For some reason, people think poetry is old fluffy irrelevant stuff, but poetry is really one of the most subversive art forms out there.

Here’s one of my current favorite poems.

Take the Humor Test

Your Score: the Idiot Savant

(47% dark, 46% spontaneous, 42% vulgar)

your humor style:
VULGAR SPONTANEOUS LIGHT

You like things silly, immediate, and, above all, outrageous. Ixne on the subtle word play, more testicles on fire, please. People like you are the most likely to RECEIVE internet forwards–and also the most likely to save them in a special folder entitled ‘HOLY SHIT’.

Because it’s so easily appreciated, and often wacky and physical, your sense of humor never ceases to amuse your friends. Most realize that there’s a sly intelligence and a knowing wink to your tastes. Your sense of humor could be called ‘anti-pretentious’–but paradoxically enough, that indicates you’re smarter than most.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Johnny Knoxville - Jimmy Kimmel

The 3-Variable Funny Test!
- it rules -

If you’re interested, try my best friend’s best test: The Genghis Khan Genetic Fitness Masterpiece

I’m reading “Restorying a Culture of Ethical and Spiritual Values: A Role for Leader Storytelling” in the Journal of Business Ethics. I’ve talked about what stories we hear and tell in the workplace before, but not read anything scholarly on the issue. Stories in the workplace are an avenue to understanding workplace ethics and workplace culture. I pay attention to workplace stories. They are extremely important. Here’s a brief excerpt (without references sentence by sentence) from the article:

Organizational storytelling

It has been said that organizations are made up of many stories and competing story interpretations. The stories that are told in an organziation allow researchers and practitioners a way to understand and try to bring about change in an organizations’s culture. It is not surprising then that much of the storytelling work in organization studies has direct links to the organizational culture literature. Specific applications of organizational storytelling that have been outlined in the literature include, among others, confirming shared experiences, generation commitment, renewing a sense of purpose, co-creating a vision for the organization, engaging emotions, driving strategic change, and faciliating sense-making.

The article continues to suggest that inspirational leaders not only communicate stories, but actually embody them.

Craig’s List is such a great source for crappy writing jobs, and there’s so much wrong with what’s written below (not only in terms of spelling and grammar), but possibly legally as well. There are some real jobs on Craig’s List, I swear, but I’ve found quite a few like this:

Female Spanish Writers needed for product discription (sic)

Women run, women owned company looking for outstanding female writers for adult product description. Must be fluent in Spanish and English, we prefer someone who is a native Spanish speaker. Important, must be comfortable and experienced with adult pleasure objects, and very professional, and open minded. This is not a full time job, however there are is full time potential in the future, and can be written at your own time. This is a great opportunity for the right person. We do not discriminate against age, gender, race, sexual orientation, or lifestyle, however due to the nature of the content we only need female writers. This is a great opportunity and we look forward to meeting the right person.

Qualifications:
-BA or equivalent required, masters or higher education strongly preferred.
-3-5 years experience in editing, journalism, web-writing, or publishing
-Must be in the Los Angeles area (NO Exceptions).
-Self motivated and very reliable
-Flexible and Organized

Please send resume and 2-3 writing samples of previous published work in Spanish posted in body of email ATTACHMENTS WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED

so here’s the quiz: How Spiritual Are You?

You can sort of figure out what “spiritual” means for the author of the quiz, and it all seems to be about sensing connections, with a couple of other aspects thrown in (e.g., awareness of miracles).

I’m somewhere around 16, I guess. You can post your score here, if you wish. Though it’s not a competition, of course. You can also comment on the questions, which is probably more interesting than the actual score.

I thought #19 was pretty funny.

Do you have a best friend at work?

I’ve written about encouraging the practice of having a best friend at work as one of the elements of good managing (not only for managers, but for everyone). And, of course, friendships are work aren’t necessarily easy and they aren’t all the same. The quality of your best friendship at work matters a great deal, and can contribute greatly to your job satisfaction.

One element that is often identified with spirituality is the idea of connecting to other people. Having a best friend at work is a really good way to connect to others. Just thought I would mention it.

So what you’re going to see from now until the 2008 Olympics in Beijing is a massive PR effort on the part of the Chinese government to assure the world that there are no human rights violations, Chinese workers are happy, the soil, rivers, and air are clean, and all is right in the world: Majority of Chinese Goods Up to Standards

It’s certainly worth noting that the US FDA also stops products imported from Mexico, India, and the Dominican Republic from entering the US for reasons of salmonella and filth. It’s not just China. But that certainly doesn’t make the situation any better.

There’s also some manipulation in the article in terms of numbers. Kudos to you if you point out what doesn’t make sense….

In China Quietly Muscles In on the Organic Food Market in the New York Sun, you may recognize someone and her No China Diet….

Is there anyone who objects to the notion of spirituality or religion at work?

I’m writing an article and need to interview someone who thinks this is a terrible idea and can articulate why. I won’t make fun of you in the article, but good journalism always shows that there are at least two sides to the story.

Just post here in comments or send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com and we can set something up.

Thank you! And feel free to forward this post to your anti-spirituality at work friends.

In Call Center Confessions, we once again learn how horrible customers can be. This is sort of a companion article to the one about Sprint dropping customers who complain too much.

Let me note two things:

1. It’s my belief that you can tell a lot about someone’s character by how he or she treats people in service jobs. And I know that some customers do just act like total assholes. I get that.

2. This article portrays a classic false dichotomy in the workplace between customers and customer service. The customers get lousy service from the corporation. The corporation treats the customer service people badly by imposing time limits on calls and penalties. And then customers and customer service blame each other, not the corporation. Nicely done, corporation.

And before I go, here’s a poem from a call center representative at Call Center Purgatory:

This New Green Home is a 10 minute video on building straw bale homes in Crestone, Colorado. I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s in my in box this morning means Jim would like to move to Crestone and build one or possibly go to the sustainable energy fair in Crestone over Labor Day weekend.

I’ve found that on the No China Diet two things have happened: 1. I buy far less in general. 2. I research what I buy.

In U.S. Family Tries Living Without China, Sara Bongiorni describes life without Chinese goods similarly:

For all of 2005, minor purchases required dogged detective work as Bongiorni
scoured catalogues and read labels. She repeatedly struck out trying to buy inexpensive shoes for her son, and even the chic local boutique that sold fancy European labels had gone out of business. So she shelled out $68 for Italian sneakers from a catalogue.

Broken appliances gathered dust because the spare parts came from China. And, with the Asian country having a near lock on the toy aisles, her 4-year-old son grew tired of taking Danish-made Legos to birthday parties as gifts.

Sara Bongiorni describes more of her life in her book A Year Without ‘Made in China’

So anecdotal evidence suggested to me that work life for the middle class at age 30 was terrible. Just absolutely miserable. It certainly was for me. It was for my friends. It was for the dozens (approaching hundreds) of strangers I sometimes coerce into interviews about their work lives. But this graph (scroll to page 3) also suggests this is the case. In fact, job satisfaction bottoms out at age 30. The good news? It only goes up from age 30 on.

So, if it’s perfectly legal to be ordained over the Internet without any additional education or training, why does it bother people ? And it does bother people. At least it used to really bother me, as a seminarian, a decade ago, so much that apparently I waited ten years to complete some thoughts on it.

Pure Speculation…
1. Performing Wedding Rites I contend that much of Universal Life Church ordination is for people who are asked by friends or family members to perform weddings (or sign legal documents validating marriages). This doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s perfectly legal, and I understand why people might want a friend to perform a ceremony, particularly if they are unchurched. More on this in my other post.

More Speculation…
2. Universal v. Universalist I can’t go any further without pointing out the similarity between Universal (Life Church) and (Unitarian) Universalist. These words sound similar, but they don’t mean the same thing. I certainly know that my Christian Scientist friends become…irritated whenever someone mistakes Christian Science for Scientology (and vice versa, actually). I think there may be a perceived fear of mistaken identity. Or equated identity, perhaps.

Some Actual Research…
3. The New Testament Now within the Christian tradition, the New Testament is pretty much silent on ordination though you do get lots of verse-throwing-around with what Jesus probably meant to say or what he implied about ordaining women and gay folks. Let’s not go there.

As far as I can tell, the ordination (and ministerial training beforehand) process is something human beings developed in the past two thousand years in order to square the notion of being “called” with “legitimacy.” In other words, if you’re called, but you don’t get the education and training and verify that call with an earthbound authority, you may not be considered legitimate by some folks.

More Research…
4. Doctors, Lawyers, Ministers…oh my! Doctors and lawyers have roughly the same amount of education and training as many ministers, but they have big deal lobbying groups that band together and make rules. Ministers don’t band together nationwide, particularly, only within denominations. So, yes, it’s illegal to practice medicine without a license, but not ministry.
Comparative Notes….
5. Every profession I studied (artist, editor, and teacher) had colleagues that described a hierarchy of what sort of work was valued and what was not. This was really valuable for me to see in writing, and possibly worth the words I spent getting to this point.

So when some ministers start talking about how the Universal Life Church doesn’t really ordain or those ministers aren’t “real” ministers, that’s completely in keeping with how people in other professions evaluate their colleagues (e.g., She’s not a real artist because she doesn’t have the MFA. He’s not a real editor because he works for pennies. She’s not a real teacher because she teachers in a rural public school that doesn’t have “real” problems.) I’m not sure very much is gained in the long-term by devaluing the work of others within your profession.

Conclusions….
In general, I think job titles are most powerful and work best when they reflect the work that we do regardless of validation of legitimacy by Academia and organizations, colleagues, or even the general public. Yes, there’s probably exceptions. But, if you’re a minister, and you hear a call and do ministry, you get the title in my book.

So what do we make of the fact that all the Universal Life Church needs for ordination is a name, address, and email? Are “real” ministers called to ordination in this church? Is this “legitimate” ordination? And who decides if it’s “legitimate”? Let’s first look at motivation for ordination in the ULC.

1. It’s my contention that many people choose ordination with the Universal Life Church not in order to have a life-long ministry in a formal church or to mock ministers ordained after lengthy discernment processes and education, but to perform a wedding ceremony. One wedding ceremony. That’s why Tori Spelling seems to have done it, Jamie did it for this purpose, and so did I. So perhaps what we really have is a problem with the way marriage is legally described and weddings are performed.

Marriage in and of itself could be an entirely separate post, but let’s leave it at the fact that marriage is a state-governed legal institution in this country with an implicit violation of separation of church and state. Marriage can be viewed as a religious committment with a legal license, a legal committment officiated by a member of the clery, or a purely legal commitment, but it is not purely religious (for the people allowed to marry by the state) because there’s a legal contract involved.

On a practical level, many couples who do not belong to either a church or know a judge choose to be married by someone they know and respect who can only perform the ceremony legally with ordination with the Universal Life Church (or a similar denomination with a relatively easy ordination process). Does that make their marriage less legitimate? Certainly not legally.

Next post: 2. Universal v. Universalist, 3. what the NT says, and 4. doctors, lawyers, and ministers, oh my.

Obijuan brought up the ordination of Tori Spelling on his blog, which I thought raised a lot of interesting issues about job titles, standards, and legitimacy:

• Who can use a job title?

• What makes use of a job title legitimate?

• Who decides if you’re legitimately using that job title?

I looked at how job titles (artist, editor, and teacher) are perceived by individuals who use the titles (me, in these cases), the general populace, colleagues, and academia.

So what did I learn?

• I’m willing to use a job title that represents my daily work regardless of professional training or a degree (I wonder if this is a Gen X characteristic, involving lack of respect for institutions);

• If I use the job title and earn money from the job practice, members of the general population will regard me as legitimate;

• Within all three professional fields (art, editing, teaching), colleagues inevitably set up a hierarchy of what sort of work is valued and devalued; and

• Regardless of daily work practice, academia is more than willing to set up a credentialing program for legitimacy regardless of what is actually needed to do the practice of daily work.

Next up? I’ll look at the Universal Life Church ordination process with what I’ve learned in mind. Perhaps.

What happened to the leisure society? What happened to the four-day work week? What happened to unions? And what do we do with our money? Why can’t we work less?

Watch three and half minutes of the Overspent American to answer those questions.

Good resources on this topic through the Media Education Foundation.

I’m trying to write more about generational differences in the workplace. Many of the questions people send me and stories people tell me seem to hint at fairly significant differences in attitudes and experiences of work based on generation. It’s not the only frame to look at workplace differences, but it’s an interesting one.

A few articles on Generation Y were recently brought to my attention.

In Bosses Dodge Gen Y Bother, we learn that in a survey of small- to medium-sized Australian employers of Gen Y’s:

• Employers were not satisfied with spelling and grammar of Gen Y’s or their understanding of “appropriate corporate behavior”; and
• Employers thought Gen Y’s were more demanding in terms of asking for a raise or getting high-tech equipment.

In What Gen Y Really Wants, we learn that:

• Gen Y wants to spend work time in meaningful ways;
• More than half of Gen Y live at home post-degree and may have more room to choose a job based on criteria other than salary;
• Gen Y wants jobs to allow for personal growth; and
• Gen Y considers working with friends to be very important.

Can you correctly guess the U.S. publisher of children’s books who asked a German author to edit an illustration of a gallery of art in a children’s books so it was breast-free and penis-free?

It’s most like one of these guys: DK, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin, Random House, Scholastic, or Simon & Schuster. Those are the biggies who would be interested in negotiating with the Germans.

For educational purposes (and in what I think is “fair use“), here is the offending frame. Do you see the breasts? the penis?

I know, I’m terribly offended and wouldn’t want children to see it. Lord knows what they would do.

One of the fascinating aspects of publishing, particularly children’s publishing, is that the staff in publishing companies is most likely entirely liberal but catering to their perception of a conservative public (and always always always avoiding negative publicity and potential boycotts of products). I was once told to change an illustration of two women camping to a woman and a man. Because two women camping would be sexual in some way and offend someone.

Read The Mini Penis Scandal: U.S. Publisher Turns Away from Cartoon Nudity.

Although conditions for workers in the United States are generally better than China, they are far from perfect. Ditto for food production. Especially in slaughterhouses. Perhaps that’s why I get great pleasure in China blocking meat from the United States: In Role Reversal, China Blocks Some U.S. Meat.

This is the third in a series of posts about job titles, legitimacy, and calling. The first was Job Title: Artist, and second, Job Title: Editor. This is Job Title: Teacher. And perhaps when I’m done I’ll be able to examine using the job title of “minister” after being ordained by the Universal Life Church. But back to teaching and the title of teacher for a moment.

My Own Perception I worked as a math teacher at a private school for Indians in Santa Fe for two years. I didn’t have much trouble thinking of myself as a math teacher based on the fact that students came into my classroom every hour, we did stuff together with numbers, manipulatives, graph paper, calculators, and exercises, and then they left. I didn’t feel called the work, but I did feel all right using the job title to describe my daily practice of teaching.

The General Populace’s Perception The national rhetoric pretends that it respects teachers, but if society truly did, teachers would be decently paid. So it always seemed to me to be a difference between how individual people treated me as a teacher (well and with respect, especially parents) and how society treated me (fairly poorly and if I deserved to starve).

Note: While teaching, I also noticed that the title “teacher” often implied an age range for students (K-12). For example, professors in a college do not use the term “teacher” to refer to themselves.

We also don’t call a lot of people who teach “teachers.” Like parents, for example. I’ve never heard, “I’m a stay-at-home teacher” rather than “stay-at-home dad.”

Other Teachers’ Perception Much like with editing (and art), there is a hierarchy in teaching. Public school teachers expressed to me that I was some sort of a wimp for teaching at a private school, as if I had a cushy gig (I did not). They were doing the “real” teaching. And later I found that teachers in urban areas regarded their own teaching as “real” teaching, and the rest of us in small cities or rural areas had no idea what the “real” problems were. Even within the private schools, I found that my private school had a less than stellar reputation. I couldn’t be doing “real” teaching there.

Academia’s Perception Once becoming a teacher and teaching on a daily basis, I found I needed a zillion courses for a teaching credential according to local universities and the state department of education. According to academia, I was only a “provisional” teacher.

So, in short,

• I perceived myself as a teacher because it’s what I did as a daily work practice;
• The general populace perceived me as a teacher because of daily practice and the fact that a school hired me;
• Other teachers established my (low) ranking quickly in teacher hierarchy; and
• Academia decided I “provisional” until I had completed their courses and had the right sort of certificate from the state department of education.