Christianity

The sadness of Jeremiah Wright

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I was privileged Tuesday to attend a seminar at Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist seminary, addressed by Rev. Wright, Obama’s famous or, in the eyes of the media, notorious pastor. Wright entertained the seminarians with tales of how he took a church in Chicago that was dying because it was a white church in blackface that had no appeal to the nearby projects, and turned it into a black church that brought people in by the thousands. Much of his talk centered on music: how the German Lieder and Negro Spirituals (which he dissed as black music made fit for European audiences so it was no longer black music) were replaced with gospel, blues, and jazz, which his first choir director dismissed as folk music. Clearly he is a churchman of great accomplishment and courage, and one who is more than willing to admit faults. He described his early homophobia frankly, and the pay off for people’s lives once he came around and congregants came out of the closet.

Christianity

Let's have some more of that Middle Class Emotion

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Why did the Quakers stopped quaking, the Shakers stop shaking and the holy rollers stop rolling? Why did the vibrant tent meetings of the early Methodists become the sober respectable Methodists churches my grandfather went to? The main theory I picked up in my postgrad studies was that it’s about class. Any number of emotionally expressive lower class sects became more middle class. As they did so, became more emotionally restrained and theologically centered on this world.

Christianity

All Shall Be Well

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For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties. To explain why I’d probably have to write a book-length memoir, which I’ll spare you. But I do think it is an occupational hazard of trying to dream big to change the world. As Michael Lerner writes in Tikkun’s Core Vision, “We are trying to create something which doesn’t have an exact analogue in contemporary life. The truth of the matter is, many of us are wary of any organization — they remain human institutions, susceptible to the ever-present reality of human frailty.