I don’t follow 304 blog- and news-feeds for nothing. (And if you use Google Reader and would like to share your finds with me, let me know. And then there’s Delicious, where I keep my links (rather than storing bookmarks in the browser.)

Now on for the highlights:

• Ben Myers (Faith and Theology) quotes Rowan Williams, in a way that makes him sound universalist. Worth a look at the source, and a reminder that he was a brilliant theologian before being such a disappointing Archbishop of Canterbury.
• Church Marketing Sucks lauds a church for abandoning its weekly bulletin. (But I can’t help think how generations managed with hymnals and hymn boards, plus announcements.)
• Treehugger reports how Western e-waste — ostensibly second-hand electronics — ends up dumped in Ghana, causing ecological mayhem. Another reason to carefully consider that upgrade, and to reconsider repurposing old electronics. Or at the very least to dispose of electronics through your local collection procedures, so their hazardous materials may be recovered.
• Oh, and the August 10 front page of Anglicans Online — one of the few Anglican/Episcopalian resources I can manage any more — argues for stewardship (”thrift even!”) in our nonlocal meetings. Gives us Unitarian Universalists room to think before the next round of district meetings and General Assembly.

And two blogs you should read:

1. Love libraries (librarians?) media and data? See Jessamyn West’s librarian.net.
2. Love under-appreciated design. Then Dinosaurs and Robots.

Using GnomeSword to tease out biblical citations

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

Exhibiting at General Assembly: part one, goals

Monday, July 10th, 2006

But here are a few goals an exhibitor could have, most of which have measurable outcomes.

• push people to its website
• push people to featured GA programming
• identify congregational contacts
• identify potential member contacts
• enroll or renew members
• launch a campaign or program
• distribute general literature
• distribute program-driven literature
• “interview” potential candidates for a program or committee
• be interviewed by potential members or stakeholders
• express a visual identity
• meet to leave for off-site activities (like dinners)

Tips for remembering names

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Madeira for communion?

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Exposure to extreme temperature and oxygen [in production] accounts for its stability; an opened bottle of Madeira will survive unharmed for a considerable time, up to a year.

Universalist desk reference

Thursday, July 27th, 2006

. . . The Fire and the Rose blog.

Havurot: a parallel for Christians?

Friday, July 28th, 2006

Since the 1970s, the havurah movement (havurot, plural) has created small (and not so small) communities for Jewish living, study, service and prayer.

Are all donors revealed? Whats the timeline?

It gets back to influence, and as free people we deserve to know at least who has given more than, say, $200 to either candidate for his and her campaign.

Here we have some precedents of the web log, or blog. But there’s another: the personal diary. A way to remember the day and to put on paper what the mind can loose, conflate or confuse. Diary-keeping is a Puritan spiritual discipline for this reason: it makes it possible for to review your life with as little self-deception as possible. (In practical terms, too, Hubby and I have been able to lose so much weight because we have food intake diaries. It’s a nuisance, but it also works and shows what foods we ought to be eating.)

I mention this because George Orwell’s diaries are being published in order, 70 years after the fact, beginning today. I don’t expect all my pressing Orwell questions to be answered — indeed, the first entry was about a snake found in the garden — but I like this use of the blog.

A scandal concerning Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking facility, concerning animal welfare and labor standards (including child labor) made The New York Times (”Inquiry Finds Under-Age Workers at Meat Plant“) and the wires and gave Hekhsher Tzedek a particular timeliness. (PETA and the UFCW have their own exposé sites.)

I welcome the new certification, but it is one of dozens (many local) and is dwarfed by the Circle U hechsher of the Orthodox Union, which apparently doesn’t share the expanded set of concerns. (Also Hekhsher Tzedek is Conservative; I can only imagine the intra-Jewish controversies and politics at play so I’ll comment no further.)

So what’s the import for non-Jews? There are relatively few standards — fair trade certifications, vegetarian certifications and union labels among them — by which one can measure whether something comes to market in a way the buyer thinks is ethical. Plus, some ethical standards may clash: say, local production against opportunity for persons in a developing country, or synthetic fabrics that have recycled content but which itself cannot be further recycled. Lacking standards, it easy to give up the hope of consuming ethically, or worse, be lured into thinking you’re doing your part by something that has the affect of an ethical decision, but is substantially no different than an “unethical” product. Certain brands of bottled water come to mind. I’ve come to the point where I’m more suspicious of a product if it claims to be green than if it doesn’t.

Until more certifications come into being, we can celebrate and support the ones we have. If Hekhsher Tzedek can tell me a lettuce is free of insects (a kosher issue) and came from a farm with fair labor practices, I’ll respect its authority and buy accordingly. And we can take a stronger interest in the activities of those who produce the goods we use, and share the news: the considered opinion of a thoughtful and just person may be the greatest certification of all.

Can’t get excited about any of it. I doubt I’ll watch a minute. What do you think?

In a quotation given to the Washington Post for a story in yesterday’s paper (”Unitarians Keep the Faith After Attack in Church“) we have this from UUA public relations director Janet Hay Hayes is quoted has saying:

The denomination considers itself “post-Christian,” she said. “We include the teaching of Jesus and we appreciate the wisdom of the Bible, but we don’t limit our sources of inspiration to the Christian faith.”

I’ll pass on the “the denomination considers itself” part as writer’s shorthand for something we take with quite a bit of nuance. But “post-Christian” is a theological delimiter that singles out and minimizes Christians within Unitarian Universalism. It’s not a term of pluralism but triumphalism, and has no place in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s official communications.

Good news indeed.

• the religious education blog Tensegrities (which I read) by Luther Seminary professor Mary Hess
• the blog of the senior pastor of First Baptist, Knoxville (especially worth reading)
• a Presbyterian minister elsewhere in Tennessee
• an Episcopalian priest in Detroit
• a couple of forums: [1] [2]

http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/25960934.html

I’m trying to remember if this was the church were my aunt sometimes attends. Keep solidarity in prayer and word. More later.

Later. According to WBIR, one person has died.

For myself, I’ve read, organized, managed and written on mailing lists for well more than a decade, but these days I can hardly be bothered. Most of the ones I read have dried up. The ones I’ve recently started hardly moved. It was easier when it was the only game in town.

But no more. The problem is that a lot of us still depend on them, including the generic us of Unitarian Universalists, who for our size have a menagerie of mailing lists. Which is OK — no technology really dies, even cassette tapes and punch cards — but there are opportunities lost by not moving to something more public, interactive, selective and robust.

Thoughts?

I’m terribly fond of a blog — UbuntuCat — described as “Random musings from the radical feminist Christian antiracist left - some having to do with Ubuntu.” If you like this blog, you might like it, especially if your interest is more technological.

I saw a good article a little while back on Blue Avocado, a newish site about nonprofit management sponsored by nonprofit insurers, which answers some basic questions about the professions but — better yet — ask aloud some questions I would want answered if getting bids for insurance. Indeed, the article’s questions would easily morph into a worksheet, which wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

“What should boards know about insurance brokers?“

Distracted enough, on my part, to start fiddling with my long-neglected UniversalistChurch.net site. It hasn’t been what I hoped, and an increasing number of texts available at Google Books means I need to find a better purpose for it. But until then, a lighter and easier content management system in the form of my favorite workhorse, WordPress.

UniversalistChurch.net

The size and diversity of the United States, plus wildly different concepts behind how succeeding generations of housing were built, means there’s no single solution to the emerging fuel and transportation crisis. Urban-style bus systems won’t work in the suburbs (though there are alternatives). Not everyone can telecommute. There’s not enough biomass to convert fuel systems away from petroleum, and so on.

H.R. 6495 proposes a number of fixes, including increasing the limit for transportation fringe benefit; if you get SmarTrip in D.C., you know the limit is $115 a month; this would be raised to $200. There’s also a proposed $400 telework technology tax credit, a bicycle tax credit, consideration given to transportation in Section 8 housing programs, transit-oriented mortgages support, encouragement of pay-as-you-go car insurance, and expanded funds for promoting transit. Lots of options to help people get out of — or avoid the need for — single-occupancy cars.

Again, call your rep or your rep’s legislative assistant and show your support. It’s a far better option than what Ms. Theologian’s rep is considering.

It’s pretty clear the fine folk at Google have their sights on Microsoft, or really any operating system. Why have anything as pedestrian as software on your own computer if you can have access to software on a Google server? The future, they they say (or hope) is “in the cloud.”

They’ve moved long past searching. You can manage your email, maps, news feeds, weather information, maps, social networks, mailing lists, web sites, library, videos and other forms of information. They also support free and open source software development. It’s really amazing. (Perhaps a bit too much; I’m already planning for a post-Google life and more about non-Google options later.)

Through Google Docs, you can use a word processor and spreadsheet online, and work collaboratively. (I can’t think of an easier way for a national committee to draft a document, say.) But it isn’t really a replacement for a proper office productivity suite. (As you know, I promote OpenOffice.org if you need one.)

Now, Google Docs users can add one of hundreds of templates to make business cards, letter head, calendars, newsletters, workflow tools and slide presentations (”Powerpoints”). And you can tailor them to fit. I’m excited to try.

For details and other new features, see what’s new.

We can leave the small club of nations — like Sudan and Iran — that think this kind of policy makes sense. I’ll leave the final word with conservative blogger and D.C. resident — who is a British national and HIV-positive — Andrew Sullivan, who obviously has more than a philosophic interest in this development: “The HIV Travel Ban Is Repealed.”

The aspects of Universalism and Unitarianism that inform my religious life are Christian and my Christian faith is distinguished by Universalism (and to a lesser degree, the ethos of Unitarianism.) If you’ve read my blog much, you’ve gathered that. Yes, of course, I know that most Unitarian Universalist aren’t Christian and perhaps don’t want to be. But if so many people are pining for the hundreds of thousands of “lost” Unitarian Universalists that the recent Pew study suggests live in the United States — of which we know almost nothing — then who’s to say that there’s not a significant corpus of silent and unknown Unitarian and Universalist Christians out there, perhaps even a majority? Or more to the point, I’m hacked off that it’s acceptable to verbally minimize the import of Unitarian and Universalist Christians and not expect pushback.

Which brings me back the all-to-familiar refrain, following by Fred L. Hammond, the eponymous author of A Unitarian Universalist Minister in Mississippi, who wrote

If we see ourselves as a denomination that means that we are a denomination of a specific faith tradition such as Christianity. Yet, we no longer identify as a Christian faith. We may have people who honor their Christian heritage and identify as Christian but Unitarian Universalism is not a Christian faith.

I think this is fundamentally an error, and he’s only the most recent — and far from the most grating — to make it. Rather, it is that the Unitarian Universalist Association is not a Christian organization. But the UUA and Unitarian Universalism are not the same thing.

The Unitarian Universalist Association is essentially a service and coordinating body, not an ecclesiastical organization. Consider this: if the UUA Board of Trustees — even the General Assembly itself — adopted a resolution which defined what a Unitarian Universalist is, how would we collectively act? I suspect there’d be howling from the rooftops. And before the howling, quick calls from many quarters that their particular constituencies not be excluded. Basic questions of membership and leadership are invested in the congregation and that’s detailed in the UUA bylaws. Doctrinal teaching, too? A particular church can make that call; the UUA can’t. (Which, for instance, is why I flinch when the president of the UUA gets deliberately “pastoral.” Bill Sinkford isn’t my pastor.)

But informally, because it has had the coordinating power and bridged congregations, ministers, schools and other institutions including the independent/cast-off affiliates, the UUA has had more power to shape congregational internal identity than it could ever hope to acquire. That’s going to change. The promise of distributed social networks — welcome to this blog! — and a deliberate constriction of role by the UUA means that the constellation of Unitarian Universalism is going to get bigger.

Even if we weren’t liberal, and generally comfortable with pluralism, we would still have to describe ourselves — inasmuch as that’s possible — in a plural way. If someone asks, we’ll have to continue to hedge and give caveats and realize that the dreaded “elevator speech” can’t mean anything more than a dictionary definition or a personal testimony. In other words, I don’t expect to say you’re a Christian if you’re not, and I demand you not write me out because you prefer to paint in broad strokes.

Both of these verities have changed, and if you’ve missed the large and growing collection of Universalist Quotes of the Day at Transient and Permanent, you’ve been missing a treat.

“Introducing the Linux user interface” (July 8, 2008)

Good timing, too: Canonical, the for-profit business behind Ubuntu Linux, has announced a partnership with a software distributor to put boxed copies of the operating system in Best Buy stores. For about $20, you get the disk and manual. Admittedly, you could get the software for free online and there’s plenty of online documentation, but for a lot of people, something in a box with a manual is going to see more real. (I’m only a little worried that the low price-point is going to make some people suspicious of the quality.)