BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a powerful story today about punishment for juveniles who commit crimes. The Supreme Court has thrown out the death penalty for such young people, but in 44 states they can still be sentenced to life in prison without parole.  Is that just for children – even for the worst crimes? Tim O’Brien reports from Tampa, Florida.

TIM O’BRIEN: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young is serving life in prison with no possibility of parole for a series of hotel robberies in and around Tampa, Florida. It was June of 2000. Young had just turned 15 and was 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?

Mr. YOUNG: Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security cameras?

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: And you did that?

Mr. 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.

Mr. YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

Mr. YOUNG: Kill her.

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother, who says she’s been off drugs for more than three years, blames herself for the fix her son is in.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along?

STEPHANIE YOUNG: Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, me being on drugs, then my son wouldn’t be where he’s at today.

O’BRIEN: Young is being held at a maximum security prison in central Florida. Under Florida law, juveniles charged with serious crimes are tried as adults, and serious crimes — like armed robbery — can bring life in prison. And in the courtroom of Judge J. Rogers Padgett, being a child didn’t seem to help. It can even hurt the child who behaves like one, as Kenneth Young did.

Judge J. ROGERS PADGETT (Hillsborough County, Florida Circuit Court): So 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 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: Enter law professor Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino has been trying for years to get the Florida legislature to allow parole consideration for all juvenile offenders in the state to give them a second chance, his arguments as much moral as they are legal.

(to Prof. Paolo Annino): Is it your position that no juvenile should be sentenced to life without parole?

Professor PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University): Oh, absolutely, and I think we’re immoral, ultimately, as a nation. 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? I mean, we do have Western traditions, and one part of our Western traditions is called redemption, and for many people in our culture redemption is an important value.

Judge PADGETT: There are some crimes that these people have committed that simply have no redemption. The victim and the public in general who know about the crime are looking for retribution.

O’BRIEN: It’s all about retribution.

Judge PADGETT: Retribution, right.

O’BRIEN: According to Human Rights Watch, the United States is the only country in the world that regularly sentences juvenile offenders to life in prison without parole. There are now more than 2,500. Pennsylvania has the most with 444. All but these six states allow life without parole for those under 18 at the time of their crimes.

Most of the crimes that bring life in prison without parole are far worse than Kenneth Young’s armed robberies. Most involved murder, often the murder of other children — crimes that shock the conscience and break the heart.

DAWN ROMIG (testifying): Good morning. My name is Dawn Romig.

O’BRIEN: In Pennsylvania, a Senate committee held hearings last October to consider doing away with life sentences for juvenile offenders. Lawmakers got an earful from opponents like Dawn Romig, whose 12-year-old daughter had been murdered by 17-year-old Brian Bahr.

Ms. ROMIG (testifying): We learned that Brian had made a list. It was called 23 things to do to a girl in the woods: “Beat her, check; rape her, check; kill her, check.” Everything on that list was carried out. It was an adult act he planned and executed. Why should these juveniles not get life in prison? Age cannot excuse what they have done.

JODI DOTTS (testifying): I never got to say goodbye to Kimmie. I never got to see her in a casket. I now talk to her at her grave still, 10 years later, on Mother’s Day. I’d also like to add, as I was sitting here listening to people saying they need second chances, my daughter didn’t have a second chance. She wasn’t given that choice whether to live or to die and I’m here to fight to make sure that these juveniles do not get released. Thank you.

O’BRIEN: What do you say to the parents of a child — whose child is murdered?

Prof. ANNINO: Well, it’s tragic and it’s very difficult, and I turn to a group that I’m associated with, and it’s called Mothers Against Murderers Association — and their children have been killed

O’BRIEN: MAMA Inc., a remarkable support group in West Palm Beach. Seventy-three women, all of whom have lost a child to murder, meet at this storefront office every other Thursday. The walls are lined with the photographs—the mother with her lost child.

On this day, Paula Bowe will be joining MAMA’s poignant photo gallery. Her daughter was shot to death by an ex-boyfriend—

PAULA BOWE: And he shot her. He shot her twice at point blank—once in the face, once in the neck.

O’BRIEN: What makes this association so remarkable is that, despite their grief, members do not seek retribution. Instead, they speak out against it.

ANGELA WILLIAMS (Founder, MAMA Inc): That’s one thing I tell my moms all the time: the only way they’re going to move on, they’re going to have to learn to forgive, you know, and if they don’t learn to forgive, then they’ll never be able to move on to the next step.

O’BRIEN: And Angela Williams should know.

Ms. WILLIAMS: I lost seven. I lost five nephews and two nieces in my family, and that motivates me to keep going to help others. Gun violence — all killed by guns.

O’BRIEN: MAMA is supporting Kenneth Young’s petition for clemency on the premise that any child should be given a second chance, even for murder.

O’BRIEN: Sylvia Manning is a preacher whose son was shot to death. She believes there’s hope for his killer, who has yet to be apprehended.

Reverend SYLVIA MANNING: I feel as though whoever did this to my son, they can be redeemed. I mean, if they know Jesus they can be redeemed.

O’BRIEN: It’s a religious issue to you?

Rev. MANNING: Not really religious. It’s what my heart says.

O’BRIEN: Linda Battle is a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff whose son Eric was run down and killed by a drug dealer.

LINDA BATTLE (Deputy Sheriff, Palm Beach County, FL): I worked in the jails, and I see the juveniles come in there for major crimes, and they’re just babies, and I don’t know what got them to that point.

O’BRIEN: What got them to that point? The U.S. Supreme Court, in rejecting the death penalty for juvenile offenders four years ago, relied in part on the growing body of psychiatric evidence that shows why children often fail to act as responsibly as adults,

Dr. RICHARD RATNER (American Psychiatric Association): In a nutshell, it is that the brain has not really matured. You do not really have an adult brain until you are in your early 20s.

O’BRIEN: You have actual, empirical evidence of that?

Dr. RATNER: We do.

O’BRIEN: Ratner says that magnetic resonance imaging — MRIs like this one — show that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process than adults, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do.

Roughly 25 percent of the juvenile offenders serving life with no parole for murder never murdered anyone; rather, they were following the lead of an older adult. But under what’s known in the law as the felony murder rule, they are just as guilty as those who pull the trigger and often sentenced just as harshly.

Prof. ANNINO: They follow these older adults, and then the adults commit a murder. So the kid never has the gun in his hand. The kid never touches the gun. Many times—

O’BRIEN: But he’s still charged with murder?

Prof. ANNINO: He is charged with murder and gets the exact same sentence.

O’BRIEN: An accessory is as guilty as the principal?

Prof. ANNINO: In the state of Florida it is exactly the same, and that’s the felony murder rule, and we have it not just in Florida, but around the country, and the felony murder rules denies the individuality of the child. It ignores the fact that you have a child here, and you’re treating the child just like an adult.

O’BRIEN: Among those who have problems with that, we were surprised to find the judge who had sentenced Kenneth Young to four consecutive life terms. Judge J. Rogers Padgett said judges have no way of knowing what might become of the children who appear before them and, at least where the victim doesn’t die, their fate should be left to the Department of Corrections.

Judge 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: But in Florida, as in most states, it’s too late to turn back the clock. Even the sentencing judge cannot reopen this case decided more than seven years ago.

Ms. YOUNG: It’s hard. It’s so hard — the sleepless nights that I have had. And every time I go to see my child, and I have to leave that prison without my baby, it just takes something out of me. It hurts. It hurts so bad.

O’BRIEN: Unless Florida changes its law, or the governor commutes the sentence, Kenneth Young will die in prison. He will never get out.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Tampa, Florida.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Think of Buddhist monks and you probably imagine practitioners sitting stark still trying to quiet their minds.  Who knew that the violent martial art kung fu has it’s own spiritual foundation? Lucky Severson reports on “action meditation.”

LUCKY SEVERSON: Many people in the Western world think kung fu is all about combat, about beating up the opponent. It’s true that the original kung fu monks were legendary warriors defending one Chinese emperor after the other. But there is another side to this martial art, perhaps the most important one, according to Berkeley professor of religious studies Robert Sharf.

Professor ROBERT SHARF (Center for Buddhist Studies, University of California at Berkeley): They say this is not actually about harming human beings. It’s not even necessarily about defending oneself. It’s really a form of personal cultivation.

“It’s a combination between going to the gym and the therapist.”

SEVERSON: Gay Hobner, a fundraiser for a nonprofit charity, says she has benefited.

GAY HOBNER: I practice kung fu because it’s a combination between going to the gym and the therapist, and it’s also — I found a spiritual home here as well.

SEVERSON: How?

Ms. HOBNER: How? Because I think that the reasons people go to church are the same reasons a lot of us come here — for that sense of spiritual renewal.

SEVERSON: There is a spiritual side to kung fu. It’s called Chan Buddhism, and through it kung fu becomes an instrument of enlightenment.

SHI YAN MING: You must understand they are one, not two. Just like our mental and physical, we have to understand that’s one piece — one body.

SEVERSON: Shi Yan Ming is a 34th-generation Shaolin monk, a kung fu master who defected from China in 1992. He has established a Shaolin temple and kung fu school in downtown Manhattan.

SHI YAN MING: That’s why I defected. I want to spread the Shaolin philosophy of martial arts to the rest of the world.

Shi Yan Ming is a 34th generation Shaolin monk.

SEVERSON: A fundamental precept of Buddhism is that the mind must be emptied of all worldly desires through meditation, and only then can a person become enlightened. Yan Ming says that martial arts are “action meditation,” in other words, focusing so intently on the complex moves of kung fu that the mind empties all of life’s anxieties.

Prof. SHARF: The point of Buddhist mediation — there’re many different kinds of mediation — but the point of most of them is the quiet and ultimately still that inner voice, because they believe when we still the inner voice then who we really are comes forward. It just becomes naturally apparent.

Ms. HOBNER: For me this empties my mind. It’s better than any kind of sitting meditation. I’ve done yoga. This does it. You don’t have a thought in your head for two hours, and just that blankness, that for me refreshes me mentally.

SEVERSON: The state of enlightenment is the goal of all Buddhists, but in Chan Buddhism it is not necessarily at the end of a long road of reincarnations.

Prof. SHARF: The Chan school had this doctrine of sudden enlightenment, and they said that you really are already a Buddha, you just don’t understand that. So it’s nothing that you have to acquire through years and years of practice. It’s really something that you just have to let shine through, or to let come forward in the instant, and the moment you let go of all your discursive mental activity, the moment you let go of that inner voice and our inner desires and our wants, including the desire for enlightenment, at that point you’re a Buddha.

Professor Robert Sharf

SEVERSON: The home and birthplace of Chan Buddhism and Shaolin kung fu is this temple in central China. It dates back 1,500 years and has become a mecca for kung fu students from all over the world.

SEVERSON: Yan Ming started training to become a monk at the Shaolin temple in China when he was only five years old. The training is rigorous and goes on for years. Bright and early each morning, students run up the steps of a steep hill and then crawl back down. As the training advances, the challenges become more strenuous.

Shi Guolin also trained here. He wanted to become a monk when he was a little boy so he could fly. He did earn the revered kung fu title of Shaolin Hero.

SHI GUOLIN: When I was young, I trained kung fu eight hours a day.

SEVERSON: Every day, eight hours?

SHI GUOLIN: Yes.

SEVERSON: Eight years?

SHI GUOLIN: Yeah.

SEVERSON: Shi Guolin is in line to become the next abbot of the Shaolin temple in China. He now operates a temple and school in Flushing, New York. The first and one of the most important aspects of Shaolin kung fu is something called “chi.”

Shi Guolin is in line to become the next abbot of the Shaolin temple in China.

SHI GUOLIN: Chi in body like air.

SEVERSON: So breathing is very important in kung fu?

SHI GUOLIN: Very, very important.

SEVERSON: Yes?

SHI GUOLIN: If no breathing — no life.

SEVERSON: The notion of chi goes back thousands of years. It is considered to be a person’s life force or energy. Cultivating chi, this inner power, is what kung fu is all about.

SHI YAN MING: We walk 10 blocks, we don’t feel tired, that’s chi. If we walk five blocks and your legs feel heavy like 1,000 pounds, you cannot move forward, there’s no chi.

SEVERSON: It takes, for instance, an amazing control of chi to perform some of the martial arts shown here. Yan Ming and Shi Guolin have each performed these death-defying feats many times. There’s yet another side of kung fu — the artistic side. It was on display in San Francisco recently. This was a rehearsal for a performance, a collaboration between Shaolin monks and the acclaimed Lines Ballet company. The artistic director is Alonzo King.

ALONZO KING (Lines Ballet artistic director Alonzo King): A lot of times people will look at their movement and think this looks violent, or it’s preparing for some kind of struggle. But it’s dancing.

Lines Ballet artistic director Alonzo King

SEVERSON: But these students are not interested in dancing kung fu. They’re more interested in the essentials of Shaolin philosophy. That means that while learning martial arts they must also cultivate a sense of ethics, one that encompasses justice, diligence, honesty, hard work, and mental discipline. Melanie Lo has been a student of Shi Guolin for 12 years.

MELANIE LO: He has a term called “monkey mind,” where we’re not focused, and we’re thinking about all these other things in our lives, and then he tells us to bring our self back here, back in the present moment and practice and focus.

SEVERSON: And the ultimate goal of all this practice, this “action meditation,” is a state of enlightenment. Yan Ming says it’s a very happy state to be in.

(to Shi Yan Ming): Have you achieved total enlightenment?

SHI YAN MING: I achieve. I understand myself clearly. Yes.

SEVERSON: What does that feel like?

SHI YAN MING: Feel like Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.

SEVERSON: Yan Ming says kung fu is for everyone no matter what their religion, and that the world would be a more peaceful, happier place with “action meditation.” Then, he says, every day would be a holiday.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in New York City.

After 21 novels and countless short stories, John Updike still creates characters who behave in the usual Updikean fashion, embarking on ribald sexual escapades and wrestling with spiritual and moral angst. His latest book, VILLAGES, published in October to mixed reviews, returns to the themes — first mined to full effect in the 1960s in works such as RABBIT, RUN and COUPLES — of mortality, salvation, and lots of sex. John Updike the man, however, seems to have mellowed with age, reaching peace after his own professed search for existential comfort.

At a talk on religion in his work Thursday evening (Nov. 18) at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, Updike told the audience of 300 that his Christian faith had “solidified in ways less important to me than when I was 30, when the existential predicament was realer to me than now. … I worked a lot of it through and arrived at a sort of safe harbor in my life.”

While much of his earlier work contains traces of Updike’s furious immersion in Christian theology, he said he looked more to the congregation of his hometown Massachusetts church as the rock of his faith today.

“When I haven’t been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to be there,” he said, standing at a podium in front of the altar, against a backdrop of Byzantine-style mosaics and dressed in a gray suit befitting one of America’s elder statesmen of letters. “It’s not just the words, the sacraments. It’s the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity.”

As a young man studying at Oxford in the mid-1950s, Updike said he devoured new translations of Soren Kierkegaard at Blackwell’s bookstore, discovering him “so positive and fierce and strikingly intelligent, like finding an older brother I didn’t know I had.” He pointed to his classic character Harry Angstrom, of the Rabbit tetralogy, as an example of the Danish philosopher’s influence. The Swiss neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth informed another character in the first book of the series, the Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach, who faces off with an Episcopal priest in a scene Updike chose to read. Upon going to Kruppenbach’s house to discuss Rabbit’s desertion of his family, Rev. Eccles is treated to a diatribe against meddling in others’ affairs. Kruppenbach sounds like a stand-in for Barth himself.

“When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ,” he tells a disconcerted Eccles. “Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”

Speaking in the narthex bookshop as Updike diligently signed books following the talk’s conclusion, the Rev. J. Christopher King, associate rector of St. Bart’s, mentioned the passage from RABBIT, RUN as the evening’s most gripping excerpt for him. “I couldn’t help but hear Kruppenbach addressed to me,” he said. “He’s talking about a certain kind of formation where we’re led to think of ourselves as fixer-uppers. If it happened to me I think I’d behave very much like Eccles. The reason Eccles is angry is because he knows the truth has been spoken to him.”

Offering his lifelong “tour of Protestantism” as the tongue-in-cheek reason he could address an audience on the topic of religion, Updike explained that he had been raised Lutheran in Pennsylvania, the grandson of a Presbyterian minister. He said he joined a Congregational church with his first wife, the daughter of a Unitarian minister, “as a good midway point between our sects.” Since marrying his second wife in 1977, he has worshipped as an Episcopalian. For good measure, Updike added, to much laughter from those listening, that his first girlfriend was the daughter of a Methodist chaplain.

Updike’s studies of theology and Scripture have led him to form strong opinions, though he remains reluctant to position himself as an authority on anything except his own oeuvre. Asked which of the Gospels was his favorite, he answered, without even a beat to reflect, that he liked Luke’s stories the best, but trusted Mark “as the earliest and least prone to wishful thinking.” Updike paused for a moment. “It’s also the shortest,” he said, before critiquing Matthew as legalistic and “the most full of hellfire,” and John as “almost too much of a Platonic philosophy.”

Responding to a question submitted from the audience on whether orthodox Christian theology’s invocation to accept God’s will runs counter to progressive politics, Updike concluded, “I think there is a quietism, at least in the Lutheran faith, that you can see in Luther’s own life.

“Yes, I think to a certain degree it mitigates against trying to change the world, instead trying to find a peaceful, satisfactory place within the world that exists,” he said. “It is consoling to think that if not every detail is the will of God, there is a kind of will bigger than your own. You can’t change everything. You have to accept the world as it is.”

Introducing a poem from the 1950s, “Burning Trash,” he called wonderment at one’s own existence and that of the world “one of the seeds of religious consciousness,” offering the fear of death as the other. After describing the poem as an attempt to convey “the sense of being suspended in space, in an endless darkness,” Updike mused that “maybe when you’re young is the time to think about your death.” For a man famously averse to expounding on himself in interviews, who once said that “when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep,” the comment suggested that now, at age 72, he prefers to console himself in the “safe harbor” of his faith.

–Benedicta Cipolla is a writer in New York City.

Sex, lies—and food—dominated the proceedings at this year’s annual meeting of Christian and Jewish ethicists.

The January 8-11 gathering in Chicago marked the 50th anniversary of the Society of Christian Ethics, and while most of the discussions remained contemporary rather than retrospective, some dealt with new sides of age-old dilemmas, such as what constitutes ethical eating, how to strengthen marriage, and why business ethics is so often an oxymoron. The Christian ethicists held their meeting concurrently, as they have since 2003, with the Society of Jewish Ethics.

Scandal provided a subtext for a number of the sessions. It was clear from several discussions just how deeply the shutdown last May of Agriprocessors Inc., the kosher meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, seized for a variety of food, safety, and labor violations, has shaken the Jewish community. Among Christian ethicists, the sex scandals of the Catholic Church and controversies over homosexuality in both Catholic parishes and Protestant denominations continued to spark debate, and the ethical lapses on Wall Street and Main Street that led to the current economic meltdown provided grist for both groups alike.

This year’s meeting coincided with the release of “Sex and the Seminary: Preparing Ministers for Sexual Health and Justice.” The study, a joint project of two respected institutions—the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing in Westport, Connecticut, and Union Theological Seminary in New York—found that seminaries aren’t preparing clergy well in either case. This despite the fact that pastors say issues such as sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, marital infidelity, sexual harassment, infertility, and gender identity are among the leading problems for which congregation members come to them seeking counseling.

Researchers surveyed 36 leading seminaries, mostly Protestant, and rabbinical schools and found that in 90 percent of them students can graduate without ever taking a course on human sexuality. Two thirds of the schools don’t offer any sexuality courses.

The survey also found that seminaries are more focused on preventing sexual harassment than helping future religious leaders have a deeper understanding of their own sexuality and the sexual behavior of others. Seminaries often stress biblical texts and doctrinal teaching about sex, but don’t encourage students to examine their own sexual history and attitudes, said Dr. Kate Ott of the Religious Institute, author of the report.

Marriage came under scrutiny at a session on “Family and the Social Order,” at which Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, spoke about the bishops’ long-anticipated pastoral statement on marriage.

The bishops were expected to issue their statement last year. George told the gathering there have been multiple drafts, but no finished document. When an ethicist from Boston College questioned whether part of the bishops’ problem may arise from the fact that there has been little consultation with actual married people in drawing up the document, George said there are no plans to hold public meetings to gather input on the subject from lay people, as the bishops occasionally have done on other issues. He called the fact that fewer baptized Catholics are marrying in the church or marrying at all “a great personal tragedy” and stressed “self-sacrifice” rather than personal fulfillment as essential to the marriage bond, reemphasizing marriage as a lifetime commitment. “There are relationships that, once chosen, cannot be unchosen,” George said.

Don Browning, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and director of its Religion, Culture, and Family Project, offered a formal response to the cardinal’s remarks. From a sociological standpoint, he said, there have been “robust signs of change” concerning the family in recent decades. Depending on one’s viewpoint, these changes may be seen as signs of decline or possibilities for the evolution of the family.

Browning also said the fact that more people are choosing to cohabit rather than marry and to raise children outside of marriage or a traditional family setting, as with same sex couples, may not necessarily represent a danger to traditional marriage. He suggested that religious leaders, sociologists, and lawmakers consider ways to strengthen family life in whatever form it takes.

In the midst of the current economic crisis, as some Americans worry about putting food on their tables, ethicists at the meeting seemed deeply concerned about the kinds of food people are eating, and in what quantities.

Aaron Gross of the University of California at San Diego, Laura Hartman of Augustana College, John Sniegocki of Xavier University, and Rabbi ElizaBeth Beyer of the University of Nevada at Reno all presented papers on the topic of food ethics. What constitutes proper eating for a person of faith? Did Jesus think fasting was superior to feasting? Should consumers take into consideration the working conditions of farm workers in buying a bushel of peaches? Do commercial techniques for slaughtering animals constitute a lack of reverence for life?

At the same time, Jewish ethicists pondered whether kosher dietary laws and meat processing rules are sufficient, or whether it’s patently immoral to slaughter anything “with a face.” Fair trade, locally grown food purchasing, and organic agriculture also came in for scrutiny.

But the ethicists were often short on concrete suggestions for what we can do in our everyday lives to eat more ethically. Hartman said she hoped consumers would simply begin to think more about their buying and eating choices, what she termed “an ethos of attention” to food.

There likely will be much more discussion on the ethics of meat-eating at future meetings. An ethicist from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, announced that former “Price Is Right” host Bob Barker has donated $1 million to Drury, his alma mater, to establish an animal studies center. Barker, a longtime vegetarian and animal rights activist, has also contributed money to several law schools, including Harvard and Stanford, to support animal rights studies.

Both the Agriprocessors scandal and the fraud charges against financier Bernard Madoff, accused of bilking his investors out of billions of dollars in an elaborate Ponzi scheme, formed the backdrop of a session on Jewish business ethics. Judaism contains many precepts for conducting business ethically. In many ways, its approach is more stringent than commonly accepted secular business practices. A contract, for example, is viewed as a covenant under Jewish ethics—not merely an agreement to complete a task, but a promise to build a relationship. Fraud and theft are likened to desecrations of God’s name.

Moses Pava, an ethicist at Yeshiva University in New York, said some high-profile businesses like Timberland, the New Hampshire company that makes rugged shoes, boots, and outdoor gear, have tried to follow Jewish ethical precepts with varying degrees of success. The problem lies not in the set of ethics, Pava said, but in the fact that business people often don’t follow the rules. “They’re not connecting the dots,” he suggested.

Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause and a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who has also served as president of the National Council of Churches, spoke to the meeting on government ethics just as a committee of the Illinois legislature was voting to recommend the impeachment of Gov. Rod Blogojevich, who is accused of trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. Edgar suggested specific ways ethicists could work to improve government. He urged them to support bans on campaign donations from lobbyists and government contractors, and he proposed a new system of public financing for political campaigns.

On the practical and applied ethics front, Dawn M. Nothwehr, a Franciscan sister who teaches at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, reported on a project training people in low-income city neighborhoods to fight for environmental justice. Poor neighborhoods house a disproportionate number of waste sites and industrial facilities and, as a consequence, their residents suffer more from environmentally caused asthma and poisoning by PCBs, mercury and lead, Nothwehr said. The “Knowledge as a Path to Empowerment” project helps members of these communities mobilize. Residents in a few Chicago neighborhoods are fighting to have lead and mercury-based materials removed from residential buildings and are forcing companies to clean up toxic waste. These are just initial steps, and the victories at this point remain small, Nothwehr acknowledged. “The poor and people of color still bear the brunt of the nation’s pollution problems,” she said, but projects like this offer hope for the future.

As violence in Gaza grew, there was also a session on the Compassionate Listening Project, a Seattle-based effort to teach “attentive, empathetic, and compassionate” listening as a tool for conflict resolution and a type of “citizen diplomacy.” The conflicts may range from everyday family and neighborhood disputes to the battles between Israel and Hamas, said Frida Kerner Furman, a professor in the religious studies department at DePaul University in Chicago and a self-described strong advocate for Israel. She reported on a recent trip she made to the Middle East with project members to meet a Palestinian mayor who is also a member of Hamas. Such meetings can often devolve into “dialogues between the deaf,” she said, where both sides remain firmly ensconced in their own viewpoint, without seeking commonalities.

Compassionate listening follows the adage that “an enemy is one whose story I have not heard,” and it begins with storytelling. It requires each side to suspend skepticism, criticism, and self-preoccupation in order to enter into another’s experience. “Let the speaker’s truth take center stage, while our truth takes a back seat,” Furman said.

Furman acknowledged having difficulty identifying with the political views of the Hamas mayor. But something changed, she said, when he began describing the personal experiences he and his family have had living in an occupied territory. Furman said she thought of her own family, and her heart “cracked open.”

“There will never be peace,” she concluded, “if those opposed to us aren’t listened to.”

On the final day of the meeting, the ethicists discussed the possibility of establishing a new Society of Muslim Ethics. “There is support from the board to form this group,” said Hamid Mavani, assistant professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University, and he reported that the 2010 meeting will include four panels on Muslim ethics, with formal creation of a Society of Muslim Ethics expected the following year.

Judith Valente, a Chicago-based correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, has reported for the program most recently on Thomas Merton.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The role religion will play in the administration remains to be seen, but in Washington this past week, faith was a major part of the inauguration festivities and the days that followed. Kim Lawton has our report.

President BARACK OBAMA (swearing in):  So help me God…

KIM LAWTON: President Barack Obama was known for his God-talk on the campaign trail, and that focus on religion continued in the first days of his new administration.

“This is their first full day on the job, and the best way we could imagine to begin is by praying with them and for them.”

Obama began his Inauguration Day as many presidents before him have—with a private prayer service at St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House, then more prayer at the swearing-in ceremony. Megachurch pastor and bestselling author Rick Warren gave the invocation, and Reverend Joseph Lowery, the veteran civil rights leader, gave the benediction.

Obama’s inaugural address was sprinkled with several references to Scripture and to God.

President OBAMA (in inaugural speech):  This is the source of our confidence, the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

LAWTON: The two men who prayed at the ceremony are both Protestants, but Obama specifically praised America’s religious diversity.

Pres. OBAMA (in inaugural speech):  For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.  We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.

LAWTON: Religious diversity was on full display Wednesday when the Obamas and the Bidens attended what was billed as a National Prayer Service at Washington’s National Cathedral.

Reverend SAMUEL LLOYD (Dean, National Cathedral, speaking at National Prayer Service):  This is their first full day on the job, and the best way we could imagine to begin is by praying with them and for them.

LAWTON: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu leaders were among those who took part in the service, offering prayers and guidance from their faith traditions.

Reverend SHARON WATKINS (President, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), speaking at National Prayer Service)):  What you are entering now, Mr. President and Mr. Vice-President, will tend to draw you away from your ethical center. But we, the nation that you serve, need you to hold the ground of your deepest values — of our deepest values.

LAWTON: Not everyone was happy about all the religion that was tied to the inauguration. A group of atheists launched an ultimately unsuccessful court battle to try and stop the official inaugural prayers. But as a recent poll for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY found, the majority of all Americans say they believe God has uniquely blessed this nation, and many expect that God should be acknowledged at big national events.

Religious groups sponsored a host of unofficial events this week as well. Prominent black leaders celebrated at the African-American Church Inaugural Ball. Many saw Obama’s election as a direct result of the black church organizing first started by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Vincent Harding

Dr. VINCENT HARDING (Veterans of Hope Project): There would be no point in trying to really speak to the beauty and the strength and the meaning of Barack’s inauguration without finding some way to speak to the strength and the beauty and the meaning of black religion as it inspired the people who opened the way for Obama.

LAWTON: Faith-based activists at an interfaith peace service pledged to continue working toward King’s full vision for America. Many here were optimistic about a positive relationship between Obama’s administration and the religious community.

Reverend WILLIAM SINKFORD (President, Unitarian Universalist Association): President Obama really is grounded in his personal faith. I think he values the religious voice. I think it is wise of him to bring in a broad spectrum of that religious voice.

LAWTON: There was also high optimism among American Muslims, who sponsored their own inaugural gala. Many here praised Obama’s stated goal to improve relations between Islam and the West.

Pres. OBAMA (in inaugural speech):  To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

INGRID MATTSON (President, Islamic Society of North America): It’s very clear to me that many people in the Muslim world overseas are so eager for a positive message from the United States, and I’m very hopeful that we’re going to have an opportunity to convey that positive message and to do some healing.

LAWTON: But there was also concern this week in some sectors of the faith community. Tens of thousands of abortion opponents came to Washington Thursday for the annual March for Life, which marks the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v Wade decision. Obama released a statement reaffirming his support for a woman’s right to choose. But he also urged new policies to reduce the number of abortions. Still, these activists are angered by administration plans to expand federal funding for abortion and for embryonic stem cell research.

Tony Perkins

TONY PERKINS (President, Family Research Council): There’s certainly some contrast here and concerns over some very fundamental issues of the respect of human life. Of course, then we get into the issue of marriage and of the traditional family — a lot of issues that raise concerns with us.

LAWTON: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins does praise the way Obama has incorporated faith-based outreach into his politics. Perkins says religious conservatives are willing to work with Obama when they can.

Mr. PERKINS: We’re not here to be adversaries of the president if he’s doing the right thing. We want to encourage him and help him do the right thing.  But we will, if forced to, take an adversarial role if he is moving the nation in the wrong direction, as it appears he is on the issue of life.

LAWTON: A spokesman for the new president says Obama is looking forward to working with “a range of partners in the faith community.” But keeping all those partners happy will be no easy task.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a story today about an ethical dilemma in the care of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. More than five million Americans have that terrible illness, which gets progressively worse and for which there is no cure. After a certain point, should an Alzheimer’s patient be kept alive with a feeding tube? Many family members say, of course: they should do everything possible to prolong a loved one’s life. But some doctors say inserting a feeding tube is inhumane, because it can just prolong a vegetative state for years. All those involved say they want what is best for the patient. But who is right? And who should decide? Betty Rollin reports.

BETTY ROLLIN: Dorothy Gregory, who is 85, has end-stage Alzheimer’s and lives in a nursing home in North Carolina. She stopped eating five years ago, at which point a feeding tube was inserted into her abdomen. That was the decision of her nephew, Bobby Davis, whom she brought up.

(to Bobby Davis): Does she know who you are?

Bobby Davis

BOBBY DAVIS (Nephew of Dorothy Gregory): No, she doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t know anyone. Mostly she’s like a vegetable almost, you know. She can’t talk. She can’t do anything for herself. She’s on that feeding tube. That’s the only thing keeping her alive.

ROLLIN: Dr. Doug Nelson oversees the care of many Alzheimer’s patients and is greatly troubled by what he sees as the aggressive use of feeding tubes and other measures to keep end-stage Alzheimer’s patients alive.

Dr. DOUG NELSON (Geriatrician, Hickory, NC): You go back to the Bible: Do unto others as you would have done unto you. I would never want somebody to do this to me, because when you look at the patient, they are sitting there. They’re crumpled. They develop bed sores. They get contractures. They can’t move their arms or legs. Their muscles just freeze up, and they are simply laying there existing, waiting for something else to happen that would finally kill them.

In a typical patient with Alzheimer’s, they gradually get worse and worse, and then at some point they stop eating. One of two things happens at that point. Either one, we keep the person comfortable. We continue to try to offer them food or water, or both and they eventually just peacefully pass away. Or sometimes what happens is the family insists on a feeding tube, and we’re forced to put a feeding tube in there, and then they will lay there for months or years.

ROLLIN (to Mr. Davis): If you had to make the decision again, would you have the tube put in?

Mr. DAVIS: Yeah.

ROLLIN: You would?

Dr. Doug Nelson

Mr. DAVIS: Sure.

ROLLIN (to Mr. Davis): Because…? Just to keep her living?

Mr. DAVIS: That’s right. If you believe in God, a miracle might happen. But I just don’t think it’s right, you know, to choose whether a person lives or dies.

Dr. NELSON (with his patient Yula): How are you doing, girl?

ROLLIN: Many family members decide on the feeding tube because they think the alternative is starvation. But Dr. Nelson says that’s not how it is.

Dr. NELSON: The patient will die, but they will die of dehydration, not starvation. When you think about it, that’s how God designed most of us to die. We get some kind of disease. We stop eating and drinking. It’s the lack of water will kill us within a couple of weeks, not the lack of calories.

ROLLIN (to Dr. Nelson): How painful is that?

Dr. NELSON: It is not painful at all.

ROLLIN (to Dr. Nelson): Why, then, do family members choose a feeding tube?

Dr. NELSON: It’s always out of guilt, and we are the only Western country that I know of where it operates like that.

ROLLIN (to Dr. Nelson): Guilt of what sort?

Dr. NELSON: That they’re not doing everything that they could for their loved one.

ROLLIN: Sharon Newell’s mother Barbara Kinley has suffered a series of strokes as well as dementia. After the feeding tube was inserted she got pneumonia, a common complication of the tube.

Sharon Newell

SHARON NEWELL (Daughter of Barbara Kinley): She was in intensive care for 28 days; on a ventilator for 14, and at that point the doctors and nurses and even other family members were like, “You need to turn it off and let her go,” etc., etc. That is just not — wasn’t an option. We are a religious family. My belief is in God and that we are all in his hands.

ROLLIN: Sharon has also seen to it that her mother has what is called “full code,” which means that everything medically possible should be done to keep her alive.

Ms. NEWELL: She would never, ever give up on one of us, regardless, and there’s just no way we could ever give up on her and not give her every benefit she deserves.

ROLLIN: Because her mother is on Medicaid, as most of these patients are, Sharon does not pay for these benefits. The average cost of a semi-private room in a nursing home is more than $72,000 a year plus the cost of whatever medical interventions are used. The insertion of a feeding tube is only a few thousand dollars, but the main cost is the result of the feeding tube which can prolong a patient’s life sometimes for years. Dr. Nelson is one of the few doctors who tries to convince families how bad a decision feeding tubes can be. But doctors are not paid to do that.

Dr. NELSON: And so from a money issue, most doctors that do nursing home work find it hard to take the time out to do it for free and talk with the families. So if the families say, “I want a feeding tube,” many times it’s a knee-jerk reaction: “OK, fine. We’ll do a feeding tube.”

ROLLIN: And not to comply with the families’ wishes is to risk being sued.

Dr. NELSON: If the family says, “I want a feeding tube in,” you have to put one in. All our malpractice insurance companies tell us if they do that, you put it in because if you don’t, patient dies, you go to court, you’ll lose in court.

ROLLIN: What bothers Dr. Nelson most of all about this situation is his conscience.

Nicole Lewis

Dr. NELSON: I question myself: “Am I sinning by continuing to have this feeding tube?” When you look at the chart, the doctor’s name that signs the order for the feeding tube is Doug Nelson. And I always wonder what will happen when I get to heaven and I’m confronted by God: “Why did you keep signing your name to that if you thought it was wrong?”

NICOLE LEWIS (RN): I’m just listening to your chest this morning.

ROLLIN: Nicole Lewis is a nurse who works with Dr. Nelson.

Ms. LEWIS: Once a tube feeding is put in, the decision’s much, much harder for a family member, say complications do arise, to make that decision to take it back out, and a lot of times that is what happens. Whereas if the decision may have been even thought through a little bit more, they had been educated a little more about what kind of complications could arise, they may not have made the decision to put the tube feeding in to begin with.

Ms. LEWIS: We will be back in a little while. OK?

ROLLIN: One way to fix this situation is for Alzheimer’s patients to have both a living will and a health care power of attorney, which protects you from treatment at the end of life you may not want.

Mr. DAVIS (talking to Ms. Gregory): Wake up. Look at me. Wake up! It’s Bobby talking to you. Wake up!

ROLLIN: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Gastonia, North Carolina.

ABERNETHY: The ethical arguments also surround removing a feeding tube once it’s in.  The Vatican, among others, says removal is immoral.