dell, which is a mess of glitches and incompatability quirks, and frustrating techo-support.

Does anyone have an opinion of dot-mac?

What’s funny — or maybe not — is that the new Macs have a Blog feature that is entirely template-based and doesn’t require html knowledge. Currently, Scott Wells is busting his bachongas on my behalf getting both of my blogs onto Wordpress. Scott, my butter lamb, be assured that I won’t switch to Mac application when and if I DO return to the land of Apple, and I won’t beg you to help me if I eventually do. I’m thrilled to be starting with WordPress (Hey! I can BLOG without 17 error messages!), but that doesn’t stop me from lusting after a new Mac.

Looking at this all from the perspective of neurological wiring, it’s pretty fascinating stuff.

Agita!

Dear readers,
Thanks to the eternal patience of my dear friend Scott Wells, I can post this after about 1,000 techno misunderstandings from Clueless Moi to tell you that we’ll be up and blogging again soon.

xoxo PB

PeaceBang The Blog Is Moving!

Hi everyone,

PeaceBang the Blog is in FLUX.

With the help of my dear friend BoyInTheBands, we are moving to WordPress.

My learning curve on this stuff is as steep as it gets, so bear with me.