Please correct me if I’m wrong. But it appears that the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal is only making printed copies available of its report. Moreover, it is only making one copy available to each congregation. The rest of us must buy a copy of the report (link withheld) from the UUA bookstore for $14 plus shipping and handling. Oh, and we get to enjoy the UUA Bookstore’s lightning fast response speed.
So the report, "Engaging Our Theological Diversity," is supposed to address the question, "What is the unity in our theological diversity?" The mission of the COA is this:
Grounded in the living tradition of our free faith, yet charged with acting independently, the Commission on Appraisal’s mission is to provoke deep reflection, energizing and revitalizing Unitarian Universalism.
So why do I have to buy my own damn copy? Can’t they just post a PDF and/or convert it to HMTL? It would take, maybe, all of twenty minutes to do. Or send me the InDesign file and I’ll do it myself.
Oh, yeah, and it’s a freaking committee report!?!
Printed copies, in and of themselves, are fine by me. (I may want one myself.) My beef is that this info should also be freely available over the net. I won’t go into the transparency and class issues except to say that, as it stands, the COA presents itself as only needing to "energize and revitalize" GA delegates and those with $20 in their committee report budget.
Well the Report says it isn’t the end of a process, but the beginning and everybody on the Commission wants to learn–so teach ’em! I bought it because I want to stay up with what is going on, but I am also kind of living off savings and a free pdf would have been nice. My cursory reading of the report was disappointing as it appears to report the obvious. I suspect it is a decent compendium of our current “issues”, but it does not point much of a way to any creative resolutions. The biggest disappointment for me was the scant numbers of persons who bothered to engage the process–and this included a definite lack of participation by clergy. I think a much more substantive “report” could be made by taking a representative number of published sermons and doing a content analysis and jotting down what’s being suggested by this “theological” dialog between pulpit and pew. The same could be done with Church Newsletters if you want to get a sense of the current praxis within the congregations.
Cheerfully, Roger Kuhrt
Semi-retired Minister
Tacoma, WA
[…] hat to buy instead Show me the report! I had the same response as Chutney: why isn’t the Commission on Appraisal report available online? […]
If you are truly interested in the subject (our core) it would be worth checking out the Lecture Robert Bellah gave to the UUA a few years back. I think it was the Ware Lecture. If you google Bellah his site will come up and he has included those remarks there.
Cheerfully, Roger Kuhrt
PS: I think his presentation is much for informative that the COA report!