Author Archives: Fred Yi

Day of the Dead

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: On Thursday (November 1), many Christians mark All Saints Day, and on Friday (November 2), All Souls Day honors the saints and faithful who have died. During this time, many Latinos also observe what they call the Day of the Dead, when it’s believed the spirits of the departed return to Earth. There are different traditions for this across Latin America, and Hispanics in the U.S. are celebrating as well.

KIM LAWTON: In many communities, Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is a joyful public event, with parades celebrating the belief that, for this one day every year, the spirits of loved ones have returned. Families often hold private observances as well.

ROCIO BERMUDEZ (speaking Spanish): Estamos de fiesta. Es una fiesta.

LUIS BERMUDEZ (translating): We are in a festive mode right now. It’s a party.

post01LAWTON: In Rockville Maryland, Rocio and Luis Bermudez incorporate their Roman Catholic faith with their Mexican-American traditions, building a special altar in their home. On the altar they place pictures of their deceased family members and a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Candles are lit to help the spirits find their way down from heaven. Water is put out to replenish the thirsty souls after their long journey. And since it’s a party, the altar is decorated with colorful papers and treats.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: The mango, the water, the tequila — it’s all an enticement so that they will come, and when they come they’ll have their favorite foods that they can celebrate with us.

LAWTON: When the altar is finished, the family offers prayers for both the living and the dead.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: We then pray to the Virgin Mary, to the saints, and to the Lord so that they’re with us, as well as our loved ones, as a sign of respect for God.

LAWTON: The Bermudez family says the Day of the Dead ritual reflects the Catholic Church’s teachings about life and death.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: So the belief is that when we die our body physically isn’t here, but our spirit still lives on forever. We actually are reborn. So that’s what we celebrate. The spirit doesn’t die, it lives on.

LAWTON: For the Bermudez family, that’s something to celebrate every year.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: I believe that when I go and I die, my spirit is going to go to heaven, and then every year I’ll be coming back on the Day of the Dead to visit down here to my loved ones.

Campaign 2012: Republican Presidential Candidates

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During this week’s debate, Mitt Romney said voters should not select candidates on the basis of their faith.

MITT ROMNEY (Presidential Candidate): That idea, that we choose people based upon their religion for public office, is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure, and even put it in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion.

LAWTON: Romney was responding to recent remarks by Dallas evangelical megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, who told reporters he believed that Romney, as a Mormon, is part of a “theological cult” that is not Christian. At the Values Voter Summit earlier this month, Jeffress introduced Rick Perry, referring to his evangelical faith.

REV. ROBERT JEFFRESS (First Baptist Church of Dallas): Do we want a candidate who is a good moral person, or do we want a candidate who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?

LAWTON: Jeffress’ comments stirred controversy, even among other religious conservatives.

WILLIAM BENNETT (Conservative Commentator): Pastor Jeffress, do not give voice to bigotry. Do not give voice to bigotry.

LAWTON: Romney’s Mormon faith was also an issue in the last presidential campaign, prompting his 2007 speech saying that while he will be true to his beliefs, they would not dictate his presidency. It’s an issue of particular concern to many evangelical voters. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, almost 60 percent of white evangelicals believe that Mormonism is not a Christian religion. Although Romney does have some high-profile evangelical supporters, it appears he still hasn’t caught on at the evangelical grassroots. But neither has Perry, who has been openly touting his evangelical faith, so much so that Perry’s wife told supporters she feels he’s come under unfair attack because of his beliefs. Meanwhile, Herman Cain, who describes himself as a conservative Christian, is also making a play for evangelical voters with several recent faith-based stops, including a book signing at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Evangelicals are a key GOP constituency, especially in the primary season. In 2008, 44 percent of all Republican presidential primary voters were self-identified evangelicals, with even higher percentages in several early voting states. This time around, evangelicals are still undecided. At the Values Voter Summit, Ron Paul won the straw poll, followed by Cain and Rick Santorum. Perry and Michele Bachmann tied for fourth. Romney came in sixth.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Multifaith Theological Education

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SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: With Korean-American drummers leading a line of professors, a new experiment in American religious education began this fall. This was the opening of southern California’s Claremont Lincoln University, which describes itself as America’s first interreligious school of theology, one that will train pastors, rabbis, and eventually Muslim imams all on one campus. The school’s philosophy was captured in the opening remarks of Muslim-American religious scholar Najeeba Syeed-Miller, a professor at Claremont Lincoln.

PROFESSOR NAJEEBA SYEED-MILLER: The diversity of humankind is not a curse from God. It is a sign of God’s creation, and the beauty of humanity is in our very differences.

GONZALEZ: What do you hope to accomplish here at Claremont Lincoln? What’s the grand vision?

PHILIP CLAYTON (Provost, Claremont Lincoln University): You have to get beyond the point of people defining their religions by the traditional walls.

GONZALEZ: Philip Clayton is Claremont Lincoln’s provost. He sees this school as offering an alternative to traditional religious education.

post01-multifaitheducationCLAYTON: When you train rabbis in one school, pastors in another, imams in another, you put them out into communities they create an “us versus them” mentality. What if we do something that’s never been done before? Let’s train them in the same classroom. Let’s let them work out their differences in their day-to-day education. When they go out into their communities you won’t find them doing the “us versus them,” but, we hope, the “we.” What that would for the face of religion in America would be staggering.

GONZALEZ: Claremont Lincoln is actually the creation of a much older institution, United Methodist-affiliated Claremont School of Theology, founded in 1885. It partnered with southern California’s Academy of Jewish Religion and the Islamic Center of Southern California to form this new school. Students attending this school can get master’s degrees in divinity, rabbinic studies, and Muslim counseling.

INSTRUCTOR: I’d like you to stand or to turn in the direction that you normally pray.

GONZALEZ: But all are required to take classes like this one that emphasize interreligious education and understanding. Many of the students feel they couldn’t get this kind of multifaith education anywhere else.

WALLY BURMAN (Student): Most of the reason I’m here is I looked at the other colleges and other programs, and it appeared they were preparing students to be leaders in the church of yesterday, where Claremont is training people to be leaders in the church of tomorrow.

GONZALEZ: This school’s ambition to train Muslim clerics is important to Valentina Khan, a Muslim-American student of Iranian descent.

post02-multifaitheducationVALENTINA KHAN (Student): I definitely think that we need to have is a voice that’s an American voice as Muslims. I mean, having somebody in Saudi Arabia telling us how it should be here in America is absolutely, in my opinion, not the way I’d want to be told.

GONZALEZ: However, the creation of this school has also generated some criticism.

CLAYTON: I’m actively involved in blogging and social networking, and I began to find sites that would label what we were doing as the work of the devil, and people absolutely guaranteeing the blogosphere that I was on my way to hell, so that it really drew a hostility. People felt that we were undercutting the way they defined their entire religious tradition, which is this oppositional and exclusionary approach.

GONZALEZ: However, many of the students and faculty at Claremont Lincoln don’t want to ignore the tensions and theological differences between their faiths.

SYEED-MILLER: I actually hope that there is conflict. I often say when we get together in interfaith dialogue we try to “out-nice” each other and say, “Oh, you know, you’re wonderful!” “No, you are wonderful!” If we are truly going to be conversation partners, we need to say, “Look, this is how I view your tradition.” I think we really need to get into conversations about history, because so much of what we carry in interfaith dialogue is about the negative histories that each of our communities has had with one another, so if we are not willing to go there then I don’t think any of us are going to be able to move forward.

post03-multifaitheducationGONZALEZ: Beyond America’s changing religious landscape, there’s another reason why Claremont went multifaith: survival. Like other schools of theology and seminaries during these tough economic times, this campus faced a declining enrollment and a tightening budget. Allowing students from other faiths to train here is one way to keep the lights on and the doors open.

CLAYTON: This is an extremely hard time for American theological schools. We could go on with a dwindling number of Methodists students, but we decided we wanted to be ahead of the curve.

GONZALEZ: Well, ahead of the curve because you had to be. I mean, you had to open up this institution to other faiths to keep your head above water.

CLAYTON: Sure, but we had a 45-year history of being edgy. We were always sort of pushing the envelope, and so we decided we would push the envelope on this one.

GONZALEZ: To help it go multifaith, this school received a $50 million grant from philanthropist David Lincoln and his wife, Joan. In their honor, the school was named after them. Clayton believes to survive more and more schools of theology and seminaries will have to adopt Claremont’s interreligous approach.

CLAYTON: We’re starting to get visits from academic deans and presidents who say, “Oh, we’ve see where you’re going. Can we talk about this new movement?”

post05-multifaitheducationGONZALEZ: But skepticism remains high.

DENNIS DIRKS (Dean, Talbot School of Theology): It’s fine for Claremont. It would not be good for us.

GONZALEZ: Dennis Dirks is the dean of the Talbot School of Theology in southern California, a Christian multidenominational evangelical institution. He says religious clarity, not a mixing of faiths, is essential to a religious school, arguing a multifaith approach could weaken the curriculum and anger alumni and other campus supporters.

DIRKS: We’re frequently asked, “Do you admit non-Christians here?” They want to know. They want to hold us accountable for that, so that’s something that we want to look at very carefully.

GONZALEZ: And they want to make sure that the non-Christians are not here.

DIRKS: Well, yes, not as enrolled students, because they are fearful of diffusion of the curriculum.

GONZALEZ: But do you think it’s easy for faiths to cohabitate like that in theological instruction?

DIRKS: No, I think it’s very difficult. I think there are great challenges.

GONZALEZ: However, at Claremont they think the future is on their side in an increasingly multifaith America.

CLASSROOM SPEAKER: Some of us are looking in a Jewish direction. Some of us are looking in a Muslim direction. Some are looking in a Christian direction. And yet we are all looking in a God direction.

GONZALEZ: Beyond Christians, Jews, and Muslims, administrators here are already talking about enrolling Jains, Buddhists, and Hindus.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

Mending Medicare

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BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: For years, Natalie Albin endured aggressive treatment for leukemia. She wound up in Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. Death was near.

FRAN CRONIN: She’d had years of chemo. She was done with it. There was nothing left for her body to tolerate.

ROLLIN: Her daughter, Fran Cronin, says that what the family wanted at this point was a quiet time to be together and say goodbye.

CRONIN: But the doctors kept on coming back to us and asking us if we’d like to do tests, what else we could do, and we’d have to say, well, what kind of difference will this make? Is this going to change the prognosis? No. This might extend her life for a couple of months. What quality of life is she going to have? Nothing really better, can’t guarantee. In our effort to say goodbye to my mother we were always being interrupted by the hospital’s own need to be service-driven. They weren’t about hospice care. It wasn’t about saying goodbye. Their role and their interaction with us was to provide treatment.

post01-mendingmedicareDR. LACHLAN FORROW (Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital): We are wired as human beings, thankfully, to when in doubt you fight for life no matter what. Doctors and nurses are trained, first we want to try to save a life.

ROLLIN: While the person whose life is being saved wants to be kept as comfortable as possible, he or she doesn’t necessarily want to be saved, and often this hasn’t been made clear to either the doctor or the patient’s family. Dr. Lachlan Forrow is director of ethics and palliative care at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

DR. FORROW: The tragedy is our health care system does not provide any context to help doctors and nurses have the time to talk with people about these hard things, and the whole system is greased to pay hospitals and others for expensive things people might not even want. One of the fundamental problems is what gets called our fee-for-service system. Doctors and hospitals get paid for the things that they do that tend to be expensive. The more expensive it is, the more you get paid.

ROLLIN: Our medical system can’t keep everyone healthy, but it excels at keeping people alive, which is expensive. Twenty-five percent of all Medicare spending is for the 10 percent of patients who are in their final year of life. For the year 2012 alone, that’s expected to be $137 billion. Most of the money is spent in the last 6 months of life, which is often of little benefit, if any, to the patient. And the conversations between patients and doctors and family members which might make a difference, Dr. Forrow says, aren’t happening, partly because people are afraid to talk about death and because the part of the Obama health care reform plan, which would have reimbursed doctors for these conversations, was shot down.

DR. FORROW: Cheap, political, inflammatory comments like “death panels” and “pulling the plug on grandma” for cheap political points have terrified the American people in a way that I think—I think that’s immoral.

post02-mendingmedicareROLLIN: Dr. Susan Mitchell, who has studied advance dementia in nursing home patients, has found that even though these patients can be treated and kept more comfortable in a nursing home, they are often hospitalized where they receive aggressive and sometimes painful treatment that is covered by Medicare.

DR. SUSAN MITCHELL (Senior Scientist, Hebrew SeniorLife): The nursing home does not get reimbursed for taking care of a patient who’s acutely ill with advanced dementia, which can take a lot of staff time and resources. So it’s at no cost to them to send them to the hospital where they will get that care.

ROLLIN: The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that the cost for dementia care in 2011 will be approximately $183 billion, mostly paid by the government, and that cost will go up to $1.1 trillion in 2050.

DR. MITCHELL: I think there’s a lot of unnecessary and costly medical care being provided for patients with advanced dementia that is not what the families and patients want.

ROLLIN: But even if patients and their families have expressed their wishes, that doesn’t solve the entire cost problem.

PROFESSOR DAN BROCK (Harvard Medical School): At the end of life, people often have greater difficulty in giving up, in no longer using resources, and so you hear this notion, particularly from families, “I want everything done,” and implicitly there, or sometimes explicitly, “Don’t worry about the cost,” right?

ROLLIN: Professor Dan Brock, who teaches ethics at Harvard Medical School, is one of the few who believes America must ration covered health care based on efficacy and cost.

post03-mendingmedicarePROFESSOR BROCK: I was once at a meeting in Britain many years ago with British physicians, and we were talking about end-of-life care decisions, and the Americans asked, “Well, what do you do when patients demand or when families demand?” And the British docs sort of looked bemused and said, “Well, they don’t do that here. They don’t demand here.” We have insurance, so we say we’re entitled to it, and we have this view that rationing is a bad thing to do, and so we think we ought to get it.

ROLLIN: The problem is more acute when the patient is dying.

PROFESSOR BROCK: Should we cover this new cancer drug which extends life on average for three months and costs $200,000 or $300,000 to do so? And when you look at it that way, then people can begin understand that, well, it doesn’t seem to make sense.

ROLLIN: And the other difficulty, Professor Brock adds, is that once a drug is considered safe, Medicare does not consider cost in their approval of coverage. They ask only whether the treatment is “reasonable and necessary.”

PROFESSOR BROCK: Medicare is not able to deny coverage on grounds that—what’s usually called cost effectiveness. That is, the cost isn’t merited by the benefits.

ROLLIN: Many experts say if the question of cost is not dealt with it will surely get worse because of new treatments, which will be more expensive. Also, a growing population of the aged and their physicians will want these treatments, no matter the cost to Medicare.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Betty Rollin in Boston.

Dan Brock Extended Interview

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“It’s impossible not to ration, it’s irrational not to ration, and it’s unethical not to ration” medical care at the end of life, says this professor of ethics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health.

 

The Way

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Martin Sheen says “The Way” is ultimately about a journey—a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh.

WOMAN (in film clip): So what is it, on a pilgrimage to change your life?

TOM (in film clip): Something like that.

MARTIN SHEEN: All of our journeys are personal, deeply personal, and they’re all mysterious, you know. We’re all looking for that transcendence, but we’re looking to each other, and we identify with each other. I think the genius of God is choosing to dwell where we are least likely to look, within the depths of our own being.

DANIEL (in film clip): If I don’t have your blessing that’s fine, but don’t judge this. Don’t judge me.

TOM (in film clip): My life here might not seem like much to you, but it’s the life I choose.

DANIEL (in film clip): You don’t choose a life, Dad. You live one.

post01-thewayLAWTON: The story centers around Sheen’s character, Tom, a doctor who has a strained relationship with his free-spirited son, Daniel. Daniel dies in a freak storm in Europe, and when Tom goes to collect his remains, he discovers his son had been walking the famed 500-mile pilgrimage across Spain known as El Camino de Santiago—The Way of Saint James.

MAN (in film clip): We believers are told that the remains of Saint James, the apostle of Jesus, are interned there, and so we make pilgrimage. This is what your son, Daniel, was doing.

LAWTON: Grief-stricken, Tom decides to finish the pilgrimage himself, sprinkling Daniel’s ashes as he goes. Along the way he meets three other pilgrims, and together they search for healing and ultimate meaning in their lives. The story was inspired by a trip Sheen took to the Camino several years ago, although he drove instead of walking. He came home and told Estevez they needed to do a project around it. Estevez wrote the script, casting his father, who is a practicing Catholic, against type.

FATHER FRANK (in film clip): Are you a Catholic?

TOM (in film clip): I don’t practice anymore. You know, Mass at Christmas, Easter, that’s about it.

FATHER FRANK (in film clip): Here, take this.

TOM (in film clip): No, I can’t take your rosary, Father.

FATHER FRANK: No, please take it. There are a lot of lapsed Catholics on the Camino, kid. Besides…

post03-thewayEMILIO ESTEVEZ: There cannot be conversion if you already start out being devout. Let’s open the film where you’re not even interested in praying with your parish priest, right? He’s reached bottom now. He’s a widower, he’s now lost his son. He’s totally alone in the world, he’s without family. His idea of community is, you know, playing golf with his fellow doctors at the country club, and so I needed him to be at that place so that by the time this character arrives at the end of the film, there is a transformation. He is awake. He is converted.

LAWTON: Sheen says his Catholic faith was strengthened by seeing and experiencing the rituals of the Camino pilgrimage and the Mass that takes place at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela when the pilgrims finally arrive.

SHEEN: The botafumiero, you know, the incense ceremony at the end of the Mass, brings out a deeply moving exaltation from the congregation. They burst into applause, and many of them burst into tears. And, you know, the incense is an offering to God, you know, but it’s also an ancient tradition and ritual, and we don’t have a whole lot of ritual in our lives. You know, we’ve lost more and more of ritual just within our own family structures—evening meals, evening, you know, family prayer. So I think people are—they respond to ritual. It’s something that you can get reconnected with, in a way. You know, they’ve been doing that since the Middle Ages.

LAWTON: And you had mentioned earlier just with pilgrimage, the sense of the physical, the flesh and the spiritual coming together. How did you see that, especially there?

SHEEN: Well, you know, pilgrimage is kind of a demanding struggle. It must be to take you out of your comfort zone. So you go to a place, whether it’s Mecca or Santiago or Tibet or Rome, Jerusalem, wherever it is—you’re seeking something, and you’re going to have to do it on your own. Nobody can carry your pack. Nobody can walk in your shoes. You must do it alone, but you cannot do it without community.

LAWTON: The difficulty of the journey, he says, touches the soul.

post04-thewaySHEEN: You begin the journey within. Now the real pilgrimage begins, because now you have to open up the dungeons and jail cells of your heart and release all of the things that have been keeping you from being yourself, keeping you from, you know, discovering who you really are. So you let go of your resentments and your anger and your jealousies and your hatreds and all the dark parts, and eventually you’ll become free, you’ll become yourself, and you’ll become part of your extended family, which is community.

ESTEVEZ: And sometimes that family and those people you pick up along the Camino are not necessarily people you would choose. They choose you in many ways, and yet those are the people that we sometimes learn the greatest lessons from.

LAWTON: Estevez describes his own spiritual situation as still evolving.

ESTEVEZ: I’m what my mother likes to call a work in progress. My parents—I grew up in a house where my parents differed on what religion was all about. She was raised Southern Baptist, wasn’t allowed to see movies or dance. It was very, very strict. He was raised a devout Catholic.

SHEEN: We sang and danced all the time.

ESTEVEZ: So as a young boy—I was baptized Catholic, but all I heard were arguments about religion. There was no talk about spirituality. So I sort of had to take a step back from that.

LAWTON: He says this film has opened him up to new spiritual possibilities.

post05-thewayESTEVEZ: I think it’s an example, a shining example of where I’m at right now in terms of my spiritual path, the path I’m on.

SHEEN: Are you saying there’s a chance you could become a Catholic?

ESTEVEZ: I’m just saying there’s a possibility of everything. I’m open to the possibility of absolutely everything.

SHEEN: Buddhist even?

ESTEVEZ: I said everything.

SHEEN: Okay, I’m just asking. We don’t get this opportunity.

JACK (in film clip): So far, there are some 15 percent say they are doing it for health. Fewer than 5 percent say they are actually looking for a miracle.

TOM (in film clip): Miracles are in short supply these days, Jack.

LAWTON: Despite the setting and themes, the film’s religious messages are subtle.  Estevez says he didn’t want to hit people over the head. But they have been marketing “The Way” at special screenings for Catholic groups—and for evangelical audiences, too.

ESTEVEZ: People will stand up and begin to witness and give testimony, and probably 60 percent of the Q and As really have no Qs. They basically just want to stand up and say thank you for making this film, and this movie touched me because…

post07-thewayLAWTON: What’s been the reaction of the church, the Catholic Church?

ESTEVEZ: Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Across the board. And it started in Spain. You know, we screened the film in, opened the film in Santiago. We were there for the pope’s Mass last October, and then two days later we screened the film for the archbishop of Santiago and the government of Galicia, and we were sitting in a little tiny box in a 200-year-old theater, and we were sweating because we were so nervous about how they would react.

SHEEN: They were the first audience.

ESTEVEZ: Right, and so the archbishop turned to my father after the screening and hugged him and said, “This film is a gift. Thank you.”

SHEEN: They were very relieved, basically.

ESTEVEZ: And so were we.

LAWTON: They say they hope their audiences get as much out of this project as they did.

SHEEN: Whatever the audience takes away is going to be their gift, if you will. We offer this gift. If they accept it, we’re delighted.

ESTEVEZ: We don’t impose our Camino on anyone, but we say get outside of yourself and join us on this journey.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.