A Hand Up for the Environment and the Poor

The Department of Energy hosts an annual Solar Decathalon in D.C. on the National Mall. One of this year’s most exciting entrees is Empowerhouse, a superefficient, solar-powered family home, built by a team of students from three universities in the Northeast. It is unique for a number of reasons, including its low cost and real-life feasibility. It will be moved after the competition to a neighborhood in Northeast Washington and become a home for a family from Habitat for Humanity and be a model for future energy efficient and green housing in the future for this organization.

This is the first year that homes will be graded on both their energy efficiency and attractiveness… as well as their affordability (in construction and purchase), moving the competition toward real-life application and not merely a concept that might provide ideas to the construction community. Last year’s winner was a house covered in solar panels, which produced more energy than the house needed. The problem… the house cost over $2 million.

One of the most attractive aspects of Empowerhouse is that employs “passive house” design principles, including thicker walls, insulation and air-tight design, even triple-glazed windows. They can reduce energy consumption by 90% compared to the average home and even 40% less than the average “high-efficiency” home. This reduces the need for expensive renewable energy sources on the home and the repair and upkeep of such systems.

As with energy efficient appliances, the upfront costs for Habitat are greater, but the long-range costs achieve the organization’s goals of making homeownership affordable in the long run. The cost of this kind of home is 10-15% more than Habitat for Humanity currently spends, but over the life of a 25-year mortgage, a family could save somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 to $130,000, a dream come true for some families.

The group behind Empowerhouse will host a conference in June of next year for Habitat for Humanity affiliates across the United States to share information about passive house design technology. This could mean a huge leap forward in green design and be a way for the organization to lead the way in giving a hand up to the poor and to the environment.

Why Men Should Not Be Ordained

Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained

(note: this blog is also sarcastic, please take the proper precautions against feather ruffling)

10. A man’s place is in the army.
9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.
8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.
7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.
6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.
5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.
4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.
3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.
2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.
1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

SOURCE: By way of David Jones... Presented by David M. Scholer on February 20, 1998, at the Fuller Follies at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. David’s version was taken, with small modifications, from a November 24, 1997 internet communication from W. Ward and Laurel Gasque, who have long been champions of Biblical equality.

First Follower

Whether it's Jesus or a leader you admire, this video demonstrates a fascinating lesson about being and recruiting followers.

Spiritual but Not Religious

As church attendance drops in many churches across the US, we’re seeing a trend toward the “spiritual but not religious” category amongst Americans. Being of the younger generation and having my own issues with power and authority, there is a lot I respect about this stance. However, today I do want to challenge it a little with a few quotes and superbly written post by a UCC pastor. Fair warning, if you are SBNR (spiritual but not religious) and cannot handle small doses of sarcasm with your sunsets, I bare you no ill will, please take the opportunity to exit here: (intended to have a link to sbnr.org here, but it is now inaccessible due to being reported as a malware attack page).

Standup Comic Jim Gaffagan says he hates living in California sometimes because girls come up to him at parties and say, “Hey, I’m spiritual but not religious.” To which he responds, “Well, I’m not honest, but you’re interesting.” It’s not just girls in California, nor most of the residents of Colorado. LifeWay Christian Resources did a survey in 2009, in which 72% of millennials (18- to 29-year-olds) said they're "more spiritual than religious." According to a recent Barna Group survey only 21% of self-identified Christians believes that spiritual maturity requires a vital connection to a community of faith.

Christians and secular Americans alike seem to responding to the snobbery they perceive to be associated with that statement as much as to the snobbery of religious folks who look down their noses at church truants. The UCC is not at all known for their religious imperialism, but a recent brief post by Lillian Daniel, senior pastor of a church in Illinois, wrote is worth sharing in its entirety… (This is actually the passage on which I recently preached)

Spiritual but Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.

August 31, 2011
Matthew 16:18

"And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it."

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo.

Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?

Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition.

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.


More resources on SBNR:

Beliefnet
More than one fifth of Americans describe themselves with this phrase. What does it mean?

CNN
Are there dangers in being 'spiritual but not religious'?

If It Feels Right...

The following excerpts are from a NY Times op-ed by David Brooks...

If It Feels Right ...

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America....

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America...

Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called “The Death of Character.” Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described.

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

What have you observed?

Spirit-breathed

Presbyterians love the words Holy Spirit. We love the idea of it. We love to invoke the concept. We don't often try to nail down exactly what it is or what's in its job description. And in some way, I am very glad of that. We also like the concept of human imagination. And though we are perhaps more brave in our invocation of the term and concept and more apt to assign it certain tasks, we hesitate to nail it down either. And we cringe at the idea of defining the boundaries for the two, or where they may overlap.

The discomfort level rises among my more secular friends in trying to determine where humanity ends and divinity begins, particularly in the cretive process. And if there is a major difference between my more spiritual and more secular friends, it is who gets the blame when it all goes to hell (divine concept) and who gets the credit when the artist really nails it. Many pastors I know struggle to remember to let themselves get out of the way in the creative process and to remember they can take very little credit for good sermons and try not to shoulder too much blame for the bad ones.

Saw a fascinating TED Talk from the recent author of Eat, Pray, Love. She struggles with the same ideas in her creative process, although the concepts and vocabulary are new to her. Without the same ideas about how God or the Holy Spirit intervene in her work, she stumbles, sometimes awkwardly and sometimes beautifully to capture the essence of inspiration, blame, responsibility and reverance in ways that express her own experience and hope for others. I think it's worth watching to gain a perspective of one person's search for the relationship between the human and the divine in the creative process.