Recently in Our theological diversity Category

I left off blogging after the death of my late spouse and partner Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley,  the old blog had come out my life with Marjorie and my ministry in Florida.  

While I discussed my transition to Pasadena in the previous blog, after Marjorie passed away, I wasn't ready to think about a new direction and emphasis for my weblog.  I am now.  

The new People So Bold! will continue to reflect a Unitarian Universalist ministers voice and his search for a theology of liberation. People So Bold! will continue to comment on the Unitarian Universalist movement, but now with special emphasize on the people of color community within Unitarian Universalism and the soul work of anti racism.   

But there will be a significant change,  the new People So Bold! will now have as its mission to support and give voice to the struggle overcome the legacy of the conquest of North America by a racist, violent, patriarchal and imperious culture.  Its point of view will be that of a Native American Indian who grew up within Unitarian Universalism and knows it well, but is acutely aware of that this, the faith tradition of my lifetime grew out of, continues to reflect, and perpetuates the system of domination that People So Bold! seeks to overcome.

Albert Schweitzer observed that each generation projects their own theological understanding onto Jesus, and he gave up the search for the historical Jesus. I respect his observation but cannot follow to his conclusion. If one respects that Jesus was a second Temple Jew who spoke in the metaphors of his time, and responded to the violence and oppressions of his time, then we can "meet Jesus" and gain some insight from his wisdom. It may not be the wisdom we would have him speak, but it is wisdom nevertheless and we can learn from him. If his culture had set up a religion that worshipped the Buddha, I suppose Schweitzer could have given up on the search for the historical Siddhārtha Gautama as well.c

Peacebang observes Unitarian Universalist ministers quote Buddhist sources a lot, I confess to doing that myself. But does that make me a Buddhist? No, It makes me a Unitarian Universalist who is quoting Buddhist sources when they help illustrate a Unitarian Universalist sermon. I have observed that Catholics quote scripture to preach Catholicism, and Baptists quote scripture and come to Baptist conclusions. The original meaning of these scriptures are not impossible to discern, but teaching the wisdom of a Second Century Jew doesn't interest Baptists or Catholics, any more than it does to the average wisdom borrowing Unitarian Universalist trying to be inclusive. We have learned to quote just about anything that helps us make the point we want to make, and we don't become Taoists, Buddhists, Jews, or even Christians by our choice of readings or sermon illustrations.


Many Unitarian Universalists share in a faith tradition that has a humanist orientation and is informed both by liberal Protestantism on the one hand and Transcendentalism on the other. This tradition has taught us to be open to the wisdom of the world's religions, but from what I observed that means retelling some stories, holding up some compatible ideas and maintaining our distance from some of the "harder" teachings of these religions. I have heard many a Buddhist story in our churches and very few mentions of hungry ghosts, and the miraculous birth narratives of the Buddha. We love the Dalai Lama but we don't want to talk about the feudal hell hole that his monks ran in Tibet.


I don't think we are vague humanists because we don't tow the American Humanist Association line. Our humanist orientation includes James Luther Adams, who reminded us that God wasn't God's name, but was our ultimate commitment nevertheless. Our humanist orientation was informed by Emerson, who insisted that we would worship something and what we are worshipping we are becoming (which this Christian humanist took to mean I should worship something enduring.) Our humanist orientation was deepened by Hartshorne and Weiman who in different ways attempted to understand God as part of the cosmos and experienced in our ordinary lives. The impact of process thinking and empirical approaches to the divine on our movement can not be underestimated, and is reflected in the World magazine and our devotional materials. Our humanist orientation includes non theistic theologians like Sharon Welch and William Jones whose contributions to our movements theologies of transformation is ongoing and profound. They both claim humanism but are hardly classical Humanists.


From my vantage point our ministers are reading these thinkers, as well as other varieties of humanist thought including existentialism, critical theory, and varieties of feminism. That none of these thinkers are part of the classical Humanist canon is more a commentary on the limits of the Humanist canonizers than the death of humanist thinking among us.

At our most recent Florida District Annual Assembly the theme speaker, Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie, and the programming were dedicated to spiritual practices. We spoke about mediation, prayer, and other disciples that develop habits of the heart that open us to transformation and the spirit. The delegates were open and curious, and engaged in the various workshops with enthusiasm.

How we have changed. It wasn't that long ago when the idea of the spiritual was controversial among us. At this meeting delegates talked about humanist spirituality as one way of being spiritual among many. How we have changed. This is Florida. Florida Unitarian Univeralism has had it virtues, but it has not been known for its openness to theological language and spirituality.

Our congregations have been listening and struggling over the last decade, not everyone is comfortable with the "language of reverence" but the discussion has liberated so many Unitarian Universalists to talk about their spiritual lives and use those words that were once "banned" as being too religious for Unitarian Universalist. We can now say at a District Assembly let us pray, and Amen. How we have changed.

Thank God Almighty free at last!

Religious liberalism arose not on the basis of abstract principles, but within a concrete social context. Unitarian Universalist church historian Conrad Wright probes how some of our principles reflected the historical conditions of the time (and place), and suggests that subsequent social changes challenge those principles. Conrad Wright writes in Walking Together:
"Liberal religion articulated a value system that derived its strength from the social arrangements made possible by the discovery of the resources of the New World. But those resources were not limitless. The infinity of the private individual was plausible enough on the shores of Walden Pond, when there was no closer than Concord Village a mile away: it is hollow rhetoric on the streets of Calcutta or in the barrios of Caracas. The progress of humankind onward and upward forever may have seemed an axiom grounded in history to James Freedman Clarke: it seems something less than that to the residents of Middletown, Pennsylvania. The principle of religious toleration was easy for Jefferson, who could not see that it did any injury to his neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no gods, but the principles of toleration takes on a sharper edge when the decisive differences are not in the realm of speculative theology, abut on the question of apartheid and what it is others should be forced, despite their opinions, to do about it."

So what is permanent and what is transient about liberal religion? Contemporary religious liberals assert that it is a religious principle to work to build a world of peace, democracy, equality and justice - we may disagree whether such a world can be attained, and just what such a world might look like, but social justice and overcoming violence and coercion have become foundational to our religious community. Our spiritual ancestors shared these values with us.

Yet Wright points out that their understandings of these principles were based on their peculiar social situation. He doesn't mention, but I will, that one particularity of that social situation of early American religious liberalism was that it rested on power, and privilege. That power and privilege was based on an accumulation of wealth that resulted from: the conquest of North America, and its peoples; the privatization of the land; the institution of slavery; and the exploitation of impoverished laborers in a rising industrial society. North America's economy today is the product of that historic accumulation.

So religious liberalism arose in a social context, and the social context was based on a history which many of us would describe as unjust, exploitative and contrary to the principles that we espouse. Our contemporary Unitarian Universalist movement exists in a social context as well, and many of us would argue that the social order in which we exist is contrary to our values, and principles. The difference between us and our spiritual ancestors may be that we are aware of the contraction, that we can understand that our religious values call upon us to transform our social situation.

The founders of religious liberalism saw the best hope for their values in their new republic, and its unfolding destiny. Today, Unitarian Universalists are much less optimistic about the wonders of an American future, than our spiritual ancestors.

One of the tasks of Unitarian Universalist theology is to articulate what is the basis for our optimism. We continue to articulate an optimistic theology and social vision. But what is the basis for that optimism. If not the republic, then have we really come to embrace a set of abstractions; such as the triumph of reason and science, the potential of human beings to do good, or love overcoming evil?

What does it mean to affirm the goal of a world community of peace and justice? And what are the means toward that end?

Gary Kowalski who serves the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Burlington, Vermont has written an important book for religious liberals, Science and the Search for God. The book provides its readers with a good introduction to relation between religion and genuine scientific inquiry, and helps its readers to make the distinction between the philosophical stance known as materialism and new findings of science. Materialism, a legacy of the ancient dualisms of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, mind and matter has become merged in the minds of many with science. But Kowalski in a popular style and with excellent illustrations argues convincingly that contemporary science has moved beyond the limits of reductionism and materialism, and introduces liberal religious thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne who have developed theological approaches that are more compatible with science as it is actually done.

But materialism continues to have its adherents. Kowalski writes:

Like some slow-growing disease, the ideology of materialism has gradually infected the scientific world-view and then popular culture, slowly but surely taking over the senses, one by one.  As defined by the dictionary, materialism is the "philosophical doctrine that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world, including thought, will and feeling can be explained in terms of matter alone."  

Materialism robs us of our vitality and saps the will to change.  And it's hard to imagine anyone crawling into such a mental straightjacket voluntarily.  Naturally, it didn't happen all at once.  The process began with the Copernican revolution as science addressed the question of where we are.    Human beings learned that they were living in a universe much larger than they supposed, but hardly one in which our kind held ay special place or privileged position.  In the nineteenth century came the Darwinian revolution,  which examined the question of how we got here.  The longstanding mystery of the origin of the species yielded to explanations based upon chance and necessity.  Finally, materialism invaded the inner world of the personality -the question of who we are-as within the twentieth century advances in genetics and molecular biology seemed to unlook the ultimate secret of the mind and consciousness itself.

Not too long ago, it was still possible to believe that each person possessed an eternal soul, a divine spark, a sacred essence. The individual was seen as a moral agent and creative force within the unfolding drama of history, but breakthroughs in genetics have seemingly reduced ingenuity and daring, heroism and sacrifice, to nothing more than the chance combinations of chromosomes.  As Francis Crick, the discover of DNA, has written, "the astonishing hypothesis is that €˜you,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your freewill, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells, and their associated molecules.?

But what is modern physics saying about matter? Kowalski continues his critique of materialism: "Ernest Rutherford , first discovered the atomic nucleas almost a hundred years ago.  When he was first asked to describe his discovery he replied to the effect that "Something - we don't know what - is doing something - we don't know how."

The bafflement among physicists that Rutherford expressed has only increased as the atom has revealed more and more of its workings, we have muons and mesons, which seem multiply geometrically, and even these subatomic particles have been analyzed and we find quarks and the quarks appear to be strings, not things at all.   Our universe rests on a firm foundation of one dimensional strings of vibrating energy."


Matter?  What matter?   The fundamental building block of all material existence, mere flashes in the microsphere.

Is it possible?  The Universe seems to be made up of nothing,  nothing but pulsating waves of energy.  How much to you weigh,  how tall are you?   Take away the empty space, and you and me would be reduced to sparks of energy no larger than grains of sand.  But wait, a grain of sand is full of energy.  Go to the beach, and get some.  There is enough energy stored in that sands atoms, to drive a city for a week.   A child's bucket full of sand if the energy could be released could power a hundred thousand automobiles for a year. 

Energy / mass / matter /stuff.

Empty space isn't what it used to be....we are now told that space is charged with cross currents of wave fields, and these field are constantly giving birth to particles,  energy taking form,  becoming what we once called matter.   And then disappearing again, in a fraction of a nanosecond.  

So much for God created the heavens and the earth,   and so much for the apocalypse, as well.   The beginning of matter happens every moment of eternity, and the end of matter as well. A different theology is needed for a universe in constant flux, neither materialist nor theist. My stance is pan-en-theist, the universe is holy, creative, and conscious of itself.

To the people of this land - as well as to many contemporaries who commit to living deliberately, and who seek to be aware of the world that has been given to us all - the world is "alive with spirit."

Some "intellectuals" would tells us that this world understanding is something they call animism,  and dismiss it as pre-modern and "superstitious."  The more mechanical and arrogant "science" that was in vogue in  the first half of the twentieth century lent authority to the imperiousness of modernist anthropologists of religion, whose own world view saw nature as an object to be manipulated, rather than the outward form of our mother earth and our father sky - that sacred realm in which we lived, and moved and had our being.

I am not in awe of "the science" of those who think of the cosmos as dead matter,  devoid of consciousness and vitality - I find that way of thinking dangerous and if my readers might indulge me  "unscientific."  Materialism as an intellectual movement has impoverished thinking and created the dangerous ideologies of the capitalism and communism.  Sometimes the materialists would have us believe that they are "naturalists."  The more materialist of the humanists are fond of that dodge.

Naturalists are those who seek a explanation of all events based on explanations drawn the processes of nature,  naturalists do not seek "supernatural" explanations.  Why did the Hurricane come?  The supernaturalist argues about a God that directs hurricanes,  a naturalist would point toward warm water causing updrafts of air, and wind currents forming convection cooling, and stirring currents.  But the naturalist is not compelled to the materialist conclusion that the earth is a mechanical system rather than a living ecology that learns and changes based on those learnings.  A naturalist is not compelled to ascend into "human only" ethics, but may assert with Gary Kowalski that animals have souls, and should not be subjected to vicious treatment nor raised for slaughter.

Edward Abbey speaks to me and for me as a cosmic mystic, pan-en-theist, religious humanist when he writes:
"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures.
The croaking thing with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. . .

How utterly rich and wild
Yet some among us have the nerve,
The insolence, the brass, the gall to whine
About the limitations of earthbound fate
And yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.

We are none of us good enough
For the world we have."

Some have argued that religious humanist perspectives necessarily descend into "anthro-centric" points of view,  incapable of self criticism directed at the hubris of modernism with its "humankind against nature" mythologies that provide the rationales for the ecological destruction that we witness.  But religious humanism is not inherently modernist, nor is religious humanism incapable of transcending the dominant culture's technocratic corporatism and imperialism.  A liberating, multicultural, anti-oppressive religious humanism that realizes that the earth does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to the earth is being born.  A religious humanism that proclaims with ancient wisdom that our earth is sacred,  we are part of nature, and we are connected intimately and passionately with the whole.

Gary Kowalski writes: "Which is More Dangerous; science or religion?"  I did a double take when a friend handed me a newspaper clipping with that headline.  It was an ad from an organization called the The Great American Think off, which posed the question as the subject for its annual Philosophy Competition.  Reading more, I learned the contestants were invited to submit opinions in the form of an essay of 750 words or less, with a monetary award and book contract promised to those with best answers.

Maybe my friend thought I might want to enter the contest.  But while the idea of a philosophy competition has a quaint appeal, this one seemed deliberately misleading.  Isn't it possible that science and religion are allies rather than antagonists?  Doesn't the real peril arise when the two are seen as stark alternatives rather tan as natural partners?  The timing of the contest, on the edge of the twenty-first century, was an alarming indication that the warfare between science and religion - a running skirmish for the past four hundred years - is still unresolved and spilling over now into a whole new millennium. 

Gary Kowalski serves our congregation in Burlington, Vermont as its minister and his most recent book Science and The Search For God argues that the antagonism between science and religion stems from an argument between bad science and bad religion,  and he writes convincingly the most recent scientific research and theory compels us "to move beyond materialism toward an understanding of the world that includes the realities of consciousness and spirit.  In the twenty-first century,  human beings have less reason than before to feel they hold a privileged or special position in the cosmos, but more cause than ever to feel connected and akin to all that is." 

Gary Kowalski provides his readers a wise and thoughtful guide to wrestling with one of religion's perennial problems, what do (we think) we know and how do we know what (we think) we know.  Don't do a book reports sermon on this book, but ponder it and it may give birth to a dozen reflections over the years.

Several weeks ago I wrote of cliché book report sermons. 

Books make good jumping of points for sermons,  even reports can help frame a sermon.  But the sermon should be more than what one has read.

I offer an example of a preacher using written material as a jumping of point, but also using personal experience and theological reflection to bring the message home.  but John Cullinan writes about  Engaging Our Theological Diversity.  But John uses stories from his personal experience to discuss his understanding of theological diversity,  check out a audio file of his sermon  How We Walk Together. 

This is no book report sermon, Preacher John speaks from his own authority! 

There is also a written manuscript.

If you think that religious humanism is an invention of dominant culture intellectuals rooted in the European enlightenment, then you might be surprised by this anthology of writings. Anthony B. Pinn has assembled a collection which includes slave narratives, selections from novels, essays, and theological analysis that shows a religious humanism that arose out struggle for liberation of African Americans in the United States, a religious humanism that is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with African American Christianity and earth centered spirituality. By these hands: A documentary history of African American Humanism is essential reading for Unitarian Universalists who seek to understand the intellectual history of the United States, and the contribution of African Americans to that history. Discover a rich, engaged religious humanism in the writings of Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, William Jones, Richard Wright and many other writers. The writings reveal a different struggle than the one usually raised by Enlightenment based "scientific humanism." The struggle for African American religious humanism is not "does God exist given science," but rather "is God an old white man." This humanism does not seek to liberate from "superstition" as much as it seeks freedom from submission to the dominant culture's God game. Reading these writers one receives the gift of a liberating theology not imported from another land, and not rooted in an alienating supernaturalism.

The publishers blurb sums the book up in this manner: "The Black church is often praised for its contribution to Black culture and politics. More recently Islam has been recognized as an important force in African American liberation. Anthony Pinn's new anthology By These Hands demonstrates the crucial, often overlooked role that Humanism has played in African American struggles for dignity, power and justice. Pinn collects the finest examples of African American Humanism and shows how it's embrace by a variety of prominent figures in African American thought and letters has served as the basis for activism and resistance to American racism and sexism."

"Pinn uncovers little known treasures of African American Literature such as The Slave Narrative of James Hay, where an abused slave decides to rely on himself, rather than God, for deliverance from the horrors of slavery, and a letter from Frederick Douglass which scandalized his religious friends by proclaiming that "One honest Abolitionist was a greater terror to slaveholders than whole acres of camp-meeting preachers shouting glory to God."

Since the publication of the Commission of Appraisal's Engaging Our Theological Diversity we have experienced a renewed conversation about what is the core of Unitarian Universalism.  The conversation has been energized by the Commissions provocative question; with so much theological diversity are we danger of imploding, exploding, splitting, or otherwise suffering adversely from our decades long celebration of theological diversity?

Jeff Wilson over at The Transient and The Permanent has answered no, he "predict[s]  that UUism will not implode, that it will not fracture into a bunch of Balkanized groups, that it will keep marching on toward a future of squabbling and coffee hours and social justice work and revelation of beauty. Because what holds us together isn't really coffee or politics or any specific religious language, it's a belief in love and freedom."  Matthew Gatheringwater began an extended discussion at Coffee House with the provocative question whether a changing Unitarian Universalism will drive some people to  leave.  He asked what is your Tipping Point? Many of the participants argued that for them, they prize Unitarian Universalist "diversity" and if it was threatened they would leave.  Since the Unitarian Universalist community consists of multiple spirituality's, and multiple theological orientations, it seems unlikely that we will become less "diverse" in the near future.

Richard Grigg has made the distinction between exclusive pluralism, and inclusive pluralism.  The United States is religiousily plural, but Grigg would point out that that is exclusive pluralism.  Each religious community is in competition with all the others, and members of a particular religious community identify with their own religious community exclusively.  While liberals Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Unitarian Universalists may function in alliances relative to the Religious Right, we recognize boundaries between say ourselves and the United Church of Christ.  But at our best Unitarian Universalists practice inclusive pluralism;  we are not like an interfaith coalition, we support each others spiritual development and members see such support as good for their congregations as a whole.  I know of many non-Christian UUs who helped to develop fellowship groups for UU Christians, and non Pagan UUs that have helped develop activities for pagans.  It is essential to our way of doing ministry that theists ministers find ways to minister to non-theists, and vice versa.

It is my contention that Unitarian Universalism is a religious movement that arose out of interaction of the humanist tradition as it [re]emerged during the Renaissance and by (heterodox) Protestants during the Reformation.  Those North Americans whom we associate with the early emergence of Unitarianism and Universalism in this country were simultaneously humanists and dissenters from orthodox Protestantism.

Peacebang put it thus way: "I think Unitarian Universalism is a Humanist religious tradition that uses readings and teachings from various world religions, and which respects and remains enthusiastic about the diversity of wisdom sources available to us. We're not inter-faith, IMHO, unless we actually are congregations of Muslims, Jews, Christians, pagans, etc."  I agree, and applaud her placing the question so starkly.  We share a religious humanist orientation, and that we manifest in a plurality of spiritual preferences.  And, while many will find this controversial, I observe that we are continue to function as a Protestant denomination.  Most of us can identify with Unitarians, Universalists and other religious liberals going back to Renaissance and Reformation, because we share in a common tradition.

We share a common framework and that framework is both humanist and Protestant.  We have allowed the word humanist to defined in a way that excludes many, if not most Unitarian Universalists.  We have allowed the conflict to be defined as "Humanist" versus UU Christian,  versus UUs who use the word God, and versus those who just love the universe and want to use poetry to describe their exuburance.  We have accepted a definition of humanism that is militantly secular and which scorns all religious language.  The result has been that in the reaction to this arrogant secularism, humanism has acquired a bad name within our movement.  Thus we have become divided over words, rather than over differences of substance.

I believe we must renew our understanding of the humanist tradition, so that god loving humanists, humanists who don't do god, Christian Humanists, Cosmic Story humanists, and "naturalistic" humanists can learn to talk to one another once again.  Because we share a core religious humanism and because most U.U.s continue to draw inspiration from our formative Protestant tradition we have been enabled to explore the wisdom of the world's religions.

We have not become an interfaith organization in the process.  While there is a small number of individual members of in many of our congregations who do not share in this core orientation, that orientation has both a history and a momentum that has prevented us from flying apart, or any of the other dire predictions that some perceive to be the consequences of our diversity.

There are social, religious, and political forces in this world that oppose the values and world view of humanism, liberalism, and Progressive Christianity, and while we are fighting with each other we may lose this world.