Sunday September 28, 2008

faux_pseudo@livejournal.com: 2008-09-28

Ok. I have been reading this for over a year and I still don’t fully understand your posts about the adult children thing. Could you post something on this explaining the whole concept to everyone?

A bit of history: First came Alcoholics Anonymous. Then came Al-Anon, for family and friends who wanted to help alcoholics with their recovery. (And Ala-Teen.)

Adult Children of Alcoholics, which split off from Al-Anon, concentrated on helping children of alcoholics help _themselves_ recover from the effects of being raised in alcoholic families. Then people from non-alcoholic dysfunctional families started joined, and the name was changed to Adult Children of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families.

Complexities: There are Adult Children meetings which belong to Al-Anon and follow Al-Anon guidelines. And there’s a separate 12-step organization for survivors of incest.

dreamshark@livejournal.com 2008-09-26

“In some ways, MUMC is very different from what Methodist churches were when I was growing up.”

I grew up in more or less the same part of the country you did and I don’t recall Methodist Churches being particularly liberal.

[Oops -- I didn't intend to say they were.]

In upstate New York there were typically two choices if you wanted to attend a Protestant church in a small town: Baptist or Methodist, and the only obvious difference between them was that the Baptists had those fascinating dunk tanks hidden under their altars. They even used the same hymn books.

[I grew up in an area settled while New York was still New Netherlands.  So there were Dutch Reformed churches. And there were churches of various other denominations; a Lutheran church, for example.

[Back when the newsgroup alt.culture.ny-upstate actually discussed Upstate New York, one poster from Buffalo took for granted that all of Upstate was heavily Catholic.  Upstate isn't exactly monolithic.]

I sort of thought Methodists were descended from Calvinists; not liberal at all.

Nowadays they seem to be just one notch up the liberalism scale from Unitarians. I wonder if it’s just Midwestern Methodists, or if they’ve really changed that much in the last 40-50 years?

[I think they really have changed that much.  Not all, of course; Southern Methodists are likely to be much less liberal, for example.  And I don't think the Midwest is on the leading edge; New England and the Pacific Northwest are more likely to be.]