RevCyn

-- Some spoilers herein --  My daughter's teacher told me of some books she's been reading to my daughter's class this year -- Among the Hidden and Among the Impostors from the "Shadow Children" series by Margaret Peterson Haddix.  The stories are dystopian futures for youth readers, not unlike The Hunger Games or  Divergent , but for a slightly younger audience.  In Haddix's Shadow Children books, third children are illegal in this post-famine totalitarian state.  The first two books follow the story of Luke, a third child.  In the first book, he's in hiding in his family home.  In the second, he's at a school under a fake ID.  What struck me, when reading these books, is that the main character, Luke, fails to act.  Unlike many science fiction and fantasy books where the main character becomes the central character in the struggle for justice or freedom, Luke, at least in these two books, does not.  In the first book, he's invi...

The thought shared today in ministry days is that doing social justice without having the models and training is like doing the work of religious education without renaissance modules and trained religious education professionals. We do have models and structures out there that we can tap into, though.  In Michigan we have the Michigan UU Social Justice Network (MUUSJN), which recently brought a workshop on healthcare to Jackson.  We can network with other local (non-UU) congregations, and with other Michigan UU churches.  We need something like what we had in Jackson with the Jackson Interfaith Peacekeepers, but with a broader social justice platform. I think one of the questions is: What do we want from our faith?  Are we looking for our religion to be a place from which we do social justice?  If so, let's start working on putting the structures in place to do that ministry.