BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This past week (November 9) the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it’s constitutional to sentence juveniles who commit crimes other than murder to life in prison without parole. Tim O’Brien reports.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young had just turned 15 when he committed a string of hotel robberies in the Tampa area, acting at the direction of 25-year-old Jacques Bethea, a neighborhood drug dealer with a long arrest record.  Bethea would hold the gun. Young would take the money.

KENNETH YOUNG: The only thing he told me to do was get the money and the tapes, and that was it.

O’BRIEN:  What tapes?

YOUNG:  Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security camera?

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN:  And you did that?

YOUNG:  Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young says he had little choice. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine and had stolen drugs from Bethea. He believed her life was in danger.

YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

YOUNG: Kill her.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along.

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother blames herself for her son’s problems.

STEPHANIE YOUNG:  Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, I mean …

O’BRIEN: But that didn’t keep Kenneth from being sentenced to life in prison with no parole.

JUDGE J. ROGERS PADGETT: What we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge J. Rogers Padgett

PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him, so we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Florida, like many states, allows prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults for serious crimes, and the state legislature did away with all parole in 1995. As a result, there are now 77 inmates in the state serving life without parole for non-homicides committed when they were under 18, more than in all other states combined. Paolo Annino runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University:

PAOLO ANNINO: This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children. Do we want to do that as a society? Do we want to ignore our Western traditions?

O’BRIEN: This week (November 9) the U.S. Supreme Court took up that question in two separate cases involving Terrence Graham, who at age 17 committed armed burglaries while on parole for a previous armed robbery, and Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of raping and robbing a 72-year-old woman when he was only 13.

BRYAN STEVENSON: We don’t think there’s any dispute that sentencing a 13-year-old to life in prison without parole is unusual. It’s happened only twice for non-homicides. We also think that to say to any child of 13 that you’re only fit to die in prison is cruel.

O’BRIEN: But Stevenson ran into some skeptical justices, including Antonin Scalia: “I don’t see why it is any crueler to an adolescent that it is to an adult… Where do you draw the line?” Justice Sam Alito: “What about …brutal rapes, assaults that render the victim paraplegic but not dead …the person shows no remorse… the worst case you could possibly imagine? That person must at some point be made eligible for parole? “You are correct, your honor,” answered Brian Gowdy, the attorney for Terrence Graham.

BRIAN GOWDY: If the court rules in Terrence’s favor, about one hundred persons who committed crimes as adolescents will benefit by getting a chance to show some day that they have changed, and that’s all we’re asking for. Not for immediate release, but a chance to show that the kid has changed.

Brian Gowdy

O’BRIEN: In court, Gowdy pointed to a landmark Supreme Court ruling four years ago in which the justices rejected the death penalty for juvenile offenders, relying heavily on evidence showing that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do. Several justices observed that that was a death penalty case, and death is different.

GOWDY: Death is different, but not in any critical respects when you’re talking about an adolescent. Both sentences condemn the adolescent to die in prison, both give up on the kid, both determine that the adolescent can’t be changed,  and both say that, based on an adolescent mistake, you can never live in civil society.

O’BRIEN: The attorney for Florida said the state’s sentencing practices were aimed at addressing a serious crime problem and that such policy decisions should not be second-guessed by federal judges.

SCOTT MAKAR (Florida Solicitor General): That’s a quintessential states’ judgment, and 21 states have said no to parole and our position is that the court shouldn’t impose something on the states that the states themselves have rejected.

O’BRIEN: Chief Justice John Roberts proposed a compromise requiring judges and juries to consider a defendant’s youth, but allowing life without parole in extreme cases. Defense lawyers dismissed the idea as too little.

STEVENSON: Because poor kids and minority kids and disadvantaged kids are always the ones who end up with these harsh sentence.

O’BRIEN: Conservatives on the court dismissed it as too much. Meanwhile, back in Florida, Kenneth Young and more than a hundred other prison inmates nationwide serving life without parole for crimes they committed as children got some support from what might seem to be an unlikely source. The judge who sentenced Young, J. Rogers Padgett, has come out against laws that deny parole to juveniles in non-homicide cases.

PADGETT: If I went and talked to Kenneth, I might have sympathy, too, because I firmly believe the Department of Corrections ought to be given the latitude to determine when these people are ready to go. What do I know? At the time of sentencing I’m doing a snapshot, so what do I know?

O’BRIEN: The justices appeared sharply divided, making any decision unlikely before the end of the term next June. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

ABERNETHY: Among those who have filed briefs with the court are 20 religious groups that argued that the values of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion are central to their faiths. They said judges have a responsibility to consider those values, along with the possibility of rehabilitation, especially for juveniles. They urged what they call “restorative justice.”

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Jakarta looks like any other modern Asian capital, but here, alongside the glittering office towers, you’ll also find imposing houses of worship. At the Istiqlal mosque recently, about 10,000 worshipers gathered for Friday noon prayer. It’s part of a religious revival that’s been taking place alongside a booming economy in recent decades. It is visible in mosques—and in malls. At this crowded shopping center, the most popular garment seems to be the head scarf.

INDONESIAN WOMAN: I’m here because Islam tells women to wear the scarf.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar

DE SAM LAZARO: This 40-year-old accountant began covering her hair three years ago.

INDONESIAN WOMAN: I feel ashamed, because I should have been wearing it since I was young, but at least I am wearing it now.

DE SAM LAZARO: Islam is making a comeback in Indonesia along with democracy that began 10 years ago. For years after independence from the Dutch in 1945, and then under decades of Suharto’s dictatorship, religion was officially tolerated at best.

DR. DEWI FORTUNA ANWAR (Indonesian Institute of Sciences): Islam and the traditional, customary laws were regarded as being backward and primarily blamed for, you know, the defeat for many Muslim countries under European rule, so that many of the earlier nationalist leaders, many of the educated elite, in fact, turned their back on religion, and among the younger generation there seems to be a greater willingness both to be openly religious and to be modern and educated at same times. I think maybe this is not just a search for greater spiritual anchor, but also I think it’s greater self-confidence.

DE SAM LAZARO: She and others say this growth of religious expression is spawned by the new democratic freedoms. It’s neither fundamentalist nor militant, notwithstanding recent terrorist incidents. Bombings in two Jakarta hotels killed nine people last July, and a 2002 attack in the tourist haven of Bali killed more than 200. But religion scholar Ulil Abdalla, with the liberal Islamic Youth Association, says such extremism is not widespread.

ULIL ABDALLA (Islamic Youth Association): For some people, Islam as practiced in this country is corrupted. Movies and food and, you know, lifestyle and so forth, it’s pretty much influenced by the American cultures. So when radical Islamic ideologies was introduced by some activists to Indonesia, it appealed to young people, but that’s, you know, the appeal is limited to a fringe in the society. It’s not a predominant trend.

Ulil Abdalla

DE SAM LAZARO: The more accurate gauge, he says, is Indonesia’s recent election, in which secular incumbent [president] Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won easily. Islamist parties, which had surged to 40 percent of the vote in 2004, lost ground, to less than 30 percent.

ULIL ABDALLA: Some people feared that if democracy, if the democratic space is opened it will allow Islamist party to dominate the arena. That is not true.

DE SAM LAZARO: Significantly, the reaction of the Islamist and other parties after the election indicates a commitment to democracy, says Anies Baswedan, a scholar of political Islam.

ANIES BASWEDAN (Paramadina University): We have around 40 parties. Only nine were able to gain seats in the house, yet we do not see significant problems from supporters who are not having their parties in the house. Acceptance to political result, democratic result, is very important.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says Indonesians, especially the 14 percent who survive on less than a dollar a day, have much more pragmatic concerns—food prices, the economy in general, and corruption—even voters who’d like to impose stricter Islamic law or sharia.

MARTA: From what I understand about Islamic states, the people live in prosperity, and the law is enforced very strictly. Those who steal, those who are corrupt, they cut off their hand, rather than here, where people who can bribe judges and police get away with things.

DE SAM LAZARO: Yet Marta, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, voted for the secular president. So did his neighbor, Samsuddin, who praises a government initiative that’s helped the poor.

SAMSUDDIN: Number one is cash for poor families, and the second is cheap rice. We get $10 a month in cash and 15 kilos of rice. We are a Muslim family, but we are not that strict. I voted for the party that is already helping people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamic or not.

Anies Baswedan

DE SAM LAZARO: That kind of sentiment has moved Islamist parties to the center.

ANIES BASWEDAN: People understand now, campaigning, that “we are Muslims, we are an Islamic party, this is a sharia platform” does not sell. People ask, “Tell me what else, tell me in reality, what will you deliver beyond the slogans?”

FAHRI HAMZAH (Member of Parliament): We don’t name it sharia, because if you name it sharia people then from beginning suspicious to see.

DE SAM LAZARO: Fahri Hamzah is a Member of Parliament with the most successful Islamist party, called Prosperity and Justice, which joined the ruling coalition government. Although it once campaigned for Islamic law and more conservative women’s attire, Hamzah says they are happy to govern by consensus in a liberal democratic framework.

FAHRI HAMZAH: We are an Islamic party, but what we talk about Islam is Islam as the universal value, because we believe every religion, you know, inspired by God. We follow this direction that anti-corruption is Islamic agenda, clean government is Islamic agenda, you know, welfare, manage our economy, open economy, you know, liberalize our economy is one of the, you know, good agenda.

DE SAM LAZARO: That interpretation might well have its roots in the history of Islam in this vast, diverse archipelago.

DR. DEWI FORTUNA ANWAR: We are used to living in differences. Indonesia is composed of islands, over 17,000 islands and over 700 different ethnic groups with different languages, different cultural traditions. Islam came to Indonesia fairly late, from 12th century up, mostly through traders and Sufi teachers. They found Indonesia already very rich layers of cultures, and to be accepted a new belief, a new religion would have to adapt to local circumstances from the beginning. I think that was the case when Hinduism came here and when Buddhism came here and then when Islam came here, when Christianity also came here.

Fahri Hamzah

DE SAM LAZARO: So even though it’s 85 percent Muslim today, Islam here reflects Indonesia’s polyglot culture, readily evident in architecture, language, even in the mall scarf shops.

YUDI TOZA (Shop Owner): We believe in Indonesia that Islam is more modern, more moderate. People who wear the plain dress, it’s not our way.

ROSA LESTARI (Shop Clerk): It will look strange if an Indonesian woman wore that kind of plain clothes, especially nowadays. They probably think you are a terrorist’s wife.

DE SAM LAZARO: Shop owner, saleswoman, and customer told us there’s no contradiction between Islam and fashion, that the notion of a plainly dressed, fully covered woman is—foreign. Shopping here was Nur Inani, who was buying for customers in her own clothing business in the island of Sumatra.

NUR INANI: Mostly they are looking for clothes this long and this long, which is basically covering the butt and the arms. I look for the dress first, and then I will find the matching scarf, the color, the style.

DE SAM LAZARO: Terrorist incidents aside, Indonesia is enjoying a period of stability rarely seen in its independent history. Indonesians are free to choose their government, and they are free to pursue religion, and they’ve made it clear in elections that they want to pursue each separately, that is, to keep religion out of government.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Jakarta.

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: In Los Angeles, a group of inner-city clergy, many of them inspired by veterans of the civil rights movement, are taking their ministries out of the pulpit and into the streets. Instead of only preaching to save souls, they are returning to activism: confronting homelessness, unemployment, and violence. Lucky Severson reports.

Speaker at Bryant Temple AME Church service: It’s time to break the silence. It’s time to draw a line saying “this far and no farther.”

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Bryant Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Central Los Angeles. The music will move you, but this is not a celebration. It’s a service dedicated to bringing an end to the needless deaths of all the boys who will never become men.

REV. EUGENE WILLIAMS (CEO and National Director, Regional Congregations and Neighborhood Organizations Training Center, speaking at service): Our young people have been dying in the streets day and night where we have hidden our light under a bushel.

SEVERSON: How many kids have been killed, say, in the last year?

REV. WILLIAMS: About a hundred.

SEVERSON: Pastor Eugene Williams managed to survive his inner-city childhood, but the odds are worse today. He says it’s partly because too many African-American churches have lost their way.

REV. WILLIAMS: And so we’ve gone from a period of ministers like Dr Cecil Murray and Dr. J. Alfred Smith, who taught that it was important to love your neighbor as yourself, to a place where ministers believed that it was important that the community love them.

SEVERSON: So that’s why Williams and other activist preachers started a program called Passing the Mantle, now in its fourth year at the University of Southern California.  It’s a nine-day course where pastors, now known as the Old Lions, teach younger pastors, African American and Latino, how to get civically engaged in the real-life drama of inner city Los Angeles.

(to Rev. Cecil Murray): Did you ever think that you would be called an Old Lion?

REV. CECIL “CHIP” MURRAY (Professor of Christian Ethics, USC School of Religion and Former Pastor, First African Methodist Episcopal Church, Los Angeles, Calif.): Bless the Lord, I knew I’d be called old, but not a lion.

SEVERSON: Cecil “Chip” Murray retired at 75 as the pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, which was the largest AME church in the country. He could preach hellfire and brimstone, but he was more concerned about social issues like homelessness, jobs, violence, and hunger.

REV. MURRAY: We must not only have life after death, but we must have life after birth, even as with the founder of Christianity. He would preach personal salvation, but he would also preach social salvation. He would reach out.  I have come that you may have life, not I have come to take you to heaven.

SEVERSON: Pastor Mark Whitlock is a co-director of Passing the Mantle. He says because of Rev. Murray he turned his life around, so he knows a pastor can make a difference, even with kids society deems beyond hope.

REV. MARK WHITLOCK (Director of Community Initiatives, USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and Pastor, Christ Our Redeemer AME Church, Irvine, Calif.): I would probably be one of those people you would be afraid of in the community, yeah, sold some product that were illegal and did some things that I’m not very proud of.

SEVERSON: Now, as pastor of Christ Our Redeemer AME Church, he sees how much more difficult it is today for inner-city kids to break free of their environment. He was once one of those kids. The need for black churches to get involved, he says, is urgent.

REV. WHITLOCK: It’s immediate, and you look at the challenge of gang violence, the number of African Americans, Latinos that are locked up in this country, over a million, the absence of African Americans graduating, particularly African American men graduating from high schools and even elementary schools, the attention is necessary now, and it’s an immediate need to change.

REV. MURRAY: To say we are here to save souls and that’s all—you can’t save souls in isolation. It’s a totality of heart, soul, mind, strength, family, environment. It is essentially your environment.

SEVERSON: Pastor Murray earned his reputation as an Old Lion as a leader of the civil rights movement in California from the very beginning. Despite his quiet, humble demeanor, he has won many battles and concessions from the city and state, including one that the police would no longer hold suspects in choke-holds.

Pastor J. Alfred Smith is another Old Lion who led the civil rights movement in northern California. He is senior pastor emeritus of the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland.

REV. J. ALFRED SMITH (Pastor Emeritus, Allen Temple Baptist Church, Oakland, Calif.): The church was the civil rights movement because the church understood the meaning of “go down, Moses, and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.” The church understood the meaning of saying “we shall overcome.”

SEVERSON: And after they led the struggle against segregation and police brutality and eventually forced Congress to pass civil rights legislation, it was black pastors who calmed the fury of the LA race riots in 1992. Then things changed. Many black churches began focusing less on social justice issues and more on saving souls and preaching the gospel of prosperity, which teaches that the faithful will be rewarded with material blessings.

REV. MURRAY: I would just admonish those who preach prosperity to remember that the one who founded the Christian church had one pair of shoes.

REV. WHITLOCK: We believe Christ came to set the captives free, to bring sight to the blind, to clothe the naked, to find housing for those who are looking for housing. That’s the work of the church. We must return back to the values that made the black church a true success.

REV. WILLIAMS (speaking at Bryant Temple AME Church service): And we came by here to tell you young people that we’re sorry. We’re sorry because we left you to fend for yourselves.

SEVERSON: Outside the chapel at the special healing service, there was an empty casket. No one needed to ask why. They all know someone.

Woman praying at service: Bring, Heavenly Father, what only you can give…

SEVERSON: A few days earlier, someone dumped the body of a young man who had been shot in the head just a few hundred yards from the church.

REV. WHITLOCK: It’s wonderful labels that we’ve given our children—gang members, Crips, Bloods. I’m sorry. Those are our sons, those are our daughters, those are our cousins, those are our nieces. So we must not be afraid of our own, and if they’re doing wrong, they’re doing wrong.  Selling drugs is wrong. Doing crime is wrong.  Not going to school is wrong.  So the church must speak to the moral—take a moral position on it, but after we take a moral position then we must wrap our arms around them and love them back to a place where they feel safe in the church.

SEVERSON: Most parents in South Central LA are as caring and loving as parents everywhere, but with far greater obstacles. There are few jobs, few public parks to get the kids off the streets, poor schools, and not enough role models. There are now twice as many Latinos as African Americans, but people of all races are starting to realize they’re in this together.

REV. MURRAY: If under the skin all people are kin, if all human beings have an area that can be approached, then we need to find what that area is and go to it, because the problems are not going to fix themselves.

SEVERSON: There are some signs of progress. Inner city pastors have managed to wrangle some new affordable housing. Some of the estimated 40,000 gang members have been persuaded to try to go straight. Pastors are getting more involved. And there’s one more change on the front lines: A majority of those asking to receive the mantle are women.

Woman pastor speaking to group: …that we have to make the difference. That’s what I learned today.

REV. WILLIAMS: People are dying in the streets. We’re saying that people are engaging in risky behavior. So you’ve got to come out behind your stained glass windows and come out here and help people, because if you don’t, all of those problems are going to end up, and they are ending up, on your doorstep.

SEVERSON: They’ve heard promises of help before, promises often not kept. Now it’s the most trusted men and women in the neighborhood who are offering hope.

REV. WILLIAMS (speaking at Bryant Temple AME Church service): If we lock arms, if we continue to move and work together, we will improve the communities where we live, work, and worship. I came by here to tell you to stand on your feet, because we gonna be more better. Let’s give God some praise….

SEVERSON: So far, the Old Lions have passed the mantle to about 400 younger pastors who seem determined to do what authorities have been unable to do without them.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in South Central Los Angeles.

BOOK REVIEW
Charles Taylor, Peggy Lee, and the Secular Age
by David E. Anderson

In September 1969, singer Peggy Lee released the popular single “Is That All There Is?”, a poignant  song  of disillusion at the edge of despair written by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It climbed to number 11 on the US pop singles chart and won Lee a Grammy Award for best female pop vocal performance.

Canadian scholar Charles Taylor, professor emeritus of philosophy at McGill University, invokes the song twice in A SECULAR AGE (Harvard University Press, 2007), his massive study of the rise of secularism. It is a magisterial 874-page doorstopper of a book (776 pages of text and almost 100 pages of notes and index), and it received the prestigious Templeton Award in 2007 and the equally prestigious Kyoto Prize for achievement in arts and philosophy in 2008.

Taylor cites the song as emblematic of the “flatness” and lack of “fullness” many experience in contemporary life. The lyrics are, in fact, a retelling of German novelist Thomas Mann’s 1896 short story, “Disillusionment,” suggesting that “flatness” has long been a feature of modernity. Strangely, Taylor’s book mentions Thomas Mann but not his story—and then only names Mann in a list of other writers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who are said to represent a widespread belief “in our reliance on the forces of irrationality, darkness, aggression, sacrifice.”

Such historical and cultural references are both a strength and weakness of Taylor’s encyclopedic yet exhausting approach to telling the intellectual story of the last 500 years and the rise of secularism that has come to define if not dominate contemporary life. In one sense they show the broad range of his intellect and his command of much of the material he brings to bear on his argument. But sometimes the references are not fully engaged, as if Taylor believes his point can be made through citation and invocation rather than argument and engagement.

Taylor has set himself a daunting task. He begins with an obvious assertion: belief in God is not the same today as it was in 1500. What that change consists of and how it came about is the story he wants to tell. In 1500, everyone in Latin Christendom believed in God. Unbelief was virtually impossible to envision much less embrace. Now, in the early years of the 21st century, belief—at least in the West—is just one option among many and not always the most intellectually or emotionally attractive option at that.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Taylor wants to argue that previous descriptions of how we got here—the gradual secularization of the world—are wrong. The conventional wisdom of secularization and what he calls “subtraction” theories do not adequately account for the way we live now. Those theories say secularity is inextricably connected to modernity, especially the rise of science, and is explained by humanity’s inevitably shedding—either losing or being liberated from, depending on your point of view—the “enchanted” view of the world that existed before the 16th century.

Taylor wants to distinguish between three kinds of secularism which, he argues, while related, are often confused and therefore lead to a potential misreading of the current secular age.

First, there is the secularism that is a result of religion being emptied from public institutions and practices, especially political life. Formally, this is the secularism of the Founders’ notion of the separation of church and state, and informally it is what conservative intellectuals such as the late Richard John Neuhaus, organizations such Focus on the Family, and committees such as the National Day of Prayer task force lament as “the naked public square.”

Second, there is the falling off of religious belief and practices, seen in lower church attendance rates or a decline in confessions, prayer, or Bible reading. Many Western European countries, even those with a vestige of state or established churches, can be understood as increasingly, even pervasively, secular.

Third, and most important, there is a change in what Taylor calls “the condition of belief.” In this sense, secularity consists in belief moving from an unchallenged assumption of everyday life to one option among many. “The change I want to define or trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others,’’ Taylor writes.

It is the change in the conditions of belief, from an “enchanted” world filled with supernatural spirits and demons and God and a porous self in which these forces are active on the person, to a buffered self in which the world is experienced within nature and its processes and is no longer vulnerable to the world of spirits. This creates the environment for an “exclusive humanism” in which the world is explained and “fullness” or “flourishing” is experienced without recourse to outside or transcendent factors.

Thomas Mann

Taylor argues this change is not a “subtraction,” the sloughing off of superstition, but is, rather, the result of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices that evolve, ironically, out of the pressures of what he calls Reform with a capital “R,” medieval, pre-Reformation movements within the church aimed at narrowing the gap in religious practices between the laity, ordinary people, and elites, especially spiritual elites such as monks and nuns. The Reformation of Luther and Calvin, Taylor argues, is the ultimate and perhaps necessary fruit of the Reform spirit, producing for the first time a true uniformity of believers, a leveling up that eliminated the spiritual gap between laity and elite.

From these currents of Reform, Taylor traces in painstaking detail the disenchantment of the world and  the rise of humanism through the Protestant Reformation, the more radical Calvinist Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, Renaissance humanism, the scientific revolutions, deism, and the gradual replacement of what he terms “the transcendent frame” with “the immanent frame” and exclusive humanism.

The result, however, is not the substitution of exclusive humanism for religious belief but, rather, what Taylor describes as a “nova” or an explosion of a host of possible positions.

“The salient feature of Western societies is not so much a decline of religious belief and practice, though there has been lots of that, more in some societies than in others, but rather a mutual fragilization [a Taylor neologism] of different religious positions, as well as of the outlooks both of belief and unbelief,” he writes. While the developments of modernity have made earlier forms of religion, e.g., medieval orthodoxy, virtually unsustainable, new forms have sprung up.

While a host of positions are possible, Taylor is primarily interested in only three and, peripherally, in a fourth, the older orthodoxy. What engages him are what he calls exclusive humanism, the primary form of secularism today; Nietzschean atheistic anti-humanism, which Taylor uses as a foil to critique both humanism and orthodox belief; and his favored position, a transcendent “modern religious consciousness.” The result is a society in which great numbers of people are not firmly embedded in any one of these stances but feel puzzled and cross-pressured.

After his lengthy historical examination of the way secularism, or unbelief, became a credible position for many people, Taylor in the last two parts of the book (running some 350 pages) turns to the contemporary situation. These sections, while still grounded in analysis, are far more prescriptive than descriptive. Taylor takes off his historian’s hat and trades it for a theologian’s as he seeks to outline and examine the dilemmas faced by those living in the contemporary culture of the West.

Peggy Lee

In his analysis of the rise of the secularism that has made unbelief one of many possible positions to credibly hold, in a manner unthinkable in 1500, Taylor understands the current situation as primarily a triangular debate. Instead of a contest merely between religion and secularism, belief and unbelief, transcendence and immanence, he sees the party of unbelief divided among regular secular humanists, exclusive humanists, and Nietzscheans who fault secular humanism for its failure to offer a kind of atheistic transcendence, a vision of courage and glory that requires more than ordinary life for its fulfillment, even as it criticizes religion for its theistic transcendence.

On the borders of this triangle Taylor also allows a vestigial religious position, the medieval orthodoxy that finds some adherents in conservative Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, yet he seems to see it as a major player and a strongly credible stance in current cultural debates. Similarly, his personally favored position of transcendent theism is rooted in a particular form of Roman Catholicism that stresses the theological work of philosophers Ivan Illich, Charles Peguy, and Jacques Maritain or artists such as Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, but not, interestingly, French priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, whose groundbreaking efforts at integrating Christianity and modern science might have engaged Taylor’s attention, one might think, at least as much as the more marginal social critic Illich. Taylor also completely ignores the work of such giants of modern Protestantism working in the same cultural arena as Rudolph Bultmann and Karl Barth. One might have expected to see some discussion of Paul Tillich’s theology of culture, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Christianity without religion.” In a work that seeks to be as encyclopedic as Taylor’s, these lapses are not oversights. They are emblematic of the particular theological place Taylor wants to take his readers.

Taylor draws a compelling portrait of a part of the contemporary cultural situation in two long and complex chapters on what may be the most challenging problem facing both secularists and unbelievers today—the problem of violence. Again, his skill as a historian of ideas is much in evidence. Drawing heavily on the work of French historian and philosopher Rene Girard on religion and violence and the ideas of scapegoats and victims, Taylor acknowledges that “it would certainly appear that since the very beginning of human culture, religion and violence have been closely interwoven. And there are certainly cases today where the connection holds.”

Rene Girard

At the same time, Taylor accurately notes that “when we examine more closely some of what we might call the religious uses of violence, in particular its appeal to scapegoat mechanisms, and the self-affirmation of our purity by identifying all evil with the enemy outside…we find that all this can easily survive the rejection of religion, and recurs in ideological-political forms that are resolutely lay, even atheist. Moreover, it recurs in them with a kind of false good conscience, an unawareness of repeating an old and execrable pattern, just because the easy assumption that all that belonged to the old days of religion, and therefore can’t be happening in our Enlightened age.”

Taylor finds no simple prescription for either believers or secularists to resolve the problem of violence. “Both sides have the virus and both sides must fight against it,” he asserts. But he does say “there can be moves, always within a given context, whereby someone renounces the right conferred by suffering, the right of the innocent to punish the guilty, the victim to purge the victimizer. The move is the very opposite of the instinctive defense of our righteousness. It is a move that can be called forgiveness, but at a deeper level, it is based on a recognition of common, flawed humanity.” Nelson Mandela is his chief example.

Looming even larger than violence, however, is the broader cultural malaise, the seeming lack of meaning many moderns and, it would seem, mostly nonbelievers, in Taylor’s telling, find in their lives. “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-purposed” and “very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief,” he observes. At the heart of the malaise is the question asked in the chorus of the Leiber-Stoller version of Thomas Mann’s story. It might be called the Peggy Lee syndrome: Is that all there is?

For Taylor, the valorization of ordinary human life and its experiences that secularism proposes cannot meet humanity’s longing for depth of meaning, its aspirations for a higher form of ethical living, and thus it requires a transcendent grounding. But it seems possible to argue Taylor misreads his own history. He appears to indicate the reform impulses that created contemporary secular humanism are exhausted and what he somewhat dismissively terms “ordinary human life” does not contain within it the resources to respond to and be deeply moved by beauty. Human beings, he suggests, can’t experience courage in the struggle for justice, universal human rights, and economic equality, can’t experience conversion and transformation without reference to a transcendent theism.

Indeed, Taylor seems to have a pinched view of secular humanism’s experience of the world. He gives the game away when he writes that “modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame are therefore responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it,” which is a little like Humpty Dumpty’s reply to Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.” If immanent experiences of fullness, wonder, and awe are really experiences of transcendence, then ultimately there is no such thing as a secular humanist.

But if we are to take Taylor at his word, both transcendence and immanence are credible “frames” in the contemporary secular age. Theists may, as Taylor does, lift up Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous lines, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,” to support their stance. Humanists, on the other hand, may lift up the American poet of self-realization, Walt Whitman, for a vision of the fullness of secular humanism, as novelist E.L. Doctorow does in an essay in his collection REPORTING THE UNIVERSE: “Whitman when he walked the streets of New York loved everything he saw—the multitudes that thrilled him, the industries at work, the ships in the harbor, the clatter of horses and carriages, the crowds in the streets, the flags of celebration. Yet he knew, of course, that the newspaper business from which he made his living relied finally for its success on the skinny shoulders of itinerant newsboys, street urchins who lived on the few cents they made hawking the papers in every corner of the city. Thousands of vagrant children lived in the streets of the city that Whitman loved. Yet his exultant optimism and awe of human achievement was not demeaned; he could carry it all, the whole city, and attend like a nurse to its illnesses but like a lover to its fair face.”

Despite some flaws, Taylor’s book is a major achievement, one that demands sympathetic yet critical engagement. He has changed the way believers and unbelievers alike will understand their history, but A SECULAR AGE is a first word rather than the last word in making sense of our contemporary culture.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on John Updike and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: In inner cities across the US high numbers of African-American men are caught up in the criminal justice system. It’s costly to keep them in prison. It’s also costly to the communities they leave behind — and return to. Phil Jones reports.

PHIL JONES: Welcome to Brownsville — a pocket of poverty inside Brooklyn, New York, a place where crime and prison often are a way of life.

RONALD HERRON: Both my parents were drug addicts. My father wasn’t at home.

Ronald Herron

DEJUAN SMITH: I went to prison for murder in the second degree.

NATHANEL RICE: The first time for robbery — two years; second time for robbery —12 years; third time for drug possession.

VINCE MATTOS (Community Activist): I was out hustling narcotics. What I would have to tell Mom is, “Look, I found a whole bunch of money!” I would see Mom crying because she was behind on bills or something like that. I would come in and say, “Mom, look I found x, y and z.” You know, she was like, oh, you know, “God is good” — this and that.

JONES: But Vincent Mattos’s mother is proud of her 42-year-old son.

Mr. MATTOS (speaking to men): Hey brothers. How you doing?

JONES: He now roams these troubled streets as a community activist. He knows the turf.

Mr. MATTOS: Young men that’s out on the corner from sun-up to sundown, falling back to do what they know to do to earn a living because there’s no jobs for them. There’s no helpful reentry program that’s in place right now. Whatever you want, you can get it on this strip. Drugs, sex, and guns, that’s what’s major out here.

JONES: What else is major — the pervasive presence of police with the task of arresting the bad guys and putting them behind bars. There is no doubt that police activity decreases crime. But is there a tipping point, when legitimate law enforcement, designed to protect the public, may have unintended consequences: promotion poverty, even more crime?

ERIC CADORA (Director, Justice Mapping Center): The current overuse and overdependence on criminal justice is a complete failure. It’s having no impact on these issues of public safety and crime. That’s not to say there isn’t a need for a level of criminal justice. But this radical overuse is not accomplishing those goals.

Eric Cadora

JONES: In the 1970s, there were about 200,000 inmates in US prisons. Today there are about two million. For years law enforcement used crime mapping to target places where the crimes were being committed. Eric Cadora, director of an organization called the Justice Mapping Center, is an advocate for sentencing reform and prison alternatives. He proposed another use for mapping.

Mr. CADORA: I said, “Well, what if we don’t do crime mapping? What if, instead, we mapped where people lived who are going into jail and prison every year?” When we started doing maps of where people lived, we found hugely concentrated neighborhoods where vast majorities of people were going to prison and jail and coming back, and other neighborhoods where nearly none were.

This is New York City. The brightest red show the highest rate per thousand adults, male adults, admitted to prison for a single year. Let’s say there are about 100,000 people living in Brownsville — about half of them are male, that’s about 50,000. About — between 10 and 13 percent are going to prison and jail every year.

JONES: This increased prison population has come at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

Mr. CADORA: We can now calculate, block by block, how much we’re spending to remove and return people en masse from and back to that block.

JONES: This cluster of housing projects is what Caldora calls a “Million Dollar Block.”

Mr. CADORA: We found about 150 individual blocks in New York City for which we were spending more than $1 million a year to remove and return people to prison and jail.

Vince Mattos

JONES: Cadora uses dark red to show the concentrations in other states. They are maps that call for new directions.

Mr. CADORA: What these maps have done is accumulate the effect over the course of a year of a criminal justice and imprisonment system. What’s heated up here is a mass migration with the costs of having to move back and forth from this neighborhood to prisons upstate and back. So what we’re seeing here is constant grappling with resettlement, with disruption, cost of split families, tough health care.

JONES: Greg Jackson, another civic activist and a life-long resident of Brownsville, doesn’t need a map. He’s seen his own community imprisoned.

GREG JACKSON (Community Activist): Incarceration is not just the individual going to jail, but it’s the whole family going to jail, for Brownsville. Everybody’s suffering from it.

JONES: How’s that?

Mr. JACKSON: Because when this individual comes out of jail he still can’t find employment. And that person, the kids he left behind, the parents he left behind, the wife he left behind, they all suffer in the interim. So, when he comes out you think, “Wow, it’s a good time, my father’s coming out of jail, my mother’s coming out of jail.” There’s nothing good about it.

JONES: For one thing, felons aren’t allowed to live in these public housing projects, although some do. Others end up homeless, and most are jobless. Ask Dejaun Smith, still struggling eight years after his release.

Mr. SMITH: I’ve done odd jobs like — I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many. I went to an interview several months ago, and once they learned about my conviction they looked at me like, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

JONES: After decades of hard-line policies on crime — tough justice — more and more communities are looking into what is called Justice Reinvestment.

Mr. CADORA: Let us take the investments that had been built up over the years from criminal justice, redirect them to investments in civil institutions in those neighborhoods — better schools, better health care, better mental health support, and so on. In many of the states where the Justice Reinvestment initiative has taken root, prison populations are either dropping or the trend line in growth has been radically reduced, and that’s from Connecticut to Kansas — liberal to conservative.

Matoka Belton

JONES: Most of the crimes are connected to violence, drugs, and alcohol. But researchers found another culprit for the increased prison populations.

Mr. CALDORA: We found states where 60 to 65 percent of everyone entering prison each year were entering as a result of a revocation of parole and probation.

JONES: That was the case in Kansas, so legislators passed a new law — a new direction —committing taxpayer dollars to cities and communities that change parole and probation regulations that’ll reduce the prison population by 20 percent.

Mr. CALDORA: That’s kind of what the reinvestment project is about. It’s about saying, “Look, if you can reduce it, we’ll give you the money to keep reducing it.”

JONES: According to Caldora, states are being forced to rethink their hard line throw-the-criminals-in-jail attitude because, especially in these hard economic times, the criminal justice system is too costly, both financially and psychologically.

Mr. CALDORA: They realize that this overwhelming overuse of criminal justice is one of the greatest threats to sort of civil society.

JONES: This threat to society, this impact on communities in prison, can be felt on the streets and inside the crowded housing projects. We met Matoka Belton. She didn’t want us to see her three children. Their father went to prison.

(to Ms. Belton): What was he in prison for?

MATOKA BELTON: A number of things, and it was due to survival.

JONES: What was impact on the children of him being away?

Mr. MATOKA: It’s hard because they’re like, you know, what “school” is this, because you try not to say he’s in prison. “What school is this that they don’t come home? College?” But then it comes to the point where they’re a certain age and you can’t lie anymore. I was once an inmate myself. I know what it was like for my children to feel like, “Wow, my mother’s not here. Why can’t mommy come home with us?” It’s hard to leave a visit.

JONES: It’s a cruel cycle — poverty, crime, prison — passed from one generation to the next. A child whose parent went to prison is likely to end up behind bars too.

Mr. MATTOS: When you look at a kid and you say, “How could that kid, you know, have done such a crime like that?” Because he was never really told that was something wrong to do. He never celebrated Christmas with the family or sat down at the dinner table with the family.

JONES: About 700,000 inmates come back home every year. Most are unprepared for re-entry, and their communities are unprepared for their return. As the US government is making huge investments in industries and businesses, it is now being forced to also address a broken justice system, a system in desperate need of a stimulus package of sorts — justice reinvestment.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Phil Jones in Brooklyn, New York.

LUCKY SEVERSON:  Some think Tim DeChristopher committed a crime and should be punished. Others think breaking the law was the right thing to do. This University of Utah student, whose only previous brush with the law consisted of two speeding tickets, hardly seems like someone who would purposely break the law.  But here he is facing prison time for committing a felony deliberately.

Tim DeChristopher

TIM DECHRISTOPHER (Student, University of Utah): Jail is certainly a scary thing, but I’ve been scared for my future for a long time. I think that the scariest thing for my whole generation is that we stay on the path that we’re on now. Jail is not nearly as scary as dealing with the real consequences of climate change that we’re expected to see in my lifetime.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher is a devoted environmentalist—has been since he was a kid. He’s especially worried about what man is doing to hasten global warming. He was moved to tears after speaking with noted Stanford University environmentalist Terry Root at a conference a few months ago.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: She said there were things we could have done in the ’80s and things we could have done in the ’90s, but I’m sorry, I think it’s too late. It shook me to the core. I literally went outside the hotel where the conference was being held, and I just cried. And I went through a very — a period of really deep despair, where it was almost like I was mourning for my future; that I was mourning for the future of us all.

SEVERSON: He was convinced the Bush administration was auctioning off too much of the West to drilling companies. So when he heard the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, was conducting an auction in December of last year offering leases for over 350,000 acres of public land in Utah, some of it in pristine red rock country, he decided to attend, expecting to disrupt the auction and then get kicked out.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: And instead I went inside. And as soon as I got inside the door an official said, “Hi.  Are you here for the auction?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And she said, “Are you here as a bidder?” And I said, “Well, yes I am.”

SEVERSON: Dressed like a student and carrying a backpack, DeChristopher started bidding simply to drive up the prices, but before long he was winning bids.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: I figured I probably would go to prison, and so I had to ask myself if I could live with that. But on the other hand seeing this opportunity to protect some of this land, keep some of this oil in the ground and give us a better chance of a livable future, if I turn my back on that opportunity can I live with that? And I thought, “No.”

SEVERSON: He ended up purchasing 13 lease parcels — over 22,000 acres — for about $1.7 million until the auction was abruptly stopped.

Ron Yengich

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: And then a BLM agent came straight over to me and showed his badge and said, “Lets go speak outside.” And then he asked me what my intentions were — whether or not I intended to pay. And I told him very clearly that my intent was to disrupt the auction, that this was an act of civil disobedience.

RON YENGICH (Attorney): If you’re charged with a federal felony you’re in serious trouble.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher’s attorney, Ron Yengich, acknowledges his client committed an act of civil disobedience, but because it’s against federal law to bid without the intention or means of paying, his client is facing three to five years in prison.

Mr. YENGICH: The idea that he is a good kid — he’s a nonviolent kid. He did it, if not on the spur of the moment, he certainly did it because of a deep-seeded belief that this country should be green.

KATHLEEN SGAMMA (Director, Government Affairs, Independent Petroleum Association): Right, I think he should be prosecuted.

SEVERSON: Kathleen Sgamma is director of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association. She says the industry has a good record when it comes to the environment, and DeChristopher did wrong and should be punished.

Ms. SGAMMA: I don’t think this rises to the level of a case where civil disobedience really is warranted. We reclaim the land. We are very protective of the environment with out activity, despite what you hear in the press and despite the rhetoric of environmental groups. So unfortunately in this case I believe the perception that oil and gas is going to come in and destroy the land has caused this person perhaps to do something to break the law.

Kathleen Sgamma

Dr. DAVID KELLER (Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for the Study of Ethics, Utah Valley University): Civil disobedience is ethical because the law and morality are not always the same.

SEVERSON: David Keller is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University.

Dr. KELLER: We have the responsibility to be civil-disobedient where in situations where our complacency emboldens the power and those laws which are unjust.

SEVERSON: Pat Shea is a former director of the BLM in the Clinton administration and is also a lawyer defending DeChristopher. He says DeChristopher’s behavior may have been illegal, but it was patterned after the actions of some of the world’s great leaders.

PAT SHEA (Attorney and Former Director, Bureau of Land Management): Just as with Thoreau or Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, he had this ability to look at this situation, deal with it in an existential way, and then come through with his actions on a principled manner, a nd that’s something that I think most people would love to see in their children and maybe in themselves.

SEVERSON: Attorney Yengich says civil disobedience in and of itself it not a defense.

Mr. YENGICH: But the primary defense would be what lawyers would call the “choice of evils” defense, and that’s an historic defense about someone who is basically protesting a government action, and they are saying that I did this, even if it may be technically against the law, because there is a greater evil out there.

SEVERSON: One of the concerns expressed by critics was how near some of the leases were to national parks. In fact, national park officials were so concerned they had asked the BLM to delay the auction. Ten of the parcels DeChristopher won were located near Arches National Park in southern Utah.

Former BLM director Pat Shea:

Mr. SHEA: I think that they were trying to push through in the Bush administration as many energy leases as they possibly could. So there were a number of commercial energy companies that had an interest to get as much as they could before the curtain came down and there was a new administration.

SEVERSON: Kathleen Sgamma’s association represents many of those energy companies, and she says they are performing a valuable service with little impact on the environment.

David Keller

Ms. SGAMMA:  In Utah less than one percent of public lands — much less than one percent of public lands — is disturbed for oil and gas so that we can provide people heat for their homes. That’s a basic human necessity. We can’t go back to freezing in the dark or back to burning, you know, firewood in the fireplace or shoveling coal like we had to do 100 years ago.

Mr. KELLER: That’s certainly one of the benefits of civil disobedience — bringing attention and stimulating public discourse, and in the case of Tim DeChristopher, I do think that it is beneficial that we are having a discussion in Utah about whether he is a terrorist or not, a saboteur, an exemplary citizen, a criminal — or the charges should be brought against him or not. All this is healthy for a democracy.

SEVERSON: What makes civil disobedience ethically acceptable and when is it not?

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: I think when it’s nonviolent, first off, and non-destructive is one of the things that make it ethical.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher says he would never think of destroying property or vandalizing equipment to stop actions he thinks are illegal. Attorney Yengich says that, above all, civil disobedience must be done in a civil way.

Mr. YENGICH: We’ve got to be careful, and I guess this is why we say when we talk about doing acts of civil disobedience that they’ve got to be done with respect to everyone. And maybe, maybe if the government rules against you, then you have to take the punishment as part of the process, yeah.

SEVERSON: As of now, the Obama administration has withdrawn those leases offered in December. Now Tim DeChristopher is waiting to find out how this will affect the case against him.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

KIM LAWTON: As they prepared for inaugural festivities, President-elect Barack Obama and his family visited the Lincoln Memorial this week, evoking more memories of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Reverend MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.:  I have a dream…

LAWTON: It was on the 45th anniversary of that speech that Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president. He noted that, given the situation in 1963, the crowd could have expected to hear King speak in anger, with the frustration of dreams deferred.

President-elect BARACK OBAMA (in speech): But what the people heard instead, people of every creed and color, from every walk of life, is that in America our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one.

LAWTON: In this historic week, connections between Obama and King are inevitable. Many Americans across racial and religious lines see Obama’s inauguration as one key fulfillment of King’s dream.

Reverend Donna Jones

Reverend DONNA JONES (Senior Pastor, Cookman United Methodist Church): For this bi-racial guy with an immigrant father, with roots in community organizing, with an African American wife and two black kids to move into the White House — what kind of country we have today that that can happen is such a testament of hope and a testament to the sacrifice of Martin Luther King.

LAWTON: Philadelphia United Methodist pastor Donna Jones says Obama’s election has ignited a new sense of optimism in her community and in communities across the country.

Rev. JONES: What this campaign has done in its entirety, and this is beyond Barack Obama, is it let us know that the process can work to effect change, but it didn’t necessarily change anything.

LAWTON: And, indeed, amid all the talk of hope, some religious leaders are also cautioning that much work still needs to be done before King’s full social vision may be realized.

Professor HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR (Howard University Divinity School and President, GLOBE Community Ministries): We don’t want to come to the conclusion that because Obama is now the president we’re going to have this sort of panacea-existence both in the United States and with respect to our position in the world.

LAWTON: Dreams aren’t always easy in this North Philadelphia neighborhood, where Jones is senior pastor at Cookman United Methodist Church. It’s an area plagued by drugs, prostitution, and economic distress. Cookman has developed a host of social programs to try to deal with the problems. The church has a special focus on at-risk youth. They run an after-school program and teen lounge where kids can hang out, take refuge from the streets, and get counseling and homework help, and Cookman also has a school for chronically truant youth that uses a home-school curriculum. The students meet at the church every day for classes.

Professor Harold Dean Trulear

Rev. JONES: I believe that Jesus was involved in social service. He went around healing. He healed a lot of people. He healed before he went out with the gospel message. So it’s an expression of Christ’s love, and whether people even accept Jesus Christ or not, his love should be offered.

LAWTON: She also believes the programs fit into Martin Luther King’s vision of what he called “the beloved community,” a term he learned from earlier theologians. It’s an inclusive vision of brotherhood and sisterhood, where all people share in the wealth of the nation, and justice and peace prevail. A place, Jones says, where all God’s children have enough, and nobody has too little.

Rev. JONES: That’s the legacy of King, first putting out the reality of the beloved community, again, all of that’s very biblical, but also putting out the hope and the encouragement to say you know what, you can do something to help create that, whatever the something is.

LAWTON: Students at Cookman got excited about Obama’s campaign, and several were part of a get-out-the vote project. His election means a lot to them.

ZULEIKA SILVERA (Student): I ain’t going to lie, I didn’t think he was going to win. But I’m like, wow, we really did it. It really felt like we made a change, like we got people to go out there and vote, and I’m, like, we made a change. We really did.

KHAREEM COLEY: You could do anything if you put your mind to it. That’s what that message really gave me.

Prof. TRULEAR: They have the sense that they too can become president. I mean, part of the thing with Obama is that it’s not just that he’s an African American, but he’s also common. He cut his teeth, even as a Harvard-trained lawyer he cut his teeth working in neighborhoods like this in the South Side of Chicago.

“What kind of country we have today… is such a testament of hope and a testament to the sacrifice of Martin Luther King.”

LAWTON: Howard University theology professor Harold Dean Trulear is president of GLOBE Community Ministries, a faith-based group that offers support to youth programs, including those at Cookman. He says Obama’s election will have a profound impact on coming generations.

Prof. TRULEAR: My daughter sends me a text message next morning, it says, “Dad, I have a black president.” That won’t be an unusual thing for her. Those kinds of things, I think, give my generation a lot of hope, and the only nagging thing is we just don’t want to lose sight of where we’ve come from.

LAWTON: It’s easy to forget, he says, that King’s vision was about more than race.

Prof. TRULEAR: Most people, when they refer to King’s dream for America, they go back to 1963, and they refer to the “I Have a Dream” speech, which of course is about racial justice and racial equality. But five years, later when King is assassinated, his dream is more about economic injustice and working with poor people. He talked about economic justice, he talked about militarism, war and peace, and he talked about racial justice.

LAWTON: Just as King led his grassroots movement from churches, Trulear says congregations of today still have the responsibility to lobby for broad social change no matter who is president.

Prof. TRULEAR: A lot of our religion, whether it’s the television prosperity gospel or whether it’s what you hear in a regular mainline church, has more to do with affirming who we are than challenging us at our root. I think we’ve lost sight of the prophetic dimension of the faith tradition.

President-elect BARACK OBAMA (in speech):  What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

LAWTON: Pastor Jones says seeing the success of Obama’s grassroots effort gives veteran activists like herself renewed motivation to keep working toward King’s vision.

Rev. JONES: For our generation, I believe it was a sense of confirmation that this stuff of democratic renewal and public policy advocacy and community organizing really does work.  And I think that we needed to see that, because we were getting really cynical.

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep… I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

LAWTON: She says many faith-based activists had begun to feel like the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness in the 40 years since King’s death. Obama’s election changed that.

Rev. JONES: I would have said “not my lifetime.” Now I don’t have anything that I will say “not in my lifetime.” So that means beloved community could happen in my lifetime. For King to hear that in heaven he’s probably, like, “All right. They’re coming out of the wilderness.”

President-elect BARACK OBAMA (in victory speech):  The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.

LAWTON: Ultimately, Trulear believes, there is a spiritual message that Martin Luther King preached as well — the true meaning of hope.

Prof. TRULEAR: We say I hope it doesn’t rain. I hope the Eagles win the football game. I hope I hit the lottery. It’s more like a wish that’s not grounded in any kind of reality — it may happen, it may not, I have no control over it. In the biblical sense of the term, hope is a very, very fixed reality. It means that I have an expectation that something is going to be different than the way it is now.

LAWTON: Obama’s election, he says, has tapped into that deep place of hope.

Prof. TRULEAR: There really is an expectation in this country that things are going to be different. There really is an expectation around the planet that things are going to be different. Whether those hopes are materialized or not is a different issue and nobody really wants to even think about that right now. But there’s a real sense that there is going to be a change, and a real sense that people are going to be disappointed if there’s not a real, concrete change.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in North Philadelphia.

Despite a divided view of America’s impact on the world, the vast majority of Americans believe the United States has a moral obligation to be engaged on the international stage, according to a new survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc. for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY and the United Nations Foundation.

Watch now Watch excerpts from a Washington press conference with: Anna Greenberg Kim Lawton Tim Wirth John Hamre Timothy Shah Watch excerpts from interviews about the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly/UN Foundation survey with pollster Anna Greenberg and UN Foundation president Tim Wirth.

The September 2008 survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say the U.S. should be very actively engaged in world affairs and 70 percent believe America should be at least moderately involved. Most believe the nation should be actively involved in world affairs because of an explicit responsibility or moral obligation to take a leadership role in the world. At the same time, nearly eight-in-ten (79%) of Americans agree that sometimes U.S. involvement in world affairs causes more harm than good. Overall, Americans are equally split about whether the U.S. has a positive or negative impact on the world.

“Americans remain very interventionist in their views about America’s role in the world and want the U.S. to take an activist role on the world stage,” according to University of Oklahoma professor Allen Hertzke, a visiting scholar at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, in an interview with RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY. But, he added, “They want us to be smart about it.”

Sixty-eight percent of people who attend religious services at least once a week say America has a moral obligation to be involved in world affairs, compared to 54 percent of people who attend less frequently. Fifty-five percent of people who attend religious services every week say America’s influence in the world has been positive, compared with 44 percent of people who attend less frequently,

Americans view their country as a nation set apart from others. Most Americans believe God has uniquely blessed America (61% agree), and a similar number (59%) believe the US should set the example as a Christian nation to the rest of the world.

The findings are based on a national survey of 1,400 adults, including an oversample of 400 young evangelicals ages 18-29. The survey was conducted September 14-21, 2008, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent. The survey results and report are available on the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY Web site at www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics and will be the basis for a two-part broadcast series on America’s role in the world and on the views of young evangelicals beginning October 24 (check local PBS listings).

View or Download the Data: Full Report (PDF – 666 KB) Questionnaire (PDF – 168 KB) Viewing these files requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Additional Key Findings:

• Eighty percent of people who attend religious services regularly believe that America is blessed by God and that America should set an example to the world as a Christian nation (77% agree). Only 48 percent of people who attend services less regularly agree that America is uniquely blessed by God, and 49 percent of them agree America should set an example as a Christian nation.

• A substantial minority of Americans (41%) say they consider America’s culture to be better than others, agreeing with the statement “our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others” (21% strongly agree).

• The most important foreign policy priority across the religious spectrum is controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons (80% of Americans, 86% of white evangelicals, 82% of Catholics, and 76% of mainline Protestants extremely/very important). It is harder to find support for objectives that would require a significant, long-term investment of resources, such as improving the standard of living in developing countries (49% of Americans, 47% of white evangelicals, 45% of Catholics, and 47% of mainline Protestants extremely/very important) or promoting democracy in other nations (39% of Americans, 48% of white evangelicals, 38% of Catholics, and 36% of mainline Protestants extremely/very important).

• Evangelical Protestants express the greatest support for an interventionist role on the part of the U.S., while more moderate religious groups such as mainline Protestants and Catholics
take a less interventionist posture.

• Evangelicals and traditional Catholics are more likely to believe the US is a positive presence in the world (58% and 53% positive respectively) than liberal Catholics, mainline Protestants and Americans who attend religious services only irregularly (37%, 45%, and 44% positive, respectively).

• Young evangelicals have a broader definition of pro-life issues than older evangelicals. Sixty- three percent of young evangelicals (ages 18-29) agree that poverty, disease, and torture are pro-life issues, compared to 56 percent of older evangelicals.

I grew up in a very musical congregation. The organist would play Bach toccatas and fugues for prelude music, and it only got better from there. The choir would do movements from Handel and Mendelssohn oratorios for the offertory and anthem. It was just incredible to have music of that quality, be part of the worship experience every Sunday. When I was three years old, I saw some middle-school-aged girls playing violin in my church, and they had on the most beautiful, long dresses. The sound of the violin was intriguing, and according to my parents I jumped up in my seat in the pew and I said, “I want to do that.” I don’t remember saying that. But I definitely remember how I felt — that somehow it was almost just like this moment of revelation and I knew that I had to play the violin. Well, my parents didn’t totally believe me, I guess, and they thought maybe I was a little more interested in those beautiful dresses. So they didn’t get me a violin right away. But luckily that same summer while I was still three there was a teacher in my neighborhood, just a few blocks down the street, and a lot of the other kids, neighbor kids, were taking lessons, and their parents encouraged my parents to let me give it a try, and as soon as I had that first lesson, I just absolutely fell in love with it and I just wanted to practice all day. My parents thought I was pretty weird. They would say, “Don’t you want to set that thing down and go ride your bike?” But I just knew that I was meant to be a violinist. I was just so excited to be able to create music and explore the instrument, and it was just a feeling of joy, really.

Rachel Barton Pine (Photo by: Andrew Eccles)

I really do believe that God is within each of us and is all encompassing and with us at every moment, and yet what kind of a specific hand does God ever have to be involved in our life? I really don’t have the answer. I’ve always believed that somehow it was fate or perhaps God’s direct intervention, meeting the violin. But since I’ve been older and I’ve started thinking about these things logically, one has to ask, well, God did this for me. What about people that perhaps God hasn’t shown their calling? It just creates so many questions that can’t be answered and yet, you know, sometimes I think life is random. But what God can do is help us make the most of both good and bad luck. And so perhaps God didn’t cause those violinists to play for me that day. But maybe God was there when I heard them. That might be the best way to put it. I also met my husband in church, and I think maybe there’s something to that, as well.

I really didn’t have a sense of being better than other kids or anything like that. I certainly didn’t care about it, even when I started to notice it. But it was just all about how much fun I was having with it and how fulfilled I felt when I was making music and how I just really felt the most like myself and how I just really felt the most myself during those moments when I was onstage or in front of my congregation, in church, sharing music with people, and that’s what really motivated me. Not any sense of competition or anything else. Certainly, I was very grateful that I had an aptitude, because it meant that I could get to more and more interesting pieces that much more quickly.

Bach has been such an important part of my life for so long. The church that I grew up in, where I was baptized and confirmed, they actually started as a German immigrant congregation before eventually becoming part of the United Church of Christ. Now the congregation is very mixed. It’s not even predominantly German, by any stretch. But the stained glass window of Bach is still there among the various characters from the Bible and so forth. And, you know, as far as I was concerned, Bach was right up there with the saints. There’s something about his music, both listening to it and especially playing it, you know? I can really feel the presence of God whenever I’m hearing Bach. And I know that was how Bach felt as well. All the music he was creating, whether it was specifically sacred or not, he felt that his musical gift was a gift from God and that all the music that he wrote was serving God, and playing Bach’s music really puts me in touch with that sense of music being my calling, because sharing music with people is the best way that I can serve God, by doing God’s work in the world.

It’s actually so challenging always to articulate, even trying to talk about music, because the amazing thing about music is that it goes beyond words. It’s the most profound way that human beings can communicate with each other and therefore connect to each other. Music transcends all barriers of nationality, of ethnicity, of race, of class — all of those things. It’s the common human language. Just recently I was in Africa doing some work with my foundation and working with some classical musicians in Ghana, and there’s a country that has absolutely no cultural background in classical music. And yet the music of Beethoven spoke to them so deeply. Music is what brings us together. That’s why it’s so important to be part of making music in the world, because I think it’s really how we can heal and uplift people.

Some repertoire you’re very meditative. Some repertoire is very extroverted. Some repertoire is full of angst, and then, you know, it’s very cathartic to kind of move through that piece to its ultimate conclusion and resolution. Other pieces are much more joyful and celebratory. Whatever the music is, it really reaches into the deepest part of our soul, but from many different angles. Some music is transporting, and some music is just about having a good time. But that’s equally important.

Obviously, I earn my living playing the violin, doing what I love, which I am so grateful for — that my calling can also be my job. But from the early age of five is when I really recognized concretely that I knew I was a violinist. I started signing my kindergarten papers “Rachel Violinist.” I knew that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life, having absolutely no clue about what kinds of different career paths you can have in music. I figured I’d be able to pay my bills somehow or another by playing the violin. But first I had to, of course, get to the end of my studies. And that was always very iffy, because while I relied on scholarships and borrowed instruments for virtually the entirety of my student years, just even paying for the gas to put in the car to drive to the lessons, sheet music purchase, paying for the piano accompanist fees, concert clothes, which we would very often get at the thrift store and then try to fix up before going to a competition, and where was the airfare to go to that contest going to come from? These were real difficulties in the life of my family. My father was unemployed most of the time, and my mom was taking care of me and my younger sisters. It was very challenging to hold onto the faith that this is what I was meant to do, and that this is what I was going to keep doing, when there were so many obstacles at every turn. From any practical perspective, it looked like, well, how is this possibly going to work? And yet I just believed so strongly that this is what my life was meant to be about that I just kept on practicing as hard as I could and just trusted that things would work out somehow.

That brings us back to the question of what is good luck and bad luck and the hand of God. We would be one payment away from getting kicked out of our apartment, and some relative or member of the church would come through and get us by just enough to make it through to the next month. Our electricity would get turned off. But then we would find a little bit of something and get it turned back on. Things always kept going through these ups and downs and through it all I just kept practicing. I don’t know if you would call it a karmic connection, but maybe the faith that I had so strongly, and the fact that I did as much as I could to increase the odds, so to speak, by working hard and trying to make the most of what I had been given probably did help.

By the time I was a teenager I was able to earn enough money with the violin, going out and, you know, not just my solo engagements but also playing background music, string quartet gigs and playing in local orchestras. What do they call it now? Busking. You know, playing on the street, that kind of thing, whatever I could do to bring in some income, and things were a lot more stable in my family once I was able to significantly help out with paying all of the bills and groceries and rent and all of that stuff. But in order to get my solo career going to the next level I really did need to participate in the European competitions. So I saved up and went off to Germany and Italy and Budapest and Belgium. I was fortunate enough to have success in all of those competitions that I entered. So things were progressing just as I had always hoped, where I had a series of invitations that had resulted from those competitions, successes, and prizes that I had received, and I was on my way.

As much as I love every aspect of making music with my violin, whether it’s chamber music or different kinds of chamber orchestras and all of that stuff, playing solo repertoire, concertos and sonatas and even unaccompanied repertoire, with my own personal voice, I just feel like that’s the way that I can most deeply express my artistry. And so it was always my dream to be able to share my music with people as a soloist. That’s what I always was aiming for, playing with top symphonies and famous conductors. Of course, those are such artistically fulfilling experiences. But there are great musicians in every orchestra, not just the most famous, and I love the variety of going around to different countries, different cities, different communities and collaborating with all of my colleagues wherever I go and just playing as many concerts as I can, because I just love making music, and the more the better. After my initial injuries in the mid-’90s, it was very uncertain about when I would be able to travel again, to what extent I would be able to continue touring and so forth, just because the complicated nature of the combination of my injuries was not what you see everyday, I guess. My doctors couldn’t point to ten other people like me and say that this is the result. It was really very up in the air. And it was many years before I was stabilized enough to be able to resume the path I had been on prior to my injuries. But thankfully I’m back now and able to do what I love and fulfill my dreams and my mission.

There was a period of time just after I was injured, right at first, when I couldn’t play my instrument because I was just too ill to even sit up in bed and have that kind of strenuous activity. And so far from music being able to sustain me during this difficult period of time, instead I had the added worry of wondering when I would ever be able to make music again. In a way, perhaps, the difficulties of my childhood prepared me for yet another challenge, because while a lot of people might look at this as the most dramatic episode of my young life, to me it was like, okay, here’s another obstacle. Here’s another roadblock. Here’s another challenge that I can’t see how I’m going to get through, and yet I know from experience that I will come out the other end, and that if I just hold onto my hope and faith in God, that somehow or another this will work out even though I can’t quite see how at the present time.

I did have to go through a process of forgiveness for those who were responsible for my having been injured. But I grew up in my church and I learned how to pray for help in being able to forgive. And I drew upon those lessons at that time because I knew that the only way that I was going to be able to heal would be if I was able to forgive for what had happened to me.

The question of God as interventionist — I’m not qualified as a theologian to speak super articulately about this, but does God ever do things to us of a negative nature? I don’t believe so. I know that some people believe differently. They feel that God might actually cause challenges to occur in their lives for them to learn lessons from. I personally don’t believe that. We can’t quite figure out about why does God not intervene. I mean, how could I be angry at God for not somehow preventing this from happening to me? I would have to extrapolate that and be angry at God for not preventing the Holocaust or not preventing, you know, an earthquake that might have happened last week or a tornado or — terrible things happen to many, many people every day on this planet, and can you be angry at God for not preventing all of those things? This is something that I had certainly thought about in Sunday school for years, you know, during my teenage years reading, oh, what’s that wonderful American history book? A People’s History of the United States, recognizing all of the ways that our society is flawed and thinking about where God’s role is in all of our human societies, and so it never even occurred to me to be angry with God. Certainly, you know, that day a couple of kind people happened to be in the same vestibule as me and happened to know how to do tourniquets and saved my life. Well, did God plant those people there as my guardian angels? Maybe not. You know, maybe in life you have random good luck and random bad luck, and that’s kind of the understanding I’ve come to, that God didn’t necessarily not rescue me. But, you know, maybe God didn’t necessarily send the people who saved my life. Maybe it was all very random. But where God’s role was in all of this — God’s place in my life was being with me at every moment during it.

Perhaps people might imagine that going through what seems like such a dramatic challenge in my life with my medical issues might have challenged my faith, might have strengthened my faith. I really don’t believe either of those things happened. I believe it perhaps merely confirmed my faith. You know, all throughout the first 20 years of my life I’d had a lot of ups and downs. I’d had so much to be thankful for. You know, the talent I had been given, the opportunities that I’d had to develop my talent and to share my music with people. So many wonderful friends in my life — people that I was so blessed to be a part of my life. And then, of course, the various challenges of the financial circumstances and stresses of my family life. All of those various experiences on both ends of the spectrum shaped who I was as a person of faith. I really don’t know that going through various medical challenges during my 20s changed or refined my faith all that much. But it was almost like the lessons I learned and who I had become during my formative years helped me to deal with all kinds of things in my life in my adulthood. While negative things might seem like very profound moments in one’s life, so are positive things, and meeting and falling in love with my husband, I believe, impacted my sense of faith even more so than any bad things that might have been happening to me.

I definitely feel like I’m so blessed in my life right now. A number of my longtime dreams have come true. I’m happily married and I have my foundation. I had all those years when I was being helped by so many generous people, providing scholarships and the loan of instruments so that I could have a violin to play on when I couldn’t afford to buy one. Now I’m able to, as they say, pay it forward by helping other young people in similar circumstances, and that’s what I had always imagined doing, and now I am. I just feel like I’m so excited to be alive right now and to be doing the things I’m doing and traveling all over and sharing music with people. It’s just a great joy, and I feel like it is what I was always meant to do, and I’m so happy to be doing it.

Music is an amazing place where God and people can come together, even outside of a house of worship, you know? On a concert stage, in a performance in a living room, anywhere where people are gathered. Of course, you’re playing music written by human beings who crafted the notes on the page, and then here you are as another human being playing the notes. But the inspiration to play the notes the exact way they’re coming out that night with all of the inflections and the phrasing and the emotions behind the notes, where does that come from? That inspiration, I really believe, is God’s presence. When you can fully open yourself up to that and receive that inspiration as you’re playing, whatever the repertoire might be, and then reach out to the listeners and share that inspiration with them so that they also can get fully caught up in the emotions that are going on in the music, that’s when — gosh, I don’t even know how to say it. Those are just, you know, the most amazing moments in life, and I just feel so privileged to be able to be a part of that. One of my favorite theologians, Marcus Borg, talks in his book The God We Never Knew about the various paths to worship experience or a spiritual experience or a connection with God. It’s different for everybody. Some people find that place through silent meditation. Some people might find it through ecstatic dance. I don’t know that music is a superior path to others, but it is a path, and definitely for me that’s where I find the closest connection to God is through experiencing God in music.

It’s interesting to read about how historically certain denominations have actually shied away from involving music and worship — that somehow they felt that music was not of God. I almost think that’s because music is so powerful. It’s like, you know, getting right down to the core of who we are and bypassing the thinking part of our brains, and maybe that can almost be a little scary — the power that music has. And yet who does that power come from? I think that music is something that is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. I truly believe that probably before people ever discovered language, they were probably already singing. And as they were singing, they were probably already feeling, and probably as they were singing, they probably already experienced a sense of the divine.

That’s always been an interesting question for me as a Heavy Metal fan. Where does that music come from? I know certain people have very strong opinions about that. But, actually, I’ve come to believe that even Heavy Metal is kind of like praying the Psalms, you know, where you’re crying out with a loud voice and moving through moments of great passion, to come out the other end with a real feeling of, what’s the right word? I always use this word when I’m talking about the Tchaikovsky concerto and now it’s eluding me.

Music is a part of our humanity that we can’t ever separate from. Music is part of our humanity that is so core to who we are. Playing things like Paganini pieces or my variations on the birthday song, which is sort of in the style of Paganini with all those techniques and virtuosic tricks, that kind of music, you know, it’s not a profound worship experience to play it. And yet I still do believe that God is there, because who gave us our human potential to do these physically amazing things? It’s like watching the Olympics. You can definitely see God in people reaching the limits of human potential and perhaps even exceeding them. That’s something that gives us all great joy and hope to see people being able to display great accomplishment that comes from hard work. It’s a lot of fun to be able to rip through all of the licks in “Happy Birthday.” It’s just fun to celebrate that. It’s also just really cool to be able to, you know, take a tune like that that everybody knows and show all the cool ways the violin can make it into something completely transformed and really show what the violin is capable of as an instrument. Working hard is how you’re going to get to anywhere you want to go — the hours of practice to get all the muscles and tendons and stuff working with your hands and your arms and your fingers and then all the hours of study. Reading about the history of the music, exploring the architecture of the score, listening to others’ performances and all of that — that’s really how you can maximize your potential is through working as hard as you can.

I always try to do at least a few hours a day of actual practice with my instrument in my hands as opposed to the studying kinds of practice, which I also spend quite a bit of time doing. But I certainly wouldn’t use my current self as an example for a student. When I was a student, I was incredibly consistent. I did eight hours a day of practice between the age of 11 and 17, when I completed my formal training. And, of course, not everybody can have the flexibility of schedule in their life to be able to do eight hours a day, and it’s certainly not necessary. It got me where I wanted to go that much more quickly. But whatever you can commit to realistically, whether it is three hours a day, six hours a day, 45 minutes a day, consistency is the most important thing. The statistic that I’m the proudest of is actually the fact that from my first lesson at age three till I was 13 I never missed a day of practice, even if I was having a birthday or Christmas or if I had the flu or something. I practiced every single day. That’s really what allows me to have the foundation to be able to do all the things I do these days and be a little bit more erratic and still be able to maintain the level of technical accuracy I need to be able to express the artistic side of the music the way I envision it.

I am interested in all the music that I can get my hands on. You can see my sheet music collection over here, which is completely dominating my living room. I just love all music, well, all good music for the violin, from the most famous and popular pieces to new music written today, early music written in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, and obscure music which has been unjustifiably neglected. I have had the great pleasure of having a number of my CD projects resurrect repertoire that really should regain its rightful place, things like the violin compositions of Franz Liszt or music by Scottish composers from the 19th century for violin and orchestra based on Scottish folk tunes. My new album, which actually pairs Beethoven’s masterpiece of a violin concerto with the concerto by his dedicatee, which was written one year earlier in the exact same key, the same instrumentation, the same length, and the same musical aesthetic as Beethoven’s — it was obviously a big influence on Beethoven’s concerto and nobody is aware that it even exists, let alone how profound an impact it has on the Beethoven piece we all know and love. I just love doing that kind of historic thing. One of the projects that was really fun was my album of concertos by composers of African descent from the 1700s and 1800s. Chicago, my hometown, is very lucky to have right here in the city an organization called the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR), which is one of the only such facilities in the nation, and so being a Chicagoan and knowing about CBMR, I’d been interested in this repertoire for a while, and I made the album, and it was so amazing how this album really affected so many people. Students, parents, and teachers started coming up to me telling me that they had no idea that these composers exist and that classical musicians of African descent had existed way back when and were making such important contributions to classical music, and so that’s what inspired my foundation’s other project, the String Students Library of Music by Black Composers, which is our curriculum, which will be the first-ever anthology of music by black composers from around the world and throughout the centuries graded by skill level for beginners through advanced students, and telling the stories of things like the fact that Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass were both enthusiastic amateur violinists, the fact that just like there were the Negro baseball leagues there were all or mostly black orchestras in the U.S. during the 19th century, the fact that the violin is now being used in hip-hop these days. There are so many wonderful stories to tell, and I’m hoping that through the release of these materials, which we’re hoping will hit the shelves in a couple of years, that they will help to inspire African-American string students to recognize that classical music is part of their culture and heritage also and that they will stick with it and be inspired to be part of the next generation of performers and audience members.

In the exact moment when I was injured, it’s so hard to put into words. But I’d read about near-death experiences and I guess I have to say that’s what I had. In that moment when I was with God, it was really that I had a choice, that God was offering me a choice that I could either stay or return and that neither decision would be more right or wrong than the other one, and in that moment everything that I’d always believed about the meaning of my life was just crystal clear to me. I didn’t even have to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I just knew my answer instantly — that I had not yet done all the things that I had been put on earth to do and that I wanted to go back and do them. I knew that it wouldn’t be easy and I knew that it would okay to not do it, but I just really wanted to. And yet, returning and having so many obstacles really challenged that belief, as I said earlier. But now here I am, and I am able to positively impact the lives of many young artists with my foundation and with my other charitable and educational and outreach activities. I’m able to share my music with people all over the world and explore the great repertoire and bring that to people. When I think about the fact that I just recorded the Beethoven Violin Concerto, a piece that has been, to me, the pinnacle of the violin repertoire since I can remember, and I’ve recorded it, and that recording is going to be out there for everyone to listen to, and to be able to share the profound spirituality of that piece of repertoire which surpasses almost every other, and I think, “Well, you know, I was right. This is what I was meant to do, and I’m doing it.” I just feel so blessed.

Being injured is something that is immediately apparent to people as an obvious challenge. But all of us have challenges in our lives, little daily challenges of interpersonal relationships or setbacks in our jobs and careers or the death of a loved one. We have challenges every month, every day, every week in our lives. I certainly don’t want to say that any challenge that I’ve lived through is harder or easier than anybody else’s. It’s, maybe, different. But we all have challenges. The one thing I’ve learned is that the way to get through a challenge is just to ask God not to change what’s happening, not to make it okay, but just simply to be with me in the worst of times and to be with me in the best of times. And for that I’m very thankful to God.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Our reporter Judy Valente in Chicago has a moving story today of a young violinist, once a child prodigy on her way to world-class status, who was struck down in a terrible accident. But she’s coming back now, with great courage and faith. Her name is Rachel Barton Pine.

RACHEL BARTON PINE (Violinist): Music is something that is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. I truly believe that. Before people ever discovered language they were probably already singing. As they were singing they were probably already experiencing a sense of the divine.

JUDY VALENTE: Rachel Barton Pine is playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. When she was just three years old, she heard Bach being performed at her church, St. Paul’s United Church of Christ on Chicago’s North Side.

Ms. PINE: The sound of the violin was intriguing, and according to my parents, I jumped up on my seat in the pew and said, “I want to do that.”

Bach has been such an important part of my life for so long. The stained glass window of Bach is still there among the various characters from the Bible. You know, as far as I was concerned Bach was right up there with the saints. There’s something about his music, both listening to and especially playing it. I can really feel the presence of God.

VALENTE: This performance of the Boccherini minuet was recorded. The violinist was five years old. She made her orchestral debut at age seven. She liked playing, but mostly she played the violin, practicing as many as eight hours a day. At the age of 10, she was chosen to play in a young performers competition with the Chicago Symphony.

Rachel Barton Pine

Ms. PINE (as a young girl, from file footage): Lots of people will watch me on TV, and I’ll start getting famous, and the Chicago Symphony isn’t just any old orchestra. It’s a big, super-duper orchestra.

HOWARD REICH (Arts Critic, Chicago Tribune): Rachel was a prodigy of world-class level.

VALENTE: Howard Reich is an arts critic for the Chicago Tribune.

Mr. REICH: Through most of her childhood and through most of her life, Rachel was always at the front of the pack. Whatever room she was in, she was the best fiddler.

VALENTE: Even as she performed with the Chicago Symphony, her family struggled with financial problems. The income she earned through her talent had become essential to her family’s support.

Ms. PINE: My father was unemployed most of the time. Just even paying for the gas to put in the car to drive to the lessons, sheet music purchases, concert clothes which we would very often get at the thrift store and then try to fix up — these were real difficulties in the life of my family.

VALENTE: She won for her performance with the Chicago Symphony. She would later become the first American to win the gold medal at the Bach International Competition in Germany.

Howard Reich

Mr. REICH: She racked up so many awards that everyone predicted a global career for her. Everything was ready. She was exactly where she needed to be.

VALENTE: Her debut CD won rave reviews from music critics. She seemed poised on the verge of a spectacular career. All that changed on a frigid morning in January 1995. Twenty years old at the time, she had taken a Chicago commuter train to the suburbs where she was to give a violin lesson. As she got off, the doors closed behind her, but her violin case was still inside the train with the strap attached to her arm. The train began to move, dragging her along. As she pulled free of the strap, her legs swung into the path of the wheels. Her left leg was severed, her right leg badly mangled.

Ms. PINE: In that moment, when I was with God, it was really that I had a choice, that God was offering me a choice that I could either stay or return. In that moment, everything that I had always believed about the meaning of my life was just crystal clear to me. I had not yet done all the things I had been put on earth to do.

VALENTE: Within a year of the accident, she was playing the violin from a wheelchair. She has undergone 40 surgeries. Today she walks with prosthetic devices. Regular physical therapy continues. So does considerable pain.

Ms. PINE: There was a period of time just after I was injured right at first when I couldn’t play my instrument because I was just too ill to even sit up in bed and have that kind of strenuous activity. And so far from music being able to sustain me during this difficult period of time, you know, instead I had the added worry of wondering when I would ever be able to make music again.

“At age 10 she played with the Chicago Symphony.”

Mr. REICH: Then when she started to rehab and recover and was ready to go back into the world and try to claim her glory, it was too late, because the next wave of young fiddle stars was taking those prizes and those concerts. She almost had to start over.

Ms. PINE (showing Valente her violin): Well, my violin was made in the year 1742 by Guarneri del Jesu.

VALENTE: She travels constantly, both in the U.S. and abroad, and still dreams of performing in the great concert halls with the great symphonies. She says it has never occurred to her to be angry at God.

Ms. PINE: How can I be angry at God for not somehow preventing this from happening to me? I would have to, you know, extrapolate that and be angry at God for not preventing the Holocaust or not preventing, you know, an earthquake that might have happened last week, or a tornado. Where God’s role was in all of this, God’s place in my life was being with me in every moment during it.

VALENTE: Nine years after her injury, Rachel married Greg Pine, appearing in public without crutches for the first time. She was awarded millions of dollars in damages for her injuries and has established a foundation to help young, disadvantaged musicians around the world. But her taste in music is not limited to the classics.

Ms. PINE: I decided to have my dressmaker sew patches of my favorite bands on my violin case.

VALENTE: I see Led Zeppelin, Rush . . .

Ms. PINE: Yeah, we’ve got ACDC, Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeath, Slayer — all the great speed metal bands.

VALENTE: As performed by the heavy metal group Pantera, this is the song “Cowboys from Hell.”

This is “Cowboys from Hell” as performed by Rachel Barton Pine.

“Music is God’s greatest gift.”

Ms. PINE: I’ve come to believe that even heavy metal is kind of like praying the Psalms, where you are crying out in a loud voice and moving through moments of great passion.

Playing things like my variations on the birthday song, that kind of music, it’s not a profound worship experience to play it, and yet I still do believe God is there, because who gave us our human potential to do these physically amazing things?

VALENTE: The story of Rachel Barton Pine could be simply a story of lost opportunity, of the unfairness of life. Or it could be a story of resurrection in which, in spite of horrific injuries, her talent endures, her music is heard.

Mr. REICH: She might over the long haul establish herself as a world-class violinist through the interesting recordings she’s doing and the really good performances she’s giving. The world has not still discovered her.

Ms. PINE: I’m so excited to be alive right now and doing what I am doing, traveling all over and sharing music with people. It’s just a great joy, and I feel like it’s what I was always meant to do, and I’m so happy to be doing it. The inspiration to play the notes the exact way that they are coming out with all the inflections and phrasings and emotions behind the notes, you know, where does that come from? That inspiration, I really believe, is God’s presence.

The one thing I’ve learned is that the way to get through challenges is just to ask God not to change what’s happening, not to make it OK, but just simply to be with me, be with me in the worst of times and to be with me in the best of times.

VALENTE: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Judy Valente in Chicago.