http://www.harvardsucks.org

Ron

(I’d quibble with City on a Hill because of it’s subsequent Americanism and because the metaphor needs some folks to not be in that city, so that it can be seen from a distance and admired. But small points.)

I just want all this in a story with a good plot! We have good symbols and metaphors (when we care to use them), but a good story is so much more compelling.

And, at last, we’ve found something that all UUs should aspire to: Fuck Texas! and Fuck Harvard! ;-)

Trusting in unbounded love, not restricted predestination.

Practicing self-culture (as Channing called it) or self-reliance (as Emerson did), which IMO are both elaborations of the earlier Puritan idea of “visible sainthood”, but without falling victim to the closely correlated tendency toward self-satisfaction (which the original Puritans would have preached strongly against).

Taking responsibility for our own ethical and educational nurturing, rather than waiting for God to do all the work needed to change us.

Serving and relieving the needs of the weakest and most oppressed among us, no matter what theological vocabulary we use.

And I might also add:

Working continually toward the fuller realization of the just society, whether we call it “Beloved Community”, the “Kingdom of God”, or the “City on a Hill”.

Continuing to search for the balance between covenanted community and personal inspiration that eluded John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson, Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Edwards, and RW Emerson and Andrews Norton.

Keeping a lid on the Harvard attitude, and learning instead, or at least in addition, to love “Boomer Sooner” (which is, of course, an adaptation of “Boola Boola“, written by Allan M. Hirsh, Yale class of 1901).

Yes, the Harvard attitude! I wish I’d thought to put it that way. And I’ll take the Red Sox Nation over the damn Yankees any day. (I’m not really a baseball fan, but when I am, I’m a Red Sox fan.)

Perhaps another way to put it is that it begins to feel like being trapped inside a Daughters of the American Revolution cocktail party—dear god, must everything go back to the Puritans! In our case, it pretty much does, but this does not give us any special virtues.

Yes, there no direct line from Roman-era heretics. We risked life and limb to be who we are, and often it didn’t work out for us. To go into alternative history mode: Who knows who we would be now if those first inklings of Uism and Uism hadn’t been crushed by the powers-that-be?

Yes, description versus prescription. And, yes, no self-flaggelation allowed. I think, now, that you and I are fundamentally in aggreement. Your write-up would make an excellent historical preface to a longer, aspirational story. What I want to ask now is who we should aspire to be. What is that story?

OTOH, if what you’re objecting to is my implication that we UUs walk around with what other New Englanders call a “Harvard attitude”, a sense of their own moral superiority that imposes on them a certain way of behaving toward the rest of the world, well, I would say that (a) yes, in fact we do, and (b) that is in fact where we got it. As the 12-steppers say, admitting that you have a problem is half the battle. Nevertheless, it is a part of who we are and always have been.

We don’t stand in a direct line from Origen or Pelagius as you suggest, though we have adopted some of their ideas. We do stand in a direct line from William Bradford, John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson, and many of the concerns that preoccupied them still preoccupy us. They signed the Mayflower Compact and built the “city on a hill”, and argued about communal versus individual discernment of truth. Show me a UU church today that does not espouse egalitarian democracy or have a core of folks who conceive of themselves as a “city on a hill” and model for the rest of the world, or does not have problems conflicts between communal and induvidual pursuits of spiritual truth, and I’ll show you an empty meetinghouse with a for-sale sign on the lawn. (Incidentally, those are broadly American, not narrowly Yankee, cultural archetypes and conflicts, but they are also in a religio-cultural sense uniquely ours.)

(BTW, whatever the New England ethos may be, it’s not a Yankee ethos. New England is Red Sox Nation. They hate the Yankees.)

I am describing why we are the way we are. You are arguing that that is not who we should aspire to be. Yes, I will agree that there are things about what our predecessors believed that we may no longer choose to uphold — certainly that has happened before in our history — but I will argue also that at some level a leopard cannot change his spots. If we can’t get comfortable with the spots we do have, all we end up doing is flaying ourselves.