Moderator: I only have half an hour for discussion now and then we break for lunch.

Dean: To protest, I know an editorial protest in this newspaper but Parker and Garrison managed to remain friendly, partly because Garrison respected all Parker’s activism.

Interviewer: Ballou and Garrison you know were connected. You know, they managed to stay friendly too, even after they disagreed quite widely.

Lady Speaker: I just wanted to follow up on some thing Dean said about how the theory of nonviolent resistance has really been articularly that and that is why I think, even by Aden Ballou because the place where he addressed those slavery issues directly and also where he said people believed that the American revolution was wrong, that was in the 1860. So, in those earlier years he had not come to those positions yet.

Dean: And as I say Civil Disobedience we’ll see from and so Farrow who supports John Reynolds and the capitalists and Parker wrote a number of servants advocated distance in laws, but he is always very clear to say it’s not possible. So, Civil Disobedience and non violence had not yet been strong and working.

Interviewer: I have three questions. First is, you know how popular were these Unitarian and Universalist people just to masses? And how part of it they reached? What kind of following did they have like die hard Unitarian and Universalists and the question that hopefully we kind of talk about at some point is what today have they really influenced in the way which Unitarians and Universalists are not ultimately rejected or accepted.

Speaker 1: A quick answer to that is one thing is that both Ballou and Parker work with dissidence within their respected movement. And they had been reclaimed by, I mean Parker was sort of read out of Unitarian’s list initially for his activism and for his theology because he was the first Unitarian minister, active minister to say that bible was not a miracle for salvation. The Unitarian at that point had said you know there is no original sin in the bible and etc, etc. But they still believe in miracles that happened that Jesus had performed there on and so and so. Parker said no they happened as myths. And so the, he was sort of, as for as it could be excommunicated. They could not do anything because they never had the mechanism to do anything. As far as they could be they kind of pushed him out of the movement. But the younger generation of Unitarians was regarded as a hero and after his death in 1849 and after his death they sort of brought him back in to the movement as a great hero. And Aden Ballou, her relationship with universals was very complicated.

Interviewer: Well he was a, but that it might take little more time. There are criminal ways, so that he would be saved for the fullness of time, which could be hundreds and thousands of years of purgatory resistance in the after way. And the Alterist, which were led by Hosea Ballou who was about the sixth cousin of Aden Ballou. They believed that in death they called the death into glory, you die and.

Dean: Well resurrection will not endure in occurrence of your saints.

Interviewer: There is no working out that you have to do. Okay.

Dean: A very egalitarian approach.

Interviewer: Sin is restricted to this way. That is what Hosea Ballou said that since only in this life can you commit sins. Only in this life can you be punished for sins. When life is over.

Dean: Also saint suffering comes from sin and so there is not a sin into this life that suffered a sin. So you are into salvation.

Interviewer: That is it.

Interviewer: They are all Universalists that we are talking about but if you look at the question of fairness and so forth being restoration as would not believe that altered way of looking at I think was fair. And it was not the word punishment was not the word that they would have really preferred but it is conferred and abates that way they call future punishment. But it was really future discipline or future education. It was more of a, you know their penal idea was that people would have to be encouraged. They have to learn.

Dean: Parker had similar vision of say heaven, as a hospital for the sort of spiritually diseased and the healing and that is what takes the time.

Interviewer: So Aden Ballou was slightly better than 50:50 for the restoration of theologically speaking. But Hosea Ballou was such a potent person that the radical restoration was put much in the order.

Dean: Just quickly, the influence of. So some of the cities were outside the figures. But Parker had a huge replication and following. What is now the Orphine theatre in Boston, it is a church in 1850 and filled that up every Sunday and so few thousand people need coming here which that time was 2-3% of the population in the city. And he was, he himself estimated that couple of hundred thousand people a year, hear his lecture because his lecture was all over the north.

Interviewer: Like in other churches or.

Dean: Lecture hall mostly. Few of the churches let him in. He was isolated enough in Unitarianism that he had greatness on isolation ceremony in 1846 (laughs). So the idea of that, I mean they were outside of here but they had a certain. I mean Aden Ballou was more of an outside figure. I think he had a smaller group.

Interviewer: He was a smaller because the restorations was in denomination when it got broke up in 1831. They only had about ten churches left and all those ten churches, five o them were really Unitarian churches with restoration as ministers and including a Ballou’s church and then around 1837-38, the restorationists basically broke up over abolition and though things like that. And perhaps that went with Aden Ballou formed the hotel community. And that was a very small group of that people. But they had missionaries around and they went around the different places they had worked in. Aden Ballou was the principle minister here but there were other ministers there and they sent some of these people out to visit all around. So they had a presence, which was larger than just the community.

Interviewer: And they lectured, they published the newspaper, published these books. So did they tried to get his message out?

Dean: Now I get some questions from up here.

Interviewer: And just you still have a hanging question to about. What is the influence contemporarily of these perspectivism of last ages?

Dean: Well, I would just say that one thing happens is that for the Parker I know is that for a whole, for ever after he became some sort of template for the radical activist minister and people in the Unitarian tradition specially. And many subsequent people would look back to him as some sort of a prototype. He is like a first one. The next generation of people who make him revolve round was the rights moment and so forth. He would look back to Parker, and then the people involved in social gospel movement would look back to Parker, then one of the leading pastors. The twentieth century John Hem Holmes into the church in New York, who broke the Unitarianism over rule number one because you know. He, Parker was one of his great heroes, had his desk, had his diary from 1859. So in that sense he provided to a prototype and you know Aden Ballou was influenced Pacifist since either.

Interviewer: But this influence was very, it was very narrow by the time of Tolstoy to the extent Tolstoy marveled at Aden Ballou. So poorly known in his own country. But the fact that he was known by Tolstoy was important as you know you see that the link from Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King is there.

Interviewer: You know Aden Ballou’s ideas are more well known than he is. For the years have survived and not necessarily his name attached to them.

Dean: I think he talks in the preface to his own biography that you know, he feels like he is labored not because he has seen his community fall apart so forth. He has labored not for his generation but for the future and so he is sort of like, his books are like little time bombs. And if we can just keep them in print, they will go off in the hearts to use a violent metaphor. Maybe a time capsule or time pill would be better. So that eventually the people will pick it up and rediscover. And say, world was not ready in 1856 for what he was preaching but may be it is ready now. You know, we would got just sort of faster and keep it alive in some way. And may be people will rediscover when it’s time is right.

Interviewer: Questions remembered on the, we will take like till 15 minutes. How is it like real like to get people a chance to have him talking if you went to sleep and then.

Dean: Like Aden Ballou when he converted to universalism. He went through the bible and he took a sheet of paper and made recalls. He said okay universal. You know an eternal punishment in this column. When you die you just destroy it, what he calls destructionism you know nothing, if you are back you just destroy it. That is the second call and universal salvation is the third call and then he puts them down. He lists all the passages from the Bible that support one or the other. And In actual fact universal salvation did not win but he said after reading through it he got the scent. After going through the exercise and investigating what it needs, he decided that the general spirit of the Bible, the general message of the Bible had taken as a whole. The spirit underlying it was the universal salvation and the same thing would be true of peace and nonresistance. The general message that bible teaches us not every verse but the general message let us say a fairly liberal way of reading the Bible.

Interviewer: Peter Parker’s theological explanation for his resorting and encouraging violence. Well I think the key to it is the idea that to bottle fault in history because if you start to see that then you start to see that a whole range of activities which Whites say eventually lead to even what is what intended, even if they get bad intentions, they would lead to positive result because God was leading us towards a better future and Parker had a very strong belief in that. And so he would say that you know that here he was influenced by Tolstoy, but he said that absolutist Marx in France. They were trying to increase your liberty, but they broke down the nobility in order to increase their own power and they increased the power of the ordinary people to break down power of the nobility and the end result was the people got more powerful. And it is not that you know you will say why did that happen? Was that just an accident? And he said if you look at the overall tradition of history, no, there was a clear line. One of the lines, which is most famous, which was adapted for by John Hines Holmes and then taken up wisely by Martin Luther King was the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice and the idea that if you take that sort of historical view then somehow it leads you to a somewhat more flexible view and somewhat not for king but for Parker lending to some more flexible view was the explanation of these things. He also comes from, you know he thought because we were still someway his children learning to walk. We would make mistakes, but just like a child who stumbles. They would in the end teach us something. So even violence, even though that is not the ideal, it would teach us something and lead us to a better future. That was a strong conviction.

Interviewer: It was a kind of ideal that revelations are not sealed?

Dean: Absolutely. Revelation is not sealed. I mean that is a little fundamental view in his Bible and the fundamental view of. I think he was part of the Transcendentalist movement, Emerson and that crowd and as I would then went for the key that theologically know what they were trying to do was that they took the idea that was very strong in traditional Theology that you have revealed religion as you have in the Bible and you have natural religion, which is what you can figure out from you own reasoning. You could figure out there was maybe a God. This was a traditional explanation for how the Pagans had religion. Before there was revelation right then natural religion was revealed. Transcendentalists said no, they were all the same thing. Revelation is universal. We all have revelation. Every body has revelation.

Interviewer: Mysticism.

Dean: Mysticism could be any number of things like revelation through any form of truth is revelation. Any form of love is revelation. That was Parker’s view. And so as a result not that we have new Bibles that have been written, such as Emerson called for even a heinous progress and he once was writing a bible. But also that we will continue to find new truths and we know no truths. You know the Bible has many communicators at the time you know per se communicators seem to recognize slavery. But Parker said well if it does, that is so much the worse for the Bible. Right? Because we now know more than the Bible writers did know. And even though so he get the idea of democracy came from him. And in so far as the constitution supports democracy, I support the constitution. And so far as it does not, I do not.

Interviewer: And I will advance more.

Dean: Right. Exactly. That was it. But that historicist view allows violence, that is what distorts the development view. It allows violence as a potential myth.

Interviewer: Just a point there and very quickly on that. Aden Ballou would have been a sealed theologian, sealed revelation, sealed theologian?

Dean: Well, he probably felt he was going dangerously far in allowing that Christianity had no essential premise in among religions. I think that the way he interpreted the Bible probably had a lot of the same effect. In the sense that by talking about the spirit, that what the Bible says as opposed to the letter in every thought he was essentially making the difference between the transient and the permanent in religion. He was trying to find the permanent within it, but I do not think he allowed publicly that that is what exactly he was doing.

Interviewer: My question is similar to that, what I am trying to say that in terms of the question expounding franchise as a medium it seems that Parker was really the key of one of those five, Sir. With turning six points of it’s expanding franchise, you know bigger and bigger as we know more and more truth. So as we including more and more people under the word people (laughs). No, I mean. And so then my impression was what in kindness to the moral perfectionism, the ability of the individuals, to withdraw from an imperfect society and perfect themselves away from that. What would Parker think of that Sir, the concept of individual moral perfectionism?

Dean: Well he believed that individuals should strongly, should constantly aim for self-perfection. But self-perfection, part of self-perfection was helping others achieve perfection. In other words he would say a perfect mind is to achieve truth, a perfect heart is to achieve love, and that would also include philanthropy and other such things. That is one of the ways you are as a person and a perfect conscience is to achieve right not mean that you also have to oppose injustice. You cannot be a perfect person without trying to bring other people into perfection. So that is the way he would have phrased it. I should say that it is a moral individualistic conception and it is in interesting contrast, and I might just throw this out with Hosea Ballou. Hosea Ballou did not believe his individualistic view. He believed all humanity is safe together with resurrection and he did not believe that you achieved perfection because of the God and he made a famous thing that you may ask the famous question what does a mother. If a child falls into a ditch and the mother cleans the child. Does she love the child because it is clean or does she clean the child because she loves it? The answer is obvious she cleans the child because she loves it. He says God does the same thing. And so God is going to take us all in regardless. So the, and it is an interesting view. The effect of the universal idea, the idea of, getting rid of the idea of hell. The effect that that can have on practical life is very interesting. I was just reading, I may have heard there was a part on this American life, the program. Some months ago there was a story about Pentecost and a minister by a Pentecostal minister very prominent in the movement and he few years ago he concluded there was no hell and the effect it had on him. I frightened him right out of Pentecostalism, though he was a very keen member of church and thousands of people and everything else. The church kind of collapsed, but he has been rebuilding it. But then suddenly it has effects that he is into G.E.R.P. things. He is into all these other things (laughs). Because now it is not the question. These people are not helpless. It was a completely different ball view. And so Universalism which to a lot of humanists who use seem to be kind of a point idea that the hierarchy has still very powerful effects if you start taking it seriously. So I just sorted that out.

Interviewer: Aden Ballou thought that everyone on all universes was you know equivalent to people on this one.

Interviewer: And that they all had their own Christs. So that is a way of sort of relativising Christianity too that God sent Jesus to give his message to humanity. Other populations have other messengers.

Dean: You mean on the earth.

Interviewer: Ah, could be on the earth, could be on other earths. Could be to other species but God will speak to everyone in a language they can understand.

Interviewer: So we as communities I want to hang onto that conversation.

Dean: I think one of the ongoing influences especially appropriate was the scholarship. I would like to hear you comment on that briefly and some of the work you did. And then I also wanted to reverse the topic in a certain sense and just look in temporarily at a tactic that I think we have had much success with recently and then take your reflections on how you think this might have played out in the 1850s. So the tactic being occupations and checking on mass mobilizations, which are in some ways a intervening tactic, a kind of civil disobedience that is usually portrayed as none that we have a tremendous success with, and so I just wanted to replace that in archeology somehow.

Interviewer: Well, most area that guys in this generation.

Dean: Yeah.

Interviewer: Uh. He was. He is largely soft hearted and he was the son of a pump-maker. By the time he was 25 he could read 20 languages and then he could read, he read, started learning a lot more. And when he died, he had a library stuffed into this rather modest house of somewhere around 15,000 volumes, which he gave to the Boston Public Library in which he was widely regarded as, as and took his final roll to his original library, most of it. Ever pass by the library, if you go to the ware book room there, but he was generally thought to know everything that was in those books. [laugh] There was a, there was a famous story of Thomas Wilbur Hickenson, who is another interesting figure in the new Utilitarian tradition who regard him as a mentor and Hickenson going to ask. He went looking or he started finding something about early, about law under the Carolyn kings.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Dean: And he goes, he starts asking every prominent lawyer in the state, now we can. Nobody has a clue. He finally goes to Charles Sumner, who was a Senator and was widely known as a very learned man and asks him. He kind of something that he said go to see Parker. So goes to see Parker and Parker says well go to the college library, third alcove from the left, fourth shelf, [laughs] sixth book over you will find a book, and he started to [laughs]. He goes. He finds it. They all [laughs]. He was known to. He was not, but in those days you got books and you had to cut the pages. So he would be sitting here talking to people and cutting the pages and then they tell you what was his, although summarize the book for you. So I mean, that is the kind of [laughs]. Uh. But if he works so hard because he was just, he was doing so much stuff as far as he died at age 49. So, I mean his self-care. There is [laughs]. But, it is, it is an entry question about how you do. I mean, the thing that I am. I have sometimes reflected on and I have got this in part from Pasty’s Gene Sharp, whom some of you may know. There is this question of if you, non-violence can be as supposed to personal effective. That is you know trying to separate yourself from evil. So not just being evil. One of the effects is you generally have to mobilize that number of people and do it. It has a certain democratizing effect to that way. You have to have a lot of people doing it to sort of get the government to pay attention to you and so forth. Violence, by contrast can a handful of people do it and because it is violent the government, because the state wants to monopolize violence it has an effect. As a result violence tends to concentrate power in a few people, it tends to have that effect and you know, it tends to focus in on a few heroes on a kind of heroic _______. It has the advantage I say there are a handful of people that can do it, whereas nonviolence has a tendency to spread out and you have to get a lot of people involved to make it effective. Now, in terms of there was only a little bit of that in this period, where people were trying that. I mean, the most obvious thing was when they had big fugitive slave cases. They really tried to mobilize the population, people would be. We are including women, would be to follow people involved, trying to return the fugitive, they follow that person down the street shouting shame, shame. You know they would surround the hotel they were in and try to. You know, they do various things. Once, _______ so this was not run by Militarians it was done by the white population of Boston. The slave had been captured, he was in wait before the fugitive slave commissioner in the court-house in Boston and a group of African-Americans led by Louis Hayden just walked into the court room, grabbed him, and walked out [laughs]. And, they managed to get him to Canada [laughs]. So, the, it, the Federal government went nuts. You know, I mean it was called treason and the President. President Pearson now tried declarations and the President some what of a declaration. And so, this, the, so, but there was comparatively little of that. I think that tactic kind of came later, but I would, I would, I could be, because of its various effects. It is kind of a. I do not know. I could imagine, just thinking off the cuff here. I could relate to some congregational quality. You know, so you get groups of people, you know.

Interviewer: The people walked in to this fugitive slave and tried to take him to Canada, so the government moves trials out of the country. You know and so you know, so the government or the powers that be there are trying to monopolize violence are constantly shifting them and learning from our tactics as well. So, the tactics that worked a hundred years ago do not necessarily work the same way today.

Dean: Right.

Interviewer: Where do you think, probably not the stuff that Parker was involved in change the attitudes of the people who are trying to monopolize state violence?

Dean: While there is no direct any. It takes a, it takes a while, you know, when the government’s power rises and falls and people take the, very strong you know measures. You know, during the Civil War there was a lot of protest at some of the things Lincoln did because he suspended habeas corpus and he did various other things. The one thing I could say about Lincoln as opposed to what is going on now is that he did it all publicly. So there was a lot of public debate about it.

Interviewer: Uh huh.

Dean: He is very open. He was suspending habeas corpus. He was very open about it. Um. Uh. So, I am sorry [phone rings] because my wife is expecting. I feel that I have to keep my phone on..

Interviewer: [Laughs]

Dean: Um, I could be doing. I will be right back [laughs].

Dean: And Tracy, which was deeper than, and in some ways, I think deeper than the EUA but then the leadership that has had continuity has been able to appreciate it and I think the depth of that goes in part to the question of what if it is not about voting you know. Remember when Victor said he was talking to some another member and they were headed down the South and it is like this is about voting. You know, we have to do this. There is no question that we do this. It is a primary assumption but actually, then there was a confrontation with that phase. You know which said, maybe it is not about a plebiscite of the whole, maybe it is about a crocus and its unique needs and interests and determinations about what we should do. So, that presents to me a different model and a kind of, in a way that is very almost to the ground. Certainly I can ground what sees itself as middle road. Then there is another thing, which is that after that confrontation, what I see is that the EUA reacted in a certain way and a big piece of that reaction was about shame. Partially acknowledging failure and then partially saying let us do it better or let us do it right and that in part, that led to a whole series of programs that was based on the notion that the response to the black empowerment controversy was a kind of white racism and so I want to look at that and say maybe that is, and then that programming has gone for 40 years approximately, about 30 years approximately, and I want to look at that and say maybe that is not the right diagnosis. And maybe it is not about racism and maybe it is about a deeper theological conflict that has not been looked at clearly enough. Maybe it is about what is voting. Maybe it is about what is participation, what kind of participation, what kind of society are we asking people to join. And for me, one of the ways of looking at that is to say there is this period, history of conquests and of people who were then conquered many times, then forced into slavery, forced conscripted into war, exiled to a new continent, exiled to a reservation on a continent one minute, and that those divisions built in to the empire based on those differences of period and differences of status. And that there is also an underlying kind of unity, and that inner kind of unity goes to asking what was the process of conquest. What was the process of relocation, genocide, and exile? How is that a communality that we can base a re-construction of a power day on and what are the theological bases that we need in order to do that. So you can, might call it like deep preparations, or you might call it like humanism, or internationalism, that is based in a pagan perspective or a pre-Christian perspective or an indigenous perspective. So, briefly indigenous humanism is what I am looking at as a theological response to the crisis that I believe we faced most prominently in the empowerment controversy.

Interviewer: Thanks. In a couple of time when the rest of them in there so. It seems that they jumping up themselves. You know, ticking hands and counting the minutes that is when you do it. So, thanks New York very much and thank you Jeff Collin.

interviewer: Well I think about the way forward, Alan. I certainly think about the way forward in just pre returning Universalists. I think about some of the life forms everything and it is the most inspiring movement for me and the last 10, 12 years now has been the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and I do not know if there are many of you aware of the Zapatistas, but they are a indigenous mind group in Chiapas that engaged in armed struggle with the government and the army of Mexico in 1994, and sort of. As a result of that and a number of other things ended up controlling about a third of the state of Chiapas, which is the southernmost state in Mexico. And they have really been very inspiring for a lot of people and very important in re-building a national socialist movement, I guess humanist movement, radical movement, because just to sort of put it in a brief, historical contacts in Berlin. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and in 1990, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua fell and so, a lot of the things that some people certainly know or people on the left. If you are looking to for inspiration were suddenly gone right? And in 1994, the Zapatistas rise up and sort of in a way fill the vacuum as a model that a lot of people in the left are looking for a successful model, a successful organizing model and this thing about them. The thing about the Zapatistas though, was that they were like dramatically different than the model that had been developed in the Soviet Union or in Cuba, because unlike those models they were based on full participation and direct democracy and local autonomy. So their idea was that problems, such problems can best be addressed by the people they affect and the communities that they live and that the community should have absolute democratic control over the decisions that get made in the community and that everything is open for discussion. And that means that they started talking about things, which were sort of completely off the map of anybody in that culture or had not been brought up in that culture in a long time. So, people talked about homosexual rights and people talked about women’s rights and people talked about. I was in a Zapatista community once where they were having a long discussion of whether they should remain Christian or revert back to Catholic or whether they should start reverting back to worshipping the Mayan gods and so. There is this sort of interesting loosening that happens and the Zapatistas really were very important in saying well, okay. What happens in every community should be the decisions of every community but we are in a globalized system of oppression. So that means that we all have to work together to build a new society. We have to be in dialog with each other but what we do not want is we do not want some centralized body that is going to tell us what to do. We want to have a dialog with each other to figure out what we are going to do and we should go do it in our own communities and so they had posted these serious intergalactic they call them conventions in Chiapas. The idea being that you know they were not just specks in Mexico but the entire galaxy. But. And they were about just getting people from all the different sectors in the left to dialog and not say I am the authority of the union, you have to join this. You have to be part of this but we are just going to talk and we are going to talk about the different issues that we have, and maybe how we can work together on them and maybe what maybe, maybe like the problems you have faced and how we have beaten them and how we are facing some problems that you have solved, and so I found it a very inspiring model for like making my way forward in the world and trying to figure out what a Social justice movement in the United States or in the world would look like that was truly democratic and the one important thing that I wanted. I looked.

Dean: Yeah.

Interviewer: The sort of really important thing I want to get out there that I have not mentioned is that one of their really central things was that they were not going to go out to state power. Sort of like involve instead of saying we are going to change the laws of the state. We are going to challenge the laws of the state. It was, we are going to live in our communities the way we think people should live in their communities and we are going to decide what happens and it does not matter what the law says. We are going to be the ones to make the decision. So, that is very nice.

Dean: Thanks Tom. So, we are going to take about five minutes for the group to offer so that your thoughts on the way forward. Either you are already sort of formed ideas that you are sort of testing or questions that you may have and to briefly sort of summarize what we have heard and then sort of be very sort of brief, because that you know. So that Jack remembers things. He offers four sorts of ways, sort of four convictions that we will ______ and too I want to highlight. He says separate the essential from the non-essential is what he calls being spiritual. So, finally maybe, what is really most meaningful is what is spiritual. The other one that I an going to lift up is that power ethically understood is the ability to achieve more purpose that is, the rule of understanding power is very important to understanding what is moral. You know, a lot of about sort of, around themes of how do you understand our history and there was a saying that Bill Jones who is a African-American Union Minister says DDT diagnosis determines therapy and that how we understand what the problems in analysis is, determines how we are going to actually approach it and so it is very important for us to have a good analysis, for people to understand and you know, I guess one of the things that I have heard from here is sort of you know, we have this history of exodus of operating in the margins and you know, probably how do we reclaim our homes in some way and not keeping this. And then you know, Colin can share with us some ideas that come from the Zapatista experience and Zapatismo and I think one of the principals there is to sort of, you know communities living autonomously, making their own decisions and having a community based you know, decision making. So you know, one question I sort of have proclaimed for me was you know, are we willing to resist the system as culture change agents? If so, to what degree? You know, the Parker’s degree of violence, the Ballou’s degree of wanting to create the hotel, you know community that is sort of intentional and separate from society. How much, you know. What are our boundaries around interfacing with the institution? How much of this is personal? How much of this is political. So, some of the questions that we have brainstormed earlier and after the morning session that the facilitators and librarians termed the Julie as well is you know. What is Baric? What is the rule of humanism or indigenous movements in our sort of? What do they teach us about the way forward? What is the relationship of violence or nonviolence in terms of creating social change? As you train Universalists, where is our authority based and what are our theological resources? And from the sort of mental peace, you know, what is, I mean how does liberalism give us a way forward? Or give us a path to the way forward? So, to still append to the group for five minutes, what are some of your thoughts about something from today, something you brought in to the seminar, that you are thinking about in terms of the Ukrainian Universalists. You know, wanting to understand the history and make change. So, open it up.

Interviewer: Reflected some of the many conferences we had on our mid lunch, especially in terms of remind me. It is like forget the weekend especially the withdrawing. I guess sort of really is want to have us either, kind of working from another system and that setting a model for all kinds of importance to the standards of the society that we are living in. Is it still like withdrawing a, like good riddance to the rest of the world with regard roan policy? And I think that that is something that, you know, all sorts of subsequent vessels keep moving and freedom withdrawing sort of thing, and so do not have an answer to. And I do know our elders but you know but what exactly ______ this kind of a, kind of a drops on the tradition somewhat, but maybe that is just because I never like get enough model for look what is on the collar? I do not know if that is an answer I would love to be a little bit more familiar than the end of this?

Dean: The last weekend in our new group on campus, we had a sort of small group discussion, style discussions about the first principle and like how we should manifest respect that we have for the dignity of every human being and our lives and in our, within our belief system and how it effects us on a day to day and also on a broader, spiritual level? And I feel like one of the big ways it has in effect for me is that it has provided me with a sort of, in thinking about you know these sorts of moral, theological questions to have something to say you know. I firmly believe and you know referring the principle that every human being has a, you know worth being the and when you are looking at questions like these that something, you know that should always be at the very forefront and shaping and giving value to our views and theology as you know, so there was kind of what aspiring to life when you mention that as a question.

Interviewer: Interest always work within like our organizations. Are we going to move forward like, as a New Year rule like as the Unitarian movement?

Dean: Molly?

Molly: Um. Okay. We will begin with Civil Disobedience and at one point yesterday someone mentioned an uprising being sort of political theatre. Being a theatre person I think all the time about theatre and how people use it as a vehicle for their own messages and a lot of times I worry about how if no one is out there seeing your theatre. If no one is seeing your message, how do you get your message out? How do you get your message outside the theatre? How do you get people to listen to you and not push it off and in general I think theatre in general has a lot of power and there is, thee is he advocacy that is specifically done through the mode of theatre and actual show, and then they are like what I am interested in? My own life is advocating theatre and itself and getting people in to see these messages where people, artists are trying to put the mirror up to life and show truth and all of those other things and it just touching topics that are generally too hot, that are not always, that can like in some ways, there is the theatre that I think, words [laugh] borders on Civil Disobedience, because there are these topics that are taboo and even like in funding we get in theatre. It is pulled all the time, because certain governing groups like the NEA will give grants out and then will pull them back out again. The government does not like what the grant is being used for and yeah that is just. That is my piece from where I come from and from my work and my feelings.

Dean: Thanks Molly.

Interviewer: Person living together and I think, I think we kind of touch over this during out walk with that. This idea of record individuals and then you mentioned and then rugged individualism.

Dean: Huh.

Speaker 5: Um, has a lot of strength and I think that it is important. That is something that entertaining racism is really good at is valuing the individual.