... for ten whole days. Sheesh!
I was (as chatted about in August 14th's post) geared up to launch into a deep consideration of what the big goals of the school could be.
And then: a church happened.
I was tapped by a friend to help start up a non-religious church — an experiment in community building to provide some of the benefits religious folk (e.g. Christians) derive from their religious congregation (e.g. churches) without having to import any of the beliefs (e.g. God, an afterlife).
This excites me tremendously — I have an interesting background as a religious believer (and, these last seven or so years, as a still-oddly-religious non-believer) — and I think my experiences here could help me grow some of the skills we'll need to start up this school.
(It may also, of course, be d for failure. That's okay — most entrepreneurship doesn't pan out. "Fail fast," as they quip amongst Silicon Valley startups. Better to get some of my lessons out of the way sooner, than later with the school!)
I started a new blog — churchforatheists.com — to raise some of the possibilities such a non-religious assembly might have.
There may be a time limit to this: we're planning to launch the Seattle Assembly (that's the name we're working with at present) in November; much of the public pondering I do will be of special use before our first launch.
For the last 10 days I've tried to split my attention between the two blogs, a noble attempt which has entirely failed. I think the wise thing to do — Lee, do you still agree with me? — is to take off the rest of August and the whole of September from this blog (schoolforhumans.org), and to evaluate at that point what the best course of action is.
So is this blog done with?
OH, HEAVENS, NO.
We'll be back, and we're making plans to re-launch it more strongly than ever. (You may want to subscribe to this blog, so you'll be updated when we return!)
For the time being, feel free to visit churchforatheists.com, and watch some of the same questions of how we might form a vibrant intellectual community be ruminated on in a rather different context...