The entering div student's first sermon

Felling the need to post something to prove I'm still here, I am posting my very first sermon ever, which I delivered last Sunday at the First Unitarian Society of Westchester.

If you've visited my UU congregation, you'll know that I usually speak extemporaneously. This was the first time since high school, I think, that I actually wrote something out and actually delivered it that way. Here it is:

Twenty-four years ago, I had the great good fortune to hear Dana McLean Greeley preach, at the Arlington Street Church in Boston. Dana McLean Greeley was a name I heard frequently as a child: he was a famous Unitarian minister, he was the last president of the American Unitarian Association, and he was the first president of the the Unitarian Universalist Association.

When you read Unitarian history, you get involved in a very limited world, the world of eastern Massachusetts. In this small region, there are dozens of Unitarian churches. Lists of their ministers bear a family resemblance to lists of Harvard presidents and heads of the Harvard Divinity School. For a couple centuries, these Harvard presidents and school heads married the daughters of their mentors, and when their own daughters grew up, kept an eye on likely young men for them. These families gave their children triple-barreled names, like
Dana McLean Greeley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Edward Everett Hale
William Ellery Channing, for starters.
And their last and middle names are on streets and college buildings throughout New England. In this tightly woven group, ancestry was important.

Dana Greeley’s sermon topic twenty-four years ago was, “The Heyday of Liberal Religion.” He mounted the steps of Arlington Street Church’s high pulpit with determination. He flashed his famous wide smile, but we could all see his gauntness. He hadn’t long to live, and this sermon was his final public statement on the denomination to which he had given his life. Punch lines being what they are, it will not surprise you to learn that to Dana McLean Greeley in 1986, the heyday of liberal religion was still to come.

Think of that. This child of New England, this leader of such a traditional group, who had been minister for sixteen years in Concord, the home of transcendentalism — he believed that the heyday of liberal religion was not in those 19th-century glory days, but still to come.

We have recently elected Peter Morales — a wise Latino — to our presidency. Peter Morales is a vibrant contrast to that old tradition. His parents were Mexican immigrants and he was born and raised in San Antonio. When he took the bus off to the College of the Pacific, he had never seen a mountain, the ocean, or been more than eighty miles from home. In the years between that bus trip and today, Peter Morales — always with his wife Phyllis — has lived in Canada as a manual laborer, fleeing the Vietnam draft. He has lived in Spain as a Fulbright professor. He has lived in San Francisco as the father of a small cancer patient. He has lived in Oregon as a newspaper publisher. He has lived in Peru as a Knight International Journalism Fellow. And he has lived in Colorado as a UU minister. He has lived many lives, actually. What do you suppose Peter Morales believes is the heyday of liberal religion?

He hasn’t used the word, but he strongly suggests that that heyday could be ours. But to get there, we need to rethink who we are. In our quest for diversity in our membership, we have often commented to each other how very white we are. Peter Morales is living evidence that tomorrow’s Americans will not primarily be descended from western Europeans.

In fact, Peter Morales has suggested that we UUs have our own ethnicity, and that ethnicity is New England, Boston, Brahmin, Harvard. And it’s not working any more.

Sixty years ago, my father — from an Irish Catholic family — embraced Unitarianism. One of his nieces, my cousin Brigid, once explained to me what Unitarianism meant to my father. He had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, in a neighborhood too middle-class to have steelworkers. Its Catholic church, St. Ed’s, was the most prosperous one in a city of Catholic churches. But Youngstown had a Protestant ascendancy, based in the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. It also had a Unitarian church too, though, that was a little out of the power structure. The Unitarian church’s members were, in fact, Harvard families; they were scholars, intellectuals, teachers, readers, scientists; they were not standard people. Cousin Brigid explained to me that when my father adopted Unitarianism, he was making that heritage his own.

But now we are more than four decades past the Civil Rights Act. Americans can go to Harvard, to Yale, to Dartmouth, and be exactly what they are. They can be any race. They can be immigrants, or their children. They can be women. People no longer need to “convert” to become who they want to be. So in New England, the old, customary connections may be as sturdy as ever, but UUs across the country have moved on and are becoming something else. In fact, here in our congregation, that model was left behind long ago.

But Peter Morales is reminding UUs that we have what Forrest Church has called the gospel of Unitarianism, the good news. He believes that hundreds of thousands of Americans want what we have. They want community. They want connection. They want to know that when they walk in the door of this congregation, people will be happy to see them. They want their children to feel this kindness, this love, this concern.

I am going to read from a speech Rev. Morales gave, using his words because they are so perfectly to the point.

A few years year ago an earth-shaking research paper was published in the American Sociological Review. . . The research sought to measure changes in the close relationships Americans have. A key question in the study asked subjects how many people they feel close enough to that they feel they can confide personal information. An earlier study, done in 1985, asked the same question.

The new study was designed to measure any changes over time. The results were so shocking that the team of sociologists doing the study withheld publication for a while. They were afraid they had made some mistake in the methodology and spent months reviewing their data and procedures. But the results were real. Here are the key findings:
• In 1985, the response given most often was having three people in whom one could confide. In 2004, the response given most often was zero.
• The percentage of people who said they had no one with whom they could confide jumped from 10 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2004. That means that in just 20 years the percent of people who said they have no one to talk to went from one person in ten to one out of every
four. This is simply shocking.
• Almost half of all Americans now either have no one or only one person with whom they can discuss important matters. The percent of people who either have no one or only one person has almost doubled in 20 years.
• If a person has only one confidant, chances are that the one confidant is his or her spouse.
What this means is that relationships beyond the nuclear family are being systematically eliminated.

Listen carefully. Hear the cry of pain in these numbers. This study reveals a level of human isolation that is unprecedented in American life–and perhaps unprecedented in human history. Americans are lonelier than they have ever been. The close friendships that are so essential to us are being eroded at a frightening rate. One in four Americans has no close personal relationship at all. Zero.

... Let me throw just one more statistic at you. At the end of the Second World War about half of all American households had three generations in them. That means that about half of American children lived under the same roof with one or more grandparents. Today there are almost no three generation households left. The two or three percent of multi-generational households that exist are almost all poor recent immigrants. Today, one out of four households in American is a single person household. Let me say that again. One quarter of American addresses today has only one person living there.

You and I are relational creatures. We become fully human in a network of relationships. We desperately long to belong. We need community the way we need food and shelter. Yet, in our pursuit of a misguided sense of independence and economic opportunity, we have created a society that systematically rips apart human relationships. Yet our need for deep relationship never goes away.

So UUA president Morales thinks that our congregations can build a better world, at least for the people within them. How does he believe we can do this?

He says, by getting religion. Americans want a religious vision that can transform their lives. If they find it, they will be faithful to that vision. Now generally, our visitors know who we are. They do online research; they read what we say about ourselves, and for some, it sounds just right. Then they must come here, and be with us. Visitors must see and hear and feel our good news for themselves.

Now here is a point I find difficult. If I come here, to this small but sacred space where we spend our Sunday mornings together, I am coming for community. I am coming for kindness, and love, and to be with people who know my lumpy past and accept me as I am. I come here because I crave what I get here.

With everything I need to receive from this place, how can I find the time, and the strength, to give to someone else? It goes back to getting religion. Part of getting religion is being able to give as much as to receive. It’s being the person you want to meet. Part of getting religion is undertaking ministry yourself. I guarantee you that coming here to serve, as much as to be served, will make you happier.

Here’s what else can be done. If Americans no longer live in three-generation households, let’s make this entire congregation a three-generation household. How about finding a way to include in your own world, a person, or a family group, older or younger than you? You will share something special with them, and they will share with you. You will be thrilled by what happens. I guarantee that.

What else can we do? We can recognize that diversity can be broader than we’re accustomed to thinking. Peter Morales has commented on the sweep of immigration from the south and from across the Pacific. Not only that, but in the past twenty years, there has been sizable immigration from eastern Europe as well. The more those immigrants acclimate to this country, the more we can give them what they find themselves looking for. They will share with us and change us, and we will share what we have with them.

We build community here with our lay-led style. And next year there will be many Sundays without our interim minister. We have room to hear from other resources that have not been home-grown, which we rarely do.

Neither do other aspects of worship need to adhere to the old ways. Our music directors Diane Guernsey and Richard Slade are both interested in more rousing music. And how about dance? Americans have considered dance a spectator art instead of something prompted by the spirit. Joy has many faces, and perhaps that can be a new face of ours too. About 20 million people have viewed the viral YouTube video of Jill and Kevin’s wedding dance, and most of the commenters have felt the joy within the church. Let’s go get some of that for ourselves!

In closing, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak on a subject that thrills me for its potential in my new ministry. I believe that this FUSW community can embrace that vision too. The good feeling in this congregation can translate into more personal ministries for all of us. We can become the change we want in the world. And we can create a new heyday for liberal religion.

©2009 Diggitt McLaughlin

What makes you a Catholic if you don't accept Catholic teachings?

The Talk to Action blog today discusses the Catholic Church's "art of constructive schism." Guest blogger Frank Cocozzelli writes about the ways in which ultra-conservative elements are driving out or punishing liberals and moderates in the Roman Catholic Church.

Standing at the far side of the Reformation, I have always found this issue totally confounding. Operating within the terms of the Catholic Church itself, how is it possible to be a "moderate" or a "liberal"? The Church says what it says, and that's that.

There appear to be places within Church doctrine where someone can sincerely disagree. But none of those places are concerned with infallibility. I went to Wikipedia to find the exact words to use for this, and find the distinctions so nicely drawn that it's worth a direct quote.

Catholic theology divides the functions of the teaching office of the Church into two categories: the infallible Sacred Magisterium and the fallible Ordinary Magisterium. The infallible Sacred Magisterium includes the extraordinary declarations of the Pope speaking ex cathedra and of ecumenical councils (traditionally expressed in conciliar creeds, canons, and decrees), as well as of the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Despite its name, the "ordinary and universal Magisterium" falls under the infallible Sacred Magisterium, and in fact is the usual manifestation of the infallibility of the Church, the decrees of popes and councils being "extraordinary".

Examples of infallible extraordinary papal definitions (and, hence, of teachings of the sacred magisterium) are Pope Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and Pope Pius XII's definition of the Assumption of Mary. Examples of infallible extraordinary Conciliar decrees include the Council of Trent's decree on justification, and Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility. ... the ordinary and universal magisterium is the usual manifestation of infallibility, the decrees of popes and councils being the extraordinary expression.

In other words, and not wanting to be obstreperous, accepting infallibility of the pope and of the body of the church is part of the definition of being Catholic. If you do not accept that, by definition you are not a Catholic.

More to the point: why would you want to consider yourself a Catholic if you don't believe what the Church teaches? That's where I stumble. If you do not accept the teachings of the Catholic Church, by definition you're not a Catholic. Whatever benefits Catholics get from being Catholic are not for you. To protest that you are still a Catholic is to give jurisdiction over your life to an organization whose teachings you reject. Why the insistence?

It's obvious that many Catholics today are non-Catholics, or at least living in a state of sin, by their own definitions. Catholics get abortions and use birth control at rates slightly higher than the U.S. average. I guess the catch here is that the Church will not acknowledge that people who make these choices are not Catholics; rather it considers them as living in a condition of sin. So the Church doesn't throw these people out. If you're presidential candidate John Kerry, it may try to humiliate you by publicly denying you communion, but very few people actually get excommunicated.

Let's try these on for size:
"I'm a vegetarian but I eat meat."
"I'm a Jew but I refuse to have my son circumcised."
"I'm a Quaker but I'm a member of the NRA."
They don't work either -- and they all have more latitude within their definitions than Catholicism does. What am I missing?

Bookstore update: Evolution for Dummies

The customer approached me on the sales floor. "I can't find Evolution for Dummies," she explained. "You must have it, right?"
We chatted as I checked the computer inventory. "What are you using it for?" I asked.
"Actually, I'm kind of insulted," she answered. "I'm a grad student in education, and we're a classful of science teachers who have all been teaching this stuff for years. But the prof thinks we need this in addition to our other reading."
"Well, the Dummies books are generally thorough groundings in whatever," I said, thinking positively.
"I know! I'm using the one for bridge*, and it's terrific, but we were all science majors, and besides, we're also reading Origin," she replied.
She'd really caught my attention now. "What else are you reading? Any Ernst Mayr?"
"Yes," and she named a couple other writers vital to any sound discussion of evolution today. It sounded like a heavier reading load than you might expect, and the customer agreed that the prof has a good reputation and people come out of his classes well prepared.

She was right! We didn't have the book on our shelves, but I found it for her at the Bookstore C branch in White Plains. I reflected that the customer's true objection to buying the book was being told that she needed a Dummies as a text.

Dummies books are scattered through the store, shelved with others of their subject matter. I resolved not to hesitate about using them for my own classes should the need arise. There's a Bible for Dummies and a New Testament for Dummies. Probably not a UU Church Polity for Dummies, though.

*Full disclosure: from where I sit right now, I can reach out to Dummies books on Digital Photography, Photoshop 7, Excel 2003, Word, eBay, and starting an eBay business.

Access to Water is a Human Right. But …

The story of the New York City water supply is actually one of the Great True Stories. The quest for good drinking water is as old as the city (approaching the end of its fourth century) and involves Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, banking law, Irish immigrants, transported communities and abandoned villages, wile, guile, imagination and ingenuity. Photo at left: Many homes from old Katonah were moved to a new site a mile away, to allow for the construction of the Croton reservoir.

And as a resident of Westchester County, New York City’s water comes out of my taps — and it’s probably the best municipal drinking water in the world. Why any of my neighbors wants to buy bottled water is beyond me! Our water really does come from giardia-free crystalline mountain streams and is rigorously protected, not just by the city but by the people who live in the hundreds of square miles of the watershed. NYS DEC map at right: You can be hours from New York City (shown in purple) deep in the mountains and still have an NYC reservoir nearby.

The UU Service Committee is promoting a movement for water rights in California. And that's a grand idea ... but wait a minute. What does California do with the water it's got? Does California -- do most communities in the arid southwest use water wisely? Why should UU energy be directed toward providing more water to people living in a part of the country that cannot support the population it had forty years ago, much less today?

This question has several parts. One relates to public policy about a part of the United States that has far exceeded the carrying capacity of the land it occupies. One of the parts relates to public policy that continues to promote settlement there. And a third part relates to the goals of the UUSC. Yes, I believe that access to drinking water is a human right. But before we encourage Californians to take to the streets and the airwaves to demand more of the world's resources -- and given that nobody is lying dying in a dusty Marin street as I write -- why not assess the true starting and ending points of any suggested policy change?

In the first place, why should our denominational energies go to supporting anything as unsustainable, in any guise, as development in the southwest? Here we have a direct collision of long-term goals. The western and southwestern states need a water policy that goes further than water. The UUSC should be lobbying for a clear-eyed evaluation of today's real water management in the southwest in terms of future water needs across the continent.

Here's what I believe the UUSC should be working for. 1) Acknowledgement that access to clean, drinkable water is a human right and a government responsibility. 2) Therefore, government provision of trucked-in (if necessary) water to communities that lack other access to it. 3) Making equitable distribution of existing water a first step in any water-provision plan. As long as existing water supplies are unfairly priced and inequitably distributed, no state should be looking beyond its own borders for water. 4) Making desalination of sea-water the second step in any large water-provision plan, rather than a someday step. 5) Acknowledging that the abandonment of existing communities in unsustainable locations will happen, and plan for it -- starting now -- as a rational solution.

It's been only a year since the Great Lakes Compact was finally signed. The eight states and two provinces that surround the Great Lakes agreed on their management, today and into the future. There have already been legal challenges to companies wishing to bottle water from the GL watershed and sell it outside the watershed. It's hard for me to believe that politicians in the arid southwest don't have their eyes on GL water as a solution for their own foolish overdevelopment and bad management. The Compact pledges the signers to wise management (which includes effective use, reuse, and even re-reuse) and I predict that it will come under pressure from the arid southwest. Sending Great Lakes water south and west is not good management, wise use, or sustainable. I also believe the UUSC should have, as a goal, support for the Great Lakes Compact.

Which is the story of a large international community that made a good-faith, successful plan for resource management long into the future. It's kind of like the story of New York City's water supply! And nothing at all like the we'll-think-about-it-tomorrow greed that has characterized planning in the southwest.

Delighted with Peter Morales's election win

Over the weekend, the Unitarian Universalist Association elected a new president. Peter Morales — a latecomer to the UU ministry and a former newspaper publisher — was elected with about 58% of the vote. It was the first UUA election in which absentee ballots were cast, and I was happy to cast one of my congregation’s. (The UUA is an organization of congregations, not of individuals; this was specifically established at one point in our history.)

At the end of the General Assembly at which he was elected, President Morales (the UUA’s first Latino president) presided over his first board meeting. Notes from the meeting have appeared on many blogs, and it seems that relations were a little stilted. I’m not operating with any inside info here, but UUA Convener Gini Courter, who was reelected herself, endorsed Morales’s opponent Rev. Laurel Hallman, the favorite of many who might be perceived as an east coast establishment within UUism.

I am sure that the Hallman endorsers will deny that there is an east coast establishment inside the UUA. When I moved to New York from Ohio and San Francisco more than thirty years ago, I could see (and feel!) a real difference in Unitarianism in the east. And that’s not mentioning New England, which is even more different. There are sound historical reasons for these differences and it doesn’t do right by our history to pretend they aren’t there, even though congregations in the far west are just as likely to be in the eastern tradition as they are in the midwestern.* Incidentally, nobody including me is painting this as a sectional upset or anything like that.

I supported Morales precisely because he was out of the mold. The two candidates did not have opposing visions, but their emphases were very different from each other. It seemed to me beforehand that we would be defining our history to date — especially late 20th century events — by the choice made in this election. At left: Peter Morales as a Knight International Press Fellow in Peru.

Peter Morales won my heart with a speech he made in 2006, describing a study reported in the American Sociological Review a year earlier. I will spare you the numbers, but the point was that between 1985 and 2005, Americans lost relationships. That is, they went from having three people to whom they felt they could confide close personal matters, to having less than one. The sociologists doing the study were so shocked by the results that they didn’t publish for a long time, while they reexamined their data.

Or, in Peter Morales’s own words: Hear the cry of pain in these numbers. This study reveals a level of human isolation that is unprecedented in American life — and perhaps unprecedented in human history. Americans are lonelier than they have ever been. The close friendships that are so essential to us are being eroded at a frightening rate. One in four Americans has no close personal relationship at all. Zero.

At the risk of tedium, I will continue quoting. Let me throw just one more statistic at you. At the end of the Second World War about half of all American households had three generations in them. … Today there are almost no three generation households left. The two or three percent of multi-generational households that exist are almost all poor recent immigrants. … Today, one out of four households in American is a single person household. Let me say that again. One quarter of American addresses today has only one person living there. …You and I are relational creatures. We become fully human in a network of relationships. We desperately long to belong. We need community the way we need food and shelter [but]... we have created a society that systematically rips apart human relationships. Yet our need for deep relationship never goes away. Above, standing at left: Seminarian Morales with other members of LUUNA, the Latino/a UU Networking Association.

This oppressive and painful reality presses in on me no matter which of my most important hats I wear. As myself growing older, as the mother of an only child, as a student in ministry, and as an elected official, this social reality is terrible. And the future of today’s reality is even worse. I don’t believe people evolved to live the way Americans do now, and the longer I see myself as a person preparing for ministry, the worse the issue appears.

Peter Morales saw that study and he knew, from his own life and ministry, that it told a real truth. He’s within a very Anglo tradition, yet he comes to it from outside that tradition, which is perhaps why he can see it so clearly. He sees UUs as having good news and wants to lead us to a greater understanding of what we’ve lost, where we can take ourselves, and who we can be for people who need us.

*Mark Harris of Watertown, my UU history prof, told me that one defining characteristic can be that eastern congregations have communion sets. Communion sets! As an Ohioan, I was shocked.

Shame, scorn, and the UU quest

Imagineering Faith was Rev. Christine Robinson's sermon at First Unitarian in Albuquerque last Sunday. I find it a remarkable sermon, because it examines feelings common to many UUs, and provides the first sound explanation for those feelings I've ever encountered.

As someone who was brought up in a Unitarian household (both parents became Unitarians) I am a rare bird in most any UU congregation. At least three-quarters of American UUs came to it as adults. In my own congregation of about 170, there are eight of us UUs from early childhood.

The path from being a UU child to being a UU adult is not necessarily a smooth one. Lots of our Sunday school classmates wandered off in other directions, and most of us rediscovered the religion for ourselves when we were grown. A congregation of questers and doubters, most of whom do not agree on the same definition of anything, is not likely to produce kids who ask no questions but move forward into its adult ranks.

But back to Christine Robinson's sermon. Why is it meaningful? And what's this about shame and scorn? I invite you to read it for yourself, but in a nutshell: Robinson suggests that shame is the feeling that something is wrong with you. Not that you have done something wrong: that's guilt. Shame is about who we are. Shame damages us forever.

Scorn, says Robinson, is the kind of rhetoric used to engender shame in another person. She goes on to observe that the kind of political commentary enriching Rush Limbaugh and others of his breed uses scorn as its weapon.

Robinson goes on to point out how, as children -- whether we were active UUs or simply the kind of children who would grow up to be UUs -- we were likely to be questioners, having doubts, not fitting into the sets of beliefs that those around us seemed to hold. For our friends or for most of the adults we knew, their faith was totally natural -- but we didn't have it. And what those transactions induced in us was shame.

Shame breeds anger. And that anger in many UUs and religious "liberals" is all around us. Attributing it to shame, and attributing our shame to having to deal with a world of faith when we ourselves did not have faith, seems to me to be a masterly understanding of many UUs. And that anger against people of faith -- and even people who simply use the language of (usually) Christianity -- is a corrosive element in many of our congregations.

A few months ago, my minister was absent one Sunday and his stand-in a) wore a stole over his suit, b) used the words "God" and "faith," c) prayed, d) spoke a benediction at the end of the service, and e) lifted his hands, palms out, when he gave that benediction. Some members of the congregation were unhappy; one or two were furious and rude. As my congregation's unofficial intern, I subsequently apologized for the rudeness he encountered. He said, "We must learn to be gentle with one another, and we have not always been so."

UU-ism has changed a lot in my lifetime. When I was in school, Unitarians were often WASP-y intellectuals, mirroring our early New England spiritual ancestors. Newcomers were generally escapees from orthodoxy, like my parents -- one from an Irish Catholic family, one from a Scots Presbyterian family. They admired and embraced the tradition and were relieved to have left their families' certainties behind.

Converts anywhere carry their own baggage, though. No matter what discovered universe you embrace, you are also an ex-something. Early 20th-century religion went deep into the personalities of its children, so mid-century UU congregations had large numbers of ex-Lutherans, ex-Catholics, ex-Presbyterians; being an "ex" was significant to them. Across the U.S. there was also a significant cohort of European Jewish immigrants, prosperous, well-educated, often atheists, and generally wary and in shock. Often the significant characteristic Unitarians shared with each other was the sense that they didn't belong anywhere else. This nourished anger too.

So it's no surprise to find, in the old 1964 blue hymnal, shame and anger institutionalized. I periodically return to the blue hymnal for readings no longer in broad use, but what I find are works by apologists like him who wrote "Let us cherish the state that her mighty ends may be achieved." There is little worship and praise and exaltation; there is sackcloth and ashes and guilt. Shame is just down the road. So is anger.

So how have we changed in that half century? People coming in the door now may be in a mixed marriage seeking a place to bring up their children to value both traditions. Equally often, these parents will come from families virtually without religion. They are not escaping from generalized oppression. So what is their anger about?

Here's where Robinson makes an interesting leap from political culture to religion. The Limbaughs, she notes, have used scorn as their significant weapon. We -- their opponents -- are not just wrong, we are bad. We are not just bad, we are evil. Rhetoric leaps high as the speakers' ratings must; without high ratings, these entertainers will wither and die, and shock gives high returns on investment. So the language of scorn and hatred escalates. The wounds go deeper into everyone's hearts, and even people who are not out on a theological limb feel shamed and the anger spreads.

I think we UUs have gone wrong by not acknowledging anger that lies among us and doing something about it. Our hymn We Are a Gentle, Angry People for some unfathomable reason celebrates this anger ... but does nothing with it. It simply states that we are angry, one of the most impotent statements you can imagine.

How much better off we would be, and how much better people we would be, to get to the root of this anger and do something with the knowledge. I like Robinson's sermon immensely, because she does confront the reality, she examines its meaning, and she begins the discussion.

Christine Robinson's pic comes from the Albuquerque UU website, and the offending stole is shown at the UniUniques website.