The Fairness Project

When It Comes to Religion, Let's Keep One Resolution

    This year, let’s keep one resolution – when we talk about religious people, let’s never again refer to them as literalists. That’s because they aren’t, and no one is.
    No one takes all their scriptures, tradition, or even their natural laws literally. They all pick and choose from the variety of material available to them, taking some of it literally and some not.
    To continue to label them literalists is not only inaccurate; it gives them the edge in any argument. Even though everyone -- that’s everyone -- interprets and picks and chooses from the material available to them and decides what to take literally and what not to take literally, when we refer to right-wingers as literalists, we have conceded that we are interpreters but they the ones who understand it...."

Read more of this latest column and others.
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LJWorld.com Dr. Minor on October 8, 2011, again responds to a
Lawrence Journal World "Faith Forum" question:
"How Different Do You Think America's Religious Life Would Have Been If Columbus Hadn't 'Sailed the Ocean Blue' in 1492?"

Read Past "Faith Forum" Answers Here.

Reflections on Religion of a Re(Tired) Religion Professor

How might a retired Professor of Religious Studies ("Professor Emeritus") think of religion and the world's religions after 35 years of full-time teaching? Dr Minor presented a two-part series on that to Broadway Church in Kansas City, Missouri where he spoke of giving up dealing with religion and the religions in order to understand and interact with religious people.
You can hear it here.

If I Had Time to Read Only One Article This Week,
The Most Helpful One for My Work Would Be —

George Lakoff: "Conservative Frank Luntz Has Set a Trap for
Progressives -- Here's How to Outsmart Him and Boost
the Occupy Movement" (December 6, 2011)
"Unfortunately, Luntz is still ahead of most progressives responding to him. Progressives need to learn how framing works. Bashing Luntz, bashing Fox News, bashing the right-wing pundits and leaders using their frames and arguing against their positions just keeps their frames in play.."

Read George Lakoff, "Conservative Frank Luntz Has Set a Trap for Progressives"

The Fairness Project On-Line Activist Tool Kit

The Fairness Project is in the process of making available the handout materials from Dr. Minor's popular workshop: "Being an Activist Without Being a Victim." These materials are chosen because they encourage activist leadership to proceed from a progressive, healing model which contradicts the models of leadership found in most popular forms, models that are meant to keep the system in place rather than to make changes that support humanity, and result in burnout among leaders.

To access the current materials in The Fairness Project Tool Kit for activist leaders, click here.

Download Available: Dr. Minor's Address to the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Death Education and Counseling — "Heaven and Hell in the Afterlife
Prospects of LGBT People" (pdf)

Dr. Minor on Love, Dating, and Relationships
A Column at 50PlusPrime.com

    "A basic building block to long-lasting relationships is one of the hardest to keep in mind. And it requires both partners to regularly recommit to it in spite of all the messages we get from the relationship industry all around us that wants us to buy what it has to sell to make it all better.
    The word often used is growth. People and relationships are not static entities. They grow.
    But that word is deceiving because we think of growth as a movement in a linear direction through what we are even, at times, told are stages of relationships. Growth sounds as if we should be able to see where we are going, just as babies turn into toddlers, then children, then teenagers, and finally “full-grown” adults.
    Even that is an artificial fiction, for it often assumes that there is an endpoint to the growing process. Turning people into “adults” seems to be a goal, as if we have said something everyone knows when we say, “let’s all act like adults.”..."