Ray,

“Where people could make some religious sense, say, of the new collider in Geneva without resorting to gratuitous God-bashing.”

UUs certainly do lots of God-bashing, but I am at this point unable to see a connection between that and the LHC link. No doubt I am missing something - please enlighten me on this subject. The LHC is an exciting item, but I do not see the connection to theology.

Thanks and best wishes for your excellent blog

ps: speaking of UU view of the Deity, check out the latest Doug Muder article in the UU World, “Assembly of a Lesser God”.

As with all institutions that are based on membership… it’s important to keep the members tied into what’s going on and not allow the executive board become independent–or they start acting like corporate execs…

Seriously.

There are MORE people who assert that they are Christians in my fellowship (theological Xtian, in some cases, ethical Xtian in more cases) than there are who assert that they’re Buddhist. Significantly more. And with that… we have two Buddhist study/sitting groups and not any sort of Christian activity–and that’s with a statement from a (then) board president that the board is supportive of essentially any theological interest group that wants time and space–with “Bible study group” being a specific example offered.

Is it that over a quarter of the congregants feel that they’d be looked at funny? Heck, the bridge players get looked at funny by some–but they organize and play.

The UUA can’t make this happen.

Someone COULD write up and make available one (or more) programs for UU Bible Study. It’s not like there aren’t any UU Christian clergy who could help make it happen.

I am disappointed that the UUA doesn’t put more effort into more teaching and worship resources devoted to “authentic” Unitarianism and Universalism for those churches that want them. Such resources can’t be found anywhere else, and without that kind of support, it’s difficult for individual churches to maintain their traditions.

Touchy-feely washed in with the era of the mergerconsolidation. It was mistaken by some/many as ours because we were in the midst of trying to figure out what the new thing with two Us was. Argumentative belongs to both sides, and goes way back.

I believe that engagement with Iran is the right thing to do, but that this particular mode of engagement was not effective. I think a more effective model has been the grass-roots effort by groups of Quakers and Mennonites who spend 3 months to a year studying Islam in the holy city of Qom, and who as part of this exchange-student experience organize inter-faith dialogs with Islamic scholars and their students. These efforts lack the glamor of a UN meeting with a foreign head of state, but they engage groups of fairly mundane but religiously engaged citizens, across cultures.

And this was a bad decision, unfortunate for many reasons.

For all practical purposes, sadly, it becomes a coda to his tenure.

Sad…

And the cheap shot against Bush was sad.

But Sinkford’s Moral Failure, for which he should resign as Prez, was failing to speak the names of fellow religous and political leaders held in Ahmadinejad’s prisons.

That’s an unforgiveable thing for him to have done. Sinkford could have helped Liberal’s in Iran and failed miserably. He made their fate worse.

We need to know how the candidates for Sinkford’s job stand on this one too. We can’t have another UUA Prez like him especiallly when UUA is asking for a blank check to speak on behalf of all UU’s on War and Peace with a peacemaking statement that is almost certain to be open to a 100 and 1 intrepretations (if it’s anything like the draft my Church’s SJ committee has written).

This kind of behavior is what led to the demise of most mutual banks in most states (except Mass.), and to changes in the regulations governing mutual banks and their tax status. Mutual banks were a legal predecessor to the credit unions, and based their business model off the example of mutual insurance companies (where the company was a non-profit owned by policy holders). When the mutual banks grew too large and aggresive, they turned their eyes away from economic empowerment of their members, and towards ambitious programs of expanding their market share. Today I see very large credit unions duplicating this pattern.

I’ve long thought that Six was universalist–a seriously f’ed-up universalist, but nevertheless….