A Carnival Show for Coofs?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 18, 2002
READING: from *Away Offshore* by Nathaniel Philbrick
“...to see the island degenerate into a carnival show for Coofs was more than any self-respecting Nantucketer could rightly stand....”
***
It occurred to me this past week that it’s been precisely a year now, since I packed up my car in Portland, Oregon and set out on the cross-country adventure that brought me here to Nantucket Island. And I’ve been reflecting on the wisdom of my decision to begin my ministry here after Labor Day, rather than starting earlier in the summer, because I honestly believe that, had my first introduction to Nantucket been July and August, I would have probably been ready to start swimming back to the Pacific Northwest after only two months, instead of looking forward now to staying on for a second year as your interim minister.
I know that summer is supposed to be THE SEASON to be on Nantucket, and I suppose if your only alternatives are Boston or Manhattan, Nantucket seems like a paradise this time of year. But Nantucket’s abundant natural charms aren’t always that apparent when you’re sharing the island with 50,000 other people (not to mention their 22,000 vehicles). It’s like trying to meet a pretty girl at a crowded party (for lack of a better metaphor); you might catch her name, she may even give you her number, but never mind trying to figure out whether or not the two of you may actually have something in common.
Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with an occasional party now and again; Lord knows, I like a good party as well as the next guy (well, maybe not quite THAT much; I am, after all, a clergyman). But still, you can’t just party day in and day out, seven days a week, all summer long, and expect to have much to show for it (other than maybe a hangover). Some people have to actually get up and go to work in the morning, even if it’s only to make the coffee and clean up after the night before.
I’ll leave the rest of this metaphor to your imagination; have fun with it, play with it a little, see if it has anything to teach you. The party’s going to be over soon enough anyway, and hopefully we will all still respect one another in the morning. The students will go back to school, the seasonal workers move on to other employment, the summer people will lock up their houses and migrate back to wherever it may be that they spend the winter, the tourists and day-trippers will gradually trickle away, and the shops and the restaurants that cater to them one by one will close their doors as well; the season will be history, like so many other seasons before it, and those of us who remain will all be another year older. And if history can be trusted (and if you can’t trust history, what can you trust?), there will also be slightly more of us here on the Island than there were the year before.
History is a lot of things, but one thing it is sometimes characterized as is “The study of change over time.” It doesn’t really predict the future, but it can help us to anticipate it, and plan for it, by teaching us about what has happened in the past. One of the great pleasures, for me, as an historian, about living here on Nantucket this past year, has been the opportunity to learn a little more about the history of the island, and of this congregation’s place in it. One of the things that makes Nantucket special is the fact that you can still see so much of its history with your own eyes, but knowing the story behind what you see makes the experience all the more meaningful.
I’m certain some of you noticed as you arrived this morning (if you didn’t know it already), that this Meeting House, for example, was erected in 1809. The building dedication service was held on November 9th of that year, but the first minister, Seth Swift, wasn’t ordained until April of the following year, and the society wasn’t actually incorporated by the Commonwealth until two months after that. The total cost for the construction of the original building was $8,533.36. The bell, which was purchased in Portugal for $500, was hidden in the basement of what is now Murray’s Toggery until the conclusion of the War of 1812, and installed in the tower in 1815; it tolled for the first time on December 18th of that year. The first town clock was built in 1823 by church member Samuel Jenks. In 1830 the original tower was rebuilt to its current height and profile of 109 feet, five and a half inches, at a cost of $2,223; the following year the Goodrich organ was installed in the new choir loft, where it has remained until this day, not only the only Goodrich instrument still substantially intact in its original location, but also the oldest pipe organ of any kind which meets that criterion in North America.
Between 1842 and 1844 the meeting house was significantly remodeled: the side galleries were removed and these tall, triple-hung windows were installed, various other modifications were made, and the trompe l’oeil interior was painted by the Swiss artist Carl Wendte. The cost of that project was $5,626.50. In 1881 a new clock, the so-called Howard Clock, was donated by William Hadwen Starbuck; that clock continued to tell the time for the town of Nantucket until 1957, when it was replaced by an electrical timepiece with a mechanical bell-striking mechanism, thus eliminating the necessity for human bell ringers to toll the hour and the “52’s” by hand.
And, of course, as many of you know, that clock was in turn replaced just a few weeks ago by a new, computerized system with a Global Positioning Satellite link to the Royal Naval Observatory in Greenwich, England, which (when the installation is completed) will continuously adjust the time on our tower to Greenwich Mean Time. Many of you here today may also remember the major restoration program which took place between 1982 and 1986, under the auspices of the South Church Preservation Fund. The total cost of that project was about $850,000: approximately one hundred times more than it cost to construct the original church back in 1809.
Just a few more things along these same lines, and then I’ll move on to something more interesting. The parsonage behind the church, where I live, was constructed in 1724, but it wasn’t acquired until 1900, by the ladies of the Women’s Sewing Society , who paid for $1,600 for the property and turned it over to the church four years later. Prior to that time, as far as I can tell, the ministers purchased their own homes (that is, when the congregation could afford to hire a minister at all); Seth Swift, the first minister, lived just up the street from here at 33 Orange. Likewise, in 1810 (when the congregation was initially incorporated), there were only 6800 people on the island, yet this represented a 47% increase over what the population had been only twenty years earlier, at the time of the 1790 census.
By the 1840’s the number of people residing on Nantucket had grown to nearly 10,000 (approximately the number of people living year-round on the island today), but this level of inhabitation was relatively short-lived; the Great Fire of 1846, combined with the decline of Nantucket’s whaling industry, the temptations of the California gold fields, and eventually the Civil War, all served to depopulate Nantucket, until by the 1870’s there were fewer than 4000 people still dwelling on the island...and the population remained at roughly that level for nearly a century. Since 1970, however, the year-round population of Nantucket has increased from 3,774 to 9,520 (according to the census figures), while the peak seasonal population of the island (as I mentioned earlier) is approximately five times that amount.
Of course, you don’t need a historian to explain to you the significance of these trends. You can see the ramifications with your own eyes. Traffic congestion, gentrification and the “Nantucket shuffle,” environmental degradation, water and waste disposal problems, pollution run-off, closed harbors...the list goes on and on and on. The great irony of the situation is that these problems are not simply the result of more people coming to the island; they are also the product of an astonishing economic prosperity rivaled only by the height of the whaling industry. Thanks to tourism and the “hospitality industry,” Nantucketers are making money hand-over-fist, but even so a lot of long-time island residents can no longer afford to live here, while the island itself is rapidly becoming transformed into the kind of place that many of them wouldn’t want to live anyway...except for the simple fact that this “faraway island” is their home.
There are potential solutions to these problems. Nantucket has an excellent Comprehensive Community Plan, developed over a period of four and a half years by the Nantucket Planning and Economic Development Council, along with two more recent studies on traffic congestion and affordable housing sponsored by the Nantucket Sustainable Development Corporation in partnership with several other community organizations. The only problem with these plans is that they are merely words on paper; unless the community itself is willing to get behind these plans and put them into action, they will simply become the kind of documents that historians of a subsequent generation will point to as evidence of failed opportunities.
I’m not going to try to outline the substance and details of these plans here; you can pick up copies and read them for yourselves, talk about them with your neighbors, attend the public meetings. But I do want to talk briefly, and in a more general way, about some of the philosophical alternatives which inform the ways in which we might approach the conundrum of scarcity created by prosperity, and the challenge of both limiting the negative consequences of growth, while preserving the benefits of economic development.
So try thinking for a moment about the idea of dessert. That’s something we can all sink our teeth into. Economists will tell you that one obvious approach to the problem of scarcity is to bake a bigger pie. If there isn’t enough to go around, you make more. In the area of housing, for instance, there are currently approximately 11,500 existing “dwelling units” here on Nantucket. Of these, about 38% are occupied by resident, year-round households; another 34% are primarily seasonal homes; 10% are “secondary dwellings” such as cottages and garage apartments, and the remainder are things like hotel rooms and bed & breakfasts, dormitory accommodations for seasonal workers, nursing home beds, and boats in the harbor. Current zoning laws, on the other hand, allow for a total of approximately 25,000 units, meaning that at the current rate of construction Nantucket can build new homes for another half-century before reaching its theoretical “build out.” But even assuming that this was desirable (and I’m not suggesting that it is), the question remains: “who are these houses going to be built for?”
Last year there were only three homes here on the island that sold for less than $300,000. The NSDC’s recent Housing Needs Assessment estimates that there are approximately 400 households currently renting on the island, who have lived here for at least five years, who earn between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, and who would purchase a home on Nantucket if there were anything available in their price range. There are another 200 households doing the shuffle, who desperately need affordable, year-round rentals, as well as approximately “900 Nantucket youngsters between the age of 10 and 19 who will be moving into the workforce and looking for stable and affordable housing over the next decade.” As a community, it is possible for us to address these needs if we chose to, as well as accommodate individuals who will be moving to the island in order to fill one of the estimated 900 new service sector jobs created by a growing retirement community, who are expected to convert their existing seasonal homes into year-round residences in the next ten years.
The total need is not as great as it sounds: 400 new houses in the next eight years, at prices between $180-$300 thousand, and an additional 200 rental units, in order to accommodate people who are already living on the island, or who will be moving here simply to provide essential services to those who currently do. 400 new homes priced below $300,000 is only 20% of the estimated 2000 new houses that will be built on Nantucket during this same period based on current rates of construction, and the report offers a very workable strategy for accomplishing this goal. But it is going to take a little work to actually achieve it.
Of course, there are some folks who would argue that even this much growth is undesirable, that we should simply clamp down hard on any further development, in order to avoid the ancillary costs (like traffic congestion and environmental degradation) that inevitably seem to accompany additional building. This is sometimes called the “fewer forks” theory, and it certainly has its attractive features. If we just restrict the number of people who live here on the island, the quality of life for those who remain will be that much better, and Nantucket will more easily retain those intangible virtues which make it such a wonderful location to live in the first place.
The only real problem with a philosophy of “fewer forks” is that the people who can afford the finest silverware generally get to eat their fill, while those who can’t basically starve. Even long-time residents who already own their own homes become tempted to “cash-out” and take their windfall equity to the mainland, and the people who move in are not the same as those who move away. The community as a whole may appear more affluent; but our nurses, our schoolteachers, our plumbers and fishermen, even our own children, are compelled by the “invisible hand” of the economy to leave Nantucket, and once they are gone it becomes nearly impossible to replace them.
Of course, there is also a third alternative, which I like to think of as “better table manners.” If baking a bigger pie is not an option, and limiting the guests at our table is socially undesirable, we can always divide what we have into more equitable portions, and agree to take smaller bites. This strategy might include things like creating higher density housing in exchange for more green space, creating more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and supporting alternative modes of transportation, improving the effectiveness of our recycling efforts, and learning to adjust our lifestyles in order to be more civil with one another, and less of a burden on the resources of our community, so that we all might better enjoy the benefits of living on Nantucket.
How much does it matter to you to wait 60 seconds at an intersection, if you only have to do it twice a week instead of twice a day? Are you willing to walk to the beach, or take the NRTA, instead of driving your SUV right down to the water, if it means that you still have a beach you can go to? Are you willing to live a little closer to your neighbor, if your neighbor is someone whose companionship you actually enjoy? Even as we lament the loss of community which Nantucket’s rapid growth has engendered, we must recognize that community -- civil society -- is something that we create among ourselves, thorough our willingness to observe reasonable limits, and to generate good will.
I also know, that in some people’s minds, it is people like me who are a big part of the problem. I’ve only been here a year, I have no real roots or experience in this community, and yet here I am shooting my mouth off about issues that some of you have been wrestling with for decades. I know as well that as a minister, I enjoy certain privileges and opportunities not generally available to most other islanders: my housing was bought and paid for a hundred years ago, while the prominent position of this Society and its Meeting House in Nantucket’s historical landscape gives me immediate visibility and credibility in the wider Nantucket community. My point is that it was only through the wisdom and the foresight of your religious forebearers that I enjoy these privileges, and these opportunities...that I dwell in the heart of Nantucket, and have unfettered access to this prominent, free pulpit from which to share my observations and opinions.
Of course, THAT part of my job is still up to me...and depending upon how well this is received, I may well decide to go back to preaching only about safe, non-controversial topics (like the Bush Administration’s foreign policy). But my privileges are also my responsibilities, my “duty” as your minister to “call ‘em as I see ‘em,” to preach the truth in love. And you also have a duty, based on the privilege you now enjoy of living on Nantucket, to demonstrate the same kind of wisdom and foresight exemplified by your predecessors, so that generations from now historians will look back and acknowledge that you rose to the challenge at a time when this island community needed you most.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 18, 2002
READING: from *Away Offshore* by Nathaniel Philbrick
“...to see the island degenerate into a carnival show for Coofs was more than any self-respecting Nantucketer could rightly stand....”
***
It occurred to me this past week that it’s been precisely a year now, since I packed up my car in Portland, Oregon and set out on the cross-country adventure that brought me here to Nantucket Island. And I’ve been reflecting on the wisdom of my decision to begin my ministry here after Labor Day, rather than starting earlier in the summer, because I honestly believe that, had my first introduction to Nantucket been July and August, I would have probably been ready to start swimming back to the Pacific Northwest after only two months, instead of looking forward now to staying on for a second year as your interim minister.
I know that summer is supposed to be THE SEASON to be on Nantucket, and I suppose if your only alternatives are Boston or Manhattan, Nantucket seems like a paradise this time of year. But Nantucket’s abundant natural charms aren’t always that apparent when you’re sharing the island with 50,000 other people (not to mention their 22,000 vehicles). It’s like trying to meet a pretty girl at a crowded party (for lack of a better metaphor); you might catch her name, she may even give you her number, but never mind trying to figure out whether or not the two of you may actually have something in common.
Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with an occasional party now and again; Lord knows, I like a good party as well as the next guy (well, maybe not quite THAT much; I am, after all, a clergyman). But still, you can’t just party day in and day out, seven days a week, all summer long, and expect to have much to show for it (other than maybe a hangover). Some people have to actually get up and go to work in the morning, even if it’s only to make the coffee and clean up after the night before.
I’ll leave the rest of this metaphor to your imagination; have fun with it, play with it a little, see if it has anything to teach you. The party’s going to be over soon enough anyway, and hopefully we will all still respect one another in the morning. The students will go back to school, the seasonal workers move on to other employment, the summer people will lock up their houses and migrate back to wherever it may be that they spend the winter, the tourists and day-trippers will gradually trickle away, and the shops and the restaurants that cater to them one by one will close their doors as well; the season will be history, like so many other seasons before it, and those of us who remain will all be another year older. And if history can be trusted (and if you can’t trust history, what can you trust?), there will also be slightly more of us here on the Island than there were the year before.
History is a lot of things, but one thing it is sometimes characterized as is “The study of change over time.” It doesn’t really predict the future, but it can help us to anticipate it, and plan for it, by teaching us about what has happened in the past. One of the great pleasures, for me, as an historian, about living here on Nantucket this past year, has been the opportunity to learn a little more about the history of the island, and of this congregation’s place in it. One of the things that makes Nantucket special is the fact that you can still see so much of its history with your own eyes, but knowing the story behind what you see makes the experience all the more meaningful.
I’m certain some of you noticed as you arrived this morning (if you didn’t know it already), that this Meeting House, for example, was erected in 1809. The building dedication service was held on November 9th of that year, but the first minister, Seth Swift, wasn’t ordained until April of the following year, and the society wasn’t actually incorporated by the Commonwealth until two months after that. The total cost for the construction of the original building was $8,533.36. The bell, which was purchased in Portugal for $500, was hidden in the basement of what is now Murray’s Toggery until the conclusion of the War of 1812, and installed in the tower in 1815; it tolled for the first time on December 18th of that year. The first town clock was built in 1823 by church member Samuel Jenks. In 1830 the original tower was rebuilt to its current height and profile of 109 feet, five and a half inches, at a cost of $2,223; the following year the Goodrich organ was installed in the new choir loft, where it has remained until this day, not only the only Goodrich instrument still substantially intact in its original location, but also the oldest pipe organ of any kind which meets that criterion in North America.
Between 1842 and 1844 the meeting house was significantly remodeled: the side galleries were removed and these tall, triple-hung windows were installed, various other modifications were made, and the trompe l’oeil interior was painted by the Swiss artist Carl Wendte. The cost of that project was $5,626.50. In 1881 a new clock, the so-called Howard Clock, was donated by William Hadwen Starbuck; that clock continued to tell the time for the town of Nantucket until 1957, when it was replaced by an electrical timepiece with a mechanical bell-striking mechanism, thus eliminating the necessity for human bell ringers to toll the hour and the “52’s” by hand.
And, of course, as many of you know, that clock was in turn replaced just a few weeks ago by a new, computerized system with a Global Positioning Satellite link to the Royal Naval Observatory in Greenwich, England, which (when the installation is completed) will continuously adjust the time on our tower to Greenwich Mean Time. Many of you here today may also remember the major restoration program which took place between 1982 and 1986, under the auspices of the South Church Preservation Fund. The total cost of that project was about $850,000: approximately one hundred times more than it cost to construct the original church back in 1809.
Just a few more things along these same lines, and then I’ll move on to something more interesting. The parsonage behind the church, where I live, was constructed in 1724, but it wasn’t acquired until 1900, by the ladies of the Women’s Sewing Society , who paid for $1,600 for the property and turned it over to the church four years later. Prior to that time, as far as I can tell, the ministers purchased their own homes (that is, when the congregation could afford to hire a minister at all); Seth Swift, the first minister, lived just up the street from here at 33 Orange. Likewise, in 1810 (when the congregation was initially incorporated), there were only 6800 people on the island, yet this represented a 47% increase over what the population had been only twenty years earlier, at the time of the 1790 census.
By the 1840’s the number of people residing on Nantucket had grown to nearly 10,000 (approximately the number of people living year-round on the island today), but this level of inhabitation was relatively short-lived; the Great Fire of 1846, combined with the decline of Nantucket’s whaling industry, the temptations of the California gold fields, and eventually the Civil War, all served to depopulate Nantucket, until by the 1870’s there were fewer than 4000 people still dwelling on the island...and the population remained at roughly that level for nearly a century. Since 1970, however, the year-round population of Nantucket has increased from 3,774 to 9,520 (according to the census figures), while the peak seasonal population of the island (as I mentioned earlier) is approximately five times that amount.
Of course, you don’t need a historian to explain to you the significance of these trends. You can see the ramifications with your own eyes. Traffic congestion, gentrification and the “Nantucket shuffle,” environmental degradation, water and waste disposal problems, pollution run-off, closed harbors...the list goes on and on and on. The great irony of the situation is that these problems are not simply the result of more people coming to the island; they are also the product of an astonishing economic prosperity rivaled only by the height of the whaling industry. Thanks to tourism and the “hospitality industry,” Nantucketers are making money hand-over-fist, but even so a lot of long-time island residents can no longer afford to live here, while the island itself is rapidly becoming transformed into the kind of place that many of them wouldn’t want to live anyway...except for the simple fact that this “faraway island” is their home.
There are potential solutions to these problems. Nantucket has an excellent Comprehensive Community Plan, developed over a period of four and a half years by the Nantucket Planning and Economic Development Council, along with two more recent studies on traffic congestion and affordable housing sponsored by the Nantucket Sustainable Development Corporation in partnership with several other community organizations. The only problem with these plans is that they are merely words on paper; unless the community itself is willing to get behind these plans and put them into action, they will simply become the kind of documents that historians of a subsequent generation will point to as evidence of failed opportunities.
I’m not going to try to outline the substance and details of these plans here; you can pick up copies and read them for yourselves, talk about them with your neighbors, attend the public meetings. But I do want to talk briefly, and in a more general way, about some of the philosophical alternatives which inform the ways in which we might approach the conundrum of scarcity created by prosperity, and the challenge of both limiting the negative consequences of growth, while preserving the benefits of economic development.
So try thinking for a moment about the idea of dessert. That’s something we can all sink our teeth into. Economists will tell you that one obvious approach to the problem of scarcity is to bake a bigger pie. If there isn’t enough to go around, you make more. In the area of housing, for instance, there are currently approximately 11,500 existing “dwelling units” here on Nantucket. Of these, about 38% are occupied by resident, year-round households; another 34% are primarily seasonal homes; 10% are “secondary dwellings” such as cottages and garage apartments, and the remainder are things like hotel rooms and bed & breakfasts, dormitory accommodations for seasonal workers, nursing home beds, and boats in the harbor. Current zoning laws, on the other hand, allow for a total of approximately 25,000 units, meaning that at the current rate of construction Nantucket can build new homes for another half-century before reaching its theoretical “build out.” But even assuming that this was desirable (and I’m not suggesting that it is), the question remains: “who are these houses going to be built for?”
Last year there were only three homes here on the island that sold for less than $300,000. The NSDC’s recent Housing Needs Assessment estimates that there are approximately 400 households currently renting on the island, who have lived here for at least five years, who earn between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, and who would purchase a home on Nantucket if there were anything available in their price range. There are another 200 households doing the shuffle, who desperately need affordable, year-round rentals, as well as approximately “900 Nantucket youngsters between the age of 10 and 19 who will be moving into the workforce and looking for stable and affordable housing over the next decade.” As a community, it is possible for us to address these needs if we chose to, as well as accommodate individuals who will be moving to the island in order to fill one of the estimated 900 new service sector jobs created by a growing retirement community, who are expected to convert their existing seasonal homes into year-round residences in the next ten years.
The total need is not as great as it sounds: 400 new houses in the next eight years, at prices between $180-$300 thousand, and an additional 200 rental units, in order to accommodate people who are already living on the island, or who will be moving here simply to provide essential services to those who currently do. 400 new homes priced below $300,000 is only 20% of the estimated 2000 new houses that will be built on Nantucket during this same period based on current rates of construction, and the report offers a very workable strategy for accomplishing this goal. But it is going to take a little work to actually achieve it.
Of course, there are some folks who would argue that even this much growth is undesirable, that we should simply clamp down hard on any further development, in order to avoid the ancillary costs (like traffic congestion and environmental degradation) that inevitably seem to accompany additional building. This is sometimes called the “fewer forks” theory, and it certainly has its attractive features. If we just restrict the number of people who live here on the island, the quality of life for those who remain will be that much better, and Nantucket will more easily retain those intangible virtues which make it such a wonderful location to live in the first place.
The only real problem with a philosophy of “fewer forks” is that the people who can afford the finest silverware generally get to eat their fill, while those who can’t basically starve. Even long-time residents who already own their own homes become tempted to “cash-out” and take their windfall equity to the mainland, and the people who move in are not the same as those who move away. The community as a whole may appear more affluent; but our nurses, our schoolteachers, our plumbers and fishermen, even our own children, are compelled by the “invisible hand” of the economy to leave Nantucket, and once they are gone it becomes nearly impossible to replace them.
Of course, there is also a third alternative, which I like to think of as “better table manners.” If baking a bigger pie is not an option, and limiting the guests at our table is socially undesirable, we can always divide what we have into more equitable portions, and agree to take smaller bites. This strategy might include things like creating higher density housing in exchange for more green space, creating more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and supporting alternative modes of transportation, improving the effectiveness of our recycling efforts, and learning to adjust our lifestyles in order to be more civil with one another, and less of a burden on the resources of our community, so that we all might better enjoy the benefits of living on Nantucket.
How much does it matter to you to wait 60 seconds at an intersection, if you only have to do it twice a week instead of twice a day? Are you willing to walk to the beach, or take the NRTA, instead of driving your SUV right down to the water, if it means that you still have a beach you can go to? Are you willing to live a little closer to your neighbor, if your neighbor is someone whose companionship you actually enjoy? Even as we lament the loss of community which Nantucket’s rapid growth has engendered, we must recognize that community -- civil society -- is something that we create among ourselves, thorough our willingness to observe reasonable limits, and to generate good will.
I also know, that in some people’s minds, it is people like me who are a big part of the problem. I’ve only been here a year, I have no real roots or experience in this community, and yet here I am shooting my mouth off about issues that some of you have been wrestling with for decades. I know as well that as a minister, I enjoy certain privileges and opportunities not generally available to most other islanders: my housing was bought and paid for a hundred years ago, while the prominent position of this Society and its Meeting House in Nantucket’s historical landscape gives me immediate visibility and credibility in the wider Nantucket community. My point is that it was only through the wisdom and the foresight of your religious forebearers that I enjoy these privileges, and these opportunities...that I dwell in the heart of Nantucket, and have unfettered access to this prominent, free pulpit from which to share my observations and opinions.
Of course, THAT part of my job is still up to me...and depending upon how well this is received, I may well decide to go back to preaching only about safe, non-controversial topics (like the Bush Administration’s foreign policy). But my privileges are also my responsibilities, my “duty” as your minister to “call ‘em as I see ‘em,” to preach the truth in love. And you also have a duty, based on the privilege you now enjoy of living on Nantucket, to demonstrate the same kind of wisdom and foresight exemplified by your predecessors, so that generations from now historians will look back and acknowledge that you rose to the challenge at a time when this island community needed you most.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:28 PM
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