---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

This is what I gathered. That in that country if a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be. There are subdivisions of illnesses into crimes and misdemeanours as with offences amongst ourselves — a man being punished very heavily for serious illness, while failure of eyes or hearing in one over sixty-five, who has had good health hitherto, is dealt with by fine only, or imprisonment in default of payment. But if a man forges a cheque, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality, just as we do when we are ill, and they come and visit him with great solicitude, and inquire with interest how it all came about, what symptoms first showed themselves, and so forth, — questions which he will answer with perfect unreserve; for bad conduct, though considered no less deplorable than illness with ourselves, and as unquestionably indicating something seriously wrong with the individual who misbehaves, is nevertheless held to be the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune.

The strange part of the story, however, is that though they ascribe moral defects to the effect of misfortune either in character or surroundings, they will not listen to the plea of misfortune in cases that in England meet with sympathy and commiseration only. Ill luck of any kind, or even ill treatment at the hands of others, is considered an offence against society, inasmuch as it makes people uncomfortable to hear of it. Loss of fortune, therefore, or loss of some dear friend on whom another was much dependent, is punished hardly less severely than physical delinquency.

— Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872)

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and a discussion on the other Sundays. We have completed Exploring, volume 2 of Building Your Own Theology, and this Sunday are continuing our practice of discussing a different short reading each Sunday.

We will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which members will guide each other through the discussion. This week’s reading is from Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or, Over the Range.

All are welcome to participate.

** NOTE: ZOOM will not be available this Sunday. **

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

Note: ZOOM will not be available this Sunday.

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

---

My mother’s name will only appear in texts or in conversations because she was my mother — the mother of a man who inexplicably became famous. I want you to know, however, that my mother was a great artist, a powerful artist who poured creativity and ingenuity and brilliance into raising her children, infusing us all with imagination and the ability — with no paranormal influences — to remove ourselves, to lift our bodies and our minds, from locations and situations that were brutal. That is art, and if we studied people like my mother, there would be shelves of books on her work with her children, her friends, her small circle of enchanted friends. Tennessee [Williams]’s mother was like this. I bet yours is too.

We walk among art each and every day — not just the music and the buildings and the offerings of professional so-called artists. Examine a life — any life — and you’ll find the artist at work. We survive by so many means, by the crafting of characters, the stringing together of words and biographies that get us from nine to five; from humiliation to humiliation; from sunrise to sunset. Study those artists as well. And ask all of us so-called professional artists how we might encourage everyone to build and honor that artistic impulse within all of us.

The artistic suicide is not only the drug-addicted actor; the alcoholic singer; the writer who makes bad choice after bad choice. Artistic suicide, like charity, begins at home. We kill the artists within ourselves in the quest to get by, to walk within the lines, to mind our manners.

Write about that.

— Marlon Brando, in conversation with James Grissom, July 1990

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and a discussion on the other Sundays. We have completed Exploring, volume 2 of Building Your Own Theology, and this Sunday are continuing our practice of discussing a different short reading each Sunday.

We will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which members will guide each other through the discussion. This week’s reading is from James Grissom’s interview with Marlon Brando in 1990.

All are welcome to participate.

** NOTE: ZOOM will not be available this Sunday. **

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

Note: ZOOM will not be available this Sunday.

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

---

I put on my newly acquired and still frustrating reading glasses and lament my middle-aged vision. The words on the page float in and out of focus. How is it possible that I can no longer see what was once so plain? My fruitless strain to see what I know is right in front of me reminds me of my first trip to the Amazon rain forest. Our indigenous guides would patiently point out the iguana resting on a branch or the toucan looking down at us through the leaves. What was so obvious to their practiced eyes was nearly invisible to us. Without practice, we simply couldn’t interpret the pattern of light and shadow as “iguana” and so it remained right before our eyes, frustratingly unseen.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and a discussion on the other Sundays. We have completed Exploring, volume 2 of Building Your Own Theology, and this Sunday are beginning a new practice of discussing a different short reading each Sunday.

We will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which members will guide each other through the discussion. This week’s reading is from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.

All are welcome to participate.

** NOTE: ZOOM will not be available this Sunday. **

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

Note: ZOOM will not be available this Sunday.

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