Quest Blog
Eleanor Rigby’s Selfie
2014-07-10 We learned from the Beatles that Eleanor Rigby “keeps her face in a jar by the door.” Clearly the Fab Four thought that was not a good thing to do. But what were they critiquing? Was it where Eleanor kept her face? Or that she had a “face to meet the faces that we…
Read MoreDay Eight
2014-05-26 DAY EIGHT
Read MoreMartian Sleeper Cells and A-Model Tism
2014-07-17 Since I’m both a minister and a humanist, I’m asked—often in rather shocked terms—if I am an atheist. Many humanists use that label as a way to use a description that is positive rather than negative. After all, being labeled an a-theist implies that theism is somehow normative and that being outside that norm…
Read MoreWhat is a “weekend,” exactly?
2014-05-26 “Have a nice weekend,” people say to each other in passing. Yet fewer and fewer people I know have “weekends,” anymore. Just speaking for myself, yesterday (Sunday) I had an evening meeting to facilitate, nothing major, but it still marks nine Sundays in a row I’ve worked in some way. And it’s not just…
Read MoreCircle Round for Freedom
2014-07-23 The opposite of liberal religion is not conservative religion. It is fundamentalism – the deep certainty that there is only one truth and only one way of knowing that truth. As a liberal religion, Unitarian Universalism acknowledges a plurality of possibilities; lifts up that the Dominant Culture may dominate – but that it is…
Read MoreSpiritual But Not . . . Keep Talking
2014-05-29 Literary critic Terry Eagleton said, “The din of conversation is as much meaning as we shall ever have.” I like that. On first glance, it appears to be bleak—human conversation is all the meaning there is? But imagine what human conversation has given us. Imagine the din of conversation under the porches and under…
Read MoreWhat He Deserves
2014-05-29 I’m deliberately late to the discussion of Elliot Rodgers’s homicidal spree. If you haven’t read any of the variety of excellent pieces discussing his misogyny, and how this horrific event relates to the threat of violence that hangs over every woman’s head, you should do that before you read anything more here. (Feel free…
Read MoreLeaving Blooms
2014-06-02 Last year, the rhododendron in front of our house was a sorry sight. Spindly branches and yellow leaves, a couple scraggly blooms. I half-heartedly attempted to help it out by sprinkling our used tea leaves on it (I vaguely remembered something about acidity being good for flowering plants). But by the fall, it was…
Read MoreWe’ve Come This Far…
2014-05-14 For her 75th birthday, my Granny talked my dad, her 4th born son, into driving her and my Great Aunt Dot out the see the Grand Canyon “before I die.” Once they had made the long journey from North Georgia to the Grand Canyon, Granny turned to my dad and said “you know what…
Read MoreBomb Throwers, Navel Gazers, and Goin’ All Thoreau: Doing Justice
2014-05-15 Let’s consider an extreme example, a stark instance of the decision between doing something and talking about it. The abolitionist John Brown, fed up with the endless wrangling and political maneuvering over slavery in the early Nineteenth Century, decided to take matters in his own hands. He led a group that attacked a US…
Read More