My friend Jefferson Pierce has put together a site featuring his labor artwork. Check it out at http://pierce-artwork.blogspot.com/.

This spring marks the five year anniversaries of the Chicago Couriers Union and the Starbucks Workers Union. I have been privileged to be involved on some level (the CCU rather heavily and the SWU on the lighter side) in organizing with these unions. It is wonderful that five years in they are still both going strong. I hope that they will continue to fight for and inspire working people for years to come.

I am doing a little reading on the subject of the emergent church right now. One of things I stumbled across through the magic of Google is Scot McKnight’s 2007 article Five Streams of the Emerging Church in Christianity Today. In the article McKnight identifies five major themes inherent in much of the emerging church world. Generally McKnight believes that emergent churches are prophetic, post-modern, praxis-oriented, post-evangelical and political. Reading his descriptions of each of these themes I was struck by how much the emergent church movement, as he describes it, has in common with Unitarian Universalism. Let me briefly compare, contrast and expand on each of the themes.

Prophetic

McKnight describes the emergent church movement as using "prophetic rhetoric." He writes:

The emerging movement is consciously and deliberately provocative. Emerging Christians believe the church needs to change, and they are beginning to live as if that change had already occurred.

I think that some Unitarian Universalists use prophetic rhetoric in this manner and I know that others don’t. Being largely post-Christian I suspect that it would be difficult to claim that most Unitarian Universalists use prophetic rhetoric. On the other hand, I think that the recent work on public witness that Bill Sinkford has engaged in on behalf of the Association is grounded in a sense of Unitarian Universalism connection to the prophetic religious tradition.

Post-Modern

Postmodernity, as McKnight defines, is recognizing "the collapse of inherited metanarratives (overarching explanations of life) like those of science or Marxism." He suggests that pastors in the emergent church movement relate to postmodernity in one of three ways. They "minister to postmoderns, others with postmoderns, and still others as postmoderns."

Those who minister to postmoderns see "postmoderns as trapped in moral relativism and epistemological bankruptcy out of which they must be rescued." Those who minister with postmoderns "they live with, work with, and converse with postmoderns, accepting their postmodernity as a fact of life in our world. Such Christians view postmodernity as a present condition into which we are called to proclaim and live out the gospel." According to McKnight, "The vast majority of emerging Christians and churches fit these first two categories. They don’t deny truth, they don’t deny that Jesus Christ is truth, and they don’t deny the Bible is truth."

It is the final group that "attracts all the attention." Emergent Christians who "minister as postmoderns…embrace the idea that we cannot know absolute truth, or, at least, that we cannot know truth absolutely. They speak of the end of metanarratives and the importance of social location in shaping one’s view of truth." As one of them, LeRon Shults, write:

From a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.

It seems to me that contemporary Unitarian Universalism shares a great deal in common with this third perspective. As a community we recognize that each individual has his or her own truth. In general, we reject creeds because we realize that since religious truth is a largely a matter of personal experience it is difficult, if not impossible, for one community or one individual write a statement of belief that adequately sums up truth. Additionally, there a number of Unitarian Universalists who are suspicious of our human ability to describe or name God. Mark Belletini writes and talks eloquently about this.

Praxis-oriented

McKnight argues that more than anything else the emergent church movement is characterized by its emphasis on "praxis–how the faith is lived out." He describes how this emphasis "can be seen in its worship, its concern with orthopraxy, and its missional orientation." According to McKnight, this means that the emergent church movement is open to experimentation in worship, encourages its members to live their beliefs and calls for its participants to engage in "the redemptive work of God in this world."

Certainly all three of these elements can be found in pockets of the Unitarian Universalist movement. For example, youth and young adult worship as well as the worship of some group like UU pagans can be highly experimental and experiential. Most Unitarian Universalists I know try to live out their beliefs and certainly the prophetic members of our movement call us to engage in social justice work. None of these elements are spread universally throughout our movement. However, they can be found in many of our congregations and communities.

Post-evangelical

By this McKnight means that the "emerging movement is a protest against much of evangelicalism as currently practiced." Theologically, emergent Christians differ from evangelicals in two primary ways. They are "suspicious of systematic theology" and they are ambivalent about who is inside and who is outside of their movement. According to Mcknight, this group believes that what "really matters is orthopraxy and that it doesn’t matter which religion one belongs to, as long as one loves God and one’s neighbor as one’s self."

Again, I see some parallels to Unitarian Universalism here. Certainly there are a lot of Unitarian Universalists who are deeply suspicious of systematic theology. Indeed, other than Thandeka I would be hard pressed to name a recent Unitarian, Universalist or Unitarian Universalist theologian who has paid that much attention to systematic theology. This might, in part, reflect the fact that a lot Unitarian Universalists are post-Christian. However, I can’t even name a 20th century Unitarian, Universalist or Unitarian Universalist theologian who has made a serious effort at writing a systematic theology.

The second point is something that is true for most, if not all, Unitarian Universalists. There is certainly a widespread sentiment amongst us that there are good people to found throughout the world’s cultures and religious traditions.

Political

The fifth stream feeding into the emergent church movement is politics. Here McKnight simply notes that many participants in the emergent church movement "lean left in politics." The same, of course, can be said for most Unitarian Universalists.

In sum, I think that there are sum interesting parallels between contemporary Unitarian Universalism and the emergent church movement. Our fundamental differences, of course, should not be over looked. They are evangelical Christians and we are not. However, to the growth and success that some emerging congregations have met with suggests to that Unitarian Universalists have something to learn from the emergent church movement and that the lessons that movement provides us with might offer us some opportunities for growth.

I submitted the following letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer today:

 How quickly we forget. The sixth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq passed almost unnoticed. On March 19th the Plain Dealer’s front page had precisely no stories marking the advent of the war. Most other media outlets seemed to have ignored the event as well.

Even more upsetting is the extent to which the general public seems to have forgotten that people are still fighting and dying in Iraq. Every year for the past six years I have officiated some sort of religious service to mark the war’s anniversary. Each year these services have included a reading of the names of American and Iraqi war dead. Attendance at the services has fluctuated over the years. Last year’s service, the first I organized in Cleveland, drew about 80 people and coverage from two television stations. This year I expected a smaller attendance but I was shocked when not a single person showed up for the service the night of March 19th. 

Since March 19, 2003 more than 4,200 Americans and at least 100,000 Iraqis have died. In the future I pray that we do a better job of remembering them.

The latest issue of the Economist magazine has a review of the soon to-be-published book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. According to the Economist, the book’s central thesis is that social inequality is the main cause of many of society’s ills. This is a fairly classical socialist argument. What appears to make Wilkinson and Pickett’s book different is that they base their argument on a rich selection of data that documents that:

Within the rich world, where destitution is rare, countries where incomes are more evenly distributed have longer-lived citizens and lower rates of obesity, delinquency, depression and teenage pregnancy than richer countries where wealth is more concentrated. Studies of British civil servants find that senior ones enjoy better health than their immediate subordinates, who in turn do better than those further down the ladder.

There are lots of theories floating around about what makes human beings unique. Some argue that humanity is special because it is a meaning making species. Others argue that human uniqueness hinges upon our language ability or the fact that we use complicated tools. An article the Economist puts through a new theory. The article begins:

YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

I think it is an intriguing theory and suggests to me, perhaps, why the act of table fellowship and food purity laws are so important to some religious communities. 

Today I mistakenly typed the phrase Unitarian Society of Cleveland into google instead of Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland. I got a strange result. Via googlebooks I found a sentence reference to the congregation in The COINTELPRO Papers By Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Wall. It reads "Thus, the FBI targeted the entire Unitarian Society of Cleveland in 1964 because the minister and some members circulated a petition calling for the abolition of HUAC and because the church gave office space to a group the FBI did not like." 

HUAC stands for the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee. The committee was fond of calling supposed supporters of the Communist Party in front of it and accusing them of being un-American. Wikipedia has an article on HUAC if you’d like to learn more.

I have never heard of this piece of congregational history and I know nothing about it other than the one sentence in Churchill’s book. Hard to know what, if anything, Churchill’s sentence actually refers to without doing a lot more research.