Starting School and Intergenerational Life

-
Every year I seem to write something about fall being the start of the church year and the start of the school year. For me, this year it's true again in a more concrete way.


Today I start teaching again. I'm teaching adjunct at Jackson Community College, and I'm teaching two sections of English 131, which is freshman composition. I taught freshman composition before at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, MA, but it's been four years since I've been in a formal classroom.


I'm looking forward to meeting my students later today. At a community college, you often get a very nice mix of traditional and nontraditional students which enriches, I think, the classroom setting. I remember my own college experience at the University of Michigan, and one thing that could be said is it isolated me from the rest of the community. I remember walking across campus one day and seeing a child and thinking it had been months since I'd seen a small child! There's a way in which, if all you are around is 18-22 year olds, plus professors and staff, that you start to forget that the whole world is not centered around 18-22 year olds.


Of course, one of the wonderful things about church life is it's a place where the generations mix. There's a growing trend of churches marketing themselves particularly to the young adult age group, a group that's sometimes missing from more traditional churches, but sometimes these churches have almost only young adults, and are not truly integenerational, either. In the UU movement, there's an on-line church specifically for young adults, The Church of the Younger Fellowship. I joined it briefly as a visitor, but I was the oldest age that they accept members in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garrison Keillor Is no "Companion" for Unitarian Universalists

-
Many Unitarian Universalists, myself included, are regular NPR listeners.  And among them, many listen regularly to Garrison Keillor's " A Prairie Home Companion ."  It's on weekly at about the time I leave church, so I have listened to it many times.  Garrison Keillor makes a regular practice of poking fun at Unitarian Universalists on his show.  I've often had church members come and tell me he mentioned us again, often with delight, because we're so rarely mentioned in the media.  One example of a Unitarian Universalist joke attributed to Garrison Keillor is: "A sign at the Unitarian church said: Bible study at 7:00. Bring your Bible and a pair of scissors."  So, yes, some of the joke are funny, some point out our foibles and idiosyncrasies.  But lately I've been turning off NPR whenever "A Prairie Home Companion" comes on.  Listening to him talk about us over the years it's becoming more and more evident that he isn't laugh...
Read more

The Big Issue

-
I’ve preached and blogged on a number of justice-related subjects over the dozen years that I’ve been in ministry. I’ve written about feminism, racism, classism, and homophobia. I’ve written about immigration and war and reproductive freedom and prison reform. I’ve written about religious intolerance and all sorts of types of bigotry. But there’s one issue I’ve always avoided writing about. I used it as a one-sentence illustration of a different issue once, but only, I think, once. There are some prejudices that most of our society knows are wrong. Most people in our society know that racism is wrong, although there is still plenty of racism out there. And then there are issues that as a society we’re divided on, like homophobia, but where the liberal circles I’m in have a clear understanding that it’s wrong. But there are some prejudices that are still deemed completely acceptable. Those can be hard to write about, harder to speak up about, and hardest to confront when they...
Read more

An Open Letter to the UUA

-
I read the UU World article on the new logo, branding, and outreach effort with great interest.  The article tapped into some things I've been frustrated about and some things I've been excited about.  A couple of points in the article really resonated with me (the italics are mine): The Rev. Dr. Terasa Cooley, the UUA’s Program and Strategy Officer, said the new initiative developed out of a growing realization that the UUA and its congregations have been sending “inconsistent” messages about Unitarian Universalism into the larger world. and “We want congregations to think about the messages their congregations are sending out to the world that doesn’t know anything about them,” she added. “That includes thinking about how their building looks to guests, the structure of their services, their programs, whether they’re inward-oriented or serving the community, and what their online presence is like. ” and And the UUA is developing other resources for congre...
Read more