I had the pleasure of meeting Chris M. of Quaker blogging fame for the first time, as well as Karen Street. Chris has a list of other bloggers here, though MicahBales is the only other one on the list I’ve talked to. (I’ve also seen Kody, and will probably see Staśa this afternoon. Update: Also ran into Peterson the day after his plenary performance, and had the pleasure of meeting Robin, Liz, and Jeanne.)
Nontheist Friends events, including my and Robin Alpern’s interest group “Theist and Nontheist Friends in Conversation,” are going very well — attendance is significantly up from last year, they tell me, and the energy is very clear.
In addition to our previously scheduled events, this afternoon there’s one billed as “The Great Theist-Nontheist Conversational Smackdown of 2008″ between Chuck Fager and David Boulton, which I will try to record and post here. (Apparently it was a last-minute idea of Chuck’s.)
The interest group on nontheistic Quakerism I facilitated at the aforementionedyoung adult Quaker conference went rather well – a report may be coming on the Nontheist Friends website. (I posted one to the email list, but would want to edit it down a bit.)
Both the interest group and the conference generally changed something for me, and I find a new sense of commitment to the Quaker experiment.
I first started attending Quaker meetings back in 2002 at North Shore Friends Meeting in Beverly, Mass., and officially became a member a few years later. I’ve been living in the city for two years now, and in the past few weeks finally decided I really really felt right about transferring membership to Friends Meeting at Cambridge. I just sent North Shore a long letter of transfer, which is found under the cut.
Tomorrow I’m riding 16 hours in a van (and perhaps driving too?) to Indiana for the aforementioned conference. After that comes Kansas City – any hot tips on fun things to do in KC are welcome…
At the 5 pm Quaker meeting in Cambridge, the person deputized to close things out invited people to share any thoughts/etc. they had during the meeting that did not rise to the level of a message. Notable first because that isn’t generally done at the 5 pm, unless I’ve been missing it — perhaps just her taking some healthy (and un-Quakerly!) executive initiative.
But also notable because she gave it a specific name: “afterthoughts,” saying the word deliberately, as in, “An afterthought is when…” rather than merely conversationally (e.g. “does anyone have any afterthoughts or things they’d like to say?”). I’m sure that’s nothing new in itself, but given that this isn’t a widely formalized practice, it’s interesting to note how it’s done in different places…
If there are any Quakers reading, do they do that in your meeting? What is it called?
On the plane from Chicago I read the following in an interview with Simon Doonan, author of Eccentric Glamour –
Eccentric glamoristas love fashion but are not dictated to by trends. They treat clothing as a form of personal expression and are less about layering designer labels than the creative manner of mix-and-matching to achieve a look. [Our customers have] a high tolerance for eccentricity. She is looking for quirk. She does not dress head-to-toe in one designer.
Which sums up my general approach to clothes, though my practical application has varied.
But “lately/there’s been a lot going on.”
Psychologically, after years of androgyny I’ve become more comfortable with traditional expressions of “masculinity,” as my friends and private-blog readers already know. And this has thrown my whole aesthetic into confusion. There’s a tension — not a contradiction, but I think a tension — between “eccentric glamor” and the implicit conformity of mainstream masculine self-presentation.
While we’re on the subject, I do feel some qualms about spending tons of time and/or money on clothes. I’m far from my days of Quaker plain dress, but I still hanker sometimes for a simple wardrobe, made of a small number of fantastic things.
But can a wardrobe be small, durable and fantastic at the same time?
The most interesting finding to me is the “Unaffiliated” group, which makes up 16.1 percent of the total adult population. About a third of those are at least somewhat religious, just not any religion in particular, leaving the nonreligious total at 10.3 percent — 1.6 atheist, 2.4 agnostic, and 6.3 just plain secular. A quick read might suggest that the whole 16.1 percent is nonreligious, so I want to emphasize the more accurate 10.3 percent figure.
[Update: I generally love the think tank Center for Inquiry, so I was slightly disappointed to see them eliding “unaffiliated” with “non-religious” this press release.]
Breaking it down by percentage, apparently about 16 percent of the nonreligious in the U.S. identify as atheist, 23 percent as agnostic, and 61 percent as secular. I suppose this might inform the debate about whether people should identify as atheistsor not.
Unaffiliated is also the fastest-growing group: only 7.3 percent of the population says they were unaffiliated as a child, meaning it’s more than doubled in the past generation, despite not having a very high retention rate (many people raised unaffiliated later become religious), and the unaffiliated are disproportionately young.
The 16.1 percent figure basically confirms the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), which found 14.3 percent of the U.S. population identifying as nonreligious, as well as 16 percent having a secular outlook. (The two groups probably mostly overlapped.)
Other points of interest:
Unitarian Universalists come in a 0.3 percent. Assuming roughly 225 million adults in the U.S., that gives us about 675,000 UUs. (Another blogger estimates 683,000.) What’s shocking is that the Unitarian Universalist Association’s own figure is about a quarter of this figure, suggesting that most self-identified UUs aren’t a member of any UU church (society, etc.). More discussion at Philocrites and the above blogger, and elsewhere no doubt.
Quakers clock in at “less than 0.3 percent,” meaning “less than 675,000.” Perhaps a lot less, since our own count is only 87,000, but as with UUs, there are probably many who identify as Quaker who aren’t in the membership rolls. Don’t see much discussion of this yet, perhaps because it doesn’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know.
“Spiritual but not religious” are also a tiny “less than 0.3 percent.” It would be interesting to compare this to the larger percentage (if I recall correctly) found by the ARIS.
A year ago, at the talent show of a big young Quaker conference in Burlington, New Jersey, I wanted to play a song called “Jorge Regula” by the Moldy Peaches. I chickened out though, because I wasn’t sure I’d remember the lyrics. But last weekend I played it at the WinterCon “Talent Optional Show,” and a good time was had by all.
It’s about nothing, really, but it captures something of the “food & creative love” vibe of those sorts of gatherings. It’s also call-and-response, which, with the audience on response, allows it to be participatory. Which I like.
Saving the self-deprecation for the end of the post, musically it was nothing to write home about. The guitar part is pretty much ape-simple, but I could still feel my musical rustiness in the strumming. It’s good to get practice being on stage though.
I read a story once about a famous Chinese musician who was visiting the West, and was taken to a concert hall to hear the finest in European classical music. After the concert, he was asked what piece he liked the best.
– The first one, he said.
– You mean the Beethoven? his hosts asked, humming a few bars of the first piece.
I’m going to my first Unitarian Universalist (UU) conference this weekend — WinterCon, for Boston-area young adult UUs. I’ll be facilitating a Quaker meeting in one of the workshop slots, at the kind request of one of the organizers, who came to a Quaker-inspired meditation I hosted in December. I’ll post an update on how it goes.
I haven’t written here about Quakers yet (at least not in depth), but to make a long story short, (more…)
Browsing the early issues of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology last month for my paper, I came across a review of a book by the American psychologist Eugene Gendlin. I’d seen his name once before in an unlikely place — a booklet by a British Quaker writer named Rex Ambler, whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre.
Musings on politics, culture, and humanist spirituality from Cambridge, Mass. Status: Zach is compiling.
On a side note
Breakfast in the South End
While we're on reviews, I want to give due glory to the Hypnot—I mean, to Mike's City Diner in the South End. Anywhere with breakfast combinations called "Intensive Care" and "Emergency Room" has got to ...
Boston Billiard Club Thursday I had lunch at Boston Billiard Club, in part because I wanted to check out the pool situation. Turns out an hour of table time is only $3 before 5 pm! Add that to ...
Wheres mah latte? This photo is based on ancient news, but it was recently revived by Hillary Clinton's awful chief strategist Mark Penn, who claimed in a GQ interview last week that Hillary was undone by "latte voters." ...
