The Fundamental Things Apply as Time Goes By: The Transient And Permanent In Life And Ministry

The Reverend Khoren Arisian

The Berry Street Lecture, 1998

Delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly

Rochester, New York

June 25, 1998

“Faith founded on knowledge and sustained by free inquiry must be the spiritual religion of the future.” -Octavius Brooks Frothingham  

“... the very variety of views held by Unitarian laymen has a tendency to contract the range of the preaching, confining it to that held in common.”  -a French visitor to Boston Unitarian churches reporting his impressions in an 1897 issue of The Christian Register.

“ ... instead of committing ourselves to reasoning, we really insist merely on the privilege of thinking or not, as we choose.” -Angus MacLean

Wish to thank Forrest Church, a longtime close friend and loyal colleague, for his characteristically gracious and eloquent words of introduction, as well as members of the UUMA group who chose to bestow upon me the signal honor, privilege, and, quite frankly, anxiety of being this year’s Berry Street Lecturer, thereby causing me to ponder, intermittently throughout. the past 365 days, what not to say on this concluding occasion of Ministry Day.

In David Hare’s sparkling mid-1990s play Racing Denim, a vicar says to his bishop: “You know the situation. It’s fairly desperate ... I wouldn’t say the church is a joke. It’s an irrelevance. It has no connection to most peoples lives.”

“As a priest,” pontificates his imperturbable Anglican superior in response, “you have only one duty. That’s to put on a show ... Hold services ... And lox. k cheerful as you do it.”

Although I’m the most unlikely of persons to put on a show, I shall, nonetheless, do my best to appear cheerful. I’ve always appreciated what Emerson stated in a letter to Professor Ware following delivery- of his historic and provocatively disturbing Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838: “I shall. go on just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see.” That strikes me as neither an admission of humility nor a declaration of arrogance. It is, in the best sense of the word, modest, a claim that is frank, straightforward, confident, and therefore likely to be radical and to generate controversy. It’s not the seeing but the telling of what you see that can easily get you into trouble, as any prophet, real or ersatz, can attest. Being far more inner-directed than other-directed (a la David Reisman’s familiar typology ), I plan to tell what 1 see, for whatever it may be worth.

To be politically incorrect, as Emerson often was in his own time, allow me to quote former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was definitely unpopular with political liberals on both sides of the Atlantic : “If you must set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” Susan Vass, a professional comedian and corporate consultant on the uses of humor in the workplace who is well known in the Minneapolis area and the Midwest, remarked in a Star/Tribune interview on June 13, 1997: “The main corporate commandment is `Be Funny But Don’t Say Anything Politically Incorrect’ I’ve (actually) gotten four-page, single-spaced documents giving guidelines on things not to even think about mentioning… That’s where we’re at in’90s America .”

On a broader canvas, Susan Vass’s assessment, I find, is accurate, telling, and cause for concern. We’ve moved, as it were, during the better part of this century from Orwellian to Falwellian to Seinfeldian times, none of which are times of excessive truth-telling. Moreover, today obnoxiousness exists alongside a readiness to take personal umbrage at the slightest intimation that the sacred untouchability of one’s views, however ditsy, has been brought into question.

The 1990s is really the inaugural decade of the 21st century. Vast new forces were unleashed in the vacuum created by the nearly instant collapse of totalitarian communism in 1989. Emerging from the cocoon of the Cold War, we promptly fell into the Gulf War in early 1991, an uncharacteristically short conflict whose repercussions are still with us and which unwittingly heralded the shape of things to come--warfare as a carefully calibrated and expensive Nintendo game, the sanctified distortion of truth, the control of info rmation in an ever-burgeoning info rmation age, the cynical reduction of reality to postmodernist docudrama storytelling--in short, the splitting of actual/objective reality into politically competing subjective versions. We saw this take place on one side of the legal ledger in the first trial of Rodney King; we saw this take place on the other side of the legal ledger in the O.J. Simpson trial. In the one case, the empirical evidence was turned around 180 degrees; in the other, it was ignored altogether via jury nullification, which confused social justice with criminal justice. Neither case had anything to do with the quest for reality in the courtroom. How TV has altered the way we choose to perceive reality!

The basic point behind the title of this lecture is that ministry, especially liberal religious as opposed to traditional religious ministry, because of the broader, less well-defined scope and parameters of what we have to do, places upon us the inescapable responsibility to pay astute attention to the so-called secular realm, to choose what to imbibe from it and what to modify, what to resist in it and what to reject. In any event, we are obligated to interpret it as honestly as we can. As time goes by in this marvelous, maddening world, things get more and more complicated, events move faster and faster, so that we need more than ever to have a reliable point of view, an existential epistemological compass, as it were, by which to discriminate one thing from another. To evoke Theodore Parker’s familiar and useful formulation: What is transient in life today, and what is permanent or enduring? What criteria shall we apply in order to make such determinations? I propose we ask the same questions concerning our ministry: What is lasting or primary, and what is transitory and of second.” significance in liberal religion and in its implementation in the life of the parish and beyond? If it’s the fundamental things/the enduring values that apply equally to life and ministry, which are inevitably connected, what might they be? In response to this query, I suspect it will be of far more interest if I present what I have found has worked for me, in the hope that there may be enough universality to serve as a foil to the thinking and experience of many of you.

Following graduation from Tufts’ Crane Theological School in 1957, I began ministry the following year in Iowa City . Above all, I really did want to see what I could and to tell what I saw and to start. my ministerial career that way, not wait in order to test in what direction the institutional winds might be blowing, thus preparing myself, as best I could, to take the consequences. An unacknowledged parallel motivation, which I dare say is not unique to me but which didn’t become evident anti( some years had passed, way the desire somehow to create in the parish environment a better, less anxiety-producing family than I felt I had known. I wanted to school myself as well as I could into becoming what the late Ed Friedman called a non-anxious presence.

It was exactly a year ago that I retired from nearly 40 years of this increasingly complex undertaking of ours, well more than two dozen of them as a UU minister and about a dozen as an Ethical Culture Leader. The sunny June Sunday when, for the lest time, I stepped down from the pulpit of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis to the warm plaudits of a congregation of which I had long since become quite fond, I experienced an overwhelming emotional sense of palpable relief, gratitude, and personal satisfaction; lots of endorphins must have been released! Since that special day, while enjoying the freedom to be as busy as I want, I confess I haven’t had the least regret that I didn’t spend even mace time at the office than I did for 18 years.

In retrospect, I couldn’t be mare grateful for my bifocal professional experience in choosing to work in both UUism and Ethical Culture, two philosophically related yet atmospherically different movements of liberal religion because, given the circumstances when I made the transition from one to the other and then back again, they dovetailed nicely, providing me the opportunity to continue serving consistently as a humanist liberal religious leader. Not being one who changes his mind just for the sake of change, I came early to regard tile broad and varied heritage of liberal religion and the deep tradition of the humanist way of life with equal ardor, devotion, and delight, finding each to be a natural enrichment of the other. No other way of thinking or being has ever held the slightest attraction for me. Humanist religion, in brief, is not an oxymoron.

Let me turn now to some of the fundamentals that I believe apply in our life and work no matter what zeitgeist happens to be dominant at the moment. To be clear from the outset, the zeitgeist, let me suggest, has to be respected as a force to reckon with. We do not have to succumb or pander to it, only live with it and, if necessary, outwit it. Whoso would thrive must be something of a nonconformist-not always, for that would be suicidal, but from time to time-which will require creative risk taking and a nimbleness to move in and out of whatever “the system” may be that confronts us with its rewards and obstacles.

Reality And Authenticity

Remember what the Anglican bishop in Racing Demon forcefully reminded his vicar to do above all: Put on a good show. Most religion, organized or not, has its legitimate publicly representational aspects. The issue is whether the theatricalization is subordinate to the substance of the religious impulse from which it presumably emanates or whether it is an end in itself, in which case it is mere entertainment, surface titillation. The entertainment ethos has become integral to myriad levels of postmodern life: themed parks and restaurants, shopping malls and fantasy decor in cities like Orlando , Las Vegas , and elsewhere. Organized religion is not a stranger to these temptations, especially the one-crop-shopping syndrome of the mega-churches. Was Shakespeare right after all, that the world is but a stage and all the men and women merely players?

An amazingly well-wrought and appropriately named film, The Truman Show, reminds me simultaneously of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwells 1984, and Minnesota ’s domed temple of virtual reality and consumerist religion triumphant, the Mall of America in Bloomington . Is it any surprise that this age of unrelenting hype and entertainment, this age of celebrity mania, is also the age of plastic surgery’ What chiefly counts is appearances, as well-paid spinmeisters and shlockmeisters in politics and culture respectively will gladly attest. Surface is depth, as Ronald Reagan held to be the celluloid nature of reality. Is nothing real anymore’ Is authenticity an artifact of some distant past?

Actual reality, I submit, remains life’s oxygen, “virtual reality” is its anesthetic. I should think that even as we acknowledge that there’s far more to life than ideas, there’s ultimately no real authenticity; no life worth living, indeed, no sanity without ideas born of human realities to help anchor, capture, and bring order out of the buzzing confusions of life’s details into some open-ended scheme of understanding. Authenticity arises out of the encounter with actual reality. We who serve in an officially noncreedal movement need preeminently to beware getting suckered into that aspect of the contemporary zeitgeist that upholds the attractiveness of an un-intellectual—beyond even anti-intellectual—culture, a culture instinctively suspicious of ideas. What I’m implying is, if we wish to model authenticity in a congregational setting, we have to do more than just put on a good show on Sunday mornings or at any other time during the week. We need not only to have ideas, but also the courage and patience to tease them out and say out loud what we see. l trust that the primary emphasis in our programming, preaching, counseling, and social ministry is upon being real together, so that we all thrive together in our variegated selfhood. Real religion is created of clusters of compelling ideas about our shared human destiny, and it emerges only as its committed adherents strive for authenticity. The transient means by which we achieve that fundamental end as time goes by are, as Parker agreed, mere farms. Forget that, and we may end up with “virtual” religion; where “virtuality” prevails, rest assured it betrays a desire to escape the real world that we feel we are powerless to influence, much less to control.

What’s Sacred

A recent workplace study conducted by the Gallup organization found—hardly a surprise—that employees today are inundated by avalanches of info rmation every day: something like 200 email messages alone to cull. Their rising complaint and concern is that long-term thinking is being subverted by constant interruption and distractions, that they’re being treated as if they were nonstop machines. How little things have changed! Charlie Chaplin’s film masterpiece, Modern Times, with its satire of an industrial society in which workers are literally caught up in the machinery of the assembly line, was an early warning sign of the spiritual dislocation of human life by the killing speed of modem civilization.

When queried about what changes they would like in the workplace, the employees questioned said what they really yearned for was “sacred time,” time in which to reflect without interruption, to consider what’s important besides making a living--personal time, private time, time to get back in touch with their own being, their inner life, that which is truly “sacred.”

In a survey of 4,000 male business executives in California , nearly 70 percent of senior executives—those who had long been in the fast lane—admitted they had neglected family and personal pastimes in favor of pursuing professional goals. If they had the chance to do it over, they would change the weighting of their priorities, or so they said. In any event, there’s a feeling here of leading a driven, truncated existence. Do we in ministry not commonly experience the scone feelings?

Be that as it may, these two reports merely underscore a longstanding, well-deserved critique of modernity, namely, that in the very midst of material abundance generated by constant industrial, Scientific, and technological advance, Something precious in human experience has gotten lost or at least muffled. This was perhaps first noticed in the West long ago by the poet Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us;

late and soon, getting and spending,

we lay waste our powers.

 Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon…

We are out of tune; …

Wordsworth was clearly unsettled by the sheer pace of everyday life as it was picking up even as early as the end of the 18th century, its gathering political turmoil presaging a new world of unrelenting change and materialistic pursuit that is now with us in spades. What Wordsworth foresaw was a weakening of the un-self-conscious connectedness that for ages human beings had forged and enjoyed with the teal world and in organic human communities. In light of today’s bustling economy more and more Americans are paying their own spiritual price through being overanxious, overworked, over-scheduled, downsized and reengineered, substituting, for example, short-term networking for lasting, nurturing friendships. I’m reminded of TS. Eliot’s definition of Hell: “a place where nothing connects.” When things/people are not connecting, a spiritual problem, if not crisis, is brewing.

Yet another Gallup poll, this one in May 1998, reported that folks these days are consequently seeking solace not so much with one another as through vague, unanchored, once-over-lightly therapeutically oriented spiritualities characterized by an overwhelming preoccupation with self. Moreover, ethical depth/biblical depth/philosophic depth—whatever be the type of depth at issue—is lacking, according to the poll’s findings. This sort of spirituality, associated more perhaps with outer-directed than inner-directed personalities, mirrors the disconnectedness of our time rather than helping us transcend it. If surface is equated with depth, a proposition we noted earlier, then much of today’s spirituality reflects that equation—a spirituality without ontology, sometimes born less of authentic religiousness than of pseudo-religiosity; often too, it is a spirituality without ongoing community to sustain it.

So it is that I find myself in total agreement with classical scholar Edith Hamilton, who concluded that for the ancient Greeks (who of course didn’t know they were ancient), the rational and the spiritual were perceived, in their depth, as one and the same, simply different forms of one another, both being natural human properties. For a religious humanist like myself, the sacred is the felt, selectively shaped depth of the secular; the timeless can only be found in the timely, and transcendence is projective from within. In short, if the secular is cavalierly dismissed as bankrupt, so is the spiritual. Once you start separating the one from the other, you lapse into metaphysical dualism again. We UU’s do have a doctrine of the sacred, though we dare not give it an exclusive name as being collectively representative of our diverse membership. That unofficial, unexpressed doctrine is, at bottom, what Emerson described simply as the divinity of human nature.

I’m therefore convinced, contented, and inspired by the notion of the inherent sufficiency of human nature, despite its myriad flaws, to chart its own course ad e adequately on this earth. Shakespeare, in whose luminously unsurpassed plays and sonnets religion per se is practically absent, manifestly operates on the assumption that our human nature is in the end fundamentally sound, more healthy than not. The framers of the American Constitution made no less a bet cm human nature when they crafted that masterpiece of democratic self-governance, the first of its kind in the history, of the human race. Last but not least, Vaclav Havel, in his searching Harvard commencement address of 1995, openly confessing dismay with humanity’s current loss of awareness of its own spiritual life, skewered the arrogance of all forms of anthropocentrism and upheld the need for us to respect that which is more than us, namely the great world that starts at the tip of our noses. The world isn’t “Out there” somewhere; it’s as close to us as our breath. Call it reality, nature, the cosmic order, of which we, all people, are part. Eschew bondlessness, urged Havel, knit new relationships across differences; build the Kingdom here and now, one might add.

Admittedly, sometimes “Hell--is other people,” as Sartre tells us, and as was pedantically but still effectively presented in the last episode of Seinfetd: Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine, obnoxious to the end, packed together in a prison cell, can barely took at each other--not exactly the beloved community! Not until they transcend their self-absorption will they behold one another in the fullness of each other’s being.

By the same token, not until Prime Minister Netanyahu and his supporters fully treat Palestinians as morally equal to Israelis will there be any peace in that small, combustible comer of the planet. Not until we as a species treat nature as morally equal to our own personal needs will we stop abusing the earth. Not until UU’s see their society or church as morally equal to themselves will annual budgets be fully funded. Not until heterosexuals cease to treat gays and lesbians (Senator Trent Lott, are you listening?) as morally equal to themselves will homophobia approach its end. Not until whites and non-whites become colorblind to one another will the overt marks of race cease to be a significant cause of division, estrangement, and hatred. Jasper County, Texas, where a black man was chained to a pickup and heartlessly dragged to his death in June of last year, is still not far away.

Utopia isn’t in the cards, but we can always progress a bit despite many a backward turn. Conscience is still the driving force behind reason. A little defiant hope could help, too. Victor Frankl, founder of logo-therapy, who emerged from the concentration camp with his spirit intact--because, to quote Emerson, he did not “shun the rugged battle of faith where strength is born”--passionately believed and taught that we humans have the power within ourselves, with one another’s help, to grasp life’s inherent excitement and unconditional meaningfulness. That’s what’s sacred! That’s what’s fundamental.

Liberal Religion: Ministry And Life

When it formally appeared as an organized entity in the early 19th century, liberal religion represented a new dispensation of humanity’s ubiquitous spiritual impulse. The phrase liberal religion emphasized unprecedented freedom of thought regarding the spiritual life and the infinite worth of this sphere of time, space, and history, what Wordsworth hailed as “the world, which is the world of all of us, the place where, in the end, we find our happiness or not at all!” Liberal religion was like a genus that in time would spawn a number of species exhibiting similar characteristics and attributes. However, our UU version of liberal religion being noncreedal signifies that in today’s eclectic, neo-romantic transitional era, the varieties of UU faith will tend in the future to be more basically divergent from one another than in the past. We’ve long since gone beyond the traditional philosophic/theological categories of rational Christianity, transcendentalism, universal theism, religious humanism, naturalistic mysticism, and the like. Now there’s also Wicca, neo-paganism, earth-centered spirituality, Buddhist UUism, and so on. Two critical questions arise: Are we first of all secular liberals drawn sporadically to a nonsectarian spiritual quest in our spare time, or are we essentially a religious people who then practice our religion according to the democratic tenets of congregational polity? More precisely, are we UU’s first, or is our primary identification something else, having perhaps little to do with what’s historically recognizable in the liberal religious tradition? Because liberal religion has few, if any, barriers, any of us can enter it easily and eventually graft onto it whatever description suits our personal preference. If UUism sooner or later becomes what everybody affiliated with it conceives it to be, then it will have indeed become a complete postmodern phenomenon. At that point we wilt have stopped heeding the call to continue the fundamental directives of our history, and mere transience will have triumphed. The choice is ours.

The Prophetic And The Pastoral

Born in Boston in 1932, from the age of 71 grew up religiously in the First Unitarian Parish in Dorchester. The church’s long-time minister was Robert Stogy a wonderful pastor and gifted organiser who became a close friend of the family my earliest mentor. First Parish was a settled liberal Christian church, founded its 1630 by the Puritans and which theologically converted to Channing Unitarianism in the 1820s.

When I reached high school, Bob Storer asked me to participate in a Christmas pageant. He’d write a somewhat different script each year, drawn inevitably from Judeo-Christian history. He assigned me the role of the prophet Isaiah. As I studied and memorized the text, practicing it vocally, I could feel the power of Isaiah’s analysis of the religious and political predicament he was addressing. Isaiah wasn’t foretelling the future so much as telling people what was really going on in the pr sent beneath the ostensible surface of events. No wonder he—and others like him—got into trouble. If people want the truth, they usually prefer it “slant,” as Emily Dickinson famously put it in one of her poems—not straight. Prophets, as opposed to poets, “tend to be blunt, uncompromising, and supremely annoying.”

On the night of the performance, standing halfway up the stairs of the magnificent burled wooden pulpit that practically reached the ceiling, and wearing a role a white one at that, for the first and last time in. my life, 1 not. only spoke Isaiah’s words, I momentarily became Isaiah. Imagine that! Unbeknownst to myself, I was on my way to becoming a Unitarian minister. I systematically devoured the rest of the prophets, from Amos to Jesus. What impressed the about the Nazarene wasn’t just the extraordinary intensity and urgency of his personality but that, unlike his predecessors, he was the only one to take full responsibility for his own words and not consider himself merely a mouthpiece for Yahweh: You’ve heard it said of old, but I say unto you. When philosopher and historian died in Berlin died in November 1997 at the age of 89, his longtime friend and admirer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., said of Berlin that he “had the marvelous quality of intensifying life so that we perceived more and thought more and understood more.” To intensify life, as we’ve seen, is to sound its depths, not mirror its surfaces. For Berlin, ideas were great educational forces that ,are key to our hopes, insights, tribulations, and the trigger to action. That’s what the prophets did--they intensified life via them behavior, their tenacity, their words, and, above all, their ideas about what religion and ethics meant in everyday life. I realize anew that what 1 actually must have tried to do in my ministry was to explicate and intensify the humanist way of life in liberal religion throughout my preaching, teaching, programming, and social outreach advocacy. I firmly believe that as a rule, the fundamental things that apply as time goes by will not emerge unless congregational life is religiously/ethically/spiritually intense—not ‘lite,’ not just a show. As former Ethical Culture colleague Joseph Chuman puts it, “The questing for personal fulfillment too often drives out the imperatives of social ethics and the need to pursue the mandates of religious conscience. Most ominous is the blunting of religion’s prophetic edge…” I heartily agree. In effect, Joe is talking about the need for intensity without which moral authenticity and prophecy are not possible.

Religion And Nature

A news item in the June 1, 1998 issue of Newsweek quotes an NYU student who witnessed the sudden hailstorm that hammered the city one day the week before, flooding eight subway lines and leaving 300 residents without power. “In New York City,” she said, “You’re so disconnected from nature that it’s easy to forget that nature is omnipotent. It was like, all of a sudden, ‘Barn!’ Out of the sun comes these giant balls of ice.”

The 19^th century, which expired not in 1900 but during the Great War of 1914-18, was the last century when people were still in regular unselfconscious contact with the natural world, its extravagant beauties and perils. In our day that connection ho-as largely snapped, immersed as we are in our urbanized life of dazzling comforts, high culture, and concrete. Nonetheless, it’s useful to be freshly reminded that Emerson’s unique creative audacity consisted in part in connecting the individual’s direct, tactile embrace of nature, including its flora and fauna, with the ethical basis of the drive for social justice and social reform. Emerson’s passionate idealism was born of an entirely new faith that he founded, a faith outside the boundaries of any world religion, a faith that tied individual destiny to the sources of renewal in nature. Transcendentalism propelled Emerson and many others into the anti-slavery cause. In the 1850s, he angrily dismissed the Fugitive Slave Act as a “filthy enactment,” disobedience to which he publicly advocated. He was especially drawn into the 1854 Boston trial of escaped slave Anthony Bums, which instigated the much more physically active participation of Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Emerson somehow understood that how we treat and involve ourselves with nature and the way we treat and involve ourselves with other human beings are profoundly related, the implication being that nature and people and individuals of all colors and circumstance are morally equal to one another and that together we bear responsibility for social justice and what today we call ecological responsibility for the earth. In such an interpretive framework, nature becomes a great equalizer.

Does It All Come Down To Beauty

I submit that the best, though not the only, key to unlocking our past is to seek out that conception of liberal religion that starts with a profound, sustained awareness and understanding of the cosmic order and how our human nature relates to it. History doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it rakes place in nature, It’s not an accident or a minor thing that Jesus, apart from his religio-political program, had a reverent appreciation of the natural world. Remember these moving words from Matthew’s gospel: “Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to (your) span of life? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and so I say unto you, that even Solomon in ail his glory: was not arrayed like one of these.” The gospel statement suggests that because nature embraces history and therefore everyone’s personal life, perhaps we can learn something important from that immediate source of our being. Robert Redford’s movie The Herrse Whisperer attempts exactly that, presenting how exquisitely sensuous relationships can transpire between people, between people and animals, between people and nature, arid the anxiety-free mental balance that can result when it all comes together. A coherent, well-lived life can he a thing of beauty not only if we’ve located ourselves historically and ontologically, but also in the natural order.

In his spiritually charged novel Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak continually reaches beyond transience to the depths of the human spirit, the simple fundamentals of life that perennially apply. When we come upon Lara near the end of this passionate, harrowing tale, we find her walking alone from the rail station to the estate of the rich industrialist Kologrivov at Duplyanka. It’s the summer of 1911.

Lara walked along the tucks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and closing her eyes, tack a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. !t was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth our of love far life to successors who would do it in her place.

Life’s “wild enchantment,” calling things by their right name—Apollo and Dionysus combined! What a recipe for developing a liberal religious movement -not just a denomination or association--of true philosophic character and prophetic intensity! Worth thinking about, wouldn’t you say?

The Reverend Khoren Arisian is minister emeritus of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis and president of friends of Religious Humanism.