For the next few weeks, I will be posting material written last semester for a seminar in congregational studies. I studied a local congregation—the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield—and wrote at length about the services I attended. First, I wrote five field reports, each of which dealt with a specific topic requested by our professor. I also conducted two personal interviews in preparation for culling my arguments into a single, coherent (I hope), sustained argument.
For the posts on this blog, I want to recreate, in collage fashion, the messiness of my original field notes by posting isolated segments and passages from my reports and final essay. So it's ok if you read some of the posts out of order or skip a few entries, and you won’t really miss anything crucial or foundational for the rest of the posts. At least I think not. Some of the posts will be lightly rewritten or doctored to reflect their presentation in a new medium.
By the way, I am presenting material from the final essay (and perhaps from the additional assorted fragments I will post here) at the MWAAR conference in Rock Island, Illinois this weekend. Go me.
