Thanks to the readers of the AUR blog, December was the most successful month on record in terms of readership. Please keep linking and emailing, it truly does make a difference!
Happy New Year, and may your 2010 be more blessed than any year before!
American Unitarian Reform has now joined the tweeting masses on Twitter!
We will be publicizing the regular blog posts to Twitter, but also occasionally reposting old essays and information pieces.
So, follow the Reform on Twitter and tell your friends!
This is the sixth in a series of light-hearted signs for hypothetical American Unitarian Reform churches, created using an online image generator. I hope to show a range of attitudes and ideas all possible within the scope of AUR.
The sign for today’s notional church, Unity Christian, announces guest speakers from other faiths for Harvest Thursday, here called Thanksgiving Thursday to avoid confusion. Harvest Thursday is the only one of the Four Great Thursdays of American Unitarian Reform.
Significantly, the guest speakers are from Islam and Judaism, for whom Unitarian Christianity creates a continuity of true monotheism.
The AUR blog has been offline for a while to attend to personal issues, and as a sign that it is coming back here is a word cloud (thanks to wordle!) of the blog so far:
This is the fifth in a series of light-hearted signs for hypothetical American Unitarian Reform churches, created using an online image generator. I hope to show a range of attitudes and ideas all possible within the scope of AUR.
The sign for today’s notional church, Unity Christian, announces a “Seven Year Jubilee” for Declaration Thursday. Declaration Thursday is the only one of the Four Great Thursdays that has a date traditionally associated with it, and every seven years when the 4th of July falls on Declaration Thursday, this is celebrated as the Jubilee!
Sadly, the last Jubilee in 2008 was skipped over due to the leap year. The next will take place in 2013.
Part one of this sermon (posted several Thursdays ago) reflected on the rational cynicism that is evident in the ministry of Jesus, and necessary for genuine Faith, Hope, and Christian Love. While many churches — all along the political spectrum from conservative to liberal — offer a naïve comfort that turns a blind eye to the cynical realities of the world, AUR refuses to offer “salvation on the cheap.”
Part two explored the dangers of becoming stuck on cynicism, allowing skepticism and contrarianism to become idols worshipped at the expense of personal growth and a clear vision of reality. Sectarian atheism is a particularly common example of that in today’s world.
Reform Unitarianism recognizes that true wisdom is post-cynical, lying on the other side of a blood-sweating struggle against instincts of self-preservation and sociability, and the “unchallengeable” sacred cows of culture. Continue reading
This is the fourth in a series of light-hearted signs for hypothetical American Unitarian Reform churches, created using an online image generator. I hope to show a range of attitudes and ideas all possible within the scope of AUR.
Today’s notional church is named in honor of the Lucian of Antioch, a martyr tortured for nine years under Roman persecution. A staunch opponent of Alexandrian theology, after his death he was dubiously alleged to have accepted the proto-Trinitarian ideas of the Alexandrians. The pseudo-Pauline quote represents the Father-Son theology, original to Christianity and later condemned as Arianism, of which Lucian was a respected advocate.
This is the third in a series of light-hearted signs for hypothetical American Unitarian Reform churches, created using an online image generator. I hope to show a range of attitudes and ideas all possible within the scope of AUR.
Today’s notional church is named in honor of the First Apostle, Saint Andrew of Capernaum. The twin fish represent not only one of the earliest symbols of Christianity, but also Andrew’s trade as a fisher. The message is a translation of the first verse of the Gospel of John that more closely captures the theologically significant grammatical distinctions in the original Greek.
[Please see the updated, 2010 version of this here.]
Palm Sunday commemorates the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on the back of a colt (or donkey) with throngs of Messianic enthusiasts paving the way with palm fronds. Celebrations of this holiday therefore often include palms.
In some regions, however, this tropical plant has been difficult to acquire, particularly in the past when shipping methods were primitive. For this reason, local trees were often substituted for palms, and the name of the holiday revised to match.
Were Christians who celebrated “Yew Sunday,” because their culture knew yews and did not know palms, practicing a heresy? Other-Than-Palm Sundays certainly could be described as “un-scriptural” but are they un-Christian? We don’t think so, and we think that this is a critically important point that supports our idiomatic, rather than dogmatic, approach to religious creed. Continue reading
Our hearts go out to the victims of the terrorist attack on the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. In a candlelight vigil on Tuesday, Unitarian Universalist president William Sinkford stated, “We’re here tonight to make sense of the senseless.”
However, there was nothing senseless in the thinking of the killer, Jim Adkisson. His plan, his motivation and attitude toward his victims, and his expectation of his own bloody demise were a localized expression of the universal spiritual dynamic laid out nearly 2000 years ago in the Apocalypse of John.
As explained earlier in this blog, AUR considers the religious importance of the Apocalypse to be in its typology of evils. The Apocalypse is not a historical, physical one-time event for Reform Unitarianism the way it is for churches that indulge in materialist exegesis; it is a spiritual dynamic in action in our lives at all times. The Apocalypse is not on its way, it is at hand. It always has been, and it always will be.
The Typology Of Evils
The Beast in John’s Apocalypse represents the violent and authoritarian evil of Rage, while Babylon is the licentious and libertine evil of Lust. In John’s eschatological vision, the Beast and Babylon are closely related, but in tension. Wanton Babylon is described as riding the resentful Beast, who then rises up in hatred and destroys Her.
Adkisson clearly considered the Unitarian Universalists his Babylon, a physical manifestation of the spirit of wanton licentiousness. A longtime acquaintance told a local newspaper that Adkisson hated “blacks, gays and anyone different from him,” and one of the investigators told reporters that Adkisson “stated that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.”
However, despite that it demonstrated the Bestial nature of his own sin, the killer’s prejudice against his targets was ultimately proven wrong.
The Apocalyptic Saints
In the Apocalypse, the false god of the Beast lays seige to the false city of Babylon to destroy it. After the destruction of Babylon, the Beast is confronted and defeated by the Saints of New Jerusalem, a true city of the true God. That Adkisson was playing out this spiritual dynamic is clear in that, according to police reports about a letter written just before the attack, “he expected to be in [the church] shooting people until the police arrived and that he fully expected to be killed by the responding police.”
Manifesting the spirit of Bestial Rage, Adkisson believed he would lay waste to the Babylon he saw in Unitarian Universalism, and in turn be destroyed by the police, who were to play the role of the righteous Saints.
But, he was wrong. The congregation tackled their assailant, disarmed him, and held him for police. They were not passive victims, but full participants with the proper authorities, ready to employ the force necessary to defeat his unrighteous violence.
As a resentful and angry terrorist, Adkisson was certainly playing the Beast, but the Unitarian Universalists he attacked were by no means about to play limp Babylon to his assault. They stood up and fought back, and for that they deserve to be honored and congratulated.
Moreover, they deserve to understand the sense of the spirit in which they resisted tyranny, the reconciled and righteous force of the Saints of the Apocalypse.
