Coffee Hour

Introducing ChaliceChick

by Chalicechick

ChaliceChick thinks she is exactly as qualified to judge blogs as she is to judge the pig competition at the county fair.

As in, not.

She still thinks she will be pretty good at it, but she’s just saying.

She’s been a Unitarian for about five years now, having it discovered it through a UU minister’s very well-written sermons, and she takes her faith quite seriously. She labels herself a “cranky humanist,” but believes that any belief that can be arrived at through reason should have a home in UUism.

She is a great lover of good writing. Her favorite authors include Robertson Davies, Lisa Alther and Richard Russo. She likes trashy mysteries, good biographies and anything by Miss Manners. She used to be a reporter and has had a novella published by her college press. No, you can’t have a copy. It’s really sort of lame.

She doesn’t have a blog but pretty much uses the UU debate section of Beliefnet as a blog. There, she has deemed her future husband, “The Chalice Significant Other” or “TheCSO” for short. Her favorite UU minister is sometimes referred to as “Katy the Wise,” but should absolutely not be held responsible for any crackpot ideas CC may have.

Her primary hobby is good conversation, and she sees blog reviewing as a chance to stimulate conversation among UUs. She likes thoughtfulness, good writing and a focus on UUism or theology. If your UUism blog is really a politics blog, if you have more style than substance, or if you update less often than Donald Trump changes mistresses, she will complain.

Planning fundraising parties for members of the US House of Representatives pays her bills. She sort of looks like Velma from Scooby Doo or Meg from Family Guy. She’s a Cancerian, an INTP and the former president of Girl Scout troop 980. She was raised liberal Presbyterian and maintains affection for her former faith.

All that having been said:

I'm a bit wedding-obsessed these days, what with my own trip down the aisle less than two months away. Philocrites and Boy in the Bands are feeding this nasty obsession with a discussion of secular weddings.

Personally, I can at least partially agree with Scott's approach of having a set wedding for everybody. I was at one point a professional writer and I would not DREAM of writing my own vows simply because in every wedding I've ever been to where the couple wrote their own vows, the vows seriously sucked. (If my college roommate is reading this, I'd just like to say "Melani, I mean 'sucked' in a good way.")

Katy-the-Wise's approach strikes me as quite reasonable. She sent the CSO and I a "wedding file" full of a dozen-or-so introductions, a dozen-or-so readings, a dozen-or-so sets of vows, etc. We get to pick and choose from a set list of choices and there's a fair amount of variation in the choices. Thus we will be in some sense setting the tone of our wedding, but at the same time, the limited choices serve as a check on the self-conscious wackiness some couples might find appealing.

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I do politics all day and am less interested in politics than faith. Besides, let's face it, those who write about their distaste for Bush to a UU audience are preaching to the choir in a fairly literal sense. That having been said, UUs will write about politics. It's in the nature of the sort of people UUism attracts. And when they do write about politics, may all of them do as nice a job as Tom Schade does in Prophet Motive's latest post where he looks at character issues in the current US presidential race.

Great job, Tom.

Now get back to writing about liberal religion.

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Phil's Little-Blog-on-the-Prarie, which features a scary-looking picture of Phil that makes him look like he's thinking that the viewer might taste good with catsup, takes a look at "Lifespan Faith Development" this week.

I'm thinking that the principles of "Lifespan Faith Development" should seem pretty self-evident to UUs who have been in the faith for awhile. Indeed, the fact that UUism allows for change is, in my opinon, one of the more appealing things about our faith.

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Presbyopic Myopia takes a look at Islam that Charles Krauthammer would largely approve of.

That's not a compliment.

I'd write more, but Marcus' commentary on beard-trimming and sentences like "All of the government and religious officials seem so scared of offending Islam or God that they just knuckle under to any kind of crazy shit fatwa that some self-proclaimed Muslim authority decrees" speaks for itself.

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Debitage wins the prize for frequent updates as he has commentary on the Kerry-Bush debate up and that debate only concluded three hours ago.

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Measured Extravagence had a spiffy bon mot about saying grace.

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I love Beliefnet, and I hang out on Beliefnet as do some really spiffy UUs. But Beliefnet is not giving us love in return.

In their recent article The Twelve Tribes of American Politics, UUs are not mentioned at all, even under the section devoted to the "Religious Left."

Bastards.

Posted by Chalicechick, October 14, 2004 02:37 AM