RevCyn

I'm pouring out post after post on 9/11 to get out of my system those things which I need to say but which don't belong in my sermon.  This is done in hopes that once these things are out, I can see what is left.  What I know is left right now is the stone of hope that is hewn out of the mountain of despair.  Perhaps it is connected to those five smooth stones.  Or perhaps it is one of them.  What mountains do we hew the other four stones out of, then?  Grief, hope, memory, and even joy are all the tumblers now as I polish the stones up. 

As many of you may be aware, I have my bachelor's and an M.A. in English literature, and I often teach introduction to composition at the local community college in addition to ministry.  I'm teaching again this fall, and am thinking over my point of view about pronouns, specifically the use of "they" as a singular gender-neutral third-person pronoun. My previous perspective had been that I was there to teach them to abide by the MLA style, and that the MLA style did not (yet) allow for the singular use of "they."  Therefore, I have been marking this as a pronoun/noun error on papers for years.  As far as I can determine, the MLA , Chicago , and APA style manuals all still recommend "he or she" or "he/she" or making the subject plural.  The Chicago Style Manual states: A singular antecedent requires a singular referent pronoun. Because he is no longer accepted as a generic pronoun referring to a person of either sex, it has become c...

I'm always telling my English 131 students not to trust Wikipedia as a reliable source.  Yes, I often turn to Wikipedia for information, but you have to always remember that the information there can be put up and changed by anyone at any time. Yesterday, I saw proof of this.  When feminist theologian Mary Daly died two days ago, there was little news found on the internet covering it.   Yesterday, I noticed that her Wikipedia entry had been updated with her death date, but that was one of only three sites I could find reporting her death.  And, at the bottom of the first paragraph, the Wikipedia entry read, "Thankfully the bitch died on January 3, 2010."  It didn't last long.  I flipped over to the page where you can see the site's history, to see if I could figure out either how to remove it or how to report it.  I achieved neither, and flipped back to the entry.  It was gone.  But the point is, for a brief point in time, that is how th...

The other day in a workshop on environmentalism, we heard about how people feel confronted by the overwhelming amount of what needs to be done, so they push it all away and do nothing. Last night our UUA president was talking about how UUism can become more ethnically and racially diverse. He said that we don't get from here, where we are, to there, the true reflection of the diversity of the world, in one step. What we need to do is take the first step, perhaps the easiest step or perhaps the hardest. Today Thomas Moore is talking about where we start in soul work, and he said something similar. We need to whittle it down to the smallest thing, the smallest change we can make. That's the change we need to make. That's a big challenge. All too often in our lives we avoid doing anything because the task is too large. The truth is we need to take the small step. Letting ourselves be overwhelmed by the big picture gives us the luxury to not act at all. What we need to do is mu...