Author Archives: Fred Yi

Wilderness Spirituality

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Originally broadcast December 11, 2009

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a segment today on going into the wilderness to experience the presence of God. John Lionberger is a former atheist who had a profound religious experience on a wilderness trip. Now an ordained United Church of Christ minister, Lionberger leads others looking for their own experience of the holy. Lionberger is the author of “Renewal in the Wilderness.” He lives in Evanston, Illinois. Earlier this fall, I asked him what happens to the people he takes to the wilderness.

Rev. JOHN LIONBERGER (Author, “Renewal in the Wilderness”): What they encounter in the wilderness is getting away from all of the things in society that we call “trappings” that are meant to be good things, but that keep them away from a more authentic and deeper relationship with God.

ABERNETHY: Lionberger’s trips begin with his coaching.

post01LIONBERGER: I think what happens for them is they get to the transcendent through the physical—the act of canoeing, the act of setting up camp. I like to say it strips them of the barnacles that they accrue throughout their lives and society, and they begin to realize how little they need to be profoundly happy. They are able to simplify, and in that simplification they get a sense of something holy about what surrounds them, a sense of well being and a sense of being cared for and a sense of profound peace, and it’s kind of a hackneyed phrase—“Be in the moment”—but there is something so powerful about it, because that is the moment, in the very present is when God comes to us. It is much easier, I think, for God to get through our defenses when we’re in a wilderness.

ABERNETHY: I asked Lionberger to recall the conversion experience he had when he was alone on skis on a frozen lake in winter.

LIONBERGER: It was getting dark, and the trees were etched against the skyline in kind of blackness while the skyline was turning purple. I just looked up at the sky and put my arms out like this, with the poles dangling from my wrists, and arched my back, and at that moment I felt like I was in the midst of a warm stream of water that felt so pure and so refreshing and so cleansing and so friendly and so loving, and then it kept coming into my mind, slowly at first, and very dimly at first, but it said, “It’s God.”

Sometimes there are those wonderful explosive moments of experiencing God, but most of the time it’s very, very subtle. It’s just the small things that people ignore that being out in an environment like that brings them to an awareness of. It reminds us of who we are, who we are not, and who God is.

ABERNETHY: Back home, Lionberger tries to recapture some of the wilderness experience in a park near his house, and he says all people can do that.

LIONBERGER: I suggest to them that they have an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, and they do it very consciously. It is part of being here now. It’s part of what the wilderness teaches you.

ABERNETHY: I asked Lionberger whether some people come on his trips and have no sense of anything holy.

LIONBERGER: In the eight years I’ve been doing this, and maybe the 400 people that I’ve taken to the wilderness, I only know of one man who was not really touched by his experience in some way, who said at the end, “I had a good time, but I got no spiritual insight, no spiritual awakenings, nothing like that.” And that is not a bad batting average, one out of 400. I’ll take that.

Thomas Farr: Religious Freedom and Obama’s Cairo Speech

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Thomas Farr, associate professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University and former director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, assesses the progress that’s been made in advancing religious freedom one year after President Obama’s Cairo speech to the Muslim world.

 

Farah Pandith: “Everything Has Changed”

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It’s been one year since President Obama gave his landmark speech in Cairo promising an improved relationship between the US and the Muslim world. During a conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy on April 28, 2010, Farah Pandith, the US State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, spoke about what has changed and what remains to be done. Watch excerpts of her speech.

 

Tariq Ramadan: Muslims and the West

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In 2004, the Bush administration barred prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States, accusing him of giving money to a charity that funds terrorists. For the last six years, Ramadan has been fighting the ban, saying the charity was not on any terrorist watch lists at the time and he was unaware of any ties to terrorists. The Obama administration lifted the restrictions against Ramadan in January, and last week he made his first visit to the US since the ban was reversed. Watch excerpts from his April 12 address at Georgetown University and his conversation with journalists, including Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton. Ramadan discusses fear of the religious “other” and the need for policies that foster a better understanding of Islam, US relations with the Islamic world in the wake of President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, and the new visibility of Islam in the West and current debates in Europe over whether to ban the burqa, the niqab, and other Islamic garments.

Stanley Carlson-Thies Extended Interview

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The fight is not over whether faith groups are subject to the law, says the president of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, “because they are subject to whatever the law is, which in many cases makes this exception for them. The question is should this exception be allowed to continue?”

Barry Lynn Extended Interview

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“I don’t see any special right in the Constitution or elsewhere that allows a church to take money and discriminate,” says the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

 

Apology and Remembrance

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The Faith & Politics Institute and the National Congress of American Indians, along with representatives of six Native American nations, held a two-day event at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC May 18-19 to honor ancestors buried there and to apologize on behalf of the federal government for past wrongdoing. Volunteers cleaned and restored some of the 36 graves of Native Americans, many of whom died in the capital while representing their people’s claims before the government. A joint congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Peoples of the United States, signed last year by President Obama, was read and groups toured the cemetery grounds as tribal representatives recounted the lives of their forebears. Produced by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly production assistant and researcher Fabio Lomelino.

 

Juvenile Sentencing Decision

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The US Supreme Court ruled this past week that juvenile offenders—those under 18 when their crime was committed—may no longer be sentenced to life in prison without parole except when the crime was murder. For more than a year, since before the case went to the High Court, Tim O’Brien has been reporting the story.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Kenneth Young, now 24, is serving a life sentence in Florida for a series of hotel robberies in the Tampa area in June of 2000. He had just turned 15 and was acting at the direction of an older accomplice—a crack dealer to whom his mother owed money.

KENNETH YOUNG (Inmate, Florida Dept. of Corrections): He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

post01-juveniles-statesYOUNG: Kill her.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along.

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Although Young never held the gun, he was still sentenced to four consecutive life terms. Florida had abolished all parole five years earlier, which meant Young, notwithstanding his youth and the fact that he never physically hurt anyone, would spend the rest of his life in prison.

This week, the US Supreme Court found that to be, in principle, unconstitutional—a violation of the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The categorical rejection is welcome news for about 130 youthful offenders who, like Kenneth Young, had been serving life without parole for crimes in which no one died. It is also a stunning victory for Young’s attorney, Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino had been crusading in state legislatures for years to allow parole for all juvenile offenders, no matter how serious their crimes.

PROFESSOR PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University College of Law): Oh absolutely. 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?

O’BRIEN: In its decision, the Court relied heavily on research by Annino showing that while 37 states allow sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole for non-homicides, such sentences in reality are quite rare. Justice Anthony Kennedy, for a five-judge majority, went even further, writing the practice “has been rejected the world over…the United States is the only nation that imposes [it.]” The Court also heard from a coalition of twenty religious groups who wrote that life without parole for juvenile offenders is contrary to the central values of their faiths—“mercy, compassion and forgiveness.” The Court’s decision does not guarantee that Kenneth Young—or any other juvenile offenders—will ever be released. But it does guarantee they now are at least entitled to a chance.

For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.