Coffee Hour

Somebody emailed me to say I should work more of my personal life into these reviews. I have no idea why any of y’all might be interested in that, but I can comply.

First of all, the answer to the three most common personal questions people ask:

1. Yes, married life is great
2. No, we’re not having kids. Ever. You think we’d be great parents? That’s sweet. But we wouldn’t. We’re very selfish. And we have bad genes.
3. Well, actually, we didn’t take a honeymoon. Yeah, we paid for the wedding ourselves.

The holidays are almost over and life is getting back into a routine. I love routines.

Oh and I got a new cat. His name is Cool Disco Dan.

Peter Bowden writes about a really useful topic in Adventures in Small Group Ministry: When a catastrophic news event occurs, should you scrap a regularly scheduled discussion to discuss it? After all, no one can deny that people needed to talk soon after September 11 and the members of a group that met regularly could do one another a lot of good by airing their feelings. On the other hand, some people would make the latest shift in poll numbers in a presidential election the topic every week, which would make religion discussions hard to fit in. Bowden’s guidelines sound reasonable to me. Check them out.

Sniffle. Me and the Boys reports that Jerry Orbach, better known as Detective Lenny Briscoe from Law and Order, has died of prostate cancer. Briscoe was tough and wise and inexplicably sort of hot. And he was the dad from Dirty Dancing.

MyIrony has a survey asking people if they have spiritual mentors. Fifty percent of respondents have said “Yes, an informal one.” Interesting.

Tom Schade is taking on Bill O’Reilly in Prophet Motive and doing a nice job, taking the side of those who would say “happy holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.”

Lots of people have written about the tsunamis, but none more nicely or thoughtfully than Adam at Unity.

How is this for the initial list of award categories for our first annual UU Blogging Awards?

General Excellence:

• Best UU-themed blog by a Unitarian Universalist
  
• Best non-UU-themed blog by a Unitarian Universalist
  
• Best UU-themed community blog or on-line forum
  
• Best writing
  
• Best links
  
• Best design

Best Individual Entries:

• Best anecdote or narrative
  
• Best review or cultural commentary
  
• Best religious or spiritual writing
  
• Best theological commentary
  
• Shout it from the rooftops

Assorted Awards:

• Best commenter
  
• Top candidate for the Wayside Pulpit (best aphorism)
  
• Most likely to turn into a General Assembly workshop

How would you refine, rename, or expand this list?

(Here's the original proposal for the first annual UU blog awards.)

Chris is right. Gregory’s blog on his experiences in Iraq is really good reading. He says when he comes back, he would like to be a minister. Makes a girl wonder about blogging as training for the ministry. One of my minister friends, a Presbyterian, (CC is the sort of person who befriends ministers) described the process of pulling together a sermon, and it sounded a lot like the process of pulling together a blog.

I’d be interested to hear about the similarities and differences between blog writing and sermon writing if one of our ministers wanted to cover that.

I hate Christmas. But Adam gives me reasons to think better things about it in Unity’s account of Christmas in Adam’s church. Those Bay Staters always seem to know how to do things just right.

It being Thursday means I missed Ember Wednesday. Having read about it in Measured Extravagance, I’m sorry I did.

Ok, this was really barely discussed, and it’s not even a blog, but I thought it was interesting so I report it here. Somebody on the CFUU board provided a link here. It’s a profile of UUism on the site of a Christian group who clearly finds us lacking the salvation department. But in doing so, they give a summary of UUism better than most I’ve seen coming from actual UUs. Makes you think.

Updated post: Apparently thanks to a clever but intrusive bit of reprogramming on the part of this site's hosting company, comments are back open — and perhaps a bit less hackable by spam robots.

Time for a new quiz! What is your favorite Unitarian Universalist ceremony or ritual event? (The quiz is in the sidebar on the front page at Coffee Hour.)

I thought up nine answers (plus "Other"), based on my own broad but still not broad enough experience of UU ritual behavior. Other congregations may have profoundly meaningful events that I didn't know about or didn't include, or they may use different names for the ceremonies I included. So do you best with the quiz — then tell us about the ceremony you love most in your congregation's life. If you're a UU who grooves on GA or conferences rather than a local congregation or if you practice your Unitarian Universalism more or less on your own as a member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, tell us about the ceremonies you cherish and identify with your liberal religion.

(The previous quiz, on political ideology, is now tucked away with its discussion topic, "Must We Vote Alike to Love Alike?")

For many of us, 2004 was the year when Unitarian Universalist blogging finally arrived. A group of UU bloggers launched Coffee Hour in April to find ways to draw the Interdependent Web into some semblance of actual interdependence. If we haven't quite succeeded yet, this year did bring an increasing number of UUs to blogging as readers and writers. UU World wrote about us — not at my suggestion, I hasten to add — and Beliefnet mentioned us. But the most important fact is that the number of Unitarian Universalist blogs has grown. I'd go so far as to say that UU blogging has even improved.

Since 2004 is rapidly approaching its end, I think it would be fun to kick off the new year with awards for UU blogs, journals, online forums, maybe even e-mail lists, in a variety of categories. Our own Oscars, if you will. But we've never done this before. We don't know what our categories are yet. Collectively, I'm sure we can come up with something.

So here's my proposal: Between now and, say, January 7, we'll take nominations for categories. "Best Design," for example, or "Most Inspirational Post," or "Best Quixotic Argument," or "Most Likely to Comment." Who knows? What shall we honor? Brainstorm away.

But there will be a second part to this project. Once we've identified our categories, we'll then turn to nominations for the awards themselves. You'll dig through archives of your favorite blogs looking for posts that moved you — or that you're especially proud of writing — and nominate them. And then, sometime near the end of January, we'll set up free and fair elections open to all members of the UU Academy of Online Arts. (If you read this post, you're automatically a member.)

So tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell the people in your e-mail groups: We're now accepting nominations for award categories. Post your categories in the comments to this entry, or send them via e-mail to coffeehour@philocrites.com.

In other lively regions of the Interdependent Web, Chutney imagines "emergent" UU worship; our very own Baghdad blogger, A Virginia UU in King George's War, deals with boredom by practicing meditation; and the never-shy Davidson Loehr has roused a few lefty bloggers with his post-election sermon, "Living Under Fascism."

In her roundup of UU blogs, CC fails to point out that she herself launched a rip-roaring discussion over at Beliefnet about UUA President Bill Sinkford's post-election statement to the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. CC asks: When a religious leader makes a public statement in which each line begins, "We believe...," how is it not a creed? The Beliefnet conversation eventually degenerates into old college fight songs and inside jokes, but until then there's some interesting parsing of what is and is not an appropriate way to talk about what Unitarian Universalists believe.

Adventures in Small Group Ministry
Peter writes about blurring the distinction between lay and ordained ministry. I’m of two minds. I’ve met a UU minister or two whose insights could easily be bested by the average layman. Those people use their status as the minister to peddle really mediocre ideas. Hate that. That having been said, I’ve been to a whole lot of lay services that basically boiled down to talks on gardening or politics or the logistics of running a church. Those aren’t sermons, kids, and even the worst trained minister grasps that.

The Boy in the Bands
Scott Wells mentions that Ikeas sometimes have cafeterias that have really good meatballs (though he fails to mention that they have really good salmon, too) and segues into talking about the Swedenborgians, who sound like they fit somewhere between Mormons and folks into eckankar on the scale of people who believe weird things. It’s worth a look.

Call and Response
Has an advent service about the preparations for Chrismahanukwanzakah. I find the idea of us basing our services on a holiday invented by Virgin Mobile that combines the most shallow aspects of two religious holidays and a cultural one rather depressing, but no service that includes Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry can be all bad, and they did seem to do reasonable things with parts of it. Still, ick, y’all.

Facilitating Paradox
Links to a really excellent article about Ned Flanders as a symbol for society’s view of evangelical Christians

I Am a Druid
Morgan writes about a druid Episcopal priest who has had to renounce his druid-hood to keep his job. It would be interesting to hear more about the facts of this one.

Presbyopic Myopia
Has a really thoughtful interesting take on American culture and why we haven’t gotten Bin Laden. Good stuff.

CC