Author Archives: Fred Yi

Baseball and Religion

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Read an excerpt from BASEBALL AS A ROAD TO GOD: SEEING BEYOND THE GAME by John Sexton

BOB FAW, correspondent: New York University president John Sexton oversees more than 40 thousand students and a $2.5 billion budget. He’s expanding the university at home and abroad while contending with some faculty members who oppose his high-powered management style.

JOHN SEXTON (President, NYU): (speaking to students) We’re going to do just a little bit of a wrap up.

FAW: And yet, like few university presidents, Sexton also finds time to teach four classes. He is famous for greeting his students and anyone else, for that matter, with a hearty hug, and demanding nothing less than their absolute best.

SEXTON: (speaking to students) Eugene O’Neill famously said he who stops at mere success and does not press on to glorious failure is a spiritual middle-classer. I don’t want you stopping at the easy. None of you.

FAW: Now the former law school dean and distinguished legal scholar has written a most unusual book: “Baseball as a Road to God.” That’s right, baseball.

SEXTON: The similarities between baseball and religion abound. The ballpark as cathedral; saints and sinners; the curses and blessings. But then what I’m arguing is beyond that surface level, there’s a fundamental similarity between baseball and religion which goes to the capacity of baseball to cause human beings, in a context they don’t think of as religious, to break the plane of ordinary existence into the plane of extraordinary existence.

FAW: John Sexton says that what happens here is more than just a game—that it reveals a dimension beyond the eyes and mind letting us, in his words, “see through to another, sacred space”—what John Sexton calls “the ineffable.”

SEXTON: “Ineffable” is the word we use for things we can’t capture in our language. The ineffable is the character of this religious dimension, sometimes labeled God. We’re talking about this place where the depth of being is.

FAW: And baseball can be an avenue to that?

SEXTON: Baseball is an avenue to that in the sense that there is this dimension that we experience in baseball of that which can’t be put into words.

FAW: In baseball, as in religion, says Sexton, the seemingly impossible is part of the game:

In 1956, when hard-drinking journeyman pitcher Don Larsen went from sinner to saint by hurling the only perfect game in World Series history; when Willie Mays made that seemingly impossible catch and throw in the 1954 World Series; and in 1955, when Sexton’s beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, after decades of coming oh-so-close, won their first and only World Series with an extraordinary catch made by Sandy Amaros. Those moments in baseball, like religion, says John Sexton, give a glimpse of something beyond.

SEXTON: The beauty and the experience in the intensified heightened sensitivity of the moment that comes with the Amaros catch, that comes with the Mays catch and pivot. The ecstasy of those moments can for some transport one to this transcendent plane.

FAW: The excellence of Brooklyn Dodger great Jackie Robinson, now celebrated in a major motion picture “42,” sparked Sexton’s infatuation with baseball. Now he’s had Robinson’s number 42 sewn into his academic gown, and in his old office there’s one of Robinson’s original jerseys and a battered glove Jackie Robinson might have used, although true-believer Sexton isn’t about to check to see if Robinson actually did.

SEXTON: I chose to live in ignorance. This was the equivalent of saying, “Don’t tell me that the world’s not flat,” because I would rather… my stories, my feelings are much more comfortable in this world of heaven above, earth in the middle, flat as it is, and hell below.

FAW: You gotta believe?

SEXTON: Yeah, you gotta. There’s faith, and there’s ignorance, and in this case I chose ignorance.

FAW: Sexton says he chooses baseball over other sports because, like religion, it has its own sacred relics, prophets, and rituals. And like religion there is a kind of timelessness.

SEXTON: (reading from book) Baseball encourages, almost requires in its most meaningful moments, an appreciation of living slowly and in the moment—the kind of differentiated experience that separates the sacred in life from the profane. This experience is where religion begins.

FAW: It’s an insight, and an avenue to religion, which he imparts every week to a small class of undergraduates.

SEXTON (speaking to students): This is the essence of this religious experience, the phenomena that we are going to study.

FAW: Initially, some of the students, most of them juniors, were skeptical that baseball was the avenue to anything.

JAKE HANSEN (Student, NYU): To be completely honest, when I read the title of the course I thought, well, this sounds a little hokey, but, you know, I took one course with him. It was great. I’ll give this one a shot, but, you know, he really does make his argument well.

FAW: The students are personally approved by Sexton. They are assigned a long list of books and essays, some about religion, some about baseball.

SCOTT COHEN (Student, NYU): I feel I have a more open mind as to what religion can be. I no longer see it as something that needs a deity. It can be something that helps someone better themselves, something that gives them a reason to be moral or ethical.

HANSEN: He uses baseball as an example, but a point he’s been hitting again and again is that baseball is just one possible road to God. The fact that it’s not academic and not typically thought of as religious is what makes the point so effective, is that there is a way to find God and the ineffable, you know, the divine, in everyday life, and it can really be anything that takes you there.

FAW: What this devout Catholic is trying to do here is fuse lessons from the diamond to the underpinnings of faith.

SEXTON: The objective of the class was to get students to think about religion differently. So by using the study of religion and getting them to see it in the context of baseball caused them to go back to their thinking about religion in a different way, that maybe made it less dependent on dogma and more liturgical. Leading some of the students to the fact that they touched the transcendent plane in ways they hadn’t before, or at least understood it was possible to do it in unexpected places.

FAW: When he’s not running a major university, this is what John Sexton teaches: that this quintessential American game, just like Van Gogh or Beethoven, can sometimes give a glimpse of what matters most.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in New York.

BASEBALL AND THE INEFFABLE

Read an excerpt from John Sexton’s “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing beyond the Game” (Gotham Books, 2013):

At its best, a reflection upon one’s faith can reveal what Paul Tillich called “the ultimate concern,” that which motivates people day in and day out, perhaps leading to the complete emptying of self, as seen for example in a Buddhist monk.

bookexcerpt-baseball-sexton

Whatever its particular manifestation, faith is an affirmation of something that cannot be expressed, for it is rooted in another domain of knowledge, on that is beyond what is knowable in scientific terms. There is much that is known today, and even more that is unknown today but will be known (perhaps even hundreds of years from now). Faith—true faith—deals with neither the known nor the unknown but knowable. It deals with that which is unknowable in the scientific sense but which the believer knows with all of his or her being (the way, in a wonderful marriage, love is known). This is the domain of faith. Therein lies the most powerful connection to baseball, its rhythms and patterns, astonishing feats and mystical charm; it is not necessary to elevate baseball to the level of ultimate concern to notice that, for the true fan, there is sometimes a touching of the ineffable that displays the qualities of a religious experience in the profound space of faith.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” That thought was echoed by William James: “The divine presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience,” he wrote. “It is not a trance.”

And psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay, a Holocaust survivor, also tells us that faith can spur feelings of confidence and optimism. “As your faith is strengthened you will find that…things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.”

From “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing beyond the Game” by John Sexton (Gotham Books, 2013)

Religious Responses to Boston Bombing

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At Thursday’s interfaith service, local religious leaders prayed for the healing of their city in the wake of the attack.

CARDINAL SEAN O’MALLEY (Archdiocese of Boston): We must overcome the culture of death by promoting a culture of life, a profound respect for each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God. And we must cultivate a desire to give our lives in the service of others.

LAWTON: Within moments of the bombing, clergy and faith-based groups mobilized to do what they could to help. As victims of the bombing were brought to Tufts Medical Center, Interfaith Chaplain Mary Lou Von Euew was on site to offer counseling and prayer. She says one injured woman expressed what many were feeling.

CHAPLAIN MARY LOU VON EUEW (Tufts Medical Center): She said “the hardest thing about this is that some human beings can treat other human beings like this. I just don’t understand it.”

Chaplain Mary Lou Von Euew

LAWTON: Indeed, Von Euew says, after a tragedy like the bombing, clergy often hear age old questions about the nature of good and evil, suffering and the existence of a loving God.

VON EUEW: You know most of the time people deep down inside aren’t asking for an answer. They’re asking for you to fight and wrestle with the questions with them. We truly believe that God is with us when it happens, so we’re not suffering alone, that we have someone with us who loves us beyond all measure.

LAWTON: Rabbi Yitzhak Korff, Chaplain for the City of Boston, is helping to oversee counseling for first responders.

RABBI YITZHAK KORFF: It’s important that these people understand once they have fulfilled their duty to the citizens, the people they are serving and protecting and saving and making to feel safe and secure, they need to face any feelings that they might be having as well.

LAWTON: He says many of the victims and first responders are still in shock and will deal with theological questions later. Even then, he says, there will be little ultimate satisfaction.

Rabbi Yitzhak Korff

KORFF: The macro answer is, we don’t know God’s plan. I don’t know of anybody that God’s called and said, “Here’s the deal.” And so there’s an unknown. And prayer and meditation can help bring a sense of calm.

LAWTON: Muslims in Boston, and across the US, were quick to condemn the bombing. Imam William Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center says all the members of his mosque felt the attack.

IMAM SUHAIB WEBB (Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center): They felt very violated, and they felt the sacredness of the city was violated and that the trust of our populous was violated, so there was a sense of wanting this person to be caught and subjected to justice.

LAWTON: Webb helped organize the interfaith prayer service and urged his congregation to donate blood and find other ways to serve those who are suffering.

WEBB: Reminding people of God’s wisdom then also reminding that we are not allowed to use his wisdom to be placid or inactive. We have to go out and help and work and be positive and stay involved.

LAWTON: Some faith groups found unusual ways to offer help. Lutheran Church Charities dispatched its K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry.

Tim Hetzner

TIM HETZNER (Lutheran Church Charities): People many times, all ages, will talk to a dog before they will talk to a person.

LAWTON: The ministry took the specially-trained dogs to Boston hospitals to visit victims and their families, and set up a petting station at a local church. Ministry leaders had also taken the dogs to Newtown, Connecticut after the school shooting.

HETZNER: Whether it’s a bombing or a shooting or divorce or death, whatever happens in life, which life throws stuff at us, they bring the mercy and the compassion of Christ and comfort to people that need to work through whatever it is they’re facing.

LAWTON: Rabbi Korff says the bombing had a profound spiritual impact on the city.

KORFF: We rely on a sense of knowing if I do this then this is what’s going to happen. And so, that’s what gets upset, what upsets the balance in these critical incidents, and that’s what needs to be restored as quickly and as easily as possible.

LAWTON: He and other religious leaders urged the community to come together in grief and then move forward with a new sense of hope. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We want to talk now via Skype with Reverend Samuel Lloyd, the priest-in-charge at Trinity Episcopal Church, right in Copley Square in Boston, where the bombs went off. We are old friends. Sam, welcome. What can a pastor say to his people at a time like this, a terrible time like this, and what are people saying to you?

REV. SAMUEL LLOYD (Priest-in-Charge, Trinity Church): I think the pastor first needs to acknowledge what a trauma this has been and listen carefully to what people are saying and what I hear a lot is a sense of the fragility of people’s lives and their sense of how vulnerable they’ve been. And so what I have been doing and will continue to do as I’m with my community is to remind them of the core convictions of a power behind all of life that is sustaining us and our faith in a God who goes with us even in the toughest of times and promises always to bring healing beyond the crisis at hand.

ABERNETHY: What about the old questions of where was God in this and how could God have permitted so much suffering? Are you hearing that at all?

LLOYD: I’m not hearing it as much as I did after 9/11. It’s more people’s sense of fragility but when those questions come they always invite an explanation of the fact that we are people who’ve been given extraordinary freedom, we in this human race, and with that comes the enormous possibility of love and delight and also the kind of terror we’ve seen.

Rev. Samuel Lloyd

ABERNETHY: And also comes the ability to do terrible things.

LLOYD: That’s right. To do unimaginable damage and yet that’s never the last word.

ABERNETHY: People around the country are being told by officials and pastors to pray for the people of Boston. What do you suggest we pray for?

LLOYD: Prayer is an enormously important gift in this time because it binds all of us together as a country. I think it’s a great gift that people are praying for the people of Boston. I’d ask them to pray for courage and strength as we continue to make our way through a time of trauma. I’d ask for them to pray for a sense of our own connectedness to each other. And I’d ask them especially to pray for the magnificent police, law enforcement people, medical people and first attenders who have done an amazing job and continue to be doing crucial work. They are a model for us all.

ABERNETHY: But the thing I’m interested in, that the primary thing that you’ve been hearing is fear and what do you say about how faith can cope with that?

LLOYD: Well one of the first things I say is that fear loves isolation and what we need to do is be in touch with each other so I’m encouraging my community to text and email and call people they know and love and care about, get together as they can because we are reminders to each other of the faith we carry and the trust we’ve known and the love we’ve known through the years that gives us the courage to continue on in what we’re doing. The second thing I do is I try to send them even back to their old scriptures where the psalm for this Sunday is the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want and I’m sending everyone back to be reading that day and night these days to be reminded that there’s someone holding us.

ABERNETHY: Anything good that you see coming out of the response to this terrible thing?

LLOYD: You know, amazing, there’s been immense good. It’s just, just as when the sky is at its darkness we can see the most light. In this dark time, we see the love and care that emerges. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Mr. Rogers said in response to 9/11. Someone asked him what his advice was and he said keep your eyes on the helpers and if you look at the helpers, you’re seeing this a story of enormous courage and compassion and devotion that makes you proud to be a Bostonian and proud to be a human being and grateful for a God of love working through all of this.

ABERNETHY: Reverend Samuel Lloyd, the priest-in-charge at Trinity Episcopal Church, in Copley Square in Boston. Sam, many thanks.

LLOYD: You’re welcome, Bob.

Interview with Rev. Fleming Rutledge

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The following interview with the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, preacher and author of THE UNDOING OF DEATH (Eerdmans), a collection of sermons for Holy Week and Easter, was conducted by RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY Editor, Missy Daniel.

Q: In your preaching, you make use of the texts of Christian hymns to great effect. How do hymns contribute to preaching during Holy Week and Easter and to understanding the meaning of these days?

Rutledge

A: I am struck by the fact that most people apparently do not pay any attention to the words of hymns. I’m always startled to realize that more often than not they haven’t noticed the words; it’s the tunes they like or that they are attracted to. In my Holy Week preaching, especially on Good Friday, I try to encourage people to pay attention to the words and to sing the hymns as though they were prayers.

There’s one hymn in particular that has profound theological depth. The name of it is “Ah, Holy Jesus,” and it shows how the believer identifies with the crowd that crucified Jesus: “‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.” It’s an extraordinarily important worshipful act, especially at this time in our history, when there is so much discussion about the culpability of the Jews. Many people don’t understand that Christians (if Christians are really alert to what our tradition is) are taking this burden upon themselves, not pushing it off on the Jews.

Q: The hymns are real interpretations of the story of Holy Week.

A: Well, the best ones are, yes. Some of them are a little mawkish, but some of them are really good, and “Ah, Holy Jesus” is the best one.

Q: To what extent should the events of Holy Week and Easter 2,000 years ago and the New Testament stories about them seem strange to us, stay strange to our ears? You’ve written about how lost the language of sin and evil is to us, but you also preach about placing ourselves back within the story to understand it. Must the past and these events remain strange and distant to us?

A: That’s a very central question. As you were asking it, I was wondering to myself, do I really want to get myself back into that story, or do I want to bring the story forward to our time? I think it would be the latter. The tendency of people to be nostalgic or sentimental about faith and other issues as well is quite prevalent, and I like to try to emphasize the extraordinarily future-oriented nature of the Christian faith.

After September 11, I wrote a sermon about the fact that the cross discovered [at ground zero] really was the only symbol that could be raised there that was commensurate with the atrocity that was committed. That’s why I think we can still recover the language; we just have to reinterpret it. People are just as familiar today with atrocity and horror and tragedy and wickedness as they ever were. It’s just that it needs to be expressed somewhat differently because people are not accustomed to speaking about sin. But people know sin. They may not call it sin, but they know it. It’s the preacher’s task to show how this is a living reality.

Q: Is there anything different this year about the message and experience of Holy Week and Easter against the backdrop of world events?

A: Oh, sure. I’ve been preaching now for 27 years, and every year I’m struck by the fact that there is some new thing to speak of. Of course, last year and this year it was more dramatic and more geopolitical. But every year it’s something.

I have been preaching steadily now for several weeks about a Christian response to the war. One of my principal themes has dealt with the problem of evil. There’s been a great deal of criticism — rightly so, I think — of the president for dividing the world so neatly into good and evil. When the Christian faith is properly understood, we don’t divide the world into good and evil. We understand, as people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, that the line between good and evil runs through each person (he specifically wrote that in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO) and that there is a deep current of capacity for wickedness in all of us, given certain circumstances.

Many soldiers and veterans have spoken to me in recent weeks about discovering rage within themselves in combat that they didn’t know was there, and it scared them. Sometimes parents discover rage within themselves when their children won’t behave, and it scares them. We all have a propensity for destructive anger which we try to deny and repress, but it’s there. And when people do not recognize that tendency within themselves and project it off onto other people, that’s when we get into very serious trouble, and that’s what’s worrying critics of Bush’s Christian language.

Critics of Bush’s religious rhetoric are very concerned about his tendency to cast America in the role of the good, the innocent, and the virtuous and to describe other regimes as completely, irredeemably evil. A Christian doesn’t do that. Our greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, were shaped by the preaching of the church, and they called the nation to repentance. No president today would do that, and that’s a big loss, because Americans need to be conscious right now of the suffering of Iraqi civilians. Instead of that we’re completely focused on the incredible capacity and power of our military, and that’s not Christian — to focus on that to the exclusion of the people suffering under the bombardment.

JesusCross

In some ways we can rejoice that the dictatorship has been destroyed. I’m not necessarily anti-the war in a strict sense, but I’m very much concerned about the way that we are so self-righteous about it and so neglectful of other cultures. The crucifixion speaks directly to that because Jesus in the crucifixion is taking upon himself all those traits and qualities of evil and wickedness that we ascribe to “the other.” He has become “the other” on his cross, and that’s why it’s the most relevant thing in the world.

Q: Many people are drawn to the Easter story wanting to believe, trying to believe. In one of your sermons, you say that the Presbyterian pastor, David H.C. Read, once told his congregation: “One of the reasons I believe in the resurrection is that my mother told me. And to this day a strong element in my belief is the number and quality of the people who told me.” It’s such a simple reply. What did he mean?

A: People are always quoting that back to me. It seems to be a very memorable line. I wish I could think of a line of my own that people were quoting as much as that line of David Read’s. I’m a little worried about it, actually, because I meant it to be just one of many, many things that I was saying. I didn’t realize people were going to focus on that to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

It could sound a little bit sentimental. It could sound a little bit naïve. It could sound a little anti-intellectual or antirational — to believe something just because your mother told you. Some people’s mothers have told them to be on crazy diets or to take useless medications. Mothers tell children a lot of things that are not true. I wouldn’t want to put too much emphasis on that. The point that David Read and I both are making is that, in the case of the crucifixion and resurrection, witnesses can be trusted. That’s the important thing. When I have doubts about the resurrection, which I do pretty much every day, I always go back to Paul’s chapter in Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15), and invariably it restores my confidence that something really happened. I know Paul pretty well by now, after 50 years of studying him, and I believe Paul’s telling the truth. Ultimately that’s what Christian faith rests on — that the witnesses are telling the truth. All this modern discussion about the historical Jesus doesn’t touch that. I was just reading an article in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS by E. P. Sanders, which is highly critical of the latest book that has come out of the Jesus Seminar. He makes a wonderful point at the end of his essay. He says that what the Jesus Seminar scholars have overlooked is that Jesus is talking about God, and the action of God and the power of God and the intervention of God to bring about his kingdom. All this talk about what sort of genre Jesus preached and what type he was, how he fit into his time — it’s all interesting, and some of it’s important, but to overlook the fact that Jesus was about God is a fairly large oversight.

Q: Your sermons place great emphasis on a crucial moment in the story of the crucifixion — the cry of dereliction, when Jesus said on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Was it a moment of total abandonment by God? For Christians, how is the bad news, as you say, part of the good news?

A: There’s enormous debate about the cry of dereliction among theologians and biblical interpreters. I have chosen to follow one particular line of interpretation. Not everyone agrees with it, but I think it’s the right one. I think it’s the deepest one and the one most commensurate with our experience, because I think everyone feels godforsaken at times. And even if one does not feel personally godforsaken, any thoughtful person must admit that there have been millions of people over the years who have apparently been godforsaken — people who have died in cells alone, people who have been tortured to death, people who have been kidnapped or taken prisoner and have died away from their families and from everyone who loved them, who didn’t even know where they were or how they died.

Jesus

We have to come to terms with what seems to be godforsakenness in the world. Many people find that difficult or even impossible. And people who find it difficult or impossible will probably not come to church on Good Friday and will concentrate on the happy aspect of the faith. But I think that’s too bad, because the real depth and strength of the faith is its facing of the worst, and the fact that Jesus faced and endured the worst is ultimately, for many, the only comfort we have in the extremities of the kind of situations that I’m talking about.

The only comfort we have is that Jesus was there before us and that somehow he wrested away the power of death and sin precisely in his abandonment. How that happened, I can’t say. But the entire proclamation of the church, of the New Testament witnesses, is that that is what happened. Precisely out of the abandonment, he descended into hell.

Q: Some people search for answers during Holy Week and Easter. You say that there are no answers to evil, and we are not given an answer. Is it wrong to want answers? What do people get if not answers?

A: It depends on what kinds of questions and answers we’re talking about. I wouldn’t exactly say we don’t get an answer. We do get an answer. We get the divine “yes” in the resurrection. I guess what I meant was that we don’t get specific answers about why does my God-fearing friend have painful cancer, or why does God seem to turn the other way when extremely useful Christian people are killed young, or why are so many Christians killed — I was struck by all the numbers of people at the World Trade Center who were active Christians, reading those little profiles in THE NEW YORK TIMES. We’re not going to get answers to those kinds of questions. But God has given us an answer in Christ, an answer to the question of what it means to be human, what human beings can hope for, what kind of life humans can live, what kinds of hopes and promises we can trust.

Q: You’re writing a new book on the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus for today’s world.

A: It’s called CONDEMNED INTO REDEMPTION, from “Much Ado About Nothing.” [In Shakespeare’s play, the constable] Dogberry has finally managed to get somebody locked up, and he says, “Oh villain, thou art condemned into everlasting redemption.”

Q: Is that what we are?

A: It’s what Jesus was, first of all. It was Jesus who was condemned into redemption. The book is about Jesus, and the saying is about him. No, we are not condemned into redemption. He did it for us. We are not condemned the way he was. He’s the one who passed through condemnation for us so that we would not have to. “Condemned into redemption” is not about us; it’s about him. In the crucifixion we see the entire human race summed up in Jesus, who lived it for us. He suffered ultimate abandonment and condemnation and took it all into himself and brought it and us through into eternal life. “Recapitulation” is the word that the church father Irenaeus used for this. The term well conveys the sense that in Christ we see the entire history of humanity acted out and perfected, therefore recapitulated. But not only perfected — carried forward into the divine life of God. Again, there’s that future element.

Q: And what does it mean, then, for the human future, which often looks so grim?

A: Yes, it does, but then it always has. With the threat always present of the human species destroying itself, only a power from another sphere altogether can really mean anything. That’s what Christianity talks about — another sphere of power altogether. A power that called the entire creation into being in the first place is not going to be defeated by the tendency of that creation to destroy itself.

I have just finished a book [THE BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH, forthcoming this summer] about THE LORD OF THE RINGS (the book, not the movie), and one of the reasons I’m so crazy about the book and wanted to write a book about the book is that Tolkien, throughout his thousand pages, is always holding in his mind this other sphere of power. It’s on every page, but you don’t know it unless you’re looking for it. A lot of people read the whole book and never see it.

It’s the concept of the other sphere of power that is lacking in a lot of Christian preaching.

Religion and the Environment

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LUCKY SEVERSON: This would have been an unlikely occurrence only a few years ago: 80 clergy and lay leaders from a broad range of religions across the U.S., converging on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress about climate change and protecting the environment. They are all part of a national organization of faith leaders known as Interfaith Power and Light, or IPL, which was founded by the Reverend Canon Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest.

REV. SALLY BINGHAM (Interfaith Power & Light): We started out asking congregations to respond to climate change. And as more and more religions got involved, we realized what we were actually doing was bringing religions together where they could all agree on something. There were Hindu, Baha’i, Mormons, Catholics, evangelicals, Protestants, Jews, Muslims all agreeing with each other, we are the stewards of creation.

SEVERSON: Altogether there are now over 14,000 houses of worship in 40 states connected to IPL. Places like Adat Shalom Congregation in Maryland. Fred Scherlinder Dobb is the Rabbi and he says religion is deepening his congregation’s concern for the environment.

Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb

RABBI FRED SCHERLINDER DOBB (Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation): Ultimately love of the creator and love of that which God has created are one and the same. If you don’t love creation what does it mean to say that you love God who so loved creation?

SEVERSON: Sarah Jawaid is the director of a Washington area group called Green Muslims, made up of young professionals like herself—she’s an urban planner.

SARAH JAWAID (Green Muslims): It’s an issue that isn’t a priority for a lot of the communities that we see. Mosque leadership, you know, they’re just now starting to talk about it. You see it more and more on university campuses, but it’s a recent, recent phenomenon.

SEVERSON: Reverend Bingham says she became a priest because God called her to speak out on the environment when no one else was.

REV. BINGHAM: They’re afraid to get into the pulpit and talk about something that they really don’t know a lot about. But how can you sit in a pew and profess a love for God and then watch, sit back and watch creation be destroyed?

Rev. Sally Bingham

SEVERSON: These Pennsylvania IPL members are practicing what they preach. They bicycled 200 miles from State College, Pennsylvania to Washington, stopping at churches along the way. They are here to lobby Congress to strengthen environmental laws. Jon Brockopp is a professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State.

JON BROCKOPP (Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light): If you talk to people about their major faith experiences, something like 90% of people will think of something that happened to them out in the woods, on a mountain somewhere, somewhere along the beach. There’s something about the natural environment, the environment around us right now, that really speaks to people and speaks to us of a higher power.

SEVERSON: The Green Muslim board members meet once a week to discuss teachings from the Qu’ran and Hadith about protecting the earth. Sarah says the prophet Muhammad was a tree hugger literally because he actually hugged a tree after he heard it wailing.

SARAH JAWAID: It just showed so much about his character as a compassionate being and it helps me be more compassionate and to really live more lightly in this world.

Sarah Jawaid at Green Muslim meeting

SEVERSON: They also get their hands dirty, working at a local farm, cleaning up parks and renting out reusable dinnerware.

JAWAID: We started renting out reusable dinnerware as a way to get individuals to lessen their waste during Ramadan. And so instead of wasting a bunch of Styrofoam, we actually take our tableware and we’ll take it home and wash it. We had about 600, 700 people over the month that were using it and that’s a lot of waste that was reduced.

SEVERSON: They say it’s their faith and scriptures and not their politics that drive their views on the environment.

RABBI DOBB: Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 19. It’s a law in wartime about not cutting down the enemy’s trees even when it could give you military advantage and perhaps even save combatants’ lives. If we’re not allowed to cut down a tree that belongs to the enemy under such direct circumstances, how much more should we not allow trees to be felled simply for the convenience of the international economy.

REV. BINGHAM: Very often we have a bigger impact with a congregation by talking to them about, “Do you want to save money on your energy bill?” And very seldom does a congregation say, “Oh no.” They usually say yes, how do we do that?

Solar panels on the roof of the Adat Shalom Synagogue

SEVERSON: A number of houses of worship that belong to IPL combine their purchasing power to buy cheaper electricity from renewable energy at rates which can amount to huge savings especially for larger churches. IPL also encourages utilizing renewable energy like the solar panels on the roof of the Adat Shalom Synagogue.

RABBI DOBB: We have saved many thousands of dollars over the course of eleven years running this building because of passive solar technology, because of sensitive lighting we put in place. It absolutely keeps operating costs down. So if you make an investment in something like a really efficient boiler, it makes a tremendous difference.

REV. BINGHAM: We are asking our congregations to serve as examples to the community, and the hope is that when the religious leader can tell his or her congregation that they’re saving money on energy that people will say, “Oh, I’ll go home and we’ll do some of these same things in our homes.”

SEVERSON: Reverend Bingham says in the beginning of her ministry she faced a lot of resistance.

REV. BINGHAM: I was accused of promoting world government. I was called a communist. I was accused of taking a political issue into the pulpit which was highly against anything Americans believe in, merging church and state. But I haven’t. That hasn’t happened in the last 5 to 6 years.

SEVERSON: There’s still pushback from some churches and groups with religious and political connections like the conservative evangelical Cornwall Alliance.

CALVIN BEISNER (Founder of Cornwall Alliance): (from Resisting the Green Dragon video, produced by Cornwall Alliance) “The religious and political environmental movement, what we call the Green Dragon, has become one of the greatest threats to society and the church in our day.”

FEMALE NARRATOR: (from Resisting the Green Dragon video) “Its twisted view of the world elevates nature above the needs of people of even the poorest and most helpless. With millions falling prey to its spiritual deception. The time is now to stand and resist.”

REV. BINGHAM: It’s complete nonsense. I mean, you can go into scripture and find that God put Adam in the garden to till it and to keep it and we are the gardeners. We have not done a very good job and I would dispute anything that is behind the Green Dragon.

SEVERSON: The Cornwall Alliance produced the Resisting the Green Dragon series and sent them to churches around the country.

BEISNER: (from Resisting the Green Dragon video) “The average poor household spends a much higher percentage of its budget on electricity and other energy sources than does the average middle class or wealthy household. That means when we raise the price of energy, we are hurting the poor more than we hurt everybody else.”

SEVERSON: Dave Hunter takes a view opposite of the Cornwall Alliance video. He thinks the poor, particularly in others countries, will be hurt the most if something is not done about climate change.

DAVE HUNTER: If we don’t do anything about climate change the people who are going to be hit most by that are the people who have the least. And so to me that becomes a moral issue.

RABBI DOBB: Climate change is going to cause food scarcity, the likes of which we have never seen.

SEVERSON: Just outside the Adat Shalom Synagogue, the congregation has built and is expanding an organic garden where members are taught how to grow their own vegetables and donate part of what they harvest to food pantries. Rabbi Dobb says observing the Sabbath or Shabbat as God did after he created the earth is one way to help preserve it.

RABBI DOBB: One day in seven is of course Sabbath and that is a day of just being, not of doing. It’s a stepping back from the rat race of production and consumption and as Jews it’s our most special time.

SEVERSON: Sarah Jawaid thinks the cluttered and polluted world around us is a reflection of what’s going on inside ourselves, and that the best way to find ourselves is in the quiet and beauty of nature.

JAWAID: When I pray, I feel the most connected when my prayers are outside or when I’m thinking about a natural setting, things like that. I feel God’s presence in those moments. I mean, He’s everywhere all the time and different parts of the faith speak to different people, but that speaks to me.

SEVERSON: On Capitol Hill, lobbyists from Interfaith Power and Light are becoming a fixture.

REV. BINGHAM: Even if they don’t persuade them in that meeting, they may be able to next time. If we can point out to skeptical legislators that this is a real issue, it’s not going away, they have a moral responsibility to serve the American people, and if the American people want climate legislation and want clean air and clean water, they’ll come around.

SEVERSON: She says if enough houses of worship join the effort, Interfaith Power and Light will become a force of nature. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington, DC.

Medical Ministry

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DR. JOSEPH DUTKOWSKY (Orthopedic Surgeon): This is a young person who has a genetic missing piece of I think genetic 6 chromosome.

BOB FAW, correspondent: In a busy clinic in rural upstate New York, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Joseph Dutkowsky sees hundreds of children and adults disabled by disorders which leave them crippled or deformed. Or in the case of 19 year old Omer King Jr., blind and deaf from a metabolic dysfunction.

DUTKOWSKY: (speaking to patient) And we are going to pull. One, two, three.

FAW: As a doctor, everything Dutkowsky does is informed by his deep Catholic faith.

DUTKOWSKY: (speaking to nurse) Let’s get Jr. out here.

Was it St. Francis who said, “To preach the Gospel at all times, use words if necessary.” And so, you do it with your actions. People don’t need for me to preach at them. People don’t need for me to lecture them. They need, they need for me to care. They need for me to walk in with the love of God and to try and share it in any way that I can.

FAW: Whether treating Jr. or two married cerebral palsy patients, Josie and Chris Rosa.

DUTKOWSKY: (to Chris Rosa) You look like you should be bringing in an aircraft with that on it or something.

(to Josie Rosa): What you up to? You’re looking well today.

JOSIE ROSA: Yeah. We got to talk.

DUTKOWSKY: We got to talk. We can talk. That’s for sure.

FAW: Dr. Dutkowsky is unfailingly patient, willing to listen no matter how long it takes.

JOSIE: I know this might sound strange but can you test me for osteoarthritis?

DUTKOWSKY: (to Josie) Yeah. I’m happy to do that.

Patients like this, they need me to listen to them. They need somebody who cares enough to listen to their story, because they all have a story, they all have a need.

FAW: 57 year old Dutkowsky was an engineer when he says he got the calling to become a doctor.

DUTKOWSKY: I applied to medical school and I wrote my essay. I wrote that I wanted to take some of this technology and figure out a way to help people with disabilities. Now there’s nobody disabled in my family. There was nobody that I knew of who had a disability that I was thinking about when I did it. So I, I would take that as a Holy Spirit moment.

(to Jeremiah): Run, run, run back.

FAW: Most days here, Dutkowsky sees 25 to 30 patients like 8 year old Jeremiah Harrington, born with a club foot. For each patient, Dutkowsky uses an old-fashioned, leisurely approach rarely encountered in modern medical practice today.

DUTKOWSKY: (to Jeremiah) Can I look at your feet? Can I look at your feet? Thank you.

From a spiritual standpoint what I try and do as a physician is that even if I can’t cure the situation, even if I can’t cure the condition, if even I can’t make it all go away, if they’re being overburdened with that cross, if I can just hold up a corner sometimes, it might make it light enough for them to be able to carry it and move on.

FAW: Here in the country, he does more than just listen, give injections and comfort to anxious parents. Every Monday at the Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, he operates on severely disabled children and before each surgery, he prays.

DUTKOWSKY: It’s an overwhelming responsibility. And if I try and go in there on my own I run so many risks of failure. But if I come in and I and ask God to be with me and help me, that even in those cases where it might not work out perfectly, I’m with him and I can be in peace.

(while driving): I was born and raised in the country. I love being out here.

FAW: Dutkowsky isn’t anchored to the country though. Every week, crucifix nearby, he drives into New York City to see patients, three hours plus on the road often spent in prayer.

DUTKOWSKY: It’s a prayer to the Holy Spirit. It’s “Holy Spirit, soul of my soul, I adore thee. Enlighten, guide, strengthen and console me. Tell me what to do and command me to do it.”

FAW: Here, anywhere for that matter, Joseph Dutkowsky is not reluctant to display his faith.

DUTKOWSKY: Good morning, good day. Hello, God bless you. How you doing?

EMILY: Good.

FAW: But he never imposes his beliefs on anyone.

DUTKOWSKY: I’m not out there to tell them what to believe. But if I make that opening, and it’s important to them, then it can be part of their care.

FAW: It is a ministry he takes each week to New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital where at the Cerebral Palsy Center he sees patients like 10 year old Devon Ramsaram.

HARICHARD RAMSARAM (Devon’s father): After this shot, can we send him to school tomorrow?

FAW: Dutkowsky hopes the medical community will learn, from treatments pioneered here, how to treat cerebral palsy patients not just when they’re young but also as they grow older.

DUTKOWSKY: Country doctor, coming down to wonderful, you know, one of the finest medical centers in the world. I was way out of my comfort zone. But what’s the risk? If I fail, yeah, I got a little egg on my face. Big deal. But if we succeed, we can move the world.

JENNIFER SNYDER: (to Dr. Dutkowsky) He can’t get comfortable.

FAW: Two year old Nathan has a rare congenital disorder. His mother Jennifer feels about the same as most parents do when it comes to Dr. D as he is affectionately called.

SNYDER: He listens, yes. He’s a listener. He understands. He takes the time to educate a person such as myself.

CHRIS ROSA: A lot of doctors don’t listen. They just want to do what they gotta do for you and go away. Just because we may look funny doesn’t mean you should talk over us or through us.

FAW: It’s not like that with Dr. D though is it.

JOSIE ROSA: No, No. Because Dr. Dutkowsky would never treat us any different. He treats us with respect and decency.

FAW: And knowing that Dutkowsky is a man of faith reassures many, even non-Christians like Devon’s father Harichard Ramsaram.

HARICHARD RAMSARAM: Well it does, it does make me feel comfortable because it means that he has some sense of responsibility in what he does. You know what I’m saying? Because whoever believes in God does have a sense of caring, guidance. You know what I’m saying?

FAW: Treating so many young disabled patients might shake a person’s faith in a merciful God.

(to Dr. Dutkowsky): Do ever ask yourself why did God let that happen?

DUTKOWSKY: No, I don’t, because what I see when I see Omer, I go in that room and I feel love. It’s an energy from outside that draws me in.

FAW: There are bodies that are, forgive me, misshapen, malformed, twisted, crippled, and you see in that the likeness of God?

DUTKOWSKY: Yes, I do. I see the image and likeness of God in every one of those individuals.

FAW: For Dr. Dutkowsky then, faith and medicine intersect, complement one another. Seeing affliction, he also finds something meaningful.

DUTKOWSKY: There are days I go home with tears in my eyes because suffering is real. But sharing suffering is a gift. The depth of that love, the depth of that commitment, the depth of working with individuals like that, that’s the privilege.

FAW: Dutkowsky says he doesn’t heal, that only God can do that. In the meantime, this old-fashioned man of faith and modern man of science continues a ministry to both body and soul.

DUTKOWSKY: All right, God love you.

FAW: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Delphi, New York.