A senior researcher at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons stand our for their knowledge of world religions other than Christianity, while Mormons and evangelical Protestants do best on questions about the Bible and Christianity. Interview by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly associate producer for news Julie Mashack. Edited by Fabio Lomelino.
Click here to take Pew’s religious knowledge quiz.
Novelist Allegra Goodman say entering into the minds of religious people is “a very rich place to be as a writer.” Her new book is called “The Cookbook Collector,” and we spoke with her on September 25, 2010 at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC about writer Chaim Potok, religious poet John Donne, and Jewish characters in her earlier novel “Kaaterskill Falls.” Edited by Fabio Lomelino
SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: The Mississippi Delta—it’s a place associated with cotton fields, peaceful bayous, and faded communities where blues music was born. However, the Delta is also home to some of the poorest and most medically vulnerable people in the country, like these seasonal cotton pickers who work 12-hour days but get no health insurance. When people in this part of Mississippi get sick or injured, often the only place that will help them is a small, no-frills health care clinic in the Delta town of Tutwiler.
DR. ANNE BROOKS (speaking with patient): This is probably going to feel cold, so get ready. Big breath, all the way down…
GONZALEZ: Its director is Dr. Anne Brooks, a physician and Catholic nun who has spent nearly 30 years healing and helping the Delta’s poor.
BROOKS: We do what we can with what have. There’s a saying of George Washington Carver that I’ve always loved: “Start where you are with what you have, make something of it, and never be satisfied.” And we are not satisfied.
GONZALEZ: Dr. Brooks, a Florida transplant, came to the Delta in 1983 when many in the area still lived in sharecroppers’ shacks. When she reopened this then-shuttered clinic, it still retained segregation-era waiting rooms—one for whites, the other for blacks.
BROOKS (speaking with patient): Maybe the circulation to your heart isn’t as good as it ought to be.
GONZALEZ: In the decades since, Dr. Brooks has put down deep roots in the Delta—an area, like the rest of Mississippi, with some of the highest levels of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity in the nation.
BROOKS: I feel like I belong here, and I feel like these are my family, and when you have family folks, you love them and you take care of them, and that keeps me here.
GONZALEZ: A feeling of responsibility?
BROOKS: No, a feeling of love.
GONZALEZ: One challenge Dr. Brooks and her small staff face is treating people who have no private or public insurance. With about one-in-five people in the state without coverage, Mississippi has one of the highest levels of uninsured in the country.
VERONICA PHILLIPS (patient): You can come here when you don’t have insurance, and they’ll see you. They never turn you down.
GONZALEZ: Veronica Phillips is here today because of a lump in her breast.
PHILLIPS: My kids they have Medicaid but I wasn’t able to get it because I was working at the time that I applied for it. They said I made too much money and I was only making $600 a month at McDonald’s.
GONZALEZ: That’s what you were making?
PHILLIPS: Yes, and they told me that I made too much money.
GAIL HERREN: Without them I don’t know what we would do. I don’t know.
GONZALEZ: Without this clinic?
JOHN HERREN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: John and Gail Herren are visiting the clinic to check on John’s skin cancer. They lost their insurance when John lost his job in 2003.
GAIL HERREN: It scares you. It scares you to death. You don’t know what to do, where to turn. You live and die, you don’t have health care, it’s either you die or you live, and you’ve got to figure out how to go about it. You don’t know.
BROOKS (speaking to patient): I don’t think you broke anything. I think what you’ve done is rip up the ligament.
GONZALEZ: In order to keep her clinic afloat, Dr. Brooks often gets by on private donations and whatever small amounts of cash patients can afford to pay.
BROOKS: Seventy percent have no way of paying for their care. Sometimes we can figure out a way they can give us 10 bucks, 20 bucks maybe. But they don’t have income. They are not working because they hurt, or they are sick, or whatever.
GONZALEZ: As she heals bodies as a physician, though, Dr. Brooks also says she never forgets her responsibilities as a nun and that she’s also here to provide a measure of spiritual care.
BROOKS: You know, the patients that I have are very prayerful people. I’m listening to somebody’s lungs. I am listening to the breath of life. So I pray for my brother or my sister while I’m listening to their lungs. They don’t know it. Sometimes they need to know it. Sometimes I’ll tell them, especially if there’s trouble in the family or trouble in their heart. It’s just something that I do personally.
GONZALEZ: And what does that do for you?
BROOKS: Well, they are my brothers and my sisters, so it does a lot for me.
GONZALEZ: However, Dr. Brooks says that despite her prayers and best efforts she often can’t provide the kind of care her patients need.
BROOKS: If I have tried here, here, here, here and here and I’ve come up zip, then there isn’t anything else I can do, and that’s very disturbing, very disturbing.
GONZALEZ: And that happens.
BROOKS: Sometimes the patient dies. Sometimes the patient’s life is shortened. We do what we can, and when we can’t we keep trying.
GONZALEZ: You might think that Mississippi, the poorest state with some of the worst health care statistics in the country, would be a champion of national health care reform like that passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. But you’d be wrong. There are many people here in the Magnolia State who think that particular cure is a lot worse than the disease. Chief among them is Mississippi Republican Governor Haley Barbour. He argues health reform will put a burden on small businesses.
GOVERNOR HALEY BARBOUR (speaking with reporters): For many, many small businesses in America, the tax put on them by the government under the Obamacare bill for not having health insurance will be more money than they’ve ever made.
GONZALEZ: Governor Barbour also believes health reform violates the Constitution because it will require Americans to obtain health coverage. The governor has joined a lawsuit of Republican attorneys general seeking to declare the law unconstitutional. There are also concerns in Mississippi over the increased numbers of people, like those at Dr. Brooks’s clinic, who will qualify for Medicaid because of health care reform. Medicaid is the government insurance program for low-income individuals, whose cost is shared by both federal and state governments.
RICHARD ROBERSON (Mississippi Division of Medicaid): We’re anticipating an increase in the neighborhood of, a potential increase in the neighborhood of 400,000 beneficiaries. We’ve got about 625,000 beneficiaries now. But it will be a significant challenge for our state and I suspect for many other states too to fund the expansion of Medicaid.
GONZALEZ: Richard Roberson is an official with Mississippi’s Medicaid office. Although the federal government will pick up most of the tab for expanding Medicaid, Roberson says the cost to Mississippi’s taxpayers will still be enormous.
ROBERSON: We’re estimating through 2020 is about $1.6-$1.7 billion coming from the state.
GONZALEZ: And can Mississippi handle that?
ROBERSON: That’s going to be the challenge.
GONZALEZ: Mississippi’s leaders say they prefer tort reform and cutting waste in Medicaid as a way to bring health care to more people.
ROY MITCHELL (Mississippi Health Advocacy Program): Mississippi is essentially a benchmark for health care reform.
GONZALEZ: Critics of Governor Barbour, such as Roy Mitchell of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, fear Mississippi’s Republican leadership will try to sabotage the implementation of health care reform through foot-dragging and backpedaling.
MITCHELL: What we should be doing is working to implement programs that expand coverage rather than being on the defense all the time. I think you could say that health care reform is not successful in this whole nation if it’s not successful in Mississippi.
GONZALEZ: Why?
MITCHELL: Well, if you can’t implement health care reform in Mississippi what have you accomplished, when the need is so great in Mississippi?
GONZALEZ: Back in Tutwiler, people like the Herrens say they don’t follow the national debate over health care, but they do insist some kind of change is necessary.
JOHN HERREN: This is America. You know, we should have some type of medical coverage, some type, regardless of if you work or not.
GAIL HERREN: Some kind of—not total, but partial, anything to help you. You never know. One day you got a job, you’re doing good, you’re okay. Next day you’re out of a job and you don’t have insurance. You get sick, and there you are.
GONZALEZ: As for Dr. Brooks, she says that when it comes to the political fight over health care reform, she’s simply too busy tending to the people of the Delta to take part.
BROOKS: Other people can make words and can make noises. I’ve got other things to do. They don’t include being political. I can’t take care of it. I can ignore it. I can keep on truckin’.
GONZALEZ: You do what’s immediately before you, the job that’s to be done here.
BROOKS: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And that’s enough. That’s enough for a lifetime.
BROOKS: That’s right. More than a lifetime. More than several lifetimes.
(speaking to patient): I think you’re doing real good.
GONZALEZ: The people of the Delta who have become Dr. Brooks’s extended family over the decades are grateful for her dedication.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
If you are a patient who is poor, says this doctor-nun, “sometimes in this society you’re taught not to care about yourself…You’re denigrated. You’re just not an important person.”
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Joni Eareckson Tada is a woman of many talents. She’s a bestselling author, an acclaimed artist, and an internationally known advocate for people with disabilities. Paralyzed for more than 40 years, Tada is one of the longest living quadriplegics on record. She endures chronic pain, and just a few months ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Tada says it’s her faith that keeps her going.
JONI EARECKSON TADA: Boy, when Jesus said in this world you will have trouble, he wasn’t kidding. In this world there will be trouble. Perhaps the gift of this cancer and pain and quadriplegia is that it forces me to recognize my desperate, desperate need of God, and that is a good thing.
LAWTON: Tada was an active, athletic teenager. Then, at the age of 17, she broke her neck in a diving accident in the Chesapeake Bay. Her spinal chord was severed, and she became paralyzed from the shoulders down. She has limited arm motion but can’t use her hands or her legs. Immediately after the accident, she was angry and depressed and begged friends to help her commit suicide. Ultimately, she says she found peace when she committed her life to God.
EARECKSON TADA: God is that big, and he’s that good, and his grace is that sufficient.
LAWTON: Tada wanted to help others with disabilities and in 1979 began a ministry called Joni and Friends, offering support to disabled people and their families.
EARECKSON TADA: Disabilities are on the rise. Autism, Alzheimer’s—there’s not a cul-de-sac in America that’s not impacted somehow with a family who has a child or an elderly parent with a disability.
LAWTON: Because of her efforts, Tada was appointed to the National Council on Disability. She worked for passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, which sought to make America more accessible. But she feels more is still needed.
EARECKSON TADA: You can provide for the curb cuts, provide for the elevators and the ramps and the Braille and the TTY machines, but it’s going to require a change of heart in our society.
LAWTON: Joni and Friends provides resources to help local churches reach out to people with special needs and their families. The goal is to help disabled people find dignity and purpose in their lives. The ministry holds family retreats around the country and has begun special sessions called “Wounded Warrior Getaways” for armed service members injured in combat and their families.
Joni’s husband, Ken, knows all too well the toll disabilities can take on a family. He and Joni married in 1982 and have become mentors for other couples living with disabilities. Now retired from teaching school, Ken helps Joni with the international component of their ministry, called Wheels for the World, which provides wheelchairs and walkers to disabled people in poor countries.
KEN TADA: To give the gift of mobility to someone who has never walked before and to watch how it not only changes that person’s life, but the whole family—that’s been huge.
LAWTON: In one ministry project, prisoners at a California penitentiary make special pediatric wheelchairs that Joni and Friends distribute around the world.
Tada herself has become a living testimony that a disability doesn’t have to be, in her words, “the end of the world.” She has told her personal story countless times in speaking engagements and through the more than 35 books that she has written, including her newest one, A Place of Healing. Her autobiography called Joni has been translated into more than 20 languages, and in 1980 Billy Graham’s Worldwide Pictures turned it into a feature film.
Despite the wheelchair—in fact, because of it—Tada has been all over the world, and she’s learned how to compensate for the paralysis. Tada taught herself how to draw and paint using her mouth. Music and art, she says, give her a vibrant creative and spiritual outlet.
EARECKSON TADA: Yeah, I do many things—mostly family retreats, working at Joni and Friends for others, but boy, my artwork and my music is something that comforts my own soul, that encourages my own soul. That’s a blessing. Since I’m dealing with more pain I work more now with pencil rather than brushes. Brushes are just a little too heavy. Pencils are lighter.
LAWTON: Tada is open about her struggles. Just getting out of bed in the morning is a two-hour ordeal. A series of friends come in and help get her ready for the day.
EARECKSON TADA: And there are many days, honestly, when I can hear my girlfriends come into the front door, and they’re running water for coffee in the kitchen. I know they’re going to be in my bedroom in a few minutes with a happy hello, and I just don’t have the strength to welcome them, and so while they’re still in the kitchen I’m praying oh, God, I have no strength for this day, but you do.
LAWTON: Tada talks often about the reality of suffering—a difficult message in what she calls America’s culture of comfort.
EARECKSON TADA: We want to erase suffering out of the dictionary. We want to eradicate it, avoid it, give it ibuprofen, institutionalize is, divorce it, surgically exorcise it, do anything but live with it.
LAWTON: Even after all these years in the wheelchair, she says some fellow evangelicals still tell her if she had more faith God would heal her.
EARECKSON TADA: But sometimes healing doesn’t come, and you’ve got to live with it, and when you do you really do learn who you are. God uses suffering. He lobs it like a hand grenade and blows to smithereens these notions we have about our self and who we think we are. Blows it to smithereens until we are left raw, naked, and we have to let suffering do its work.
LAWTON: These days it seems like there is a lot of that work. After breast cancer surgery, Tada is undergoing chemotherapy, which has siphoned off much of her trademark vitality.
EARECKSON TADA: It is very hard to go on. I mean privately I’ve wondered, gee, Lord, is this cancer my ticket to heaven? Because I sure am tired of sitting in a wheelchair, and my body is aching, and I’m so weary. Could this be my ticket to heaven?
LAWTON: Her motivation for persevering, she says, is all the people she’s able to help.
EARECKSON TADA: I need a reason to get up in the morning, and my big reason is to help other families like mine, other people with disabilities, other special needs moms and dads, to encourage them and strengthen them, to help them want to face life head on.
LAWTON: She says she won’t allow herself to spiral into doubt and despair.
EARECKSON TADA: I’m not going to go there. I’m not going to go there. I went down that dark, grim path when I was a teenager and first broke my neck and wanted my girlfriends to bring in razors to slit my wrists or their mother’s sleeping pills or whatever. I’m not going to go down that path again. It’s too horrible.
LAWTON: Ken Tada says it’s been hard watching his best friend go through so much.
TADA: I’ve often had several guy friends of mine who I’ve said, you know, if I ever go to war I’d want those guys in my foxhole. The first person I’d want in my foxhole is my wife.
LAWTON: He says the cancer has brought them closer to each other and to God.
EARECKSON TADA (singing): “I surrender all, I surrender all.”
TADA: Yeah, we’re depressed. If we didn’t have God to turn to, I don’t know. I mean, I certainly understand some of the other alternatives, but boy, I tell you, you know, you just kind of grab on with both hands and just hold on as tight as you can, because that’s the only hope.
LAWTON: I asked her a question she’s been asked over and over again: How can you just keep believing in a God that would let all that happen?
EARECKSON TADA: I pray a lot, and I sing a lot. I sing because I have to sing. There’s something good about talking to yourself, reminding yourself of things you believed in the light but you’re so quick to doubt in the darkness. And I’ve seen too much of the light to not choose the Lord.
LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Agoura Hills, California.
Singing, drawing, and painting are unique forms of self-expression for this evangelical speaker and writer and also a means of encouraging others with disabilities.
View a picture gallery of 21st-century sukkahs that explore themes of Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles, such as shelter, hunger, sustenance, hospitality, and the temporary nature of all that surrounds us. Photographs by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly associate producer Noelle Serper.
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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Another historic event for Pope Benedict XVI this week— his four-day trip (September 16-19) to the United Kingdom, the first official state visit there by any pope. King Henry VIII broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church almost 500 years ago. As Kim Lawton reports, Benedict’s trip has not been without controversy.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Pope Benedict went to the UK at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II, who is also the official head of the Church of England. The only other pope to visit Britain was John Paul II, who made what was billed a pastoral pilgrimage in 1982. John Paul was greeted with an outpouring of affection, but Benedict has faced tensions and even outright protest. One major issue is outrage over the clergy sex abuse crisis still swirling across many parts of Europe.
At the beginning of the trip, Benedict admitted the church was “not sufficiently vigilant, quick and decisive to take the necessary measures” to combat the crisis. Another difficult issue is relations between Roman Catholics and the Anglican Communion, whose spiritual head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is based in Britain. Last October, the Vatican made it easier for disaffected Anglicans to become Catholics. A highlight of Benedict’s trip is the beatification of the nineteenth-century scholar and writer Cardinal John Henry Newman, a convert from Anglicanism.
But perhaps the biggest challenge has been making the case for faith in a nation known for its growing secularism. Throughout the trip, Benedict called for a return to the traditional values and cultural expressions of Christianity.
ABERNETHY: And Kim, this trip to Britain is part of the pope’s overall effort to try to roll back the trend of secularism all over Europe—no easy task.
LAWTON: It’s a big task and one that he’s very concerned about—he has been throughout his papacy. He just created a new department in the Vatican to focus on doing that, and in many ways Britain was a real test case or a real case study about this growing secularism. There was some new polling released with the visit that showed that 60 percent of British people say they never go to church. Forty-two percent say they don’t belong to any religion, and almost 20 percent said they’re sure there is no God. So that was a big task for him, to try to make a case that Christianity and faith are good for society. Now his message that he wanted to transmit faced a lot of challenges, one of which was the sex abuse crisis, and a lot of people were saying maybe his moral authority to make the case for religion being a cause for good was in some way compromised by the sex abuse scandal.
ABERNETHY: And also there’s some fence-mending with the Anglican Communion, isn’t there?
LAWTON: Well, practically since the time of Henry VIII there’s been talk of trying to get Anglicans and Catholics, these two big bodies of Christians, back together, and there are a lot of big issues, and the turmoil within the Anglican Communion over issues like homosexuality has only generated more tension, and so that remains a very big issue for those two Christian groups.
ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks.
BOB ABERNETHY, host: In Jerusalem, with Secretary of State Clinton on hand, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders continued talks aimed at Middle East peace. One of the toughest and most immediate issues is Israeli settlements on land in the West Bank the Palestinians insist is theirs. On September 26, Israel’s self-imposed moratorium on more settlement construction expires, and no one knows whether Israel will then start building again, and if it does whether the Palestinians will walk out of the talks. Fred de Sam Lazaro visited the dry and windy West Bank.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Gilad Freund has spent much of his adult life here as a farmer, an occupation not commonly associated with his roots in New York City. But as a Jew, Freund says he has his own concept of roots and geography.
GILAD FREUND: I was brought up to believe that the Jewish people have a historical strong connection with the land of Israel, and even though there’s a good life in America I felt that it was an important step for me to come here.
DE SAM LAZARO: Freund arrived 30 years ago and settled in the village of Tekoa, about 30 miles from Jerusalem, a place that dates back to biblical times.
FREUND: Tekoa is the home of the prophet Amos. He was a real farmer, and in the Book of Amos he prophesizes that the people of Israel will come back to the land and that they will settle on the land, and they will plant gardens and grow fruit trees, and he used these biblical agricultural analogies in his prophesy.
DE SAM LAZARO: Gilad Freund embodies not just that prophesy but also the Zionist vision of a Jewish state that led to the formation of modern-day Israel. Freund is among at least 300,000 Israelis who have settled on the West Bank, land captured by Israel in the 1967 War. They are drawn by religious conviction or often bu just the affordable subsidized housing. The settlements have long been a sticking point in peace negotiations. They’ve angered not just Palestinians but also settlers themselves when Israel has agreed to dismantle some of them, like those in Gaza in 2005. The Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank are areas of Palestinian self-rule. In a two-state solution they would roughly form the state of Palestine. But for many Arabs living here, the concerns are more immediate and day-to-day. In this sparse village outside the city of Hebron, residents complained about the lack of proper roads, electricity, and water. And things have gotten a lot worse, they say, as they became surrounded by Israeli settlements.
PALESTINIAN WOMAN (speaking through translator): Before settlements, the range for our animals was very large. There used to be a lot of grazing land, a lot of water. Now, because of the settlements, we are restricted from grazing, and we cannot access the cisterns.
DE SAM LAZARO: These village women complained of raids by Israeli security forces, who they say accuse them of harboring illegal Palestinian migrant laborers or terrorists on their way to Israel.
MOUSSA ABD RAHMAN (Palestinian farmer, speaking through translator): They try to intimidate us. They come at night, make trouble for our young people. They don’t have title to this land. They don’t have the right to take our land and prevent us from having access to any part of this area.
DE SAM LAZARO: Across the rural West Bank, complaints were common about intimidation and vandalism. The settlers’ response was difficult to get. Settlers are reticent, suspicious of outsiders, and they’ve long complained of a perpetual terrorist threat. What is not in question is the stark gap in the standard of living between Palestinians and settlers, a gap vividly evident in the fields. Israeli farmers enjoy water at subsidized rates. Palestinians farmers do not.
NADER AL-KHATEEB: If you look around us, we will see that the Palestinian land is totally bare now. There is no farming here because there is no water. And also this has been very much affected by the Israeli control of the water. And next to us here we can see a big farm owned by one Israeli settler who is taking the water from a well, while the Palestinians have no access or right to dig any new well to tap the groundwater.
DE SAM LAZARO: Nader al-Khateeb and Gidon Bromberg belong to Friends of the Earth Middle East, an environmental group with Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian members.
GIDON BROMBERG: Shared water resources are not being shared fairly. That’s critical to the peace process. That’s critical as an issue that creates animosity between Palestinians and Israelis, and we believe that this is not fair, this is not just, this is not sustainable.
DE SAM LAZARO: Even as they criticize what they call discriminatory Israeli policies, both men agree the Palestinians also suffer from internal problems—corruption, mismanagement, and a bloody leadership struggle that has divided the Palestinian territories. On the other hand, settlements have been largely well served with roads, water, and security under successive Israeli governments—whether left-leaning or right, whether the communities were officially sanctioned or built without government approval by private or religious organizations. One of the settlers’ strongest allies is Israel’s minister of infrastructure. He’s with the nationalist 
Yisrael Beitenu Party, a coalition partner in the government, though his views sound far more strident than official government pronouncements. Uzi Landau refers to the West Bank by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria, and says it’s an integral part of the Jewish homeland.
(speaking to Uzi Landau): You’ve been quoted as calling Arabs the occupiers. Is that an accurate quote, and what did you mean?
UZI LANDAU: It is an absolutely accurate description. They are modern crusaders. This land has been always our land. This land—so many occupiers. Jews were driven out, many of them, during the Roman period. They saw the Iranians, the Farsi, they saw the Ottomans, they saw the Arabs, they saw the British, the Marmlukes, you name it. Every occupier replaced the one and was replaced by the occupier that came after him. The Arabs are one of the occupiers. They are living over there. They have and should have all the rights as a minority has in every democratic country. But we claim that this is our land, definitely.
MOUSSA ABD RAHMAN (speaking through translator): We insist that we will stay on this land, even if it means we will die here.
DE SAM LAZARO: Palestinian farmers we talked to have their own historical starting line.
KAMAR MOUA RABA (Palestinian farmer speaking through translator): First, there were Arabs here before the Jews, so we could use the same argument to say that previous generations of our people were here before you. This is not a solution, because we are all sons of Abraham, them and us. We must appreciate each other because we are cousins.
DE SAM LAZARO: Settler-farmer Gilad Freund says he’s grown used to living with the seemingly intractable, often tense dispute over land. But all historic grievances take time to address, he says. Just look at the US and civil rights.
GILAD FREUND: Once segregation ended, it was not overnight that things changes, and there’s still a lot of problems today. There’s ghettos, there’s unemployment, there’s a lot of problems today that still have not been solved, so processes take time. Americans like to think that there are overnight solutions—overnight solutions in Iraq, overnight solutions in Afghanistan. In the Middle East there are no overnight solutions.
DE SAM LAZARO: Whether the new peace talks continue seems to depend on some compromise within the family of Abraham—whether Israel will build settlements after September 26, and if they do whether the Palestinians will keep negotiating.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.
