Diversity

       2010 was a year of increased diversity. DADT was finally repealed. Hopefully the trend will continue and grow. This morning, the minister at my Unitarian Universalist church quoted Harvey Cox as saying that diversity, tolerance, and acceptance have won, and that the extremism we're seeing amongst fundamentalists is simply the death throes of a movement that has exhausted its momentum (one lives in hope.) I so enjoy our UU church and what I learn there.
       Shortly before Christmas, we celebrated the winter festivals of light from many cultures, including Hannukah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Advent, Christmas, and Yuletide (a Teutonic pagan religious festival that celebrated the Germanic "divine mothers.")
       In the spirit of the theme "Neighboring Faiths for All," we're currently learning about Christianity, partly through Harvey Cox's book, The Future of Faith . From the Amazon review:
"What shape will the Christian faith take in the 21st century? In the midst of fast-paced global changes and in the face of an apparent resurgence of fundamentalism, can Christianity survive as a living and vital faith? With his typical brilliance and lively insight, Cox explores these and other questions in a dazzling blend of memoir, church history and theological commentary. He divides Christian history into three periods: the Age of Faith, during the first Christian centuries, when the earliest followers of Jesus lived in his Spirit, embraced his hope and followed him in the work he had begun; the Age of Belief, from the Council of Nicaea to the late 20th century, during which the church replaced faith in Jesus with dogma about him; and the Age of the Spirit, in which we're now living, in which Christians are rediscovering the awe and wonder of faith in the tremendous mystery of God. According to Cox, the return to the Spirit that so enlivened the Age of Faith is now enlivening a global Christianity, through movements like Pentecostalism and liberation theology, yearning for the dawning of God's reign of shalom. Cox remains our most thoughtful commentator on the religious scene, and his spirited portrait of our religious landscape challenges us to think in new ways about faith."
       Next, we're moving on to Taoism, and will be taking a look at the book, The Tao of Emerson, and later this month I'm going to start a class called Bridges to Islam, which is being offered by the church.
       I'm so happy the kids have the opportunity to learn about world religions. They're also learning a little about Hinduism and Zoroastrianism through their Waldorf program, along with the mythology of many cultures and the (usually pagan) Spiritual Background to Christian Festivals. My hope is that they will examine the smorgasbord before them, select what is wise and meaningful, and integrate it into an informed philosophy of life. 

Our more recently acquired Waldorf resources