A persistent question among political liberals is that of cultural appropriation — “the colonial gaze.” Is an American of Irish decent committing cultural appropriation when she celebrates Día de los Muertos? Is a person of Mexican descent culturally appropriating when he celebrates St. Patrick’s Day?

This questioning chases its own tail. No, there is no zero-point in considering an idea cultural appropriation. Think of all the appropriating that went on along the Silk Road. Think of all the places the Egyptian ankh has been. Conservatives are correct from that perspective that human ideas have long remained un-copyrighted.

Yet, is it…

A very old discussion in Unitarian circles has been the question of whether or not the movement could go beyond “the neighborhood of Boston,” as the old saying went. This is still a question; perhaps the question for Unitarian Universalism, because “the neighborhood of Boston” is more than a geographical location. It’s a mental location. It’s a mental location created by a very Boston set of rules for the game. A very New England set of rules for the game.

Growing up Pentecostal, I read the bible a lot as a kid. One thing that baffled me was the continuing backsliding and apostasy of the Hebrew people. There they were, having lived through Egyptian plagues and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, with Moses on a mountain top getting direct orders from God, and there they were, building and worshiping a golden calf. What was up with that?

How could they, I asked, keep searching when they had already found the one true god? …

When did people start changing their religion? By which I mean, when did people begin to have the option of saying, “This religion isn’t working for me, I’m choosing that one.”

Trading up. Trading down. Trading.

We don’t know exactly how religion developed among human beings, but I think it’s safe to say that evidence indicates that at one time most human groups believed a common set of things about the nature of their reality. Perhaps religious professionals were involved, perhaps not. These beliefs were probably at first quite localized.

However, somewhere along the line, changing religions became an option…

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius proposed a rather large educational enterprise when he wrote, “We exist for the sake of one another. Teach them, then, or accept them as they are” (Bk 8:59).

The story goes that the Skeptic philosopher-in-training Pyrrho was out walking one afternoon. His teacher, Anaxarchus, had somehow fallen into a lake, and was shouting, “Help!” He saw Pyrrho passing by and shouted, “Pyrrho, help! I’m drowning!”

Rather than going into a tizzy to save his teacher, Pyrrho ignored the entire scene and kept walking.

Somehow, Anaxarchus survived the ordeal, and, when next he met his student Pyrrho, he praised his student with the words, “Pyrrho, well done! You are a master of my philosophy.”

It is unlikely this actually happened, and indeed the anecdote was probably concocted to expose…

My title is a phrase from the work of the Cameroon philosopher Achille Mbembe. When I’m feeling particularly hopeless concerning the chances of achieving a more just and humane society — as has happened with some frequency since 2016 — I have learned to turn to the thought of Dr. Mbembe, one of the essential philosophers in the de-colonial movement. I admire his thought because Mbembe writes realistically and trenchantly about “the gulf separating European moral philosophy from its practical, political and symbolic outcomes.”

And, gee, haven’t we recently seen quite a gulf between the facade of post-Enlightenment liberal morality…