Author: Scott Wells

Universalist minister in Washington, D.C.
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Feed me Epiphany candy

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, or the Manifestation of Christ to the Nations. That would be the three Magi. I’ve read that it is probably an older holiday than Christmas, which is appealing. Plus, it isn’t commercialized, unless you consider a king cake commercialization. (And since the McKenzies bakery chain in New Orleans is long gone — which makes me quite sad — who sells them?)

Some Christians — at least in English speaking churches — promote Epiphany as a religious alternative to Christmas, which can be continued as a winter family fest without guilt of hypocrisy.

I could write more . . . or point you to the Epiphany posting at the Happy Feminist entitled “The Feast of the Epiphany: La Befana rides tonight.”
Very cool. Very Italian.

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Quakers and clothes

I was reading Beppeblog, as I am wont to do. From there I found the Quaker blogs aggregator, QuakerQuaker. (Which makes me think of a meetinghouse themed Vegas casino.) From there I found a number of pages on plain clothing. One of these pages is called

Gohn Brothers, broadfalls, & men’s plain dress

Two thoughts. I got a Gohn Bros. pricesheet years ago, and was fasinated by the plain clothing. Not that I would wear broadfalls, but it is good to know they can still be gotten. Clothes really do set the tone for religious lives. But you know I feel that way. Interestingly, some new-plain Friends whose story I read also pointed out the ethical dimention of clothes buying: that Friends (and Christians) shouldn’t get clothes made in sweatshops.

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For the record

Jesus wept!

I’d like to be one of the many (I hope) Christian bloggers that completely repudiates the rhetoric and theology Pat Robertson inflicts on us. He has made a fool of himself by applying an admonition from Joel to Rabin’s assassination and Sharon’s stroke.
Does that Yigal Amir (Rabin’s killer) an agent of God? His implausibly aww-shucks “I was just saying” mode of plausible denial insults our intelligence and shames Christ’s church. Who does he think he is?
Not that my usual readers would confuse me for a Robertson supporter, but if he’s going to indulge in nasty little dicta, then other Christians need to be plain about their oppostion.

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On death and hope

Ross Douthat — filling in at AndrewSullivan.com (the one celeb blog I read) — wrote poignantly about Christian Hope, following the West Virginia mine disaster and mis-reportage. With it, he makes a well-placed swing at one of the weaknesses of liberal Christianity.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion

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Wiki software on three domains

I’ve gotten the names servers routed to the three domains I wrote about earlier, and have different kinds of wiki software installed on each. Two programs — TikiWiki and PhpWiki — don’t impress me and I’ve removed their databases. I’d remove them all, but don’t want to leave empty holes.

The third site — www.universalistpartnership.org — has MediaWiki installed. This is what powers Wikipedia: serious software, but it wasn’t any harder to set up than WordPress.

I’ll try the MoinMoin wiki on one of the other domains, and perhaps Moodle (a distance learning application) for the third.

These are tire-kicking exercises, not for real action yet.

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My No-Heller experience

I think I was reading a hint of bemusement in Graham’s comment about the forthcoming NoHell.org site. For the record, I’m not being cute but referring to an old Universalist eponym.

I used to preach a fragment of an old Georgia-South Carolina circuit, which worked well as my parents live near the Ga.-S.C. line. If I preached in Newberry, I would stop in on them to or fro’. In between, there’s a little town (on the South Carolina side) that once had a Universalist church: Saluda. I had read or heard that the ruined church still stood, but I didn’t know where. I drove through the town and stopped at the combination general store and laundromat: one of those squat cinder-block jobs that pepper the South. A good a place as any for local information, and perhaps a Moon Pie.
I put on my best “lost but still Southern” manners, and asked the proprietor. He knew nothing of the Universalists much less a local church. The thought dawned on me. “What about a No-Heller church?” Oh yes. . . he knew about that. Not too far; when he was a boy (three or four decades earlier, I’d guess) he used to roller-skate inside it. His directions took me and my top-heavy Chevy Astrovan down a deeply rutted logging road. (If it had rained the night before, I might still be there.)

An archived page about the Saluda church. (No photos, alas. Steven, do you have one? I am extraordinarily dubious about it having been re-established.)

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New domains

Gang, I’ll be putting my current blog-energy into getting my three domains-in-limbo online. No content, but I want them ready for a larger project. More about that later. The domains are

  • nohell.org
  • universalistpartnership.org
  • unitarianuniversalist.org

But there’s nothing there yet, so don’t bother.

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Ah, Georgia

No theology, unless one thinks Georgia Football a religion (and many do.) A moment of recognition when reading this at smijer and Buck.

Georgia Football is the only sports-anything I have the vaguest interest in, being a ’91 grad of said school.

I knew that the Bulldogs had been doing well this season, but hearing their loss to West Virginia was no shock. Nobody can lose like Georgia can: at least it wasn’t in the last few minutes.