I am very pleased to announce that on Monday I finished all the metadata concerning the 1959 sermons. It was very time consuming due to their length and the higher amounts of complexity they possessed than the meeting minutes but I managed to get my metadata all up to date. The descriptions were the most time consuming, everything else I managed to simply copy and paste. Upon completion of the metadata I began copying the records of the sermons given in the year 1960. Interestingly, these were in a different format than the previous folders of sermons. The 1957-1958 and 1959 sermons were recorded on individual pieces of paper that were cut into tinier portions. These sermons on the other hand were recorded in pamphlets and usually there were two copies of pamphlets for each individual sermon. It is my belief that pamphlets like these were distributed to the congregation and perhaps kept by them for future services. I say future services because each pamphlet contained enough material to last multiple church services. For example, one pamphlet identified on its cover as being for the months of "January and February" and its material encompassed a sermon that touched on love and all the different types of love. Such as love for god, brothers, neighbors and family. Another pamphlet which contained a sermon about what Unitarians believed in was part of a Lent series. Which I thought was odd since lent is usually associated with more conservative churches and it was my understanding that the Unitarian church is very liberal. I dedicated the rest of the day to scanning pamphlets and I was sure to crop them after each scan so I could easily read the digital copies when compiling my metadata. It occurred to me that I forgot to crop the scans of the OMA folder so I made a mental note to myself that I would go back and crop those images when I had the time. This week however, I dedicated my efforts solely to scanning.
On Wednesday I continued scanning the pamphlets. It appeared that the first few pamphlets might have been exceptions because one of the pamphlets I scanned, titled "What Unitarians Teach their Children" was dated to a specific day in March. It appears that in 1960 Reverend Fuller began to grow more adventurous with the amount of material he was putting into his sermons. Once again I was surprised by how liberal the content of these sermons were. One thing that stood out to me in a sermon about love was how "sexual love was the highest form of brotherly love." While this would not raise any eyebrows in 2017, I found this to be a very controversial statement for 1960. Even more surprising is that this was said by a clergyman in the deep South. This goes to show that there are always exceptions to a historical trend. The South was known for being very conservative and not especially progressive during the 1960's but the presence of the liberal Reverend Fuller in this time period subverts this view. Also, more surprising examples of liberalism was found in a pamphlet that contained a sermon about how Unitarians raised their children. Unlike most peoples' Sunday school experiences, the children that attended the Unitarian school were taught a wide variety of values from different religions. They also read a book when they got older that portrayed Jesus as a mortal man. This was all very surprising to me. I have in the past attended a Lutheran church that I considered liberal but they would of never taught children that Jesus was not divine. I decided that I would finish scanning the contents of the folder next week and left feeling pleased with the amount of progress I made.
No comments:
Post a Comment