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Frustrated citizens have tried to fill the vacuum. Like-minded “followers” and “friends” feed us news online; people sometimes barter on eBay rather than bow to big corporations; and parents increasingly homeschool their children rather than expose them to failing public schools and unsafe streets. But this is coping, not institutional adaptation. And sociologists say we need the control that institutions provide: It’s how things get done.

When people trust their institutions, they’re better able to solve common problems. Research shows that school principals are much more likely to turn around struggling schools in places where people have a history of working together and getting involved in their children’s education. Communities bonded by friendships formed at church are more likely to vote, volunteer, and perform everyday good deeds like helping someone find a job. And governments find it easier to persuade the public to make sacrifices for the common good when people trust that their political leaders have the community’s best interests at heart. “Institutions — even dysfunctional ones — are why we don’t run amok in the woods,” Hansen says.

Still, no metrics exist to measure life without institutions, because they’ve been around as long as humankind. The first institution was the first family. The tribe was the first community. The first tribe’s leader was the first politician, and its elders were the first legislature. Its guards, the first police force. Its storyteller, a teacher. Humans are coded to create communities, and communities beget institutions.

What if, in the future, they don’t? People could disconnect, refocus inward, and turn away from their social contract. Already, many are losing trust. If society can’t promise benefits for joining it, its members may no longer feel bound to follow its rules. But is the rise of disillusionment inexorable? Can institutions regain their mojo? History offers hope, but Whitmire’s story, and the story of Muncie, say no.

— Ron Fournier & Sophie Quinton, “How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest Institutions”, The Atlantic, Apr 20, 2012
The full text of this article (“How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest Institutions”) can be found here.

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and discussing a different short reading each of the remaining Sundays.

On Sunday, 29 September, we will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which Robert Helfer will guide us through our discussion. This week’s reading is Ron Fournier & Sophie Quinton’s 2012 article “How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest Institutions“. I encourage all to read the full source of the excerpt included in this announcement.

All are welcome to participate.

**If you wish to join by ZOOM and do not already have the link, please email us at westforkuu@gmail.com**

Please Join us for Worship.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Children are welcome. The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park in the lot on the west side of the building; DO NOT PARK in the Washington Avenue pay lot. Please enter through the door at the back on the west side of the building.

Map

A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing, follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you are a regular attendee, we have added you to our Google Group if we had an email address. If you have not gotten a group email already, please email westforkuu@gmail.com so that we can add you to the group, which we will be using for staying in touch with each other. Public announcements will continue to be posted here on the website and on our Facebook page and Twitter account, as usual.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

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It’s one thing to find views repugnant. It’s another thing to claim that — to hear them constitute a kind of injury that no reasonable person should be expected to stand up to. That’s theatrical because it’s not true. Nobody is hurt in that immediate, lasting and intolerable way by some words that a person stands up and addresses, in the abstract, to an audience at a microphone.

— John McWhorter, interviewed by Chris Martin for Episode 17 of the “Half Hour of Heterodoxy” podcast, “John McWhorter, Politics and Protest”, Heterodox Academy, December 14, 2017
The full transcript of this interview (“John McWhorter, Politics and Protest”) can be found here.

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and discussing a different short reading each of the remaining Sundays.

On Sunday, 22 September, we will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which members will guide us through our discussion. This week’s reading is John McWhorter’s 2017 interview “Episode 17: John McWhorter, Poitics and Protest“. I encourage all to read the full source of the excerpt included in this announcement.

For more information on John McWhorter, see his profile in Wikipedia.

All are welcome to participate.

**There will be NO ZOOM link available for this session. If you have questions, please email us at westforkuu@gmail.com**

Please Join us for Worship.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Children are welcome. The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park in the lot on the west side of the building; DO NOT PARK in the Washington Avenue pay lot. Please enter through the door at the back on the west side of the building.

Map

A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing, follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you are a regular attendee, we have added you to our Google Group if we had an email address. If you have not gotten a group email already, please email westforkuu@gmail.com so that we can add you to the group, which we will be using for staying in touch with each other. Public announcements will continue to be posted here on the website and on our Facebook page and Twitter account, as usual.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

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If we look at ourselves in this light, as trustees for democracy, the means for which have been lavishly supplied to us, we have not been doing very well by ourselves or others. Domestic and foreign policy appear to be conducted without regard to the democratic history or intentions of our country. Now that the Cold War may be over, foreign policy seems to be carried on in the light of the needs of the munitions makers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., and the multinational corporations. These corporations must, among other things, be allowed to make enough money to bribe foreign governments, political parties, and purchasing agents. Domestic policy is conducted according to one infallible rule: the costs and burdens of whatever is done must be borne by those least able to bear them. What is the price of gasoline to me? To a blue-collar worker who must commute two hours a day – usually because he can’t find a home nearer to his job – the coming price of gasoline may have all the charm of a heart attack.

Against the poor, and especially the black and Chicano poor, the forces of what we call the community are massed. Since the poor are a majority of the people, we must say that the political community required by democracy has disappeared and that what we have is what the Athenians called a timocracy, a government by money. We must say also that the political community must be restored. If it isn’t, we shall experience a period of disruptive violence the like of which we have not seen since the Civil War.

— Robert Maynard Hutchins, “Is Democracy Possible?”, The Center Magazine (The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), January-February,1976.
The full text of this article (“Is Democracy Possible?”) can be found here.

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and discussing a different short reading each of the remaining Sundays.

On Sunday, 15 September, we will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which Robert Helfer will guide us through our discussion. This week’s reading is Robert Maynard Hutchins’ 1976 article “Is Democracy Possible?“. I encourage all to read the full source of the excerpt included in this announcement.

All are welcome to participate.

**If you wish to join by ZOOM and do not already have the link, please email us at westforkuu@gmail.com**

Please Join us for Worship.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Children are welcome. The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park in the lot on the west side of the building; DO NOT PARK in the Washington Avenue pay lot. Please enter through the door at the back on the west side of the building.

Map

A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing, follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you are a regular attendee, we have added you to our Google Group if we had an email address. If you have not gotten a group email already, please email westforkuu@gmail.com so that we can add you to the group, which we will be using for staying in touch with each other. Public announcements will continue to be posted here on the website and on our Facebook page and Twitter account, as usual.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

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I remember talking to my grandfather when I was a child. He was a good specimen of a nineteenth-century artisan. He was highly intelligent, and he had a great deal of character. He had left school at the age of ten, and had educated himself intensely until he was an old man. He had all his class’s passionate faith in education. Yet, he had never had the luck — or, as I now suspect, the worldly force and dexterity — to go very far. In fact, he never went further than maintenance foreman in a tramway depot. His life would seem to his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief. But it didn’t seem to him quite like that. He was much too sensible a man not to know that he hadn’t been adequately used : he had too much pride not to feel a proper rancour : he was disappointed that he had not done more — and yet, compared with his grandfather, he felt he had done a lot. His grandfather must have been an agricultural labourer. I don’t so much as know his Christian name. He was one of he ‘dark people’, as the old Russian liberals used to call them, completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history. So far as my grandfather knew, he could not read or write. He was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or had not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen.

The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below. It looks very different today according to whether one sees it from Chelsea or from a village in Asia. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. The only question was, how to make it better.

— C.P. Snow, “The Rede Lecture, 1959”, in The Two Cultures: and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1964)
The full text of this lecture (“Intellectuals as Natural Luddites”) can be found here; the full text of the Rede Lecture can be found here.

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and discussing a different short reading each of the remaining Sundays.

On Sunday, 8 September, we will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which members will guide each other through our discussion. This week’s reading is the lecture “Intellectuals as Natural Luddites” from C.P. Snow’s dissection of conflicts between the world of science and technology and the world of literature and academia, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

All are welcome to participate.

**If you wish to join by ZOOM and do not already have the link, please email us at westforkuu@gmail.com**

Please Join us for Worship.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Children are welcome. The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park in the lot on the west side of the building; DO NOT PARK in the Washington Avenue pay lot. Please enter through the door at the back on the west side of the building.

Map

A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing, follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you are a regular attendee, we have added you to our Google Group if we had an email address. If you have not gotten a group email already, please email westforkuu@gmail.com so that we can add you to the group, which we will be using for staying in touch with each other. Public announcements will continue to be posted here on the website and on our Facebook page and Twitter account, as usual.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302