Grace Lee Boggs: What do Americans look like?

June 30, 2014 by

WHERE CAN I  SEE “American Revolutionary”? The documentary about Grace Lee Boggs debuts on PBS’s POV documentary series Monday, June 30, 2014. Use this PBS webpage to learn more and check local listings. AND, from July 1-30, 2014, PBS will stream the documentary free of charge from that website, as well. No word yet on a DVD release of the film, but stay tuned to ReadTheSpirit for news of a future DVD.

REVIEW by ReadTheSpirit Editor DAVID CRUMM

As she enters her 100th year on the planet, Grace Lee Boggs has lived long enough to see all of America celebrating her achievements as a philosopher and civil rights activist. That’s a stark contrast with the many years that FBI bulldog J. Edgar Hoover labeled Grace and her husband James dangerous subversives—resulting in FBI surveillance and a thick FBI file compiled on both of them.

Filmmaker Grace Lee accidentally discovered this woman who is a household name in Detroit (as one of Michigan’s most famous resident philosophers, authors and human-rights activists). When she was starting out as a young filmmaker, Grace Lee was intrigued by the significant number of Chinese-American women with “her” same name. A decade ago, she began filming interviews nationwide in what she called The Grace Lee Project, and she eventually completed a documentary on the similarly named women in 2005. Among the women she met in that project, Detroit’s Grace Lee Boggs was by far the most intriguing—so filmmaker Grace Lee began a long-term friendship with the Detroit activist. They visited at least once each year for additional interviews.

The result is American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. The play on the words “revolution” and “evolution” comes from Grace Lee Boggs’ own teachings about her journey as a young scholar from pure Marxism through the turbulence of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—to an embrace of nonviolence and a new appreciation for the evolution of change within communities. That change takes the entire hour-and-a-half of this film to explain—including several “30-second primers” on key issues that filmmaker Grace Lee inserts into her documentary to help us keep up with Grace Lee Boggs’ philosophical arguments.

Born Grace Lee, the daughter of a well-to-do Chinese-American family in New York City (where her father owned a famous restaurant), the young Chinese-American woman stood out as a brilliant student. She graduated early from Barnard College and, by age 25, already had earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. She quickly became a well-known translator, speaker, journalist and activist in the movement for social justice and for racial equality—a movement that was ruthlessly suppressed for decades. In 1953, she married African-American activist James Boggs, the great love of her life until he died in 1993.

Her extensive work in the civil rights movement and later in the “black-power” movement—working shoulder to shoulder with her husband—mystified Hoover and the FBI. In one of the more amusing scenes in this new documentary, the filmmaker shows us a passage from her FBI file in which the agents could not make heads or tails of her ethnic identity. She was a true original even to her enemies!

WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN
‘AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY:
THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS’

The film opens with Grace Lee Boggs walking—assisted by a wheeled walker—along the huge expanse of Detroit’s most famous symbol of blight: the 40-acre hulk of the devastated Packard Automotive Plant. Her words to us, as viewers, run counter to the startling visual imagery we see on the screen. She says:

“I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. Detroit gives us a sense of epochs of civilization in a way that you don’t get in a city like New York. It’s obvious from looking at Detroit that what was doesn’t work. People are always striving for size, wanting to be giants. And this is a symbol of how giants fall.”

And she has made her point. The petite Chinese-American woman who now is nearing her own century mark has survived and continues to walk these streets—even as the gargantuan auto plant now is a dangerous ruin.

Then, she warns viewers not to think that destruction is inevitable. In fact, communities move in complex, sometimes circular patterns—and new possibilities lie just around the corner of our imagination. “Evolution is not linear. Times interact.”

If you’re a younger viewer, this may seem incomprehensible, she tells us. “It’s hard to understand when you’re young about how reality is constantly changing because it hasn’t changed so much in your lifetime,” she says.

And that’s just in the opening few minutes of this film!

Here are some other “take away” quotes from Grace Lee Boggs to give you a sense of the thought-provoking journey that these two Grace Lees—the filmmaker and Boggs herself—are inviting us to undertake in American Revolutionary.

On her attitude toward the world’s current condition: “I think we’re in a time of great hope and great danger.”

On the need for everyone to keep changing: “Don’t get stuck in old ideas. Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change.”

And: “Most people think of ideas as fixed. Ideas have their power because they’re not fixed. Once they’re fixed, they’re dead. … Changing is more honorable than not changing.”

On the power of each life: “You don’t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be. And you do choose how you think.”

On the power of conversation: “We are the only living things that have conversations, as far as we know. When you have conversation you never know what’s going to come out of your mouth or someone else’s mouth.”

On imagination: “There are times when expanding our imaginations is what is required. The radical movement has over emphasized the role of activism and underestimated the role of reflection.”

Why did she eventually come to embrace nonviolence? “Why is nonviolence such an important philosophy? Because it respects the capacity of human beings to grow. It gives them the opportunity to grow their souls. And we owe that to each other. And it took me a long time to realize that.”

Finally: “It’s so obvious that we are coming to a huge turning point. You begin with the protests but you have to move on from there. Just being angry—just being resentful—just being outraged does not constitute revolution. So many institutions in our society need reinventing. The time has come for a new dream. That’s what being a revolutionary is. I don’t know what the next American revolution will be. But you might be able to imagine it—if your imagination is rich enough!”

Care to read more?

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

The James Martin SJ inteview on ‘Jesus: A Pilgrimage’ to Jerusalem

May 25, 2014 by

“Jerusalem stirs the imagination of billions of people and is the beating heart of our world today.”

That’s the conclusion of a powerful new IMAX film, which is narrated by the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbach) and promotes both tourism and peaceful co-existence in the holy city. (You can watch a preview of the movie here.) That idea of Jerusalem as a life-changing destination also runs through the popular Jesuit author James Martin’s latest book, Jesus: A Pilgrimage.

Martin is famous as America magazine’s Editor at Large, regularly writing about Christianity for a huge audience—but he admits in this new book that, for decades, he rejected the idea of making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He resisted for many reasons: It’s just a tourist trap, he told himself. Or, if he did go, then what he would see in the “Holy Land” might conflict in jarring ways with his own fond images of Bible stories.

He admits he was surprised by this journey! When friends all but pushed him onto an airplane bound for Israel, Martin writes that the experience turned out to be “one of the high points of my life.”

Now, he can’t imagine why he waited so long to make this pilgrimage! In the book, he describes the trip as “overwhelming. It was almost unbelievable to visit the places where Jesus had lived. When I first caught sight of the Sea of Galilee, its shimmering blue-green waters surrounded by pinkish sandy hills under a blazing sun, it was like a dream.” He adds, “the pilgrimage taught me things that I had not learned from books.”

The result is an inspirational memoir that stands as a fresh perspective on Jesus. The book starts with Jesus’s birth and follows sequentially through his crucifixion and beyond to Emmaus. Each chapter includes some of Martin’s travel narrative—truly the best parts in this page-turner of a book. Then, in each case, he adds a bit of Bible study that is both scholarly and inspirational, perfectly pitched for general readers. Remember that Martin is popular with his young and old readers, these days, because of his fluid, and sometimes even amusing, magazine-style prose. This book definitely is a “mash up” of styles—but Martin makes it work!

This is a great choice for small-group discussion. The book’s 18 chapters could let you run a series over an entire season of the year, or you could pick favorite chapters for a shorter series. Word of Warning: If you use this book in your congregation, plan ahead to investigate options for participants to take their own pilgrimage. (Consider getting people excited by inviting them to see the Jerusalem movie.)

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm interviewed James Martin SJ. Here are …

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH JAMES MARTIN SJ
ON ‘JESUS: A PILGRIMAGE’

DAVID: America magazine lists you as Editor at Large. Our Catholic readers are familiar with America, but many of our other readers may not know that this is a century-old publication that combines journalism with Christian inspiration. Tell us a bit more.

JAMES: America is a national Catholic weekly magazine that’s been around since 1909 and I’ve been here for the last 15 years, most recently as Editor at Large. As a Jesuit priest, I live a life of poverty, chastity and obedience; and part of poverty means that everything I earn goes to my religious order. This is true of my work with the magazine, which is owned by the Jesuits, and it’s true of this book. All proceeds from this book go to support our ministry here at America. I don’t get a penny myself.

DAVID: Beyond the pages of America, more than 80,000 people are connected to you through Facebook. I checked on your Facebook stats and they’re very impressive: In mid May, you had 25,000 Facebook friends “talking about” you and your posts. And this is impressive, too: Facebook reports that you’re popular with people aged 24 to 54—so this isn’t a case of a bunch of Catholic senior citizens reading your material. These are lively young adults.

JAMES: A few years ago, a publisher suggested I start a Facebook page and my first reaction was: “Forget about it!” I thought it wasn’t worth it. Now? It’s become a big part of my ministry as a Jesuit priest. It’s a way to share information, videos, photos, meditations and prayers with people all over the world. And I’m amazed at the number of people who respond and tell me they’ve found it helpful.

It’s all about bringing people to God. That’s why I now see it as such an important part of what I do as a Jesuit. I get questions about people’s spiritual lives. I get requests for prayers. I get beautiful comments from people telling me different ways that they’ve met God through what I post. I especially like writing prayers and meditations throughout the day, then posting them there on Facebook. The most moving thing I’ve experienced recently is a woman who came up to me at a religious-education congress I attended. She said, “I’m a mother of four and I’m largely at home all day. And, I can’t tell you how much I look forward to your Facebook posts. They’re a link for me to the Catholic and Christian world.”

A “MASH UP” ON THE LIFE OF JESUS

DAVID: You offer all kinds of things, day by day, on that Facebook page and I suspect that’s why you felt so free to publish this “mash up” of a book on the life of Jesus.

JAMES: I’d say this book is a straight Life of Christ, but written in these three forms. There’s the story of my real-life pilgrimage, but then I do add the latest in Bible scholarship about whatever I am considering in that chapter. And then I try to offer a message for readers about what all of this means for them today in their daily lives.

DAVID: And, when you say “Bible scholarship,” we’re talking about references to some famous scholars: Raymond E. Brown, John Dominic Crossan, John Meier, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, N.T. Wright to name a few.

JAMES: There are a lot of books that just summarize the life and times of Jesus for readers and take the Bible stories at face value, so they ignore the historical research. There are books that just describe someone’s pilgrimage. I think the scholarship is important, too, so I wanted to include that. I’m trying to do all three in one book.

There is something naturally appealing about Jesus and that’s the person I want to introduce to people. This book is for everyone from the doubtful seeker to the longtime church person. I don’t assume readers know anything about Jesus. So, I hope that all readers can gather around this book and find out about the person of Jesus Christ.

DAVID: I agree with you. This is a book someone could enjoy without knowing anything about Jesus or the Bible. You walk readers through the whole story.

JAMES: I was very intentional that this not be just a book for Catholics. I do speak about my own Catholic background because—but Jesus wasn’t a Catholic. The gospels aren’t “Catholic books.” My book isn’t about Catholicism. Frankly, Jesus didn’t come for just one group of people.

“FORMS OF CHRISTIANITY YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF”

DAVID: The stories you share from your travels include lots of men and women who aren’t Catholic. Israel-and-Palestine is an amazingly diverse little corner of the world, isn’t it?

JAMES: When you go to Jerusalem, as an American, you see forms of Christianity you’ve never heard of. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself is divided into so many parts, controlled by so many different Christian groups, that you realize how frustratingly elusive Jesus’s wish—that they may all be one—has been through the years. It also reminds you that Jesus Christ appeals to all kinds of people, all around the world, not just Westerners. One of the most interesting experiences was our visit to the Church of St. Mark, a Syriac Orthodox church near the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem.

DAVID: I’ve been there. It’s a bit off the beaten track and pilgrims who sweep through Jerusalem without much time may never find the place. But it’s one of those little wonders you discover on the side streets of the Old City.

JAMES: I end the book with that scene, because our guide at St. Mark’s sang the Our Father in Aramaic for us. It was so unexpected!

DAVID: You write, “She opened her mouth and in a strong, clear voice began singing. Our new friend wasn’t an opera singer, but it was probably one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard—because it was in Jesus’s language. She sang in the lilting cadences of Aramaic, more and more strongly as she went on, and her prayer echoed throughout the ancient church that we had found by accident on our last day of our pilgrimage.”

I’ve got to say, having worked on several reporting projects based in Jerusalem, throughout my career—it’s that kind of amazing little scene that shows your readers the wonders of this city! And, I love it that you also include the surprises that take pilgrims in other directions, as well. One scene that comes to mind is your visit to what scholars believe was the real site of Jesus’s own baptism in the Jordan River. There’s a lovely spot further to the north, where a lot of tour guides tell you Jesus was baptized—but the real spot is pretty, well …

JAMES: It’s “pretty gross.” That’s what my friend told me to discourage me.

DAVID: It’s called Qasr el-Yahud and you describe it vividly in your book. Way back in the year 2000, I was there as a journalist covering an Israeli-government convoy of journalists and tourism officials to take a look at the site that the government planned to finally open up for pilgrims. It was a startling place even at that time. I remember people getting off those buses, in our convoy, and being so moved at the sight that they went into the water and some of them actually drank the stuff!

JAMES: It’s definitely a very unusual holy site. It’s a decommissioned militarized zone in the middle of the desert and it’s very simple. There are some bleachers on the Israeli side, now, that go down toward the water. What’s most surprising is the water itself, which I describe as “neon green, more like Mountain Dew than water.” That’s the result of a lot of pollution and a lot of irrigation further to the north and the lowering of water levels. This was the opposite of the Sea of Galilee, but it was a fascinating experience.

DAVID: Well, I enjoyed reading that section. And, overall, your book already is doing very well in terms of sales and reader reviews on Amazon. I see there’s also an audio version, which readers could get through Amazon.

JAMES: It’s read by Yours Truly—all 18 hours of it. There will be a paperback edition, which I’m working on now.

DAVID: I’ve interviewed you, over the years, about some of your other books. Most recently, we talked about your book on religious humor, Between Heaven and Mirth. I get the sense, though, that this new book is special among the 10 or so you’ve written. Is that fair to say?

JAMES: Yes, I would call this the most satisfying writing experience I’ve ever had. It certainly was the most enjoyable. I loved spending time with the gospel texts as I wrote. That was my favorite part of this book. I learned so much. And, now, I hope readers will, as well.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

Our Authors: ‘Out there doing something good for the world’

May 12, 2014 by

By DAVID CRUMM,
Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine and books

“Be the change you wish to see,” Gandhi says on bumper stickers. Personally, I prefer to repeat the words of a pastor friend, the Rev. Marsha Woolley, who ends her telephone voice-mail message with, “I hope you’re out there doing something good for the world.”

Over the past week or so, our authors have been out there doing so much good that we are devoting our Cover Story this week to just a handful of these inspiring examples. Making the world a better place by publishing important new voices has been the core vocation of ReadTheSpirit, since our founding. That mission now is fueling a major expansion this year to bring even more authors and cutting-edge publishing projects into communities everywhere.

Let’s start with the story of David Gaynes, a man who was a complete stranger to us one week ago …

KEN WILSON

‘A PASSOVER FREEDOM STORY’

Ken Wilson’s A Letter to My Congregation is a landmark book that tries to help the countless congregations divided by evangelical denunciations of gay and lesbian men and women. As a pastor, Ken saw many families divided within his own congregation; he also was heartbroken by the way religious condemnation can fuel teen suicides. So, Ken’s book takes a new approach to reading the Bible—an approach Ken calls “the Romans road.” You can read the three introductions to the book by Phyllis Tickle, Tanya Luhrmann and David P. Gushee here. You can read much more about the book and the controversy it has touched off here. Ken recognizes that many evangelicals vigorously disagree with him and welcomes civil dialogue. However, some critics have crossed over to angry personal attacks.

Down in Asheville, NC, veteran writer and media professional David Gaynes had never heard of Ken Wilson until recently. Gaynes and his family were celebrating Passover with the traditional retelling of the Exodus story and discussion of how we all should defend freedom everyday. At one Jewish community seder in Asheville, Gaynes recalls, the rabbi challenged each person: “How are you helping to make the world more free?”

That was the very day Gaynes’s media agency received a request from an old client. He hadn’t worked for this client for a while, so he did his homework and discovered that the project involved an evangelical publishing group. Then, he discovered that this group had recently published a particularly pointed attack on an author named Ken Wilson. This attack troubled Gaynes, whose family includes a gay son, and he wanted to learn more about this Ken Wilson. So, he dug further, finding a Detroit Free Press profile of Ken and his new book. (We’ve got a link here.) Gaynes was particularly struck by Ken’s words in that story “that being evangelical is about ‘welcoming previously excluded groups … to make the good news accessible to those who haven’t had access to it. That’s my task. That’s what a church is supposed to do.'”

Gaynes knew full well that his old client was offering a good-sized payday—but, right away, he sent a long letter to the client, declining to take on the new project. In the letter, he explained his own perspective on Ken’s inspiring book: “I do not believe that my son should repent of his homosexuality any more than I intend to repent of my heterosexuality. Both equally inherent and un-chosen personal attributes arise from the same source: our Creator. Loving my son as I do, and feeling as I do, I respectfully decline the current project with thanks. I am sure that you and your client will be better served by someone and anyone more aligned with your publisher’s viewpoint than I am.”

And then? Gaynes published the entire story, including the letter, on a Jewish blog. The headline? “A Passover Freedom Story”

As editor of our online magazine and publishing house, I spotted Gaynes’ column, Googled his office telephone number and soon was talking to Gaynes himself. I told him: “As one media professional talking to another, I’ve got to say: This was a remarkable thing to do. It was courageous that you turned down the contract. It was amazing that you published the story for the whole world.”

“I’m completely OK with sharing my story,” he said. “I’m speaking from both my heart and mind here. My reactions here were instantaneous. There wasn’t any: Wait a minute. Now, if I do X or Y, then … Not at all.”

“Why such a strong response?” I asked, and he said what I’ve heard countless parents and loved ones of gay men and women say over the years.

He said: “I would never want to do anything that would render me unable to look my family in the eye.” And, that’s precisely why millions of younger Americans are staying away from gay-condemning churches—as documented by the Public Religion Research Project.

As a skeptical journalist, though, I pushed Gaynes harder. “Come on,” I said. “Didn’t you have some internal struggle? I know from talking to you, today, that you needed this payday—and it would have been a good-sized check. Didn’t you struggle a little bit?”

And I could hear the smile in his voice as he responded. “No, it wasn’t like that at all,” he said. “It seemed beyond coincidence, uncanny really, that this happened right after the Passover seder. It was as though some Power in the universe was saying: ‘You really feel this way? Let’s find out.’ And as much as that was a needed payday, I think of it as a tiny price to find out beyond any question that my values are not for sale.”

I praised him. “Well, it’s terrific to meet you on the phone here and I’m so impressed …”

But he cut me off. He shouldn’t be praised for doing the right thing, he said. “This is our work as human beings on the planet.”

And to that, I could only say: “Amen.”

LATE-BREAKING NEWS: As we prepared to publish this column, we got word from the well-known emergent-church writer and activist Tony Jones that he has written a new piece about Ken Wilson’s book that will be appearing soon in the widely read Christian Century magazine. Thanks in advance, Tony, for all your good work on the planet!

WAYNE BAKER

PROMOTING ‘POSITIVE BUSINESS’

Speaking of high praise, as Editor of our publishing house, I learned that—as this school year ends at the University of Michigan—our long-time columnist and author Dr. Wayne Baker was honored among his colleagues at the Ross School of Business. Wikipedia’s tracking of business school rankings says that, in recent years, the Ross school sometimes has been ranked No. 1 in the nation and nearly always in the Top 5. The award presented to Dr. Baker was a major career-spanning honor, partly due to his research on American values.

The Senior Faculty Research Award was given to Dr. Baker “in recognition of his influential research, his stellar international reputation as a thought leader in the study of management & organizations and his dedication to building and maintaining a strong research environment at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business.”

And this week? Dr. Baker is one of the featured presenters at the Ross School’s first annual “Positive Business” conference. All this week, Dr. Baker is writing about the conference in his popular OurValues column. At the conference, his new book United America will be featured.

You can read much more about the nationwide response to United America here. And, you can download many free resources related to the new book in this United America resource page, including two different full-color charts of the 10 uniting values.

LATE-BREAKING NEWS: Dr. Baker just wrapped up a series on Moms for the centennial of Mother’s Day and was featured, for his research on parents’ values, in this Washington Post column. Also, his book was covered by Dick Meyer (a top journalist who formerly headed divisions for BBC, NPR and CBS) in a new Scripps column that is syndicated widely across news sites nationwide. Here’s Dick’s column as it was presented in Cleveland. To all the journalists covering United America—thanks for doing something good for the world!

DEBRA DARVICK

MOM’s 10 COMMANDMENTS OF HEALTH

This week, we also were pleased to watch author Debra Darvick on television, talking about her ongoing visual project: “Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health.”

If you haven’t read about this unusual project, then click here to read Debra’s story about appearing on TV this past week. Her “10 Commandments” are a re-voicing of the traditional Decalogue or 10 Commandments as if a Mom (or other wise and caring Parent) were voicing timeless wisdom about living a healthy and happy life. Debra had the text printed in poster form, designed by our ReadTheSpirit art director Rick Nease, in a format suitable for hanging on a refrigerator door or bathroom wall.

And—hurray—the idea is catching on!

Thank you Debra for all the good you’re doing for the world!

.

AND SO MUCH MORE …

This is just a sampling of the exciting stories that inspire our colleagues as we wake up each morning and get to devote another day to working for our readers. Among the other recent news …

MSU STUDENTS LAUNCH 3 NEW ETHNIC GUIDES
This ongoing project at Michigan State University School of Journalism now has welcomed dozens of students preparing a half dozen guides under the direction of the school’s instructor Joe Grimm. Learn about the launch of their three latest guides, which combat bigotry by clearing up the real questions that real people ask every day about “the others.”

INTERFAITH PEACEMAKERS
Global peacemaker, author and activist Daniel Buttry continues to circle the world as a representative of American Baptist Churches, the denomination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Not only is Dan organizing the publication of uplifting new stories online in our Interfaith Peacemakers department—but he’s also spreading his collected peacemaking stories around the world. We just got word this week that a new translated edition of one of his books may be prepared for use in a particularly important region of Asia. (Stay tuned for more on that later.) That spread of Dan’s message—and the messages of our other authors—is possible because of the unusual, fast-and-flexible publishing system we have developed.

NORTH AMERICAN INTERFAITH NETWORK
We heard more news, this past week, about the national conference coming to Detroit (at Wayne State University) in mid-August, called the North American Interfaith Network. That’s a wonderful opportunity to come and meet me, as Editor of ReadTheSpirit, and many of our authors as well. Learn more by following the links from this story about our MSU students. (For news on NAIN, read the first item in that story, headlined “Join the MSU Project.”)

 

FINALLY—A WORD ABOUT GANDHI

Did you know that the famous “Gandhi bumper sticker” isn’t directly quoting the Mahatma? In fact, the slogan does express Gandhi’s teachings, but the actual quote is believed to have come from his grandson—also a global peace activist—Arjun Gandhi. About a decade ago, Arjun contributed to a book that summarizes the Mahatma’s teachings—and the phrase, “Be the change you wish to see,” was born. The quotation, usually attributed to Mahatma Gandhi was researched by The New York Times in 2011. Turns out, that line appears nowhere in the 98-volume collected works of Gandhi.

The closest Mahatma Gandhi got to crystallizing that message: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As we changes our own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards us. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

And to that word of wisdom, we also say: Amen!

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

MSU journalism students launch 3 new ethnic guides

April 27, 2014 by

BIG NEWS: Students at the Michigan State University School of Journalism are dramatically expanding their popular series of books: 100 Questions and Answers About … Individual readers, nonprofits, companies and other schools are ordering these books to encourage “cultural competence”—helping Americans from diverse backgrounds to build positive relationships.

Your Opportunities …

JOIN THE MSU PROJECT
Come to Detroit in August for the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN) annual conference and you’ll meet MSU project director Joe Grimm. At NAIN, Joe’s MSU team will announce another expansion of this project—and invite NAIN participants to help shape that next phase. (Here is the NAIN-Detroit-2014 website.) The ReadTheSpirit team, including authors Wayne Baker and Lynne Meredith Golodner, also will be presenting workshops. We’ve already published one earlier story about some of the key people coming to NAIN from across the U.S. Please, join us!

MAKE THESE BOOKS YOUR OWN
Many groups are ordering special quantities of these books for incoming students, employees and other new residents. Unlike other publishing projects, these books can be modified to include the sponsoring group’s logo and background information. That makes these books a valuable form of outreach for your group. Learn more here.

HELP YOUR COMMUNITY ANSWER … THE REAL QUESTIONS
Thousands of books have been published about ethnic groups. So, why are readers snapping up these slim new books from MSU? Because they answer the questions real people are asking every day. We invited MSU’s Joe Grimm to explain this distinctive approach …

HOW WE ANSWER THE REAL QUESTIONS

By JOE GRIMM

Students at Michigan State University have been busy using new publishing tools to help increase cultural competence. This spring, they published two new 100-question guides. There will soon be six guides in the series. In a program we call “Bias Busters,” MSU journalism students conduct interviews across cultures to surface the simple, everyday questions that people ask in coffee shops and cafeterias. Some Google analysis also helps find the questions people are asking.

The students select and research the questions and write the answers, which are then vetted by experts nationwide. After everything is edited and polished, these slim paperback guides are published in print and digital formats. It takes about 10 weeks from when the students first meet each other to when the guides are listed for sale on Amazon. The speed and flexibility, which comes from Front Edge Publishing tools, means “Bias Busters” can respond to current events—just perfect for journalists. At a time when so many people are pessimistic about journalism, these young creators find that traditional skills and new tools mean they can publish information that helps people, do it quickly and explore a promising business model that they can carry with them after school.

The guides are intended to be just the first step toward deeper conversations about race, ethnicity and religion. Besides the guides, the students have built a website, Facebook and Twitter accounts. A facilitator’s guide is in the works.

Let me introduce three of our new guides …

100 Questions and Answers
About Hispanics and Latinos

100 Questions and Answers about Hispanics and Latinos was created by 14 students in the spring “Bias Busters” journalism class. About the time the guides went to press, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Latinos became the largest group in California, our most populous state. Other nuggets in the guide:

  • WHAT’S IN A NAME? Hispanics and Latinos go by a wide variety of names and, except for in Texas, do not show much preference for either of those labels. Many prefer names like “Mexican American” or Puerto Rican.” The guide uses Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. Other names described in the guide are Tejano, Boricuano, Chicano and even Chican@ and Latin@. Some academic departments have begun using those terms to reflect the fact that Spanish refers to males as Latinos and Chicanos and women as Latinas and Chicanas.
  • DID YOU KNOW? We were surprised to learn that the quinceañera, a celebration that signifies a 15-year-old girl’s transition to adulthood, is now being used in some families for boys who turn 15. Then, it is called a quinceañero.
  • We were reminded about the complicated status of Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens by birth, but who cannot vote in presidential elections if they are living on the island because only people living in states have that right.
  • Pope Francis is the first pope from Latin America, but many Latinos do not consider him to be the first Latino pope because his parents are Italian.
  • By 2050, Hispanics will account for about a third of the U.S. population.
  • Most Hispanics in the United State were born here.
  • The state with the highest proportion of Hispanics is New Mexico, with 47 percent.
  • About a quarter of public school students in the United States are Hispanic.
  • The Hispanic market in the United States was $1 trillion in 2010 and is projected to be $1.5 trillion in 2015.
  • Hispanic people should not be lumped into one political camp. Their political affiliations mirror the country overall. Although they usually vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, they are as likely as the overall U.S. population to identify themselves as socially conservative.
  • The large number of eligible Latino voters who do not vote is widely regarded by political analysts as a sleeping giant.

 

100 Questions and Answers
About East Asian Cultures

100 Questions and Answers about East Asian Cultures had the benefit of a cross-cultural creation team. Members were students in an international advertising class taught by Dr. Dawn Pysarchik in the MSU Department of Advertising and Public Relations. This team included students from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the United States. They worked in cross-cultural pairs, learning from each other as they researched. This guide was done, in part, because Michigan State and colleges and universities nationwide have large enrollments from East Asian countries. Americans have questions. These are some of the answers.

  • DID YOU KNOW? Asian countries, cultures and languages are incredibly diverse. While there are some shared cultural values, the differences among countries are incredible.
  • Differences between China and Taiwan or South and North Korea are profound. Millions of Asian people learn English, but do not know Asian languages other than their own.
  • Value systems such as collectivism, Confucianism and high-context communication play out in everyday activity.
  • In Japan, it is not uncommon for people to practice more than one religion.
  • Colors and numbers can have special significance in gift-giving, weddings and ceremonies, commerce and luck.
  • Japan gave us anime, manga, karaoke and Hello, Kitty.
  • South Korea gave us Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and K-Pop, part of the “hallyu” wave of pop culture.
  • China gave us eight major cuisines, not just the one or two you have heard of.
  • Speaking of food, chopsticks are not traditional in all Asian countries.
  • East Asians are adaptable, with Japan having become a strong U.S. ally since World War II and China easing its one-child rule and greatly enlarging its education system.

100 Questions, 500 Nations:
A Guide to Native America

100 Questions, 500 Nations: A Guide to Native America, originally published by the Native American Journalists Association in 1998, helped inspire the Bias Busters series. It has now been updated, redesigned and republished to reflect developments of the past 25 years. These are a few:

  • DID YOU KNOW? As the title reflects, there are now more than 500 federally recognized Indian nations. The guide includes a list of 566.
  • The tribes are sovereign, a concept that has been in the news in recent stories about Ukraine, Taiwan and the Middle East.
  • Tribal sovereignty is affirmed in treaties, court case law and the U.S. Constitution, but is still the subject of dispute.
  • It is OK to use the term “Indian Country” and many prefer “Indians” to “Native Americans.” Many prefer to identify themselves by their tribal affiliations.
  • Of the estimated 350 Indian languages that once existed, about 200 remain. Navajo has about 80,000 speakers, about 40,000 speak Chippewa and some others, in danger of extinction, have just a handful.
  • Indian casinos had $27.9 billion in revenue in 2012, but most tribes do not have casinos and this is only 8 percent of total gaming revenue in the country. Some Indians oppose gaming; some see it as a traditional activity.
  • Some people oppose the nickname of the Washington Redskins professional football team because, they say, it is on a racial par with the N word.

 

Other guides in the series

  • 100 Questions and Answers about Indian Americans has been available from Amazon since mid-2013.
  • In 100 Questions and Answers about Americans, we flipped our reporting perspective 180 degrees to produce a book intended for newly arriving students, workers and immigrants—answering the real questions newcomers to these shores commonly have about puzzling aspects of our American culture.
  • 100 Questions and Answers About Arab Americans (Coming in May)

COME TO NAIN in Detroit in August to learn about the next expansion of our project! Want to follow plans for the NAIN conference on Facebook? Here is NAIN Connect.

4 Things You Need to Know about Kay Lindahl

April 13, 2014 by

LISTEN …

If you take 1 thing away from this profile of Kay Lindahl, today, it should be this: She’s the woman behind The Sacred Art of Listening. As Editor of ReadTheSpirit, a well-thumbed copy of Kay’s book has been a part of my own collection of essential reading for more than a decade.

At this point in her life, Kay is a highly respected interfaith and cross-cultural teacher and a tireless professional in knitting together diverse networks of women and men. She regularly crisscrosses the country in her work, although she is primarily based in Long Beach, California. (That’s just south of Los Angeles, where she also serves on the board for the “Four Chaplains” memorial on the Queen Mary.)

Given that brief summary of her life, you might wonder: Why isn’t her book about the sacred art of teaching … or speaking … or organizing? She embodies all of those skills, after all. The answer is that she discovered years ago—thinking about her many experiences with groups: “The art of listening was the main skill that was missing for most participants.” Let me repeat that: She found that most people who are drawn to diverse dialogue groups have a real problem with—listening. Is that conclusion making you smile and nod? Recognize that truth? Kay did, early on, and created this marvelous interactive book on The Sacred Art of Listening, subtitled: Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiritual Practice. You can move through the book’s meditations at your own pace, skip around among the 40, go back and reread them—and use them in your own group.

However, unlike many of the authors we profile in our cover stories, Kay Lindahl is not a household name nationwide. Among her accomplished goals as a listener, teacher, organizer, writer and an activist promoting diversity, she has not pursued celebrity.

So, today, rather than a typical author Q and A, as Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine, I’m going to share with you …

Four Things
You Need to Know about Kay Lindahl

1. You can meet her.

She’s presenting one of the workshops in the August 10-13 North American Interfaith Network (NAIN) 2014 conference in Detroit. Last year, this influential gathering was held in Toronto and, this year, it will be hosted at Wayne State University in the historic heart of Detroit. If you care about the future of interfaith relationships on this continent—and around the world—you’ll plan to attend this NAIN event in August. Here is the NAIN-Connect page where you can register right now. The final schedule of events has not yet been published, but this conference will be jam packed with: workshops, inspiring and challenging talks, plenary sessions to discuss future projects, some off-site tours exploring the history of religious diversity in the global crossroads that Detroit represents. Most importantly, NAIN is a gathering of remarkable men and women like Kay Kindahl—and including a number of ReadTheSpirit’s authors as well. If you decide to attend NAIN, please email us at [email protected] and let us know you’re coming.

2. She is a master of creative collaboration.

As publishers ourselves, our ReadTheSpirit staff is working in 2014 to dramatically expand the way we collaboratively create books. We are impressed that Kay helped to gather a circle of friends to create an award-winning book that we also highly recommend, Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership: Where Grace Meets Power. Here is a shortened version of the story behind that book …

FROM THE BOOK: This book was born out of a deep curiosity about the current pattern of women’s spiritual leadership in North America and profound excitement about the possibilities that lie before us as women of faith and spirit. … The four editors of this book met at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2009. This Parliament was buzzing with feminine energy. People everywhere were talking about Earth-based spirituality, the Sacred Feminine, feminine principles, the full inclusion of women, women’s leadership and the critical global issues facing women and their children. Sprinkled liberally among the more than 6,000 attendees were little pink buttons with the question, “What happens when women lead?” …

Our global experiences at the Parliament inspired us to learn more about women’s spiritual leadership in our part of the world—North America. … The four of us created a new organization in 2010—Women of Spirit and Faith—with a commitment to core principles that model a different way of working: shared leadership, collaborative practices, circle processes, deep listening, mindfulness and compassionate action. The organization exists to invite the many brilliant threads of feminine spiritual leadership into relationship and to support emerging patterns of transformation. …

The next step was holding a retreat later that year for 25 women spiritual leaders from the United States and Canada. Leaders representing diversity of age, geography, ethnicity, spiritual orientation, and communities of passion came together for three days of dialogue and inquiry focused on the potential for collaboration among the many organizations and networks represented. … This conversation expanded in April 2011 with a larger gathering. … More than 150 women from across the United States and Canada came together in San Francisco to experience many diverse expressions of spiritual leadership.

This process drew together the writers—and the emerging ideas—that formed the book, Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership, finally written by more than two dozen different women and published by SkyLight Paths.

Here at ReadTheSpirit, we receive proposals for new books nearly every week—almost always by single writers planning to create books by themselves. That’s the traditional role of an author—a lone writer in a room somewhere. At ReadTheSpirit, we published our first collaborative book in early 2010, called Friendship and Faith, which featured dozens of women co-authoring a book. We’ve been encouraging collaboration ever since. Soon, ReadTheSpirit will publish our first comic book, Bullying Is No Laughing Matter, which is a convergence of dozens of cartoonists and comic artists. We believe that such innovative, cooperative books hold great promise as effective tools for building stronger, healthier communities.

So, we celebrate Kay Lindahl’s skills in this area—and we invite you to learn more from her by coming to NAIN in August and by buying a copy of her book, now.

3. She’s a certified listening professional.

Kay is certified by the International Listening Association, which is the leading professional group for promoting the study, development and teaching of listening. Kay also has a personal website, where you can explore her work. It’s an unusual little website with slowly moving words about listening that scroll across her home page—plus a series of links to read more about what she describes as “my work”—the “Listening Center.” In an interview, Kay talked about this program:

KAY: The Listening Center is the name of my work. It’s not a physical place. It’s the name of my professional work. In 1991, I started doing a meditation practice. I quickly became acquainted with centering prayer and that has been my practice every since. That has given me a deeper, richer relationship with God. I was trained by Basil Pennington and knew him well.

My denomination is the Episcopal Church, but I consider myself a very progressive Christian. About the same time I was exploring meditation and centering prayer, I also founded a local interfaith group. We got together so we could talk and find out more about each other and, right away, we found that we needed dialogue—and we especially needed to find out what works in listening to others. We wanted to avoid either debating or trying to convert.

My husband and I had moved to a new community and we realized that there was no Episcopal church nearby. We ended up being spark plugs to have a church founded in our community and the first gatherings of that church were in our home. I became very engaged in this fledgling church and the bishop at that time, Bob Anderson, came to visit us. We became friends and we would meet often. This was in the mid 1990s and we would meet and talk about centering prayer and dialogue and the start of this new church. He asked me to do a weekend retreat with clergy on prayer.

As we got to planning this, it became clear that there were three things: Listening to God, which is centering prayer, listening to others, which is the dialogue process, and then as we planned this we realize that we also wanted to talk about listening to Self. I was generating exercises and ways of presenting these three areas. The retreat was very effective. Bob and I did it one more together. It was effective again. As my mentor, Bob urged me to keep doing this. So the Listening Center came up as a way to do this work since 1997.

4. She believes this is a transformative moment.

If you haven’t already been enticed to learn more about Kay Lindahl, consider this: She believes firmly that this is a moment of historic, transformative change around the world. In our interview, she said:

KAY: So much is happening right now—and very quickly in many many places! I see a lot of people interested in finding new ways to approach all the challenges we face in our world today. There’s a lot of chaos in the world. You can’t be blind to that. But I see a groundswell of action and activity and thinking that’s going on. I see more and more of it. This is bubbling up now. This is a transformative moment and I am very hopeful about whatever is coming next for humankind.

I am seeing a great deal of movement and interest across North America, but I am also talking worldwide. I have great hope for the work being done around the world by the United Religions Initiative (URI). Through URI, I am hearing about people doing amazing work in the Middle East and Asia and other parts of the world as well. Some of the work is just mind-blowing—fueling my hope that we are onto a major transformation of consciousness on our planet. I know it. I can feel it emerging.

Care to learn more about URI? The link above goes to URI’s homepage online. There also is a Wikipedia overview article about URI’s work.

Care to read more about global peacemaking?

ReadTheSpirit hosts the website Interfaith Peacemakers, coordinated by global peacemaker Daniel Buttry and featuring a rotating series of inspiring profiles of men and women who dare to cross boundaries in pursuit of peace. See what’s new on the Interfaith Peacemakers front page today.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

The Philip Yancey interview: ‘The Question that Never Goes Away’

March 24, 2014 by

Where is God when … the next hurricane hits, the next wildfire rages, the next nuclear accident spews radiation, or the next civil war strikes down men, women and children?

As each tragedy erupts, people of faith rush to reassure the world that God remains a source of hope. But, sometimes, their well-intentioned messages do more harm than good. A deeper, haunting question remains unresolved: Why? Why did this disaster happen in the first place? Why were some spared and others destroyed?

Now, best-selling author and journalist Philip Yancey, whose books are read around the world, tackles that question. And he doesn’t chart an easy course for himself. He writes about that core question—Why?—in light of the Japanese nuclear disaster, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. He calls the book simply, The Question That Never Goes Away: Why?

If you are familiar with Philip Yancey’s Sterling credentials as a major evangelical voice in America, you may be surprised by the hard-earned honesty of this book. This is not a volume of pat answers. It’s not soft soap. In fact, the book opens with a heart-rending scene: the death of Philip’s own father in a tragic case of well-meaning Christians actually causing the death.

Throughout his career, Philip Yancey has written and spoken many times about the questions: Why do such horrible things happen? Where is God when they do? That has generated a constant stream of letters from readers about this theme until Philip finally decided that he should pull the most stirring letters from his files and revisit them. On this issue alone, he found that he had saved more than 1,000 letters!

What caused Philip to address this haunting cluster of questions right now? He tells us that it was prompted by three life-changing experiences in 2012. As a journalist, he describes them in detail in this new volume that is such a page-turner, you’re likely to read it in a single sitting. He summarizes the trio of experiences this way:

“In 2012, I spoke to groups … three times, in the most daunting circumstances. … In March, I stood before congregations in the Tohoku region of Japan on the first anniversary of the tsunami that slammed into land with the velocity of a passenger jet, snapping railroad tracks like chopsticks and scattering ships, buses, houses, and even airplanes across the ravaged landscape. In its wake, with 19,000 dead and whole villages swept out to sea, a busy secular nation that normally has no time for theological questions thought of little else.

“In October, I spoke on the question in Sarajevo, a city that had no heat, fuel or electricity and little food or water for four years while sustaining the longest siege in modern warfare. Eleven thousand residents died from the daily barrage of sniper fire and from the shells and mortars that fell from the sky like hail. …

“As 2012 drew to a close, I accepted perhaps the hardest assignment of all … in the sheer intensity of horror and intimate grief. The weekend after Christmas, I addressed the community of Newtown, Connecticut, a town reeling from the senseless slaughter of 20 first-graders and 6 of their teachers and staff.”

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm talked with Philip Yancey. Here are …

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH PHILIP YANCEY ON
‘THE QUESTION THAT NEVER GOES AWAY:
WHY?’

DAVID: In this book about vast tragedies, you begin by telling readers about 1 death: When you were an infant, your father was disabled by polio. He needed to use a breathing machine, what then was called an “iron lung.” But your family belonged to a Fundamentalist church that convinced him to quit using the machine, so that prayer could heal him. Instead, your father died. It was an agonizing experience that shaped your own life.

PHILIP: This was foundational for me, in an indirect way. I have no conscious memory of it because I was just a year old when it happened, but the overflow of this experience did affect me every day of my childhood. What I learned from that experience was not that different from other things I learned from the rather rigid church in which I grew up. The people in that church had very good intentions. The people who removed my father from his “iron lung” had good intentions. They thought they knew God’s will, but in that case they were flat-out wrong. He died.

That’s true of a lot of things in church history, isn’t it? I learned early on that you couldn’t swallow everything the church tells you. You’ve got to figure it out yourself; you’ve got to investigate. This idea flowered as a teenager. I learned that some of the things the church was telling me were wrong, in particular the racism of the church. And, for a while in my life, I threw the whole idea of faith off. I look back on that experience as healthy. It would have been unhealthy if I had just kept believing and accepting everything the church was telling me at that point. This stimulated my journalistic instincts before I knew what to call those instincts.

DAVID: People who know about your books and your work around the world may think of you as an evangelist. You’re very popular as an inspiring speaker. But your true vocation is journalism and you’ve always insisted that this role as a journalist is crucial to properly understanding your work.

PHILIP: The reason I identify as a journalist is because a journalist doesn’t begin as an expert in any one field. A journalist is a generalist, not an expert. Let’s say I’m assigned to write an article about nuclear physics. I don’t know anything about that subject but there are resources available. I can go to libraries. I can go to the Los Alamos lab. I can talk to physicists. I can eventually write an article that explains physics to people, at least a general introduction. That’s going to be quite different than asking a research physicist to write an article about his work. A lot of the books that are sold as religious books are written by the physicists of the church, the scholars, the experts.

In my work, I begin talking to people about their life experiences. That’s how I report on subjects like prayer or the problem of pain. I approach those questions from the journalist’s perspective. That’s true of everything I write. I started as a magazine writer and editor and made my living as a journalist. This new book goes beyond the usual journalistic perspective, because it comes out of three concrete experiences in three real places: Japan, Sarajevo and Newtown. But I do follow journalistic style here in the way I open each section with a description of what happened, then I write about how people lived through these experiences, then I write about my own experiences looking into what happened in these places.

I am not just asking and answering my own questions. I want readers to try to understand what it felt like to have been living in Japan when suddenly your entire village was washed away, or what it felt like to be a parent in Newtown on the day of the shootings and afterward. I want readers to experience the stories of these people, because their real stories give passion, depth and reality to the questions we all are raising after such tragedies.

THE PROBLEM WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

DAVID: You admit in the opening of your book that, all too often, people of faith wind up making things worse in their rush to reassure people after a disaster.

PHILIP: That is very true. And I do use the phrase “well intentioned.” One example: So many of the clichés you hear at funerals, or explanations given to children after a disaster, actually wind up making people feel worse instead of better. A common comment I heard, as a journalist talking to people who had survived terrible tragedies was: “The church made it worse.” Well-intentioned people show up hoping to help and share all sorts of theories about what had just happened. Many of those easy explanations were confusing and, in the end, made things worse.

VICTOR FRANKL AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

DAVID: In your book, readers will meet a lot of very wise people. As a good journalist, you draw together lots of such wisdom in your reporting. One figure you include in your book, who we just profiled in our online magazine, is Victor Frankl, the Auschwitz survivor who wrote about the importance of finding meaning in life even in the most deadly circumstances. Tell us why you included him.

PHILIP: What struck me most, the first time I read Victor Frankl, was the idea that despair is suffering without meaning. The Nazis actually carried out experiments in having prisoners work without meaning. They might have someone move rocks across a field all day long. The next day, they’d move the rocks back. Over and over again. This would break the will of the laborers and, eventually, the meaninglessness would break them down completely. Frankl argued that the human mind can survive extremely severe experiences if we can find some meaning in what we are going through.

Now, you can carry this argument too far. It’s easy to misunderstand. Some people might read Frankl and think it’s just a simple formula: find meaning and you’ll survive. Well, that’s not true. A lot of people who did find meaning in Auschwitz died anyway. Most people who passed through Auschwitz died. The same is true in other great tragedies people face today. It’s not a simple formula that guarantees survival.

But it is true that if you can just find meaning in the suffering, you can endure in a different way and you can do this probably more effectively than someone who doesn’t find meaning. I believe that principle is the same principle that Jesus uses when he encountered people who were suffering. In John 9, for example, Jesus encounters a man born blind and the disciples immediately ask: Who sinned? This man? His parents? That scene shows you the absurdity of such questions. Jesus dismisses the questions. He didn’t offer neat, formulaic theories about why something happened. Jesus was focused on: Yes, something bad has happened here, but can something good come out of this? And the answer is always: Yes.

GOD IN RED CAPE AND BLUE TIGHTS?

DAVID: So, a healthy “search for meaning,” to borrow Frankl’s phrase, often focuses on the way forward, the next steps, the individual and community response. You know from your own life, from your father’s death in particular, that God is not Superman. Here’s the lesson that I came away with most clearly from your book: If we doubt God’s reality in the face of tragedy, then we’re looking toward God with the wrong vision, the wrong set of expectations. God’s not hovering up there in a red cape and blue tights, ready to fly into our lives at a moment’s notice and rescue us. God is most present in the community that responds even in the face of evil and trauma.

PHILIP: That’s very true in the way you’re describing it. But this can be misunderstood. As you say that, people may think you’re saying: God is unable to solve problems, so God has to go with Plan B.

The way I say it is: God is Plan A from the beginning. God is not a muscle-flexing figure. God wants us to do in our admittedly inept ways, often, what God could do with a snap of a finger. Remember that God did not come to us as Superman 2,000 years ago but as a helpless baby in a very oppressed and problematic context. Jesus had many chances to snap his fingers—and didn’t. That’s what the temptation scenes in the wilderness are all about. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness to snap his fingers and do great miracles, yet he didn’t. And, in the end, he tells his followers: Now, it’s up to you to do the work here.

Every parent celebrates when their child takes a first step. Just this morning, I received a little movie clip from a woman whose grandchild had taken her first step. One response to such a video would be to email back and say: “What’s the big deal? There are billions of people in the world and most of them can walk.” But, if you’re a grandparent, it is indeed a big deal. In that way, God takes pleasure in seeing the world respond to rebuild after a tsunami or in seeing the community of Newtown come together to heal. This is not a case of an inferior Plan B—it’s what God had in mind all along.

DAVID: As I was reading your book, I kept thinking of Queen Elizabeth II’s famous words of wisdom after a great tragedy. She said, “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

PHILIP: Absolutely. I had not heard that quote from Queen Elizabeth before, but I have spoken with so many people who tell me that grief is the place where love and pain converge.

DAVID: That’s a memorable line in your new book: Grief is the place where love and pain converge.

PHILIP: Yes, and I quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who warns us not to think that we can fill that space. He wrote, “Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation. It remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap. God does not fill it, but on the contrary, God keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.”

This is such an important truth. When someone is lost, it’s important not to say: “You won’t feel the grief after a while.” Or: “You’ll get back to normal soon.” That loss may never go away. The parents who lost their children in Newtown can choose to fill their gaps in healthy or in unhealthy ways. They can become obsessed with questions or with bad advice they have been given.

I am saying: Grief itself can be a healthy thing. It’s a symbol of our love.

 Care to read more?

  • MORE FROM PHILIP YANCEY: Visit Philip’s own website where he offers columns and news about his ongoing work.
  • INTERFAITH PEACEMAKERS: Our Victor Frankl profile is part of a much larger effort—called Interfaith Peacemakers—celebrating the lives of men and women around the world whose faith leads them to risk crossing boundaries and making peace, often with others they never expected would help to form a new community.
  • OUR READ THE SPIRIT BOOKSTORE: We’ve published dozens of books on related themes. Please visit our online Bookstore.
  • WAITING FOR THE MOVIE VERSION? Our website now includes the work of long-time faith-and-film writer Edward McNulty—called Visual Parables—in which Ed shares more than 1,000 thoughtful columns on films that make us think about our faith in fresh ways.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

Ann Morisy Interview: Hope always … springs up.

March 17, 2014 by

“HOPE has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”
Studs Terkel

That’s the final line in theologian Ann Morisy’s manifesto for discouraged congregations, Bothered and Bewildered: Enacting Hope in Troubled Times. Her books are loaded with research drawn from sociology, political science, economics and theology. From that solid foundation, she raises her call to arms: The revival of Christianity—and the accompanying revival of communities—begins with small circles of men and women unleashing the power of their faith, their compassion and their creativity.

If you have never heard of Ann Morisy’s name until today, you should know that she stands in a long line of prophetic British writers whose appeals to conscience have crossed the Atlantic and built huge followings in America. That line certainly includes Charles Dickens (ReadTheSpirit is starting a Dickens reading group this week) and includes C.S. Lewis (see our earlier cover story on Lewis’ enormous legacy). That prophetic line also includes writers, teachers and musicians who have sprung from Scotland’s Iona Community (as examples, see these profiles of John Philip Newell and John Bell).

Care to read more on UK-US connections? All this week, sociologist Dr. Wayne Baker is writing about our up-and-down trans-Atlantic relations in his daily OurValues.org columns.

Care to see and hear Ann Morisy? She occasionally comes to the U.S. and will appear March 21-23 at the First United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor adjacent to the campus of the University of Michigan. Sorry—yes, we know that most of our readers don’t live in Michigan, where ReadTheSpirit’s core staff is based, but we couldn’t resist heralding Ann’s visit with this interview.

DICKENS, LEWIS, IONA and MORISY

There are echoes of Dickens, Lewis and the Iona writers in Morisy’s work. She preaches that congregations should not wallow in their anxieties about the future. Congregations are not poor, besieged outposts waiting for some do-gooder to come save them. In fact, every congregation is made up of men and women, and the truth is that each person can contribute in an “economy of abundance,” one of Morisy’s favorite phrases.

In other words, even if your options in life are extremely limited—perhaps you are wheelchair bound in an assisted living community—you still have a lot you can share with the rest of the world. Your contribution to abundance may amount to your compassionate smiles and encouraging words to others. There is no excuse for refusing to share, she argues. And, in fact, the vast majority of men and women are not so extremely limited—and can give far more on a daily basis.

The problem, Morisy argues, is that our societies—especially in the UK and the US—are tragically out of whack. Most Americans, today, know about the yawning wealth gap between the “rich 1 percent” and the rest of us. But Morisy’s preaching and writing doesn’t let the 99 off the hook. She asks audiences: Are you a Baby Boomer? Then, to those in that generation, she says: You’re contributing to the imbalance. Aging Baby Boomers—and she is one of them, she admits—are demanding that the majority of the world’s resources flow toward them. In other words, even if you’re among the “99 percent,” you’re not free of a moral responsibility to share.

“I write as a Baby Boomer, and on reflection it does indeed seem as if I have had an uninterrupted stream of benefits throughout my life,” Morisy writes in her book, Borrowing from the Future: A Faith-Based Approach to Intergenerational Equity. “But maybe I and my fellows are in for a shock. Our confident expectation of financial security rolling steadily into deep old age is threatened. The collapse of banks and the ensuing unsustainable mountain of debt that nations face mean that the future is going to be tough—even for the blessed generation of Baby Boomers. All the components are lining up for an intense bushfire as Baby Boomers and younger generations have come to terms with their—oops, I mean our—hampered desire to acquire and consume.”

OUR UNUSUAL INTERVIEW

As Editor of ReadTheSpirit, I have conducted many of our Cover Story author interviews via long-distance connections with other countries, including the UK. However, Ann is based in Streatham on London’s south side, working out of a home office that runs on an intentionally modest budget. Her own telephone connection is via the Internet and has such limited capacity that our 90-minute interview was interrupted dozens of times. Eventually, Ann turned off all the lights and other electrical devices in her office in the hope that it might improve her connection. It didn’t. So, in the end, it was impossible to publish a typical ReadTheSpirit Question-and-Answer transcript.

Here are some of the things Ann did say, between Internet disconnects.

She is proud to be part of the laity in the Church of England; although she is a theologian, she is not ordained as a priest. She says: “To distinguish myself from academic theologians, I call myself a community theologian because I like theology that grows from the ground up.”

Ann is 61 and teaches a lot, these days, about the need for older men and women to keep learning—and contributing to the larger community. “As Baby Boomers are getting older, we are a pioneering generation entering this very long old age that people are experiencing today.” She works across the UK training communities in multi-generational dialogue. “We try to encourage churches not just to respond with pastoral care in relation to older people—but to encourage older people to think and reflect—and do their damnedest—not to be a pain in later life. … If we fall prey to being a pain in later life, we can really wreck the lives of those around us—for decades.”

That kind of in-your-face preaching and teaching is guaranteed to spark some anxious responses, and Morisy says she has not been eager to establish a personal website or other online column. Shifting to slang, she chuckles and says, “I like me privacy. I like to keep me head down.”

Fortunately, although she values her privacy, Ann isn’t shy and chooses when to emerge with her best shots—sometimes in book form and often in public workshops and talks, usually across the UK. This week, she brings her prophetic ministry to Michigan. We encourage our readers to find out more about this remarkable teacher. No, we won’t see most of you in Michigan—but you can sample Ann’s books and you can seek her out in the future.

This report is by ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm. You are free to repost and quote from this column.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)