Welcome! Another voice for Unitarians, Universalists and kindred Christians. Reviewing the what, why and how of The Liberal Christian. The opportunities ahead. Copyright and copyleft. And how the readers can get involved . . . or make their own publication.
Scott Wells
Liberal Christians, as the term is understood by Unitarians, Universalists and their kindred, are few in number and perhaps declining. I write perhaps because nobody knows for certain how great our numbers were last year, a generation ago or a hundred years ago.
We do not know what changes the culture will bring to make liberal Christianity seem more or less vital, and we do not know what God has for us to be more faithful or productive. Our best days may yet be ahead. And if so, how might they be realized?
Let's begin with the conventional wisdom about reform and revival. We start by taking institution-building resources and survey our options for common work and inspiration. Generations of church organizers rallied the faithful and called for sacrifices of time, money, prayer and effort for greater and more visible Reign of God on earth. Christians have organized on a peer-to-peer basis for common, informal and non-commercial work for centuries. Today, even challenged by uneven access to technology and a faltering global economy, people have unprecedented access to receive, create and share their ideas and to self-organize into groups with a common work. If Jesus broadened our idea of neighbor, access to communication allows us to talk and cooperate. Centralized power of coordination and dissemination has real competition.
I hope that his publication can be a bridge and model between the accustomed way of making connections and a new (and not altogether formed) way.
A promise to the readers
There are two ways to approach a project like this. One way is to make the first outing a paragon, inspire participation---and fund raising---and work to make each successive issue, program or version as good as the one before it. But this tends to settle the shape of the project before it has even started and the costs would be hard to meet, much less sustain. It also betrays the greater goal of cooperative communication. The other option, which I have taken, is to begin modestly, grow and develop steadily all the while soliciting feedback. So this is, by necessity, a work in process. But even a work in process needs a standard.
I promise to put out six issues of The Liberal Christian in 2009: one at the midpoint of each even-numbered month. That should be long enough to see if this experiment will bear fruit, be migrated to some other model or be retired. My goal for The Liberal Christian is for it to be editorially independent, international in scope and intellectually rigorous.
Some rights reserved . . .
A word about how this magazine is copyrighted and licensed. Anyone who reads books, watches films or surveys the liner notes of recorded music has seen the phrase "all rights reserved" respecting the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner. Copyright protects these property owners so they can keep control of their work and may derive---if they choose---an economic benefit from it. Loose copyright in the nineteenth-century United States encouraged cheap editions of foreign authors while inhibiting a generation of American authors. On the other hand, overly broad copyright laws---as we have today; a work created today would remain under copyright until nearly all who are alive today are gone---chill the intellectual cross-fertilization that sparks new creative work and "fair use" standards for drawing from samples of copyrighted material are too vague to be reliable. There is, however, an alternative---sometimes called copyleft---that reserves some rights for the owner, while allowing free use for others under specific conditions. The Liberal Christian participates in this movement, which is supported by the Creative Commons organization.
Individual writers for this magazine retain the copyright for their work, but as a condition of publication, they release some of their rights to the general public under what is known as a "liberal license." In particular, The Liberal Christian uses the unported Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license, which can be read at http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ and at the Liberal Christian site, http://www.liberalchristian.net. The code by-nc-sa is shorthand for what the document's sharer must do to abide by the license: attribute the author, use it non-commercially and share the result under the same terms.
So this license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon material in The Liberal Christian non-commercially, as long as they credit the magazine and the author (if noted) and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute The Liberal Christian, but they can also translate, make anthologies, and produce new stories based this material. All new work based on Liberal Christian sources will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
The foregoing paragraph, for instance, was edited from text at the Creative Commons website http://www.creativecommons.org/about/licenses/ and was made available under an even more liberal license -- attribution only -- to show the use of such a license and the work that uses it. Likewise, the photograph on the front page was taken by a photographer who posted his work and permitted its reuse on the basis of simple recognition, included in the caption.
[Web version: see the image "Szekler gate and Unitarian church" by Karoly Czifra (ckaroli) at http://bit.ly/isGZ6 ]
This means bits of The Liberal Christian and works licensed like it may be shared in church newsletters, made the basis of another article, read into a recording, be formatted into a chart or translated into any number of languages. A liberal license, I believe, is the appropriate response to people doing God's work.
Carrying-on from the magazine
Publishing articles and notices of interest is not The Liberal Christian's only function: it should also inspire new practices and rehabilitate lost treasures for churches and individuals looking to conduct the work of publication and administration more effectively. An early example will include detailed steps on how this magazine is put together and published. These resources will not be included in the magazine itself, but will be included in a future section of the http://www.liberalchristian.net site.
Requests for technical help and ideas for resources worth sharing with the larger community of Unitarian, Universalist and kindred Christians are welcome.