Comments on: In search of a good, short UU history

By: Spirituality and Sunflowers

Spirituality and Sunflowers — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 05:13:52 +0000

[…] So I've been chewing on this one for a couple of weeks. I posted that FlUUnking History post, and my pal Chutney posted an elaboration on his blog, which can be seen here. And its on his point about "our prosetylization of the dead." I absolutely love that wording. In my New UU class, for example, we had a worksheet scavenger hunt on old famous UUs. The whole New UU class was rather pointless, and this just reiterated it. He may wonder why we're obsessed with declaring important dead people to be UUs, and actively pushing the fact, but it seems somewhat clear to me in my relative New-UUness. It seems twofold to me, neither which seem pretty to me. We want to seem more important than we really are, and we are so desperate to communicate with people outside UUism that we want to use a historical figure to explain it. Since we can't quite look to Jesus, Abraham, Mohamed, etc. […]

By: stevenR

stevenR — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:09:49 +0000

Paul:

If one wants to be a literalist: there was Unitarian Universalist before 1961! Richmond Va had an “Unitarian Universalist Association” back in the 1830s
(before it was renamed something else).

By: Paul Wilczynski

Paul Wilczynski — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:15:43 +0000

No one was a UU prior to 1961. They didn’t exist.

By: chutney

chutney — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 01:03:56 +0000

The link is fixed now (thanks!), but I’ll bet you could have guessed…

By: PeaceBang

PeaceBang — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:54:39 +0000

So who’s your first pick? The link didn’t work.

By: fouralarmfire

fouralarmfire — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:37:40 +0000

right on, chutney, sometimes it reminds me of the creepy mormon obsession with genealogy — the need to “claim” their ancestors as mormons so the ancestors can be posthumously baptized mormon and gain access to heaven.

only, in our case, we’re claiming our ancestors to “baptize” *ourselves* into a respectable history and to validate ourselves as a legitimate religion.

even though we want to pretend that we don’t believe anything.

the lack of a history is NOT what is “holding UUism down.”

By: stevenR

stevenR — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 01:22:31 +0000

the problem we have with our good small soundbite is this —
— unitarian universalism is a combination of two former Biblically based churches.
the basis was that other churches werent reading the Bible correctly –
– even starting with Joseph Priestly or Benjamin Rush (so we can have social justice, scientists and relgion all in one) — Priestly did found the first Unitarian Church in the USA –
so we got:
they burned his house in England, so this well known scientist came to the United States, and continued to mix the sacred and the scientific…..

hmm, not too good….. oh well, i guess i never got a calling to blurb writing…

and UU: a narative history

In Europe: pp 7-94
Unitarianism in the US pp 95-140
Universalism in the US pp 141-183
Unitarian Universalists p184-200

By: chutney

chutney — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 01:31:55 +0000

how can one cover century in a handful of pages?

A good writer certainly can. (A better writer than me, that is.) That we seem to have no four to six page overviews of our stories makes me think we don’t have a good standpoint for looking at it. But I’ll have to check out the narrative history. How short is it?

The thing with the folks and religions you mention is that they each have one, maybe two, first stringers. And their stories are simply and briefly told to the unitiated. Joseph Smith found the golden tablets, translated them, and led folks West. After trying a legalistic approach to religion, John Wesley’s heart was strangely warmed and he led a revival among the poor in England and America. Buddha tried finding peace in extravagance and acseticism, but found enlightenment sitting under the bodhi tree. You can give a good synopsis of each one’s story in a sentence.

But who would our lead person or two be? Emerson, Channing, Servetus, Thereau, etc. are all candidates, and so are others. It seems we want to include every little part of the story, and that’s not good story telling—it’s chronicling.

Emerson is probably the best bet. But I don’t know what his story would be. And he certainly doesn’t encapsulate the movement as a whole, but he comes closer than anyone else, or at least what he stood for.

Maybe something like this? 1) Servetus burned at the stake by Calvin. 2) Emerson. 3) Ballou. 4) Humanism. Then the counterculture/post-merger story Philocrites is helping to highlight.

By: stevenR

stevenR — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:07:00 +0000

Most of the U-U-UU histories written are for lay audiences, certainly Unitarian Universalism: A Narriative History is – it’s even way too brief – how can one cover century in a handful of pages?
Charles Howe’s Universalist history book, THE LARGER FAITH, is also for laymen.

My experience with other denominations is that they spend a lot more time with their history than we do — and have been alot more sucessful in getting their names in the national culture, Bringham Young, Joseph Smith, John Wesley, John Calvin, Buddha, Paul, Jesus, Moses….even their second string guys sometimes make it.

why do we prosetylize the dead? Cleo Hogan has a great theory on that: we’re a relgion that noone has ever heard of, and to keep us from sounding like Unification Church of Rev. Moon, we pull up the list of great U/U/UUs of the past – as to say: see we’re semi-respectable, see? see? oh course, there are better ways to be semi-respectable……