Greetings, dear reader! I write to you from Guatemala City, where I have been for the past two days. As with my Chiapas trip last summer, I have taken on the responsibility of documenting our travels online for our class from United Theological Seminary. If you are interested in learning how I started getting involved in the justice work that led to my arrest last July, the Chiapas entries would be the place to begin.
I would like to invite you to read my current Guatemala posts on the UTS Global Trips blog. While I considered simply copying and pasting the entries here, the voice and purpose are slightly different from the one I have grown accustomed to using as “Leaping Loon,” and I would prefer to leave the posts in the blog for which they were intended.
To give you a brief background on the other blog, it was started by a seminary friend of mine when his class went to El Salvador in March 2010. The students were required to write a 10-page paper responding to the trip, and my classmate asked the professor if he could start a blog and use the entries as his paper. The blog ended up also serving the purpose of giving friends and family back home an opportunity to “travel along” in spirit, and it gave them a way to enter into conversation with their traveler about the trip when he or she returned home. The comments section in that blog serves as a “letters from home” space, and we welcome your thoughts and voices in our journey together. When I signed up for the Chiapas trip, I asked my friend to let me continue the tradition; I ended up having such a wonderfully rich experience writing for the UTS Global Trips blog that I started this blog as a result.
I would be honored if you would take the time to read, travel, and learn with us.
Many blessings,
-lm
Leaping Loon 
Enjoy your “Justice Trip” Leaping Loon. I just got back to Montreal from a three day “Justice Trip” to Toronto where I protested against the anti-religious intolerance and bigotry that I and too many other people have encountered in U*U “churches” as well as the UUA’s lamentable negligent and complicit responses to clergy misconduct complaints of all kinds. The Canadian Unitarian Council was holding its 50th Anniversary AGM in Toronto last week so I headed on down to Toronto with some of my most pertinent picket signs and protested in front of the University of Toronto’s Chestnut Residences and Conference Center where the bulk of the meetings were being held on Friday and Saturday and then protested in front of Convocation Hall on the main campus of the U of T where Sunday’s worship service was held. I am happy to report that, although the vast majority of CUC AGM attendees did their best to remain in denial about these two serious problems of The U*U Movement, about half of those U*Us who deigned to respond to my peaceful public protest in one way or another were sympathetic and supportive. Indeed it seemed that negative reaction and positive reaction were more or less evenly divided. I regret to have to report that negative reaction included some very belligerent U*Us making total fools of themselves with a few of them engaging in anti-Christian intolerance and bigotry.
I will be reporting on my “Justice Trip” to Toronto on The Emerson Avenger blog over the next week or so. I shot some very interesting video of U*Us behaving badly which will be duly uploaded to U*UTube. . . I *also* have some video of some very interesting conversations with those U*Us who were sympathetic and supportive and that to will eventually be posted to U*UTube for U*Us to ponder.
Bon Voyage,
Robin Edgar aka The Emerson Avenger
BTW I hope that you get the chance to visit some of the Mayan ceremonial centers such as Tikal and Palenque etc. If you want to better understand the religious symbolism displayed at those sites you might want to browse through my Eclipsology blog.
http://eclipsology.blogspot.com