What pleases God? What offends God? To what is God indifferent? Shaykh Yassir Chadly at Starr King told me at the start of the last semester that proper etiquette was important because it pleases God. I'm not a Muslim, nor do I believe in God in a firm, definite sense. Something about the idea of etiquette being important to God really stuck with me, though, and I'm still mulling it over. What are the rules that govern our relationships with one another? Where do ethics come from? Are they pragmatic constructs, or do they come from a deeper source? Just idle thoughts from an early morning walk home from a late-night beer and bs session with Garrick and Neal.
This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...
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