An unintended vacation from blogging

Between being away for a long weekend last week, and then coming back to a lot of work to get done in a short time, I've been offline here and also out of touch with the blogs I usually read. And look at what I've missed.

Well, I'll try to catch up sometime this week...

A short apology

I've been away and off line for several days and thus haven't been able until now to moderate comments.

I hope to be back with more to post of substance tomorrow or Wednesday. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves.

A long time ago...

...meaning back in Middle School and High School, DairyStateDad wanted to be a lawyer.

(I was telling DairyStateKid #2 this yesterday and he asked why. I said because I envisioned lawyers as helping folks who were wrongfully accused of crimes or who were harmed by others and sought justice. By which I meant product liability plaintiffs' lawyers and malpractice lawyers. OK, remember, this was the naivete of adolescence. Early adolescence.)

Then I discovered film-making and later I discovered journalism and that was the end of that. But I still have a fascination with the law and write about it when I have an opportunity. And notwithstanding the fact that I laugh at most of the jokes that people make about lawyers, I generally admire the law and people who practice it. Good thing too, given that DairyStateMom, although not a lawyer herself, works very closely with them.

But I've always felt just a little bit frustrated with the standard adversarial system of law. Winston Churchill's line about Democracy being "the worst system, except for all the others" has a ring of truth.

This post really captures exactly why.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times, Yes.

Sluggish consumer spending: Not a problem, but an opportunity.

Let's build a society where consumer goods are not the be-all and the end-all, but rather tools to enrich our relationships with one another or tools to our enjoyment of our own minds and bodies.

Thank you, RevMary...

And an acknowledgment:

1) It's easy for a white, middle-class, middle-aged guy, who's basically got all he and his family needs need and now just has to pay for it, to embrace scaling back.

2) For the entire society to embrace this ethic will be deeply, deeply challenging.

The Council of Nicaea: Toady to Constantine, or something more subtle?

For Progressive Christians, Constantine is a favorite target, someone to blame for leading Christianity astray and shifting it from a radically egalitarian religious insurgency to an arm of the empire against which it initially represented a soft rebellion. Those of us who find the Nicene Creed too constricting or simply not credible,* notwithstanding our own Christian belief (however defined), also can blame him for that.

In Saving Paradise, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker recount the story behind the Council of Nicaea at which the creed was composed. At first, it looks like we're going to get a simple confirmation of the anti-Nicene position, as they point out that it was written by a small minority of Christian bishops then practicing:

"Although [Constantine] invited fifteen hundred bishops to his summer palace in Nicaea, Anatolia, in 325, all expenses paid, only about 300 attended..." (page 107).

(Constantine, they note, was a convert to Christianity but had not actually been baptized, and would not be until near the end of his life.)

Yet are things ever as simple as they seem? Brock and Parker observe that even if the Council represented a rump group of bishops, the creed they wrote made a subversive assertion. In claiming that Christ was of the same substance as God, rather than subordinate, they were expressly denying that the emperor -- who like his predecessors was referred to as the "son of God" -- was on a par with Christ. (For more on how calling Jesus the Son of God was a direct challenge to imperial claims, see God and Empire by John Dominic Crossan.)

"In affirming that Christ had this highest possible status [ie: 'being of one substance with the Father'], they gave themselves and every baptized Christian who shared in Christ's divinity greater spiritual power than the unbaptized emperor Constantine."

So does that mean that those who disagreed with that wording were the Constantine toadies? Not necessarily. Arius, who was on the losing side of the substance/subordinate quarrel,

"regarded Jesus as divine, but saw him as a 'creature' descended from God, not as a creator alongside God. He held to a strong monotheism...For the Arians, the equality of Jesus with God would have capitulated to Roman polytheistic values and compromised the one supreme God" (page 109).

* Another time I'll explain the role that both the Nicene and its simplified version, the Apostle's Creed, had in leading me away from the Episcopal Church in which I was baptized and later confirmed. But for now I'll share the way a pastor at DairyStateMom's church, quoting another, reconciles the words of the creed with the rationalist, skeptical worldview of 21st century prospective members: "Think of it as poetry, not geometry."

"The arc of the universe is long...

...but it bends towards justice."

I've been comforting myself in these challenging times with that aphorism made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr., who in turn borrowed it from our UU "saint" Theodore Parker. This post at Salon, on the eve of last January's inauguration, may be months old, but for me it's a breath of fresh air right now.

Can we all get along? Part 1

For the last several days I've been trying to draft, in my head, something about polarization. Mostly I've been thinking about it in the context of politics and policy, but this morning its relevance to Unitarian Universalism was brought home to me by some others.

I still want to write about this, but won't be able to for a few days, I suspect. So here are some thoughts on the topic from Lizard Eater and from Paul Oakley.

Update: One more post that ties into this subject.