E-mail a friendBob Abernethy
original airdate May 15, 2007
Emmy-winning broadcast journalist Bob Abernethy is executive editor and host of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, which he created for PBS in '97. He previously spent more than four decades as an NBC News correspondent, covering Congress, national political campaigns, education and religion. In ‘84, he took a year off to study theology and social ethics at Yale Divinity School. In Abernathy's book, The Life of Meaning, contributors speak candidly about the search for meaning in their personal lives.
Bob Abernethy
Tavis: Bob Abernethy is the host of "Religion and Ethics News Weekly," which is in its 10th season right here on PBS. Prior to that, he spent more than four decades as a correspondent for "NBC News," including memorable coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. His new book is a collection of excerpts from the PBS series called "The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World." He joins us tonight from Minneapolis. Bob, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Bob Abernethy: Thank you very much, Tavis. It's nice to be here.
Tavis: Thank you. Let me start by asking you to take me back 10 years. I have some experience, obviously, at what it takes to get a show on PBS. I can't imagine, that said, what it takes to get a program on PBS about religion. (Laughter) So tell me the struggle of how you actually - now that you're celebrating 10 years - got this thing on the air to begin with.
Abernethy: (Laughs.) Well, a lot of people, 10 years ago, were saying that the commercial networks did not do a very good job of covering religion and religion news. I was retiring from NBC; I was looking for something to do. I didn't want to stop work. And it seemed to me that a half-hour program once a week about news of religion and ethics might be something that would be timely and that I would very much like to do. So I pitched the idea to several people and found the Lily Endowment in Indianapolis, Indiana. Very generous, and 13-WNET in New York, which agreed to be the producing station, and we went on the air.
Tavis: What's there to talk about these days with regard to religion and ethics - I'm trying to give the audience, for those who've not seen the program, a sense of the kind of subject matter you cover on this program.
Abernethy: Well, we just had a piece last week from Brazil on the pope's trip there and what - and the concern of the Catholic Church about the rise of Protestantism, especially Pentecostal Protestantism in Latin America. We do all the major religion stories. And we also do stories in which we give people a chance to talk about what their deepest beliefs and concerns are. And it's that part of it that has been the source of the material for the book.
Tavis: Do you have to be a person of faith to host a program like this, do you think? Could you be an Agnostic or an Atheist, or are those views even covered on the program?
Abernethy: Sure. Sure. You can be anything. What you have to be most of all, though, is sensitive to peoples' deepest religious feelings. And if you can't do that, you'll make mistakes that will hurt a lot of people.
Tavis: Do you think we live in a country, much less a world, where people by and large are still, if ever, sensitive to the faith of other people?
Abernethy: Oh, yeah. I think we're extremely tolerant. I think we're extremely tolerant people. We don't know very much (laughs) about other religions, we don't know very much about how other people worship, but what we do know, we're very tolerant of. We say, "If it works for them, fine. I have mine; they have theirs; let's just get along."
Tavis: If I were a Muslim, would I believe that today? Would I buy that argument right about now?
Abernethy: It could be a lot worse, Tavis. I think there are many, many stories where some hothead has done something that was despicable toward a Muslim and half the town turned out to demonstrate that they think that was wrong.
Tavis: If I were a Palestinian or conversely, a Jew in the Middle East, would I buy that argument?
Abernethy: I don't know.
Tavis: Let me talk about the book, "The Life of Meaning." Let me throw some - I think the best way to get at this conversation with regard to the book specifically is I think to throw some names at you. A person is feature in the book that you were obviously impacted by your conversations with them enough to include them in the text. In no particular order, Tom Lynch.
Abernethy: Oh, Tom is wonderful. Let me just say that there is a quality that runs through most of the people in the book that I really admire. And that quality is to look at the universe and life dead on, squarely in the eye. See its joy, see its laughter, see love, beauty. But also see a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of disappointment.
And they see all that and yet, they don't despair. They go on and they affirm that in spite of everything, they think there is something more in the universe than what we can see and measure and touch. They think there is something more that is transcendent, that they can communicate with, and that they can experience the presence of in their lives.
Now, Tom Lynch. Tom is a poet in Milford, Michigan. He is also the town's leading funeral director. He says poetry and funerals have a lot in common; they are attempts to give meaning to the unspeakable. I talked to Lynch, and one of the qualities that he has and that so many others have in the book is their honestly.
They acknowledge their doubt. And for Lynch, that comes, he said, on the days when he has to bury a child. He said on those days, he shakes his fist at God, and he says, "What did you have in mind here, God?" And then I said to him, "Well, on those days when God seems absent or not to exist, what do you do?" And (laughs) Lynch laughed out loud and he said, "I pray." I like that kind of thing.
Lynch also said - he's an eloquent man, and so many of the people in the book are really eloquent - he said, he'd come to believe that grief is the tax we pay on loving people. That's not bad.
Tavis: Not bad at all. Tell me about Phyllis Tickle.
Abernethy: Ah, Phyllis. Well, Phyllis - anybody with a name - people speak with almost reverence about Phyllis Tickle who know her, and somebody named Phyllis Tickle is somebody I wanted to meet. So I went to Tennessee, where she lives. She's an editor, a writer. And she lives way out in the country, for one reason because she finds being close to nature a place where she can get her balance right.
She says, living close to the Earth, living close to the seasons and to the natural world gives her a very realistic sense of whether she matters. She says she doesn't matter nearly as much in the country as she thought she did in the city. Phyllis has been keeping the divine hours for about 30, 35 years. Every three hours, the alarm clock on her wristwatch goes off. She stops whatever she's doing, she goes to a quiet place, and she reads the prayers and the psalms appointed for that hour.
This is what monastics have been doing for many, many years, but Phyllis has been doing this and she says it's - she can't imagine not doing it. And it is really central to her life. And many people - many people that we've spoken to say this same thing. They say that this business of having their spiritual life be very, very close to what they're doing every day is very important. Phyllis says she can be in a meeting and be talking and praying at the same time.
Tavis: I gotta get out of here in about 30 seconds. Let me ask you right quick, then, to that last point, whether or not it is your measured opinion after all these conversations over 10 years that religion, as the subtitle suggests, can be used to repair the world?
Abernethy: Oh, yeah. Many people - many people are doing that. It is the central objective of many, many people. They are of all religions and of none. And it is a terribly important aspect of their whole religious practice.
Tavis: He is the host of PBS' "Religion and Ethics News Weekly." His new book is called "The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World." His name, of course, Bob Abernethy. Bob, nice to have you on the program.
Abernethy: Thank you, Tavis.
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