The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

Featured Articles - March, 2006

Interim Administrator Melinda Ewen Becomes Permanent as of March 1

At its February 14 meeting the church Board voted unanimously to endorse the unanimous recommendation of the Personnel Committee by selecting Melinda Ewen as the church administrator.

Melinda says that in many ways she has been preparing to serve our congregation as administrator for years. She discovered Unitarian Universalism during graduate school at Purdue University where she attended the UU Fellowship of West Lafayette, IN, and then first participated in UU leadership when she was nominated to be secretary to a forming congregation, UU Church of Indianapolis. During those years, her newcomer’s interest in and study of our denomination meshed well with the lessons she learned about the democratic process.

After moving to Muncie, IN, Melinda did a 17-year tour of many volunteer opportunities, including RE, membership, social committees, and a variety of board positions including two years as president. When she moved to California she interviewed for administrator positions at both Neighborhood Church in Pasadena and First Church in San Diego, but lost out to internal candidates both times.

When asked by our Search Committee why she wanted the position at UUCCSM, Melinda remarked quickly that she considered it a “dream job” — to be able to contribute her talents to a mission and community she loves.

We Will Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Our Calling Ernie Pipes as Minister

Ernest D. Pipes, Jr., retired as our church’s minister in1991, after having served us for 35 years. Since then he’s been Minister Emeritus, pinch-hitting and providing continued guidance and institutional memory. On Sunday, March 12, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of our calling him to Santa Monica, with Ernie giving the sermon at both services under the title “Thanks for the Memories.”

Ernie came at a critical time, after the congregation had split on the issue of a Cold War-era loyalty oath. After the then-minister, Howard Matson, resigned and only about 100 members stayed with the church, board member Angie Forbes recruited Ernie for a “healing ministry,” a challenge perfectly suited to Ernie and his wife, Maggie. The congregation stabilized, gradually grew, and evolved throughout the turbulent 1960s, transitional 1970s, and precarious 1980s.

Reaching the age of 65 and having raised three children, Ernie and Maggie began a well-deserved retirement. Their journey has been long and enriching, including extensive travel and social action.

Ernie, a native of Texas, first majored in chemical engineering at Rice University. After service in the navy in World War II, he enrolled at Trinity University, majoring in philosophy and social science. He graduated in 1949 and married Margaret Copeland the same year.

They went to Cambridge, MA, where Ernie studied philosophy at Harvard. He transferred to the Harvard Divinity School and graduated in 1952. His first call (the formal invitation from a congregation) was to Albany, NY, where the winter weather was shockingly cold. When the persuasive Angie Forbes traveled to Albany to recruit Ernie, the lure of sunshine, a booming local economy, and a small congregation was enticing. Ernie and Maggie with two young children took a calculated risk and, this 50-year relationship between a congregation and its minister has been one of unsurpassed loyalty and affection.

Fifty years later, “Thanks for the Memories” will be the perfect theme on March 12.

— Rob Briner, Historian-archivist

It's a Big Year for John Agnew with Two Prestigious Awards

John Agnew, professor of geography at UCLA and a member of our church, will receive the highest award in his field, the Distinguished Scholarship Award for 2006, from the Association of American Geographers at its annual meeting in Chicago on March 11.

The association has a membership of about 7,000 in the U.S. and around the world. Members are primarily academics, but there are also government employees and people who work for private businesses, particularly in computer mapping, environmental consulting, and industrial location.

The citation for his Distinguished Service Award reads, “Professor John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles, is one of the preeminent political geographers in the world today. His research record is among the most distinguished in political geography. He has written or co-edited 21 books or monographs and more than 130 research articles, notes, commentaries and other contributions to the field. His principal research contribution has been to illuminate the broad contours of contemporary geographies of globalization, nationalism, and place. His book on Italian politics, for example, is a tour de force in making a powerful case for understanding the modern ‘state’ from a geographical perspective. But he, more than any other scholar, has shown himself to be broad in scope and scale, showing how globalization, nationalism, and place must be reciprocally tied together in any comprehensive understanding of politics today.”

As if that weren’t enough, John has received another honor. His most recent book, “Hegemony,” (Temple University Press) was given the “Outstanding Academic Title Award for 2005” by “Choice,” the monthly magazine of book reviews published by the American Library Association. The editors of the magazine reserve the award for a very few of the thousands of books that they review every year. Explains John, “The idea is to identify the books that they think every library should buy.” The Preface and Chapter 1 of “Hegemony” can be read on the Temple University Press website, http://www.temple.edu/tempress.

According to the website, “Hegemony” tells the story of the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad through political pressure and the promise of goods for mass consumption. It explains that the primary goal of the foreign and economic policies of the U.S. is a world that increasingly reflects the American way of doing business. “The thesis of the book is that ‘globalization’ — the reduction of the importance of geographical distance for many economic transactions and the spread of common cultural messages (in other words, the ‘shrinking’ of the world) is rooted in the projection into the world-atlarge of the U.S. historical experience of settling North America and establishing the first large-scale ‘marketplace society,’” says John. “The trend is from a world organized primarily with reference to territorial states to an increasingly complex geographic mosaic of localities, global city-regions, and trading blocs connected by networks of flows of goods, people, capital and messages.”

Born in a village in northwest England, John was educated in England at the Universities of Exeter and of Liverpool. He received both his MA and PhD in geography from Ohio State University in Columbus. He has lived in Westlake Village since coming to UCLA in 1996. He has two daughters, Katie and Christine. Katie has just passed the California Bar after attending UC Santa Barbara and Whittier Law School. Christine, who is a church member, graduated from UC Irvine and is working for Amgen. She is applying to schools of public health to pursue a master’s degree in international health and later hopes to enter the Peace Corps.

John’s partner, Felicity Nussbaum, teaches English at UCLA and is also a member of our church. John, who joined the church in 2000, is on the Bylaws and Policies Committee.

Does he have any hobbies and special interests? “Apart from work, commuting, and reading, I like hiking, traveling, and eating out.” His favorite restaurant? “Rocca in Santa Monica.”

— Paula Bernstein

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