March 20-March 22

This week I dedicated my time to compiling metadata. It appears that in 1960 Reverend Fuller began to deliver more sermons than usual. For example, in October of that year three sermons were delivered in October. This is remarkable because last year only one or two sermons were delivered per month. Of course, this could be a misunderstanding of mine based on present material. Maybe Reverend Fuller was constantly delivering plenty of sermons but maybe some of the sermons in the past years were not recorded. Which meant that in the present day I got the impression that less sermons were delivered those years. Reading the 1960 sermons was a very educational experience because in these sermons Reverend Fuller referenced the teachings of other protestant thinkers. That is why I would like to dedicate some of this entry to the descriptions of these various protestant thinkers.

The first thinker that is mentioned in numerous sermons is Dr. Albert Schweitzer. He was born in the Alsace region of France and was brought up in a family that prized education. He received his theological education at Strasbourg University in 1893 where he graduated in 1899. He not only received a religious education at Strasbourg but also a philosophical one as well. Having done his dissertation on Kant. He immediately began preaching an served in several high profile posts at the Theological College of St. Thomas. It was there, in 1906, that he wrote his famous book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus. It was this book that earned him his fame as a religious scholar and the book that no doubt gained Reverend Fuller's attention. As I have stated in a previous blog post, Reverend Fuller believed that Jesus was not divine and that he was a mortal Jewish man with remarkable insight who lived in the Levant. In his book, Albert Schweitzer argued the same thing, saying that Jesus was a religious teacher of the late Jewish tradition that preached of an incoming apocalyptic event. These similarities make it clear that Reverend Fuller was highly influenced by the European thinker's views on Jesus. Another important thing to note about Dr. Albert Schweitzer is that towards the end of his life he joined the International Unitarian Association, making him a Unitarian, showing that the influence went both ways. With Unitarians being interested in Dr. Schweitzer and and doctor being interested in Unitarianism. Another important thinker mentioned in many of Fuller's sermons was William Ellery Channing, the famous Unitarian ancestor of his. While Unitarianism first developed in Europe, it was Reverend Channing who was responsible for its spread in America. During the early 1800's when Calvinist teaching spread across the United States, Reverend Channing most daringly preached against them. Calvinism states that mankind is destined to be punished by God and only the ones destined to be saved will go to heaven. In contrast, Reverend Channing taught that God was all loving and that surely a loving God would be unable to send anyone to hell. In 1820, Reverend Fuller formed a group of liberal ministers and in 1825 they would be recognized as the American Unitarian Association. It is no wonder why Reverend Fuller mentions Reverend Channing on so many occasions. In many ways, his ancestor was the founding father of American Unitarianism.

March 6-March 8

This week I finished scanning the documents of the 1960 folder and compiled some metadata. After examining so many documents I feel that I am qualified to talk about the specific beliefs and world views of the Unitarian Church. The Unitarian Church has a long history that stretches back hundreds of years ago to New England. In 1819, Reverend William Ellery Channing, an ancestor of Reverend John Channing Fuller, gave a sermon titled "Unitarian Christianity" where he rejected the trinity, rejected the belief that all men are borne sinners, stated the importance of reasoning and maintained the dignity of human nature. This was most likely done in response to the religious movement of known as the Great Awakening that was enforcing Calvinistic ideals on the American population. Indeed, Reverend Channing's resistance to such Calvinistic concepts as original sin and predestination mirrors Reverend Fuller's future resistance to the Evangelical ideals of his fellow protestants in the 1960's. Another American religious movement that would effect Unitarianism in the 1800's was Transcendentalism. Walt Whitman and Ralph Emerson would have a strong influence on Unitarian beliefs. Transcendentalism stressed the importance of the soul of an individual and his\her own ability to experience something vaguely known as the "divine." Also, Ralph Emerson's father was a Unitarian minister who is referenced in some of Reverend Fuller's sermons. Another parallel between past and present can be seen in how Walt Whitman is quoted in many of Reverend Fuller's sermons. One sermon Reverend Fuller gave at a Unitarian conference outside of Orlando opened with a poem by Walt Whitman.

But how do these beliefs work? Unitarianism had its roots in the Protestant Reformation in Europe and yet Unitarianism's beliefs are so different from other Protestant denominations. How did this happen? The answer can be found by examining Unitarian beliefs in more detail. The first thing that must be recognized is that Unitarianism is more of a movement than a religion, as stated by Reverend Fuller in a 20th century sermon. Members of the Unitarian Church are "seekers" who each try to use their human reasoning to discover the truth. Their human reasoning is divine because that is what gives them a measure of control in the universe. Reverend Fuller points out that yes, we are insignificant parts of the greater cosmos but our ability to understand and learn about the universe around us makes mankind special. But even if we are special, how do we use our reasoning? Unitarians say we use it by looking at the figures of the past as examples. Reverend Fuller repeatedly denied the divinity of Christ in his sermons but he still saw Jesus as an exemplary human teacher that taught important humanist values. He also listed mystics such as Meister Eckhart and even secular teachers like Freud as men whose teachings are worth learning about. Even teachers belonging to other religions are looked to. This is not viewed as unusual by Unitarians. A key belief of Unitarianism that Reverend Fuller was fond of pointing to was the "Brotherhood of Man." Unitarianism fully upholds the equality of mankind and states that we are all equal. Men are not drenched in sin but are rather made to do good by others. Reverend Fuller criticizes his fellow ministers who use threats of hell fire to keep their congregations in line. Reverend Fuller's defining belief, and perhaps the key belief of Unitarianism, is the inherent goodness of man and his/her ability to find his own salvation.        

February, 27-March, 1

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.

February 20-February 22

This entire week was dedicated to the compiling and editing of metadata. On Monday I received the good news that Mr. Cravero had finished taking notes on my metadata and had emailed those to me. I thanked him and immediately reviewed his notes and applied the necessary changed to my metadata. This proved to be a very time consuming process. The first thing that needed changing was rearranging my name so that the last name was first and the first name was last. This was easy to change but because I had done this for all my metadata entries it took a good amount of time to go through every entry and make the change. Also, I learned that when it comes to coverage it is required that locations mentioned by the documents also need to mentioned. This meant that I had to review all the documents again and check them for mentions of locations that were not the First Unitarian Church of Orlando. Even now I am still not finished with this task. Another thing that needed to be edited was the medium of the documents. Also, I forgot to put that in for several entries so along with editing already existing mediums I had to input new ones and this required, of course, the reviewing of prior documents. By the end of the day I edited out the most glaring problems and compiled some metadata about the first few 1959 sermons. Still, there are still some fixes I need to make and more sermons to be scanned.

On Wednesday I took a break from editing the metadata to focus on compiling the metadata on the remaining 1959 sermons. Being more used to metadata I worked faster than usual but was still unable to finish examining all the sermons. I found Reverend Fuller's sermons to be rather intellectual and complicated, much more so than an average Christian sermon. Reading his words I found Reverend Fuller to be a very knowledgeable and educated man. In his sermons he mentioned numerous other sources of information and even mentioned the beliefs of other religions, especially Judaism. His educations is best made apparent in is sermon about how Unitarians should read the Bible. In his sermon he discussed how it is a collection of different books written over a period of hundreds of years. He also discussed how each book was written with by a different author with his own agenda, so every book must not be taken literally and that the context of each book had to be understood before reading. He recommended that his congregation read an edition of the Bible known as the "Dartmouth Bible" because it provided useful notes that could help any reader understand the historical context of each book. He recommended that the Bible be read not as a religious document, but as piece of literature equal to the Dialogues of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare. I found this all very interesting, not because these ideas were new to me but because this was the first time I had heard of a member of the clergy expressing this sentiment. Even though I left without finishing all the metadata for the 1959 documents I was satisfied with the progress I made.    

February 13-February 15

This week I focused on finishing the metadata for the 1957-1958 sermons and scanning the sermons of 1959. Working on the descriptions of the metadata was very time consuming, not only because the sermons had more text than the meeting minutes but also because the documents the text were on were in bad shape. For some reason most of the documents were cut into smaller pieces which meant I had to reassemble the papers in order to make the text legible. When reassembled, the paper appeared to be larger than the folder so it appears that they were cut into pieces on purpose so that they would fit, even though some were not cut up at all. Once scanned, the digital images of the documents had to be rotated so that they could be read by me. Despite these hindrances I managed to finish the metadata and begin scanning the 1959 documents that recorded the sermons given in that year. Once again I was amazed by how liberal Reverend Fuller was. Unlike most sermons that talk about Biblical events or the parables of Jesus, Reverend Fuller's sermons discussed current events and practical advice from him was distributed. Since I had spent the greater part of Monday working on metadata I had to finish scanning the folder on Wednesday.

On Wednesday I once again focused on scanning the documents. Once again some of the pages were cut up and time had to be dedicated to reassembling them. The content of the sermons was very interesting. One interesting sermon concerned a group of people that wanted to find a school to teach diplomats how to fight communism. Reverend Fuller sympathized with this proposal because of his belief that communism was against Unitarian values. However, he proposed that a peace school be founded instead in order to bring nonviolence to the whole world. Another sermon that was interesting and quite unlike anything I've heard before concerned the topic of differences in generations. In this sermon Reverend Fuller compared the Victorian generation with the generation that grew up during WWII and came to a surprising conclusion. This was that the Victorian generation had many good values that the current one was missing. According to Reverend Fuller, the Victorian era was peaceful and filled with an optimistic human society that looked forwards to the future, unlike the pessimistic wartime one. Personally, I think Reverend Fuller looked much too fondly on the past but I found his view to be interesting since I have never heard one like it before. Still, it appears to me that no one ever told Reverend Fuller that the "good old days" are sometimes not as good as older people make them out to be. Another secular thing discussed in a sermon by Reverend Fuller was that of school desegregation. Apparently, in 1959, Orlando had not desegregated its schools. However, Reverend Fuller was confident in his sermon that the city would eventually follow the example of other southern schools that were becoming integrated. He insisted that Orlando desegregate soon or else the schools will be forcefully integrated and that would cause a lot of  unneeded chaos. By the end of the day I finished scanning all the documents and left feeling very satisfied.

February 6-February 8

On Monday I decided to start scanning the documents that recorded John C. Fuller's sermons. I had finished scanning the Orlando Ministerial Association documents and cataloging their metadata so it was clear to me that I needed to start on something else. Reverend Fuller was the secretary of the Orlando Ministerial Association during its most active years and was author of many of the meeting minutes. This led me to believe that by scanning Reverend Fuller's sermons delivered by him during his time spent as secretary I could possibly learn more about the Orlando Ministerial Association. Also, by scanning his sermons I would be able to learn more about the reverend himself. I spent Monday scanning a folder that contained records of the sermons he delivered in 1957 to 1958. What immediately surprised me about his sermons were how liberal they were. The first sermon I scanned was titled "Why do Good". I expected this to be a simple sermon about how God wanted people to be good but Reverend Fuller's explanation was a lot more complicated than that. According to him, their was the authoritarian way and the liberal way of doing good. The authoritarian way was the way used by most of the other churches. According to Reverend Fuller, this involved threatening people that if they did not do good God would withdraw their love from them. He also pointed out that the authoritarian way can be seen in how people constantly do good so that other people will still like them. Reverend Fuller then explained that the liberal way had a better understanding of good. The liberal way saw people as being made in the image of the divine and this meant that they were capable of doing good by themselves without being told that God would punish them if they didn't. Reverend Fuller's faith in the goodness of men and women really surprised me. In the past I attended a conservative Baptist high school and what they taught in the school sermons was very different from all that Reverend Fuller taught. Another thing that really surprised me was his December 1957 sermon where he talked about what kind of Christ he wanted in Christmas. Contrary to all that I have heard other reverends say, Reverend Fuller stated that he did not place importance in the virgin birth and that he did not believe in a magical Christ who died for our sins. He believed that Christ was a man and a wise teacher who had an amazing understanding of human problems, something I have never heard a member of the clergy say before.  

On Wednesday I finished scanning the sermons and started working on the metadata. Working on the metadata for the sermons was a lot more time consuming than the meeting minutes. This was because the sermons required longer descriptions since Reverend Fuller covered so much ground in his sermons. When it came to topics, Reverend Fuller talked about a large variety of different things. In a frank manner he discussed topics such as letting go of the past, alcoholism, mysticism and how Jesus was a Jewish reformer. I can safely say that I have never met a clergyman nowadays that was anyway like him. Reading the sermons and uploading their metadata made me realize just how different the Unitarian denomination was from other Christian denominations. Examining the sermons have also given me plenty of insight into Reverend Fuller's beliefs.

January 30-February 1

On January 30 I continued cataloging the various metadata of the documents. The more progress I made the more difficult this task became. The beginning portion of the documents were organized copies of meeting minutes that gave a pretty clear picture of what was happening in the past. However, the later documents were handwritten notes and their dates were all over the place. I do know that John C. Fuller was the secretary of the Orlando Ministerial Association and was responsible for the authorship of many of the documents. That is why many of his documents were stored and organized so well in the First Unitarian archives. However, John C. Fuller left the First Unitarian Church of Orlando in the summer of 1961 for a new church in New England. It was around this time that the documents became more erratically organized and I don't believe this to be a coincidence. These handwritten notes indicated that not too many important events had happened in 1961 and beyond. Poor attendance and talks of possibly merging with the Orange County Ministerial Association were things that were commonly brought up. Many other documents were just copies of the older ones. One interesting document that fit into neither of these categories was a copy of Sunday Closing Law bill, which made it a law for businesses to close on Sundays and made it so that any business open on a Sunday would receive a misdemeanor. The Orlando Ministerial Association was against this bill because they saw it as a violation of the first amendment. This resistance was discussed at earlier meetings but these discussions would cease to be mentioned in later records. Overall, as time went on it seemed that the Orlando Ministerial Association conducted less activities.

 February 1st proved to be a very productive day. I finally finished the metadata and I scanned the rest of the documents. After I scanned the final documents I cataloged their metadata and finished examining all the documents. The final documents were a mix of handwritten notes and printed letters that dated to 1961-1966. The secretaries during this time were Reverend Brown of the Unitarian Church and a Reverend Proctor from another Christian church, since these two were the secretaries they were most likely the authors of the later documents. Reverend Brown would later become president and he is the member who is last mentioned being president since the final document mentioning him dates to 1966. This is the year where the written records of the Orlando Ministerial Association leave off. The Orlando Ministerial Association did not appear to be up to much during their final years. The mentions of wanting to merge with the Orange County Ministerial Association disappear and the Orlando Ministerial seems to be preoccupied with trying to get WFTV Channel 9 a federal license in 1966. This presents a sort of mystery since the documents do not indicate how the Association dissolved. Based on mentions of poor attendance in previous documents it seems likely that poor attendance and a lack of enthusiasm were the culprits. However, this is not explicitly stated and gives the Orlando Ministerial Association a rather anti-climactic end. No other documents pertaining to the Association appear to exist but there are documents having to do with John C. Fuller that might have some useful information. I plan on scanning those because while the OMA documents did not present a full story, they did leave me with an interest in a man that seemed to be the driving force of the group until his departure in 1961.