There’s a lot to discuss when it comes to the eternal questions of life, and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango is taking on some of the big ones in its summer lecture series.
Based on the theme Saints and Sinners, members will be taking a look at the big picture: What’s so saintly about saints? What’s so original about sin? They’ll also be analyzing some case studies from history and pop culture, ranging from arguably America’s most famous early fictional sinner, Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, to Henry David Thoreau’s lifetime of seeking and artist Frida Kahlo’s controversial life.
“We’re living in a secular age,” said series organizer Katherine Burgess, who will kick off the series by examining saintliness. “Do these concepts have the same meaning today? I don’t think so.”
Brooks Taylor, who will follow her with a talk about sinning, doesn’t think so, either, at least not all of them.
“I’m going to begin with the scriptural ideas of sinning and bring them forward to contemporary issues,” he said. “For example, we no longer associate suffering with moral evil. In the Old Testament, there’s the idea that you must have done something sinful or wicked if you’re suffering. Now, we don’t blame someone or consider it divine punishment.”
Taylor, a retired physician who worked in public health for more than 30 years, has spent the last couple of years reading about the subject.
“Nowadays, in contemporary society, we tend to downplay the evil parts of things that happen, the parts that are attributed to the individual,” he said. “And social science has been researching what contributes to people doing evil deeds.”
He is most interested in what he calls collective evildoing.
“We have all these mass killings and genocides, particularly in the last half of the 20th century,” he said. “It’s not generally a devilish person, but a group of ordinary people influenced by circumstance.”
All of us, he said, have good and evil in us.
“The knowledge of good and evil is something we carry forward from Genesis,” he said. “None of us can pretend we don’t have that side to us.”
Ron Garst will take a look at a person who led a genocide, Idi Amin, the third president of Uganda, who was in power from 1971 to 1979. Garst and his wife, Marilyn, were living in Africa at the time, about 75 miles from the Ugandan border.
“The minimum count for his death toll is 80,000, and the maximum is somewhere around 500,000,” Garst said. “He started out as an affable young man. And, like Hitler, he didn’t kill lots of people himself; he ordered people to do it. Which makes you ask, how could all of those other people kill so many?”
Amin is an interesting study in many ways, said Garst, former provost of the Joint National Intelligence University.
“I went back and looked in my diaries, and there’s only one mention of him, commenting on the overthrow of the previous president,” he said. “Amin was so contradictory, considered either the devil incarnate or a savior. He spoke six languages but only had a fourth-grade education.”
Garst said Amin had suffered from numerous bouts of syphilis beginning in the 1950s, which might have affected his brain.
“But that’s not an excuse; it’s an explanation,” he said. “Unitarians believe in the basic dignity of every person, but Idi Amin doesn’t deserve forgiveness. He contracted the syphilis through his own sexual exploits. It’s a tragedy he was never brought before a criminal court.”
Other members of the fellowship are coming at the subject from a variety of directions. Lisa McCorry believes we can learn lessons from the words, music and life of Johnny Cash, which she will share in her talk, “Life is Gray.”
“He’s an alternate father figure in both his strengths and his weaknesses,” she said, “and I’m speaking on Father’s Day. There’s so much light, like all humans, but we all have darkness in the depths of us, in many forms, too.”
There’s a wealth of material when it comes to looking at either side of the equation, which has been a challenge to former humanities professor Burgess.
“Maybe I’m just not the right person to be speaking about saintliness,” she said with a laugh.
abutler@durangoherald.com
If you go
Guests are welcome at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 419 San Juan Drive, southwest of Needham Elementary School. Services begin at 10 a.m., with a discussion period held after a break after the service. Visit www.durangouu.org/presentations to hear podcasts of the talks.
This is the schedule of speakers and topics:
Sunday, Katherine Burgess – Saints: What’s so Saintly about Saints?
June 8, Brooks Taylor – Sinners: What’s so Original about Sin?
June 15, Lisa McCorry – Life is Gray: lessons learned from the words and music of Johnny Cash
June 29, Ron Garst – Idi Amin: Monster or Victim?
July 6, Dennis Aronson – Muslim Saints and Sinners
July 20, Doreen Hunter – Henry David Thoreau: Seeker
July 27, Terry Swan – What Was Jesus?
Aug. 3, Connie Jacobs – Hester Prynne
Aug. 10, Susanna Jones – Why I Believe Frida Kahlo is a Saint
Aug. 17, Lori Schell – Nelson Mandela
Guest speaker Michael Dowd will give a presentation June 22, and on July 13, the fellowship will hold its annual retreat at Vallecito, so there will be no service.
