Interfaith Lecture Recaps

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Americans are fascinated by frontier narratives, and the United States has always pursued the newest frontier, whatever that may be, said Margarita Simon Guillory. 

Guillory, associate professor of religion and African American studies at Boston University, sees religion in digital technology as the latest frontier.

Among this new frontier are truly digital religions — where the internet is not simply a place to talk about God, but where the Internet is God. 

At 1 p.m. Tuesday in the Amphitheater, Guillory presented her lecture, “To Boldly Go: Technological Frontiers and the Changing Landscape of American Religion,” the second of three Interfaith Series Lectures on “New Frontiers: Exploring the Future of Religion in America.”

“Frontier” does not have a rigid meaning, Guillory said. Rather, the meaning shifts based on geographical expansion. From the 18th to 19th century, the U.S. expanded from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River, then from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and finally the Pacific Ocean. Each geographical feature served as a boundary, and beyond it lay the newest frontier, Guillory said.  

After there was no geographical land to continue U.S. expansion, the country needed a new frontier.

“Indeed, science was the new frontier to be explored and conquered,” Guillory said. 

She referenced two of President John F. Kennedy’s speeches — his Democratic nominee acceptance speech and 1962 “moon shot” speech — in which he acknowledged science and space aviation were new frontiers that should be pioneered by the U.S. 

“Scientists themselves began to employ frontier language, using it as a device to discuss scientific innovations and secure government funding and to garner interest from the American public,” Guillory said.

At a White House ceremony in 2000, President Bill Clinton celebrated the Human Genome Project’s success in creating a map showing 85% of the human genome, Guillory said. He compared this map to one from two centuries prior, one that President Thomas Jefferson applauded, which showed U.S. expansion to the Pacific Ocean. 

Guillory said Clinton called the genome map the “most important, most wondrous map produced by mankind.”

She then explained how this exploration impacted American religious history. 

“At the turn of the 19th century, the backwoods, the very spaces that characterized the western frontier, burst into spiritual flame,” Guillory said. “This fire came in the form of frontier revivalism.”

That flame was kindled in 1801 after 20,000 people attended a revivalist meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, part of the country’s first great religious awakening where people would come from far and wide, on horseback and on foot, from different ethnicities and economic backgrounds, for social and spiritual connection.

“Frontier camp meetings became outlets of spiritual instruction, entertainment, leisure and social interaction,” she said. “Large gatherings like this became the driving force of frontier revivalism. Smaller scale activities were equally vital.”

One small-scale example Guillory gave was in Chautauqua County, where the pastor John Spencer gave short, practical sermons to people here between 1810 and 1820. She said this, along with other examples throughout the region, inflamed the frontiers of Western New York.

“As the American frontier spread westward, so did flames of revivalism,” Guillory said.  

The Cane Ridge event gave birth to frontier Protestantism, but other diverse religious traditions emerged and spread across the country during this expansion period, Guillory said. She cited the birth of movements like the Shakers, Spiritualists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“These examples capture intricate interconnections between western migration and the development of religious traditions considered outside the canon of Protestant revivalism and New England evangelicalism,” she said.

Between 1910 and 1940, over 2 million people of African descent moved from the South to northern cities, which Guillory presented as a 20th century example of religious frontiers and migration. 

She said these migrants saw the North as a promised land. At one point in the southside of Chicago, one could be within a stone’s throw of a synagogue, a St. John’s spiritual church, mosques and several other religious venues, Guillory said. 

Between the end of World War II and the 1980s, Guillory said, changes in social, political and economic fabrics of the nation occurred. There was new technology, changing international relations, demographic shifts in the population, growth in higher education and new policies and administrations. 

“Because religion is a sociocultural institution, and for the most part exposed to large social and cultural environments of this country, it could not help but be impacted by these changes,” she said. “These changes included denominational switching and cross-attendance, denominational schisms, interdenominational cooperation and rising tensions between religious conservatives and religious liberals — which, by the way, mirrors tensions between frontier revivalism and national evangelicalism in the early 1800s.”

Religion became a personal choice for Americans in this period, Guillory said, a trend that continues to this day. 

The General Social Survey began surveying how often American adults would go to religious services, she said. In 1972, the first year of the survey, 41.2% of respondents said they went nearly every week, a number that deflated to 28.5% by 2014, the survey’s most recent results.

“It is clear that the traditional representation of American religiosity is experiencing a decline,” she said. “However, other forms of religion, particularly those characterized under the umbrella of new religious movements, are growing.”

These new religions do not congregate in brick and mortar buildings, she said, but rather online. To Guillory, digital religions are the newest frontier in American religious history.

Not only do these religions exist in the digital world, but they use technological aspects as part of the religion, she said. 

One example Guillory gave was the Church of Google. In this religion, beliefs center around Google being omnipresent, immortal, infinite and omnibenevolent. 

“In other words, Google is God,” Guillory said.

Googlists, as members are called, also discuss existential topics like existence and death, she said. Google, unlike Christianity, Islam or Judaism, for example, is not an imaginative God. 

“It is a scientifically viable entity that answers prayers through searchable questions, and it offers endless opportunities for interactions,” Guillory said. 

Googlists also believe that individuals exist in the afterlife by sharing personal content on the internet, Guillory said. In addition, she said, a quick look at the church’s website for prayers and comments will show that it has helped people grapple with death. They find comfort in believing their presence will continue to exist online. 

Guillory hopes more research will be done on the Church of Google to answer questions about its authenticity — whether or not it is just a spoof of monotheistic religions, for example. 

Another digital religion Guillory discussed was the Church of Artificial Intelligence. In this religion, people try to understand artificial intelligence as a godhead. Members of this church believe there is a super—intelligent supreme being they will meet after death.

“Faith in this artificial intelligence godhead provides (members) with a degree of certainty against the backdrop of an uncertain future,” Guillory said.

This church, also called Way of the Future, officially closed earlier this year after its founder, Anthony Levandowski, was pardoned by President Donald Trump from an 18-month prison sentence based on a number of legal disputes. The church’s funds were donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in June 2020, according to a Feb. 18 TechCrunch article. 

These digital religions are just as valid as the fact of American religion’s definition being based on Protestant roots, Guillory said. 

“From articulating mystical experiences in the world of podcasting, to utilizing mobile phone applications as conjuring tools to access dimensions of sacredness, to employing avatars and multiplayer online role-playing games to reconstruct the souls of loved ones,” Guillory said, “all of these are bold ways in which certain demographics of Americans are expressing their religious and spiritual identities.” 

Digital religions represent the growing frontier, which will only continue to shift and expand as it always has, Guillory said.

“In the words of my mom,” she said, “it just won’t be still.” 

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

You can’t know what lies beneath something until it is uncovered, the Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson explained by describing a home renovation. She didn’t know there was a squirrel living within her walls, but discovered the truth when the wall was knocked down and the squirrel rushed out. 

She used this analogy to demonstrate the uncovering of inequities and challenges in both the United States and world — particularly white Christian nationalism, race and climate change.

At 1 p.m. Monday, July 5 in the Amphitheater, Henderson presented her lecture, “Living Between Precarity and Promise,” part of Week Two’s Interfaith Lecture Series themed “New Frontiers: Exploring the Future of Religion in America.” 

Henderson has been president of Auburn Theological Seminary, a 203-year-old multifaith, multirace leadership development and research institute in New York, for more than a decade. 

She began by looking forward to five years from now, when the U.S. will celebrate its 250th anniversary, and asking what the world should look like then. First, she described issues posed by white Christian nationalism, noting the Jan. 6 insurrection of the U.S. Capitol.

People participating in the insurrection believed they were waging a holy war, using that to justify their actions, Henderson said.

“In the eyes of many, including young people leaving organized religion, there is no distinction between Christianity and nationalism, because of what they see,” she said.

Henderson argued that there is a distinction — Christian nationalism represents more than religion by including assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity. It asks the question of who an American is, a worthy question following the July 4 weekend, she said.

Christian nationalists believe white, native-born Christians are Americans, and exclude racial minorities and other religions, like Islam, she said.

“They are defining who we are as Americans by defining who we are not,” she said.

Henderson said the narrative of Christianity in the U.S. needs to be disrupted because its foundation lies in slavery, and that people justified the practice using Christianity. Wise teachers of different religions who have a shared vision of justice, equity and love and are committed to those who are vulnerable can help change this narrative, she said. 

She also noted the underlying question of what it means to be an American.

“We can’t assume there are shared understandings,” she said.

At a time when Christian nationalism is shaping policies and has increased media attention, she said it is important that answers to that underlying question shape responses and actions, and that we shouldn’t work toward a future constructed by Christian nationalists.

The answer, to Henderson, lies in reclaiming the principle of religious freedom granted in the First Amendment. She said implementation of freedom in the U.S. has been contradictory from its beginning, noting that only white men were allowed to vote. 

“There is a certain irony to it, because the principle has been, and continues to be, abused and misinterpreted from all sides,” she said. 

Henderson has hope. She mentioned a nondiscrimination bill in Mesa, Arizona, aimed at accommodating transgender people in hotels. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church, wrote in support of this bill, she said. 

Family is at the center of Mormonism, she said, and as people (particularly young, LGBTQ+) leave due to not feeling represented or accepted, the Mormon church wants to broaden its circle of acceptance.

“I was amazed,” she said. “This defied my presuppositions about Mormonism.”

Henderson then turned to race, saying the U.S. was founded on white supremacy.

“It was and continues to be an organizing principle and part of our DNA,” she said.

Henderson acknowledged economic disparities, heightened by COVID-19, as Jeff Bezos made billions from midnight spending on Amazon.com while others couldn’t eat, lost homes or became sick, she said.

She gave an example of racism in local communities, too. In West Point, Mississippi, two women of color were named valedictorian and salutatorian in the class of 2021. Instead of celebrating, they ended up sharing the titles with white classmates after white parents protested the school, and the principal gave in. 

Across the country, Henderson said 400 bills have been introduced to make voting harder for minorities and consolidate partisan power over an election. She said people only know George Floyd’s name because somebody filmed his death and published it to the internet, while there are too many names to remember of people killed by police. 

Henderson said that Auburn Seminary leaders have spent time looking at the history of their institution. They’ve learned that it was built on stolen land from the Iroquois people, she said. Moreover, a textbook described that place and period in time as a wild and godless region, words she herself used early on in her presidency.

“We need to contemplate acts of repair and redemption,” she said. “Reparations was one of those words you couldn’t even say a couple years ago without invoking defensiveness. But it’s much more common as we move forward.”

Henderson gave a few more examples of reparations by institutions and people.

 She said she was encouraged by the story of Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who was associated with a picture of him in blackface and another person in a Ku Klux Klan costume in his yearbook from Eastern Virginia Medical School.

When that transpired, she thought he should have resigned, she said. But then, Northam began working with Black mayors and leaders across Virginia and changed his administration’s direction. Northam’s administration banned the death penalty, allocated funds to historically Black colleges, implemented police reform measures and removed Confederate monuments.

A cynical perspective would have one assume he did this for political purposes, Henderson said, but she takes him at his word.

“It’s a story laced with all those theological words like redemption and forgiveness, learning and repayment of a debt,” she said.

Good intentions are no longer sufficient, Henderson said, and to grow a circle of belonging, people must have difficult conversations. She advised people to pick one issue that is most heartbreaking to them and learn and engage with it as much as they can.

“Whose voices are you listening to?” she said. “Who is most impacted? Who is missing? What can you learn? What can we learn? Talk to people, have those hard conversations. Bring it to your religious communities. Give money. Vote. Find the partners who are doing the work and go to work there.” 

Henderson then turned to climate change, comparing lessons there to those from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“It laid us low and humbled us,” she said. “It reminded us we are all intimately connected.”

She said environmental and racial justice are linked in that our relationship with the environment has been tainted by colonization and theological rationalization.

She said humans see themselves as stewards of the environment, which puts people in the place of God.

During Henderson’s home remodel, she found snakeskins in her new pantry. Days later, she found another in the same spot.

Before COVID-19, Henderson said, she would have rushed to pour cement over every hole in the house to prevent the snake from returning. Instead, she admired the snake’s patterns and body memory, always returning to its favorite spot to shed, and was grateful it didn’t reveal itself while she was around. She said she wouldn’t have been able to form this perspective without the pandemic.

With regard to climate change, Henderson said people aren’t persuaded by facts or data, but rather by feeling a sense of belonging and connection. She said having conversations with one another is more persuasive.

One way Henderson feels connected is with her tattoo of a mandala on her forearm, with a circle in which there’s a tree of life, she said. The tattoo has roots in a red thread, which she said symbolizes humans’ lifeblood is connected with nature.

This meaning has changed for her over time. When she went to a memorial for Black people lynched in this country, in Montgomery, Alabama, where she realized her tattoos represented not only her original intent, but also the lynching tree and the blood of ancestors.

She realized her tattoo represents her expanding circle of belonging and connection.

“We carry each other,” she said. “We’re all accountable to one another. We have to hold each other tight.”

As she leaves Auburn Seminary later this year, Henderson said she is looking forward to seeing and working with people marching in streets, online or singing at Chautauqua.

“I look forward to working with you as people of faith and moral courage spread out all over the country to turn precarity into promise and polarization into possibility,” she said.

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Teaching is what philosopher Robin R. Wang does best, and this week she made her first visit to Chautauqua to teach the fundamentals of Taoism, Yin Yang and body cultivation.

“These things are uniquely Chinese,” she said. “These are Chinese seeds growing in Chinese soil.” 

On Wednesday, June 30 in the Amphitheater, Wang presented her lecture on these topics as the third and final Interfaith Lecture for Week One, themed “21st Century Religion in China: Collaboration, Competition, Confrontation?”

Wang teaches philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and she is the author of Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Early Chinese Thought. 

She began by differentiating Tao from Dao. Both words mean the same thing, Wang said, which is a road, a path or a way, but the translation one uses affects the spelling. Taoism, then, is the religion. 

“It is humans’ place in the cosmos,” Wang said. “Why are we here? Where are we going?”

Wang then mentioned the text Tao Te Ching, or The Book of the Way, originally written in the 4th Century B.C. on bamboo and silk scripts. It acts as the sacred text for Taoism, like the Bible would be to Christianity or the Quran to Islam. 

There are several versions and translations of the book, Wang said, because Chinese is a pictorial language and doesn’t translate directly to a language like English, leaving it open to different translations. Some translations are conceptual and some look more at body cultivation, or strengthening the mind and body, Wang said.

Chapter 42 of the book references Yin and Yang, a concept Wang thinks is not fully understood.

“I walk around Venice Beach, and there are yinyang earrings, surfboards and tattoos,” she said. “Everyone thinks they know about the Yin Yang.”

She said people just think it is a cool symbol with black and white fish chasing each other. This lack of understanding inspired her to write her book on Yin Yang, which she said took her around seven years to finish. 

“Yin Yang is the key,” she said. “Yin Yang helps you unfold Chinese (cultural) DNA.”

The origin of Yin Yang comes from humans’ obsession with the sun, Wang said. When the sun came out of the horizon, if there was a hill, the south would be full of sunshine while the north would be in the shadow. This concept was especially important for farmers planting their crops. 

Another example Wang used was earthquakes. She said if the Yin Yang would get stuck, the earth would shake. Essentially, Yin Yang is a conceptual way of explaining the world, Wang said. 

Yin is more aggressive, or masculine, than Yang, Wang said. She also described Yin as rooster mode and Yang as hen mode.

Yin Yang, therefore, points to relationships and connectivity, Wang said. She then described six different relationships.

First was contradictions, opposites or differences. To start off, she gave an example of a student who might be hesitant about making a decision, instead wanting to take a nap and then decide what they wanted when they woke up, in order to make a good decision, Wang said.

“In Yin Yang, it’s not about winners or losers,” she said. “In China, when we have contradictions or differences, we reposition. It’s a Chinese skill.”

Another example Wang gave is children fighting over who can play with a toy. A solution could be to let the child who had it first play first, and then take turns with equal shares of playing time. 

The second relationship is interdependence. 

“One side of the opposition cannot exist without the other,” Wang said. 

She gave a few examples of this relationship, too. One was a door — if it is open, one sees open space, but if it is closed, it looks like a wall. She presented a drawing from 200 A.D. that shows the physical pumping heart and a corresponding spiritual heart. 

“Clearly, you can see the unity of the mind and spirit,” she said. “It’s not a dualistic split. Mind and body always go together.”

Wang also described a female-only Taoist academy — the only one in the world — in Nanyue Mountain, noting Taoism does not put limitations on women’s roles. There, they don’t have washing machines and have their own vegetable garden because all Taoists are vegetarians.

“Human beings are a part of nature, not the center,” Wang said.

Wang also said all Taoists temples are often in the mountains in order to be closer to nature. 

The third relationship Wang described was mutual inclusion. In the Yin Yang symbol, there is a white dot encompassed by the black, and vice versa. She said to think of this like day and night. During the daytime, people confront the brightness, knowing that nighttime and darkness will come again no matter what. If someone prefers one, they have to experience the other anyway. 

She also said it was like a silent transformation, something that goes unnoticed by humans.

“It happens — one day, you look in the mirror and realize you’re old, or that the grandchildren grew,” she said. “Which day did this happen?”

Wang said there are two souls that act as interrelated forces. There is the hun-soul, which goes to the sky toward heaven, and the po-soul which pulls downward to earth. 

“These are underlying currents,” she said. “To understand China, you need to understand underlying currents.”

The fourth relationship, resonance and interaction, is where each element shapes and influences the other. Similar to mutual inclusion, day and night interact where one comes and goes. 

Wang said there is the Tao of Thought and Religion, but they are not separated. Instead, she said they are intertwined and mutually influence one another.

The fifth relationship was complementary and mutual support. 

“You can’t teach somebody to use chopsticks,” Wang said. “There is no right way to use it. If you can pick up rice and put it in your mouth, that’s the right way.”

She said there is table etiquette, of course, and this relationship deals with art and culture. She referenced tai chi and martial arts as a way of teaching movement, too. 

The sixth and final relationship was change and transformation. 

“The body is the vessel of the Tao, and the miniature of nature,” Wang said. “Keeping the body healthy is the first stage of the quest for transformation and immortality. It is the carrier for transcending.”

She based this relationship off the Chart of the Inner Body, found in the White Cloud Daoist Temple in Beijing, which divided the body into three sections.

The Lower Field is below the belly button, where the essence for a woman is blood, and for man is sperm. The main problem that arises in this area is lust, she said.

The Middle Field is the chest, home of emotional entanglement, she said. 

“Your heart gets hurt, and you can’t let it go,” Wang said. “To solve it, you connect with the cosmos, and you can release it.”

The Upper Field pertains to the brain. Here is the fight with stupidity and solving problems, she said. 

Wang then compared life to riding a horse, where one has to consider weather, terrain, the horse’s temperament and how far the horse needs to go. 

Taoism is like in mathematics when one starts broadly, then learns more and more until finally becoming very specific. 

She said Taoism is a great way to think about dealing with China.

“These six relationships let us think about our relationship,” Wang said. “We need communication, and we need to work together and solve these bigger global issues and in our personal life.” 

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Fenggang Yang understands that Americans may not realize that millions of Chinese have turned to religion for decades.

It might be hard to believe because of Chinese Communist Party’s suppression of religion, he said, or because Americans usually focus on Chinese economy instead of Chinese faith beliefs. 

Similar to a great religious awakening that occurred in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where people would gather in camps for revival meetings and swarm churches for salvation and renewal — like with Chautauqua’s founding — China is in its own great awakening.

At 1 p.m. Tuesday in the Amphitheater, Yang presented his lecture, “The Changing Religious Landscape in Modernizing China,” part of the Week One Interfaith Lecture Series, “21st Century Religion in China: Collaboration, Competition, Confrontation?”

Alternatively, Yang said his lecture could be called “The Great Awakening in China.”

Yang is a sociology professor and founding director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University. He is also the author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule and Atlas of Religion in China: Social and Geographical Contexts.

Since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, Yang said China has shifted back toward its first 30 years after World War II, when Chairman Mao Zedong was in power and stifled religious freedom.

“It is returning to the old days,” Yang said. “Not the good old days, but the bad old days. I personally experienced these bad old days.”

He said while he was growing up in China during the 1960s and ‘70s, religion was completely banned.

“Religious buildings were shut down,” he said. “Holy scriptures were burned. Sacred statues were smashed. Monks and nuns were forced to return to secular life.”

Communist Albania was the only other country to ban religion, Yang said. 

Yang grew up atheist. In fact, it was taught to students starting in elementary school, he said. People were taught religion was for the weak, he said, and they should find satisfaction in material wealth and cultural richness.

Instead, people were taught to respect Chairman Mao.

“In high school, we had an English class, and the first sentence we were taught to say was, ‘Long live Chairman Mao,’ ” Yang said.

Every aspect of Chinese life centered around Mao. Morning and evening prayers were said in front of a statue or picture of Mao. There were songs and poems dedicated to him, often in the Little Red Book, which was one of the only books people could get in China. Soon after Yang learned the English chant, however, Mao died.

“How magical the English language is,” Yang said. 

Before Mao’s death in 1976, Yang had never heard of universities because they were all closed, like religious venues, he said. Yang went to university in 1978; one year later, religious services were allowed to resume. 

Yang was drawn to philosophy in school, and he realized nearly all philosophers made important references to God. He was originally drawn to logos in Greek philosophy, and then came to learn through Christianity that logos represented God. 

Like his own awakening, Yang said people in the 1980s began to have their awakenings.

Yang described several encounters he had with people who were religious before the Cultural Revolution who then returned to religion. One of those people was his father, who was a lifelong Chinese Communist Party member. It took time, however, for his father to warm up to religion. 

“When I first told him that someday I might become a Christian, he reacted strongly,” Yang said. “He said, ‘If you do that, that would mean betraying me.’ ”

As it turned out, Yang’s father had a near-death experience when he rode his bike over an icy river that cracked open, swallowing him below. Yang said his father remembers being guided by a figure in white garments back toward the surface. It wasn’t until his father began exploring spirituality, after 1984, that he believed it was Jesus who guided him. 

It wasn’t just the older population turning to religion, but young people, too, Yang said. The Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, a brutal and deadly end to the Chinese Student Movement, was a major turning point.

“That was a watershed,” Yang said. “It was like a dam broke. The atheist dam broke open. People began to pour into churches and temples.”

He said he heard many stories of book clubs that wanted to read the Bible, but because it was difficult to interpret, they would find a Christian who could help them understand it, essentially turning these into Bible studies.

In summer 2000, Yang interviewed one person who said 100 people would gather at a specific McDonald’s each week to learn a Bible lesson. There would be nine different tables, and each week would be a new lesson led by American Christians. After two or three months, someone could go from not knowing anything about Christianity to becoming an evangelist. 

“It’s very efficient, like the McDonald’s service of fast food,” Yang said.

Eventually, the police raided the McDonald’s, detaining each member of the group (oddly enough, the American leaders didn’t show up that day), Yang said. It was illegal to hold religious gatherings outside of specific government-designated venues. 

The group agreed not to meet at that McDonald’s again, Yang said, which fooled the police because the group would just meet at another McDonald’s or restaurant from that point forward.

Yang met many young people who turned to all different religions, from a philosophy graduate student-turned-Buddhist monk to a descendant of Confucius becoming an imam, or Muslim leader. He knew other young people who turned to Confucianism or Taoism. 

Christianity has been the fastest-growing religion in China, he said. Over the last 21 years, Yang has interviewed hundreds of people — entrepreneurs, academics, young professionals, lawyers, journalists, writers and artists — who are now Christian. 

To explain, he compared religion to an economic market, which needs demand and supply, he said. In China, there are five legal religions: Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Catholicism and Protestantism (although Catholicism and Protestantism are generally both considered Christian, China lists them as two separate religions). 

“These religions are in what I would call the red market,” Yang said. “They are legally allowed and tolerated, but they are stained red — the Chinese Communist color.”

Churches have increased in number, but they are under some government control, Yang said. To make themselves more visible, churches would construct large, neon crosses, he said. 

This made a communist party boss in Shanghai upset, Yang said, and between 2014 and 2016, more than 1,500 crosses were removed. Church services continued as normal, though.

Yang noted two other religious markets in China: black and gray. The black market consists of about 20 banned religions that still continue sneakily to avoid the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party.

The gray market is a middle ground of legal and illegal religious activity. For example, Yang said it is illegal to worship outside of designated venues, but people could regularly get away with worshiping inside of their own homes.

He calls these jiating (family, home or house in Chinese) churches. 

“In the early history of Christianity, many Christians had to meet at people’s private homes,” Yang said. “Jiating churches have become more than that. Some have become large congregations with several hundred or more than a thousand people. Some of those congregations began to form together to create denominations.” 

The main reason people meet in these jiating churches instead of regular churches is to avoid government-designated buildings, which they fear are controlled by the Communist Party, Yang said. 

People would even worship in the streets and public squares, Yang said. Punishments are not severe — often no more than 24 hours in jail, and a couple of weeks at worst, he said. 

“As soon as they were released, they would go back to the streets and squares,” he said. “They are so fired up, it’s uncontainable.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people identify with a certain religion in China because every organization comes up with a different number, Yang said. Furthermore, the government usually gives the smallest number possible and mission groups provide the highest number possible. As a sociologist, he said he presents a more conservative estimate.

His numbers show a dramatic increase in Protestantism in China, which began rising even when religion was banned during the Cultural Revolution. Between 1956 and 1982, for example, China went from less than 1 million Protestants to about 3 million, he said. The official government number today is 40 million, which he emphasizes again is certainly an undercount. 

Yang said the higher estimate put the number of Chinese Christians over 100 million. The U.S. population is 331.5 million, according to the 2020 Census. 

“At the same time, in the U.S., we know the proportion of Christians is declining,” Yang said. “By 2030, there could be more Christians in China than in the U.S. While it’s under suppression, it could take more than 10 or 20 years, but it’s uncontainable.”

Sharing maps from his atlas, Yang showed how widespread the five legally allowed religions are in China, with official venues spread across the country, significant for the world’s third-largest country by land area and largest by population. 

One map showed which religion had the most venues for each province. In a high number of provinces, there were more Christian churches than any other religious venue. 

Yang concluded his lecture drawing points from Week One’s theme. He said China is planning on sending out 20,000 missionaries by 2030, but they could use collaboration with experienced American Christian missionaries. 

He acknowledges, however, ideological competition between China and the U.S.; between communism and democracy. The U.S. government will continue to confront China on its human rights violations especially concerning religious freedom, Yang said. 

“We Americans believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights endowed by the creator,” he said. “In this globalization era, if we do not fight for this globally, we may lose them here, as well.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

In his first visit to Chautauqua, Kelly James Clark wanted to get one key point across: Perhaps China isn’t so different from the United States. 

At 1 p.m. June 29 in the Amphitheater, Clark, the former senior research fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University, held Chautauqua’s first in-person installment of the Interfaith Lecture Series since 2019. His lecture title, “A Spiritual Geography of Early Chinese Thought,” is based on the title of his forthcoming book and was part of Week One’s theme, “21st Century Religion in China: Collaboration, Competition, Confrontation?”

Clark began his lecture by reflecting on his first trip to China, in 1999.

“I went there believing the propaganda the Chinese created for their own people during the Cultural Revolution,” he said. The Cultural Revolution was a violent undoing of capitalism by its then-Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong from 1966 to 1976.

Clark expected to see everyone happy and equal, even having the same clothes and haircuts, based on the propaganda. He was shocked to see that China was actually largely capitalist.

“Beijing, in 1999, was already like New York City on steroids,” he said. 

In addition, Clark expected Chinese people to be non-religious, or atheist, and that they would reject the notion of an afterlife. Clark had previously studied Chinese philosophy, and he said at least 20 other scholars told him China was completely atheist. 

Clark said one sociologist went to the Hall of 500 Gods, a Buddhist temple in China, and was shocked that religions in China believed in not just one god, but sometimes hundreds. 

Clark was equally shocked in his first visit to the country.

Showing a map created by Fenggang Yang, Tuesday’s Interfaith Lecture Series speaker, Clark highlighted the vastness of contemporary China’s religious beliefs.

In the west, particularly in Xinjiang province, is China’s Muslim population, totaling somewhere around 70 million people, Clark said. In the east, where the most populous cities are located, is China’s Christian population, totaling over 100 million people. 

“On any given Sunday, there are more Chinese worshiping in China than in all of Europe combined,” Clark said. 

He noted there are about 10 million fewer Chinese Communist Party members than followers of Christianity, which is the fastest-growing religion in China — a concern for the Party, he said. 

Buddhism came to China from India around 200 A.D. Despite Buddhism originating in India, the largest Buddhist population currently resides in China, Clark said. Furthermore, he said that while Buddhism was originally an atheist religion, Chinese versions can include hundreds of gods. 

Clark warned against generalizing any aspect of China, regardless of whether one was speaking about contemporary or early periods, because the nation has a vast geography and language. Although sometimes called dialects, Clark said China really has more than 100 languages.

“It’s not like the North and the South (in the U.S.),” he said. “In some places, you have to rely on written characters.” 

In early China, there were 10 warring states, Clark said, noting that separate states couldn’t be generalized under one umbrella term like “the Chinese.” 

“We like to say ‘the Chinese’ because we like to put them in a little box, and we like to think they are somehow exotic or somehow different from us,” he said. “But, it’s not true. They are a lot like us.”

Clark said the first text he read that opened his eyes to the importance of religion in China was a poem about King Wen, who may have existed around 1100 B.C. and exemplified wisdom and justice — his name is honorific, as “Wen” means culture.

The poem, which Clark read during the lecture, showed Wen as bringing a god-given culture to the land: traits like justice, harmony and peace. It shows Wen shining in heaven, so whoever wrote the poem must have believed in heaven, Clark said. 

“Turns out there’s hundreds of these texts that unequivocally make reference to God and the afterlife,” he said.

China’s political philosophy for 3,000 years, before communism, was based on the Mandate of Heaven, Clark said. God was said to approve new rulers, but if that ruler succumbed to leading unjustly, then God would search for a new leader and strip the former leader of his mandate. The Western version of this practice, he said, is the divine right to rule. 

King Wen lived 700 years before Confucius, but Confucius’ writings make clear references to God, Clark said. 

Confucius wrote about heaven’s virtue and trust in God when he found himself threatened by another king, Huan Tui. Confucius said he had no reason to fear, essentially saying God was in control so he had no reason to worry, according to Clark. 

“We see an increasing sense of morality and dependence on God with Confucius,” Clark said.

Clark also said Confucius wrote about heaven punishing him if he did wrong, noting that heaven could reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

Confucius also believed in a personal God, although the personal relationship was through deceased ancestors, Clark said. Instead of communicating directly with God, one would speak with spirits of their ancestors, who would relay the message to God. 

“It’s not so dissimilar to God in the West,” Clark said.

Clark then described how archaeologists have dug up thousands of old Chinese tombs, which contain maps drawn for spirits. Some of these maps guide the spirit on how to find flying dragons who will carry them to paradise, or heaven. They also depict strange beings who reside down below in an underworld. 

These tombs would sometimes contain letters written by the living, saying this new spirit was a good person and deserved to go to heaven, Clark said. In addition, he said there might be rooms to host food and persuade spirits to go to heaven, along with rooms to meet other spirits. 

The people who built and maintained these tombs in early China were almost exclusively farmers, like everywhere else in the world, Clark said.

“Life in early China was hard,” he said, describing constant floods decimating crops. 

He said early Chinese hated war and wanted to live in peace, and they wished for a better life for their children. 

“They delighted in a good day of work and a fulsome meal and the love of their family,” he said. 

In early China, people believed in living good lives in order to get to heaven but did not necessarily subscribe to any certain religion, Clark said. 

In contemporary China, there are 90 million communists, but Clark said many of them are members only to get good jobs, such as in universities, so it is out of convenience — not conviction. 

A lesson from cognitive science, Clark said, is that human beings are inclined to believe in an afterlife. He said one researcher expected 0% of Chinese students to believe in an afterlife, and it turned out 60% did.

“The point I want to make about China, the Chinese people, is they want to live in peace and harmony,” Clark said. “They want a better life for their children … They want to share moments and meals and jokes with friends. The Chinese people don’t want war, they want peace. They, the Chinese people, are a lot like us.”

Satpal Singh gave the last Interfaith Friday lecture of the 2020 season on his perspective of creation and humanity as a Sikh at 2 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 28, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Vice President for Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson said that Singh’s words demonstrated a theme in the Interfaith Friday series.

“One of the reasons that I do this Interfaith Friday program is for people to see how much we have in common with one another, although we would use different words and different practices to express our own own spirituality, our beliefs in the divine and so on,” Robinson said. “… In this multitude of religions, we have this one theme that keeps coming through. Despite the fact that we’re each holding a different piece of the divine, … none of us can comprehend all of it. And what you’re saying has really demonstrated that.”

After the lecture on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Robinson joined Singh in a subsequent Q-and-A fueled by questions from Robinson and the audience, who could submit questions through the www.chq.questions.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020.

Singh researches neurodegenerative diseases at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Outside of his career, he is the father of Simran Jeet Singh, who has also spoken at Chautauqua on Sikhism, and Satpal himself is a thought leader on Sikhism in interfaith dialogues and on social justice issues. 

According to the Guru Granth Sahib, the central Sikh scripture, there is one universal god who created everything. But this god is formless, without physical traits or a gender. Singh referred to God as “their” to reflect this. While he said a formless god is also difficult to describe, this formlessness is like the concepts of gravity, space and time — though in Sikhism, God also created those, too.

“In a similar way, we can feel love, which is also formless and can permeate our being,” Singh said.

God existed before creation — no land or sky, only darkness.

“Only the divine existed in a profound trance,” Singh said.

Then the divine created the universe.

“From a non-manifest state, the divine became manifest,” Singh said.

Singh sees elements of the Sikh creation story in the Big Bang Theory, the most accepted scientific theory on how the universe began.

“In both cases, starting with nothing, there was a sudden unimaginable force that created an entire known universe,” Singh said.

The divine created it, and also became part of it. Singh said that humans are not only a creation of the divine, but a manifestation, meaning that humans embody the divine itself. The Guru Granth Sahib compares the divine to the ocean, and each human as a wave in the ocean. 

“There is no difference between the water in the ocean and the water in the wave,” Singh said.

In Sikhism, the spiritual pursuit of a life is to realize this and become one with the divine. But this is not on a physical plane. Any physical action, such as going on a pilgrimage, dipping oneself in holy water, fasting, facing in a certain direction, praying in a certain language, eating a certain way, is not related to the spiritual journey — though these actions can help prepare someone for spiritual pursuits on a physical or a societal level.

Since the entire world has been created out of the same divine light,” he said, “how can one person be good and one bad in the name of religion, gender, caste or anything else?”

“Some of these actions may offer us health benefits or other benefits at the level of our physical body or societal principles, but they do not offer us any sort of spiritual advancement,” Singh said. “This may seem odd coming from someone who looks like me. My turban is not a ticket to the realm of the divine. The turban is my identity as a Sikh.”

For Singh, his turban serves as a reminder to himself to maintain Sikh values and ethics, and to make commitments to stand up for equality. Because there is a divine light in every human, Singh said that how a person chooses to follow their spiritual path does not matter.

“If you are a Christian, be a good Christian,” Singh said. “If you are a Jew, be a good Jew. If you are a good Sikh, be a good Sikh.”

He said that recognizing the divine light in every human also means that no person can be greater or lesser than another. He compared it to the idea of water from the same pitcher that fills cups, though the cups all have different colors and shapes.

It’s a matter of practicing complete equality — absolute equality, with everyone sitting together to eat irrespective of religion, caste, gender or social status, or any other divisions among us,” Singh said.

“Since the entire world has been created out of the same divine light,” he said, “how can one person be good and one bad in the name of religion, gender, caste or anything else?”

Thus, the concept of hurting another human who possesses the same divine light becomes illogical. Singh said it was like two brothers with the same mother fighting over whose mother is superior.

“It does not make sense to fight or brutalize others in the name of religion, which we often do,” Singh said.

The concept of this shared divine light, which Singh said was an intrinsic, immeasurable value, is why religious houses of worship, including Sikh gurdwaras, offer free meals to anyone who visits. In Sikhism, this tradition is called langar. With the help of donations and volunteers, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, is the largest gurdwara and feeds between 40,000 per day on average and more than 100,000 on holidays. Regular-sized gurdwaras can serve thousands of meals every day. Gurdwaras have offered food during Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, flooding, conflicts in Syria, in refugee camps, and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s a matter of practicing complete equality — absolute equality, with everyone sitting together to eat irrespective of religion, caste, gender or social status, or any other divisions among us,” Singh said.

Singh said that healthcare workers, community organizers and volunteers giving their time and energy to help during the COVID-19 pandemic expressed the greatest form of this spirituality.

“This is the divine connection that we all share with one another and our creator,” Singh said.

A computer screen separated clinical psychologist Dr. Robert J. Wicks and his audience, but it didn’t phase him. From his Pennsylvania home, he looked at the camera and spoke directly to people experiencing secondary stress and burnout in ministry roles and as physicians, nurses, educators, counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and “people like yourselves.”

His second expertise is resiliency psychology and spirituality, “which is designed not simply to help people bounce back from stress, but paradoxically because of it — to become deeper as persons both psychologically and spiritually in ways that would not have been possible had the trauma or stress not occurred in the first place,” Wicks said.

At 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 27, Wicks discussed the ways he has guided people as a psychologist and consultant bent toward the spiritual in self-care and resiliency — and how people can put these in practice — in his lecture titled “Night Call: Embracing Compassion and Hope in a Troubled World.”

His lecture marked the end of the 2020 season’s Interfaith Lecture Series, and the Week Nine theme of “The Future We Want, The World We Need.” Wicks is also a recipient of the Holy Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, the highest honor from the Pope for service to the Catholic Church. In his lecture, Wicks discussed topics from his most recent book Night Call: Embracing Compassion and Hope in a Troubled World. It touches on secondary stress and burnout in roles of both physical and emotional service to others and how a person can deepen their inner life.

He recited a quote from Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

But those who serve others also need to take care of themselves in the process.

“Not being aware of the serious stress in our life as we reach out to others — which is a call of every religious faith group — can be quite dangerous,” Wicks said.

Wicks expanded his lecture at Chautauqua to talk about burnout.

“The seeds of compassion and the seeds of burnout are the same seeds,” Wicks said. “Everyone who cares needs to be concerned, not just professional helpers and healers. It’s my belief that for every spiritually committed, compassionate person experiencing significant stress, there’s at least a dozen of us experiencing at least some form of spiritual and psychological burnout.”

Wicks observes guilt when working with nurses and physicians because they can’t save everyone, and in the case of COVID-19, hospitals often don’t have enough equipment to accommodate the high volume of patients. Health care workers also worried about infecting their family.

“Most often, stress is a development rather than a cataclysmic event,” Wicks said. 

After giving a talk in South Africa about his book Perspective, a woman approached him and said she couldn’t keep going as a social worker who specializes in helping women who have been sexually and physically abused. The women, who were often poor single moms, had to take off work to go to court. Then the often-male judge would look at the documents and cancel the court date, and would say to make another appointment. The social worker saw herself as a failure.

But Wicks said that she was there for these women when no one else was.

“Don’t you realize we are not in the success business?” he said to her. “We are in the faith business.”

He said that failure increases with proximity to the problem and possible solutions.

“The more we’re involved, statistically the more we’re going to fail,” Wicks said.

When Wicks worked with surgical residents, he started with telling them that they will end up killing people in their career.

“Maybe not through malpractice, but certainly through mispractice, because it is impossible to be at an A-level 100% of the time,” Wicks said. “But commitment is expected of us.”

Wicks described Rabbi Tarfon as a contemporary of Jesus, and quoted him as  saying: “The day is short, the work is great, the labors are sluggish and the wages aren’t high and the master of the house is insistent. It is not our duty to finish the work, but you are not free to neglect it.”

In terms of addressing wounds with God, Wicks said it was important to attribute them correctly.

“Are these wounds based on reality, or are they based on our lack of faith and our big ego?” Wicks said.

Wicks described how stress can cause a parallel process, where people mimic the patterns of those they guide, minister to or care for. But Wicks cited a spiritual master who once told him to seek to improve his part in a situation, before trying to “carpet the world,” by wearing slippers to cover his feet.

Life is not acute, it’s chronic,” Wicks said. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you have a problem, you conquer it and —’ no, no, life is chronic and comes and goes, but suffering need not be the last word.”

Wicks said people should be present with others, the self and something greater than either of those. Helping others can be as simple as comforting them in a time of need.

And be conscious of how people feel when they’re with you. While watching Desmond Tutu walk onstage, Wicks heard a man say, “Desmond Tutu is a holy man.” When his friend asked him why he thought this, the man said, “Because he makes me feel like a holy man.”

Wicks said that gratitude for others and the little things is important, and to connect with a cause greater than oneself.

On self-care, Wicks referred to humorist Irma Bombeck, who once said, “I think any man who watches three football games in a row should be declared legally dead.”

“We just eat, metaphorically, spiritually, whatever comes along — rather than taking out the time,” he said. “ … We have time for what we want.”

Stephen Covey recommends not only to schedule time, but also priorities. Wicks said people need to make time to be present through meditation, alone time, praying and reading scripture.

But when practicing self-reflection and meditation, Wicks said to avoid arrogance and projecting issues onto others, self-condemnation and discouragement — the last of which is “the last castle of the ego, because you want things to change immediately.”

Self-care is not a process that starts and ends. It’s continuous management.

“Life is not acute, it’s chronic,” Wicks said. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you have a problem, you conquer it and —’ no, no, life is chronic and comes and goes, but suffering need not be the last word.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami founded J Street in 2008 with the mission to solve the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine with a two-state solution. As of 2020, this conflict has lasted almost 100 years.

“For nearly 100 years, every effort to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians and to resolve this conflict has failed,” Ben-Ami said.

Ben-Ami delivered his lecture “Israel-Palestine 2020: One State Remains the Problem & Two States the Solution” at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Aug. 26. It was released a day after the Rev. Mitri Raheb spoke about hope for Palestine’s future. Both lectures were part of Week Nine’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Future We Want, the World We Need.”

Ben-Ami said that public debate on how to solve the conflict between Israel and Palestine is constant. But in July, The New York Times columnist Peter Beinart stoked the conversation after he announced he stopped believing in a Jewish state or that a two-state solution was possible.

Ben-Ami said he still believes a two-state solution is possible. He believes in Israel as a self-determining solution to a long history of persecution against Jews. Ben-Ami said that a Jewish person is still Jewish without being religious, especially when in Israel. Jewish people are not just united by a religion, but are also a nation of people united by language, culture and heritage — and that aforementioned fraught history.

“Rarely was the story of Jewish life in the lands of others one of integration and success,” Ben-Ami said.

He used his own family as a case study. His distant relative, Isaac Abarbanel, was an adviser to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 and told them to stop persecuting fellow Jews through the Spanish Inquisition. But his high status didn’t save him. Abarbanel and his family fled Spain, and he and his descendants would remain stateless for hundreds of years. Eventually, his paternal great-grandparents settled in the first agricultural settlement of Israel. Ben-Ami said they bought land from absentee Ottoman landlords after fleeing persecution from what was then the Soviet Union.

The Holocaust caused the international community to agree with Zionist Jews that Jewish people needed Israel as a homeland. In 1947, the United Nations granted statehood to Israel. It was mandated to exist next to the country of Palestine, whose people had deep historical attachment to the land as the descendants of empires past — Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Persians, Muslims, Mamluks, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ottomans and more.

“So while the historic, religious and cultural connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is real, so too are the connections of other people, including many who can trace their family back hundreds of years and more,” Ben-Ami said. “Palestinian nationalism is rooted in such just claims and a national history that itself is soaked in blood and tears. So two peoples, each with just claims and a legacy of suffering, find themselves locked in a conflict that has tortured this holy land for close to a century without resolution.”

Ben-Ami said that out of the nearly 14 million people in Israel and Palestine, which do not have a clear-cut border in between, approximately eight million are Jews, who enjoy a developed country that is a leading economic and military power. Palestinians, treated as second-class citizens, make up the rest of the population. They experience a vastly different reality, which Ben-Ami said must change for Israel to be a legitimate democracy that upholds Jewish values.

“Only if there is a national home for the Palestinian people in the state of their (area) between the rivers and the sea, can Israel be both a safe haven for the Jewish people and live up to the values of freedom, justice and equality on which it was founded,” Ben-Ami said.

But the two-state solution has had an 85-year track record of failure, Ben-Ami said.

To actually get closer to achieving this solution, Ben-Ami said that it will take a different set of political leaders after the current U.S. administration to push this forward, because Israel President Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to annex the West Bank and U.S. President Donald Trump supports him, while 650,000 Jews have illegally expanded settlements past the 1967 Green Line. According to international laws, legal annexation is meant to be a temporary fix that benefits those who live there rather than the occupiers. But what Ben-Ami calls Israel’s “de facto annexation” of Palestine has continued beyond a temporary fix.

Meanwhile, Ben-Ami said that Palestine currently lacks a strong political leader that can step up and lead it as a state.

“Neither society is primed, nor do they have the leadership needed, to force the necessary tough decisions,” Ben-Ami said.

Walls and barriers around the cities of Palestine built by Israel in attempts to limit Palestinian citizens also need to be dismantled in order to create a clear boundary between the two states. While Ben-Ami said these would be challenging to remove, he noted that “it’s also true that these obstacles have literally been built by people. And there is nothing built by people that can’t be moved or taken down by people when there is the will to do so.”

And the United States eventually needs to demonstrate the cost of occupation to Israel, Ben-Ami said, and reverse prior U.S. administrations’ efforts to erase Palestine by not recognizing it as a state and ignoring atrocities by Israel.

Seeing a two-state solution in the future seems impossible to others who have given up on the solution after all this time. But Ben-Ami said that surprise plot twists in recent history have happened before.

“Who thought while Mandela languished on Robben Island, he would become the country’s president? Who would have thought or foreseen in 1988 the collapse of the Berlin Wall a year later? We have experienced all these outcomes in just the past generation or two. So perhaps all those who are predicting the triumph of doom and gloom and pessimism, when it comes to two states, they’d benefit from a dose of humility grounded in our recent history.”

At 58 years old, the Rev. Mitri Raheb has lived through 11 wars and battles in Bethlehem, Palestine.

“On average, every five years we go through a war,” Raheb said. “And in such a context, it’s really not easy to keep hope alive.”

But as an Evangelical Lutheran pastor, he preaches hope all the same.

“The more I read the Bible, the more I was preaching, the more I discovered that actually the Bible itself was written in a context of lots of despair, war, exile, destruction,” Raheb said. “And you hear the prophets saying, ‘How long, oh Lord, how long?’ And yet, that same book, the Bible, is infused with hope.

In his lecture “Palestine: Hope at Times of Despair?!” Raheb described how just like in the Bible, Palestine is in despair, but he still has hope for future peace.

He pre-recorded his lecture from Bethlehem, Palestine. It was released at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 25, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the Week Nine Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Future We Want, the World We Need.”

He started with the present. After Palestinians have been pushed out of their homes by Jewish settlers for the last 50 years, Raheb said Israel President Benjamin Netanyahu aims to annex around 40% of the West Bank, including important resources like the Jordan Valley “vegetable basket” and access to water resources like the Dead Sea and a water aquifer. He compared the annexation plan to Swiss cheese.

“Israel gets the cheese, that is, the resources, and the Palestinians are pushed out and get the holes,” Raheb said.

The current U.S. administration is also partial to Israel’s goals.

“They give Israel everything without really leaving any options for the Palestinians,” Raheb said.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan, illustrated in a map, leaves parts of Gaza disconnected from one another, with limited roads to travel between them.

Raheb has been discouraged by the international state response in general. Raheb said the atrocities Jews suffered in the Holocaust often cause European states to hesitate to act on what the Israeli government has done to Palestinians in the name of a holy land.

Meanwhile, Arab states like the United Arab Emirates gain financially and politically through ties with Israel at the expense of Palestine. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish uses the Judeo-Christian allegory of the 11 brothers abusing Joseph and casting him out in the Old Testament to summarize the the waning lack of support over time from traditionally Muslim countries, though Palestine, too, is traditionally Muslim.

Raheb said it feels like a two-state solution is dissipating, while a one-state solution doesn’t seem possible yet, either.

“We live in this limbo,” Raheb said.

Raheb also uses another word to describe this limbo — apartheid.

“There is no way to violate human rights in the name of divine rights,” Raheb said.

Since 2002, Israel has built a separation barrier deep into Palestinian territory that has been condemned by the international community. Qalqilya, Palestine, is a city with 50,000 people surrounded by a 25-foot wall. To travel from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, five miles away in Israel, Palestinians need a permit. Israel has also created separate road systems that Israelis are permitted to use, while Palestinians are restricted to smaller roads.

When looking at maps, Raheb said it’s hard to be hopeful. But people still inspire hope in him.

He is first comforted by the fact that 6.5 million Palestinians live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. They are not going to just disappear. In 1948, outside forces tried to do this by kicking Palestinians out of their homes and displacing them.

He is also comforted by the 6 million-strong diaspora of Palestinians around the world. His conversations with Palestinians abroad who are young, educated and still passionate about Palestine  — even as second- or third-generation immigrants — are another source of hope.

Raheb said that young Jewish people also give him hope for Palestine’s future.

“The third sign of hope is a movement that is happening in the Jewish community, and especially the Jewish community in the United States,” Raheb said.

Raheb said that J Street is part of this movement. An Interfaith Lecture Series talk by J Street’s founder Jeremy Ben-Ami releases at 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 26, the day after Raheb’s.

“J Street said we have to work for a two-state solution. We have to find a compromise,” Raheb said. “Not because they love the Palestinians so much, but because Israel cannot be a democratic country and a Jewish country at the same time.”

Raheb said that he also still sees hope in the international community. Like this summer, when Black Lives Matter protests spread globally following the death of George Floyd. And when Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Israel, the international community did not follow suit because Raheb said it recognized Jerusalem not as the capital of Israel, but as an occupied state. And churches in the United States and all over the world are calling for companies to divest from business with Israel in protest.

“It is a desperate situation, but there is still hope,” Raheb said.

The future of Palestine, Raheb said, needs the international community to take human rights violations in Palestine seriously, engaged citizens who pay attention, and to regain the diversity that Palestine had prior to British colonization. Until 1928, Christians, Jews and Muslims worked and lived in one municipality before the British divided it  into two separate societies. In 1947, British soldiers did the same with a leper hospital and divided them into Jews and Muslims.

Raheb said that without a state, Palestine doesn’t have access to the rest of the world (though being a state doesn’t cut a nation off from everything in a post-nation-state era). After Palestine has been treated as stateless for generations, Raheb said that a confederation of two states rather than a two-state solution could be an option for peace. And regional cooperation on transnational issues beyond Palestine and Israel — like the COVID-19 pandemic — are also priorities.

“This virus doesn’t know boundaries,” Raheb said.

But to be able to prioritize these concerns, Raheb said the hundreds of billions of dollars of military funding need to be distributed back into investments for the people. He is concerned about growing religious nationalism worldwide; in Christian Zionist movements and links to general populism.

“When you blend religion with nationalism, this is a very explosive mix,” Raheb said.

To look toward the future of Palestine and the world with hope, Raheb said, reminded him of the prophet Jeremiah from the sixth century B.C.E., who watched Jerusalem fall while he was still imprisoned. He asked a family member to buy him a piece of land in Jerusalem after the tragedy.

“This is exactly what we do,” Raheb said. “We are investing in Palestine regardless of the weather, if it’s good or bad, if we have peaceful times, or even during wars; we were busy building the future.”

Raheb is the president of Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem, Palestine, and co-founder of the U.S. nonprofit Bright Stars of Bethlehem, which funds the university educational and cultural initiatives. During the last five months of the COVID-19 pandemic while everything else shut down, the university finished building an outdoor plaza for students, and a new art gallery for the university art collection — and also started a new training center in Gaza, which suffers from polluted air, water and a lack opportunities for young people due to Israeli state violence.

“The only option we have, actually, is to get ready to work and invest even when no one wants to invest,” Raheb said.

Bishop Minerva Carcaño said amidst U.S.-caused inequality in the country and abroad, reaching out to help vulnerable people to bring into communities is an antidote.

“We must agree to strive to love one another as we are loved by God, our creator, remembering that we all yearn for the same thing — belonging in a beloved community,” Carcaño said.

Carcaño gave her lecture at 2 p.m. EDT on Monday, Aug. 24. Titled “The World We Need — Belonging in Beloved Community,” the discussion on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform kicked off Week Nine’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Future We Want, the World We Need.” 

Carcaño is the bishop of the United Methodist Church’s California-Nevada Conference and an immigration rights advocate. In 2004, she became the first Hispanic woman to be elected into UMC leadership. Her lecture was pre-recorded from her office in Sacramento, California, where fires caused by lightning have ravaged the state and displaced people from their homes indefinitely. Carcaño urged people to donate to the Red Cross or to funds organized by respective religious bodies.

Carcaño said that in her role on the board of the California Endowment, the largest health foundation in the state, a fellow board member and college student, Lupe, reached out to collaborate on working for the health and well-being of all Californians. While working together over the last few months, Carcaño found that she and Lupe had many similarities. Each have immigrant roots in the border regions of the United States, have experienced extreme poverty, and imagine a better world. But while Carcaño sees the world from the perspective of someone preparing to retire comfortably in a few years, Lupe sees life in two-year increments as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals student who has to reapply to stay in the country every two years.

“DACA is just one more sign of the brokenness of our immigration policies in this country, and of our racism and xenophobic nationalism,” Carcaño said.

Carcaño said that the ICE detention camps of undocumented immigrants started not with current U.S. President Donald Trump, but with the former U.S. President Barack Obama.

“President Trump has carried out the most recent atrocities, but he did not establish these practices,” Carcaño said. “They began under the Obama administration. We have been allowing the destruction of the world we need for too long.”

Carcaño visited McAllen, Texas, with a group of immigrant rights leaders in 2014 to look into what was happening to unaccompanied minors at a U.S. entry point. Near ICE detention centers and the places on the Rio Grande River where people typically crossed, they also witnessed the intervention of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which had transformed itself into a center that provided unaccompanied children with hot food, showers, medical care, new clothes, new shoes.

But Carcaño said the welcome they gave the children was another gift, as a door opened to reveal a large room where church leaders, volunteers and immigrant children already there would stop what they were doing to welcome the incoming children in Spanish.

“Some were in awe, some would giggle, and some would begin to weep,” Carcaño said.

She remembered how one child who started to cry when he entered the facility later snuggled up to her while showing her pictures he had drawn at a coloring station. He had traveled over 1,500 miles on foot to get there. When she asked him why he was overcome with emotion, he told her that no one had welcomed him until then.

“It will not be an easy task to move from a world of division and war, from bias, blatant racism, racial inequity, xenophobia, genocide and economic systems that create long-term crippling poverty for too many around the globe, from unjust legal systems that discriminate the poor and people of color, from a world living in disastrous disregard for creation to its detriment — to a world of care, justice, peace, hope and belonging,” Carcaño said.

While thinking about the theme for this week that looks toward the future, Carcaño drew inspiration from the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“… the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community,” King wrote. “It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends.”

King said the necessary fight against racism, war and economic injustice was “a revolution of values.” He not only advocated for racial justice within the United States, but was also against war and the United States’ exploitation of young countries, including through the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement — exploitation which Carcaño said is the root cause of migration that continues today.

In 1967, King spoke out against the Vietnam War in front of 3,000 people in Riverside Church in New York City. He said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“King challenged the assumptions of the inevitability of war, stating unequivocally … that war and its effects of death, homelessness, destroyed families and communities, increased hatred and violence, and physically and emotionally disabled and disfigured soldiers could not be reconciled with wisdom, with justice or love,” Carcaño said. “War could not be reconciled with the virtues of wisdom, justice or love then, and it cannot be reconciled with these virtues now.”

Carcaño said that this is still evident, not only in wars that the United States participates in abroad, but in its internal wars. More money is funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline than educating children. Private prisons of undocumented people who make billions are simultaneously blocking the legalization of immigration.

And police have disproportionately arrested Black people. Carcaño listed just a few names of Black people who died at the hands of police. George Floyd allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill before the eight-minute video of his death went viral. Breonna Taylor, 26, was killed while sleeping in her home when police tracked down a suspect to the wrong house. Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was taking care of her 8-year-old nephew when police came to the door. Stephon Clark, from Sacramento, California, was a 22-year-old killed in his grandmother’s backyard while holding his phone. Botham Jean was 26 when he was eating ice cream on a sofa.

“The list is endless, and we should never forget a single one of them,” Carcaño said. “We are a nation at war with its own citizens, its own children. Such a nation will fail and fall.”

King titled his 1967 speech on war “Beyond Vietnam.” Carcaño said that U.S. citizens need to follow suit and look beyond the wars of today.

“In our moment of history, I agree that we must treat one another with respect and human dignity, seeking common good rather than our self-centered desires,” Carcaño said.

Carcaño ended her lecture with a childhood memory of the new neighbor, Mr. Johnson, a Black cattle rancher who became friends with her father. Her family had never met a Black person. Carcaño’s father didn’t speak much English, but he and Johnson would meet at the fence to speak with one another at the end of every day. Johnson taught Carcaño’s brothers about the bulls he raised, and watched Carcaño and her siblings when their mother had to check on the grandparents down the road.

When Johnson died years later, Carcaño discovered on the way to his funeral that he wasn’t allowed to be buried at the cemetery they lived next to because of his skin color. He was instead buried in the nearby woods.

Carcaño’s father died not long after, and was buried in their backyard. By the time Carcaño’s mother was buried next to him many years later, Carcaño saw that the woods had been cleared and the cemetery had expanded to the woods where Johnson was buried so many years ago. In death, the neighbors were reunited.

“I don’t want to wait for eternity for that gift of belonging, of love and community,” Carcaño said. “It can be ours now.”

Before he began his Interfaith Friday lecture, Rabbi Sid Schwarz said his take on progressive Judaism was one of many.

“No one should be so arrogant as to think that their interpretation is the only interpretation and the intent of the Biblical text,” Schwarz said. “What I now offer is a Jewish take, because there is no such thing as the Jewish take. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Schwarz gave his Week Eight lecture “The Creation Story and Humanity’s Homework: A Jewish Take” at 2 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 21, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Vice President of Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson joined him in a subsequent Q-and-A.

Schwarz has served as a rabbi for 40 years. Prior to Schwarz’s time as a senior fellow at the nonprofit Hazon, he founded and led PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, and organized a historic protest against the former Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jewish citizens. He said that the understanding of creation for Jewish people is multifaceted.

“For Jews, interpreting the texts of the opening chapters of Genesis, or any passages in the Bible, are closer to one of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that you might have bought for your kids,” Schwarz said.

These layered meanings are compounded by the traditional study of Rabbinic literature.

Schwarz said that progressive Judaism is not a common perspective within the broader faith. His parents were Holocaust survivors, and he grew up with the traditional idea of God as an all-powerful, omnipotent being. But when his uncle, who was also a rabbi, introduced him to the writings of reconstructionist Jewish thinker Mordecai Kaplan as a gift for Schwarz’s bar mitzvah, a young Schwarz agreed with Kaplan’s concept that religion should drive personal and community development.

I have always been drawn to this second image of God,” Schwarz said. “Not as a master of the universe, but as a force for personal, social transformation in the world. And this guy gives humanity homework because this guy cannot work alone.”

With Jewish thinkers spanning multiple centuries across the continents, Schwarz said reading the full breadth of Rabbinic literature would take several lifetimes to complete.

“If I, as a 21st-century rabbi, want to deliver my own interpretation on a verse, I stand on the shoulders of rabbis from generations who came before me who commented on the same verse,” Schwarz said.

Schwarz used two verses from Genesis to present two views of the task that God gave humanity. Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 2:15, depending on how they are translated, can connote that humans control the domain of the land on earth because God gave it to them, or that they must work in service to others, protect, and guard the land that God gave them.

Schwarz said that this dichotomy is reflected in the American debate over climate change. Climate change deniers often believe that if God is in control of the environment, humans should be able to build what they need without consideration of the earth because God will provide.

Schwarz believes in the second view of humanity: the idea that people are stewards of the earth for God.

“The world has been given to us as a sacred trust,” Schwarz said.

Schwarz said this reflects two competing perspectives on God in Judaism, as well as Christianity and Islam. One version of God is patriarchal and hierarchical, with divinely ordained justice from above.

The second version of God is a healer, in Psalm 147, and as a leader of the oppressed as described in Exodus 6.

“I have always been drawn to this second image of God,” Schwarz said. “Not as a master of the universe, but as a force for personal, social transformation in the world. And this guy gives humanity homework because this guy cannot work alone.”

Schwarz quoted a portion of the Talmud, which says that God didn’t create bread, but created wheat so humans could make bread. And rather than creating bricks, God created clay for humans to make bricks.

“Humanity is an integrative part of the unfolding of the creation of the universe,” Schwarz said.

This accounts for all humanity, not just a few. Genesis states that all humans are created in the image of God, which means that humans must treat each other as a fellow reflection of the divine.

“God is present in the world when human beings do their homework and decide to be God’s agent on Earth,” Schwarz said.

The demonic kind of evil is any system that is above reproach and is too big to fail, Fr. Richard Rohr said in his final Chautauqua lecture of the week. Examples? The penal system, the military-industrial complex, and the Catholic church — the same one that Rohr trained in as a friar.

“Lest we think the corporate and hidden character of sin is still a theoretical issue, we must ask how the seemingly sincere Catholic church was able to reduce and deny and cover up the pedophilia crisis for decades, centuries, despite 2,000 years of moral teaching and formation,” Rohr said, reading from his book, What Do We Do With Evil?: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.

Rohr gave his lecture on evil originating from the devil at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Aug. 20, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. It was the final lecture in Chautauqua’s Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Reframing Our Journey: A Week with Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.”

Playing off of the term “military-industrial complex,” Rohr said that the devil’s sort of evil is intentionally complex — to the point that people give up on trying to understand it.

The banking system is demonic, for example. Rohr said that to take a loan out used to be enough to excommunicate someone from the Catholic church for profiting off of another person’s poverty. Now, loans are encouraged. And Rohr finds the excess benefits of government workers in the postal system, with paid time off and early retirement while the post office service slows, to be evil.

“Anything above criticism is demonic,” Rohr said.

In terms of evil that can’t be identified, Rohr learned early on in his religious training that no religion has ever thrown out the notion of evil spirits. In Ephesians, Paul called them “spirits in the air that can’t be caught with hands.” Religious art — in the form of faces on the outside of Buddhist temples and gargoyles high above on cathedrals — visualizes evil so humans take it seriously. 

Anything that makes people feel powerless in comparison — something is too big, too rich, too in control — has the same characteristics of a demon. Rohr said this also characterizes the government. But people can also be possessed by evil. Jesus exorcised nine demons throughout the New Testament. Rohr said that demon possession is a kind of addiction that makes someone feel unsafe, inferior or endlessly hungry for more.

“The way I’m describing a demon, I think I’ve got three or four of them — and you do too,” Rohr said to his virtual audience.

Rohr said that the highest form of evil is the disguised kind, romanticized to the point of fantasy. It becomes sacred. Rohr gave the example of people still clinging to Confederate statues because the figures are also valued as generals and soldiers. Rohr said the way that the military-industrial complex makes murder legal in war, but not in the streets, is “moral schizophrenia.”

To overcome this kind of evil, a person has to recognize it in “the little worlds we all live in,” Rohr said.

It’s also important to have a healthy suspicion of power.

“Only a small percentage of people know how to handle power gracefully,” Rohr said.

This program is made possible by the Eileen and Warren Martin Lectureship for Emerging Studies in Bible and Theology and the Strnad Family Fund.

The world puts evil on autopilot.

“Evil is an unconscious set of social agreements,” said Fr. Richard Rohr.

In his second lecture of the Interfaith Lecture Series’ Week Eight theme of “Reframing Our Journey: A Week with Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM,” at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Aug. 18, Rohr described how the world enables evil.

The day before, Rohr gave his keynote lecture which framed the facets of evil he describes in his book, What Do We Do With Evil?: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. The book serves as an accompanying work that explains the social character of evil that he mentioned in his previous book, Falling Upwards.

Rohr said that religions have localized sin on the flesh of the individual. Though there is agency within the conscious individual who refuses to cooperate with evil when they recognize it, the world perpetuates evil by determining it as acceptable. And the environment someone is born into, based on factors including their gender, race, culture and the people who raise them, shapes how they move in the world.

“We are all good based on one another’s goodness,” Rohr said.

This also means the inverse: We are all bad by one another’s badness.

When Rohr served as a chaplain in an Albuquerque jail for 14 years, he would enter the jail knowing he was about to meet a criminal. Some were guilty of murder. Others were guilty of rape.

“I would go in expecting to meet this person I read about in the paper, fully expecting to hate them because of the murder or the rape or the dastardly thing that they’d done — even wanted to hate them,” Rohr said. “And then I’d spend an hour sitting in the cell hearing their story.”

Often, Rohr would be shocked they were living at all.

“They are surviving on this level of what little has been given to them,” Rohr said. “What little self-confidence, what little self-worth, what little education, what little self-esteem.”

While communities or religious groups commonly indict individuals as sinners, Rohr said most of the Bible indicts entire communities or cities at once.

In the Old Testament, Edith, Judea and Israel fall in sin, and the entire kingdom of Moab was punished by God. In the New Testament, Jerusalem falls. And Jesus referred to the city of Capernaum in Matthew 11:23, “And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.”

“That’s the collective that made you the way you are,” Rohr said.

The New Testament refers to this collective as the world. It is the system or the game that everyone is in, but different rules apply to different people.

“You gotta know what a culture excludes to know what it worships,” Rohr said.

Rohr said that in the United States, Americans hate the poor and people of color and worship riches, white privilege and individualism — on both sides of the political spectrum.

“Until you get rid of this illusion of you being a separate self, I don’t think you’ll get very far in understanding the message of the gospel or in dealing with the sinful nature of society that is killing all of us,” Rohr said.

This illusion also allows systemic evil like racism and sexism to flourish. Rohr said leaders in politics who blame a few corrupt individuals, and police leaders who blame police brutality on a few bad apples, is a tactic that distracts people from the systemic issue. However, the last three popes have used vocabulary defining the phenomenon of collective evil with the terms “structural sin” and “institutional evil.”

“Evil is a set of agreements that only make us happy and aren’t true,” Rohr said.

In order to escape from the burden of evil, Rohr said to find ways to not cooperate with it: by removing oneself from its mechanics.

“The point of Gospel is to keep people from buying into the sin system,” Rohr said.

To prepare for his next lecture, “Reframing Our Journey: The Flesh,” at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Aug. 19, Rohr recommended his audience read Romans and Galatians to see if it reads differently with this new lens of evil.

“Sin is hidden in good places,” Rohr said.

This program is made possible by the Eileen and Warren Martin Lectureship for Emerging Studies in Bible and Theology & The Strnad Family Fund.

Fr. Richard Rohr said that most religions don’t know what to do with evil — and within Christianity, both God and humans are complicit in evil.

“God is not just all good, but all vulnerable,” Rohr said. “… God submits to evil in its own cruel form. … God is not just allowing evil, but participating in it with us.”

Rohr delivered his first lecture for the week at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 17, titled “What Do We Do With Evil?”

This lecture served as a background for his lectures later this week. Week Eight of the Interfaith Lecture Series, titled “Reframing Our Journey,” reflects on Rohr’s book, What Do We Do With Evil?: The World, The Flesh and The Devil.

Rohr, from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said that true evil is distinct from sin. True evil, Rohr said, is found in how humans corrupt the planet and politics. And COVID-19 has exacerbated existing evil. Rohr said the way in which COVID-19 has allowed ample time to be distracted from evil allows evil to flourish. When people are removed from meaning and direction in their life for an extended period of time in quarantine, rates of mental illness, depression and suicide have increased.

Before 1054, when there was still one single strain of Christianity, the first thousand years of Christianity’s existence relied on the assumption that there are three sources of evil: the world, the flesh and the devil. While God is not in this short list, God did create them. 

Rohr is a Franciscan priest serving the New Mexico province, as well as a Christian mystic. For the last 50 years, he has served as a priest and ecumenical teacher in 46 countries. From traveling in his career, he noticed that every place, regardless whether it had a Catholic or non-sectarian Christian base, struggled with discerning true evil from sin.

For example, both Judaism and Christianity uphold the 10 Commandments. These commandments tell people what not to do and separates good and bad with clear distinctions. Rohr said that while it is good for the first half of life, and is especially good for kids who can’t easily read into subtle distinctions, it doesn’t provide a full picture.

“It doesn’t teach you how to be a person in a loving relationship with your partner,” Rohr said. “It doesn’t teach you how to be forgiving and affectionate. … It’s just getting us started by teaching us some impulse controls, … to limit the ego, to cut off the arrogance of the ego.”

Referring to Ken Wilbur’s four stages of human development, Rohr said that most religions are stuck in the first stage of creating values that outline a stark contrast between good and evil. Only 10% of people reach the third stage where they wake up and overcome the feeling of separateness from others and the world. Even less people reach the stage of showing up, where a person stops worrying about their own salvation and can focus on giving to other people.

Rohr listed World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, ongoing racism that has been unchecked for most of history, sexism and homophobia as the true roots of evil.

When religious institutions concentrated on what he calls minor sins, “Evil got away with murder,” Rohr said.

To get away with being evil, it has to disguise itself as good,” Rohr said.

In his first 30 years as a priest, when going to Confession was more common, he didn’t hear people admitting their complacency with, and how they benefited from, systems that allow atrocities.

“Issues of justice were hardly ever confessed,” Rohr said.

He heard a husband admit to being impatient with his wife. He heard a child say they talked back to their parents. Before a person finished, Rohr said they would often quickly admit a sexual sin followed by being late for Mass a few times.

“Do you think God really cares?” Rohr said. “I don’t really care.”

Rohr said the first chapter of his book focuses on how minor sins overpower collective focus, which Rohr said should be directed at true evil.

“This confusion of sin taking the place of real evil is why I think we got bored with the notion of evil, and ended up with the immense evils of the 20th century at every level,” Rohr said.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a museum in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to lynching victims, lists Black people who were lynched in counties — in places defined by their citizens’ Christian values — across the United States.

“You have the list of all the names of the Black people who were lynched and hung publicly, (events where) I’m told people applauded,” Rohr said.

And in medieval Europe, both Catholic and Presbyterian monarchs would attend their respective church services. But outside of the church, Rohr said they were tyrants and liars who committed atrocities through war and conquering abroad — and against the very people they led as king or queen.

Rohr said that this issue continues today, as current heads of state in the United States and worldwide wield Christianity and other religions as a nationalist value and use religion to disguise evil.

“To get away with being evil, it has to disguise itself as good,” Rohr said.

Citizens in Nazi Germany felt they were tasked with “purifying” the German race. And in the past and present, American politicians claim they need to make the United States safe by eliminating perceived threats against democracy.

“We have Christians being some of the most total supporters of evil — of corruption, of greed, of idolatry of America,” Rohr said. “God is the creator of all creatures. Did you hear that word, ‘all’? God loves the people in Mexico and Canada as much as he loves America.”

In his next lecture on Tuesday, Aug. 18, Rohr will describe how evil manifests in the world. On Wednesday, Aug. 19, he will describe evil of the flesh, and on Thursday, Aug. 20, he will describe evil that comes from the devil. But Rohr said that each day will bring up surprises within each focus.

“We’re always dealing with disguise,” Rohr said.

This program is made possible by the Eileen and Warren Martin Lectureship for Emerging Studies in Bible and Theology & The Strnad Family Fund.

In Sufism, life began when Allah gave a deep sigh of compassion and poured heavenly qualities into Earth.

“It’s said that the divine was pregnant with this longing to know itself and to give forth something,” said Kainat Felicia Norton.

Norton and Muinuddin Charles Smith described the creation story of Sufism on Week Seven’s Interfaith Friday. Pre-recorded in their New York apartment, the lecture was released at 2 p.m. EDT Aug. 14, on the CHQ Video Assembly Platform.

Norton and Smith lead the Inayati Sufi Order as senior Sufi teachers, retreat guides and interfaith ministers. They founded the Light of Guidance Center for Sufi Studies in New York City.

Smith said creation was instantaneous when God said the words, “Be and so become.” God’s angels, which existed previously (though not in cherub form), did not understand God’s creation — especially humans, who were tasked as “vice regents” of God. 

The angels were most concerned with humans’ potential for mischief. The first Qur’an stories detail how humans go astray, which include the story of stringing up a she-camel.

“There is so much of the Qur’an warning people that we have a tendency to get out of harmony,” Smith said. “The warnings can sound pretty severe. … But there’s also a part of the Qur’an where Allah says, ‘My mercy precedeth my wrath.’ The wrath is if we don’t live in harmony with life and we’re gonna make a mess.”

But humans also have an ability to act upright and grow into their responsibility to help God deliver the divine on earth. Humans are described as fragments of light or of the divine being, with a body of clay and a crown of stars.

“It’s not possible for the creator to be separate from creation,” Smith said. “It’s like the carpenter has become the wood. … There’s an understanding that divine self-knowledge is a revelation of the spark that’s in each of us. It doesn’t have to take a spiritual or religious form, but it’s something about being enthusiastic, having ‘theos’ within us.”

Sufis either choose new first names — or in Norton and Smith’s cases, Sufi teachers give them new first names — to serve as a reminder of a goal or value to strive for. It’s related to aspiring to that responsibility to bring the divine onto Earth.

“Usually, you’re given a name because you’re meant to unfold that or grow into it, or it’s like an affirmation,” Norton said.

Smith’s, Muinuddin, was given to him two years after he joined a Sufi community. When asked to find a quote by a Sufi prophet or leader, he was struggling to find one that resonated with him. He was sitting in front of a fireplace when a piece of paper fell out of the fireplace into his hand.

“It was the last words of an ancient Sufi,” Smith said. “Long quote, but it said, ‘Love all, hate none. Mere talk of God will not get you far. Mere talk of religion will not get you far. Bring out all the potential of your being and serve the people, and serve the poor and the widow.’”

The next day, Smith’s guide called him and said he had picked out a name for him: Muinuddin. It was the name of the same saint, Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, from the fireplace quote.

Norton had the first name Sharifa for years. In 2015, while teaching in a program, another teacher said, “I have a new name for you.” It was Kainat, a Persian name which means “the universe.”

With every breath of God, there is a new possibility,” Norton said.

There is a repeated theme in Sufism of bringing the divine on Earth, rather than accessing the divine through a transcendent experience. Norton said for a full life, the flame in the heart of a human must align with the light from above. 

“It’s said that the human is higher than the angel, because it’s more difficult here,” Norton said. “It’s a little harder here than to be up there as an angel. And yet, it has more value because the human has a full experience. Through manifestation, a lot more has happened than just staying in the angelic light.”

Another practice in Sufism and Islam, though Smith said this is also found in Judaism, Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, is to repeat the name of Allah, or another name for the divine, through chanting and praying for Allah to remember a person. It invokes, “Remember Allah, and Allah will remember you,” from the Qur’an.

“We generate the light of the soul through the word we repeat,” Smith said. “That’s a very important practice for seeing clearly what this world is about, and living in a way that is in harmony with light, with nature, with all of life.”

Norton also said that creation isn’t done unfolding.

“With every breath of God, there is a new possibility,” Norton said.

“Be in this world as if you are a traveler” is a teaching from Islam prophet Muhammad. In her lecture of the same name, Ingrid Mattson explored what it means from an Islamic perspective for people to be spiritually united.

Her lecture was broadcast at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 13, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Recorded in Mattson’s home in London, Ontario, her lecture aligned with the Interfaith Lecture Series theme for Week Seven, “The Spirituality of Us.”

Mattson is the president of the Islamic Society of North America. She also serves as the London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at Huron University College, the oldest affiliate college of Western University in Canada.

In July, Mattson said she was struck by an Architectural Digest article that recommended 41 design shows available on streaming services. It demonstrated a new shared interest in not only spending time at home, but investing in the home and family. 

Mattson said that while there was an existing desire for consuming the latest products, this energy has been redirected into the home. Breadmakers. Swing sets. Swimming pools. Gardens.

Meanwhile, there are also those who go without these luxuries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For many, lockdown means no access to green space,” Mattson said. “Lockdown means crowding with no privacy. Lockdown means being trapped in an unsafe place. We are not truly having a common experience.”

And before lockdown, nationalism and ethnic nationalism were already rising and dividing people across many countries, which enforced their constructed borders that housed those identities.

“But in this case of the pandemic, the regulation of human proximity and movement-insured spaces does have a scientific — rather than ideological — basis,” Mattson said. “An American paradox is that many of the people who claim to be worried about foreigners transmitting an ideological and cultural virus — which is not a real thing, by the way — are strangely unconcerned about viral infection, which is a real thing.”

Mattson said that while (most) people are sheltered in place, ideology is spreading out of fear. But the virus moves faster.

“It’s not surprising that in these — still early — days, the most ideological have doubled down in their views,” Mattson said. “But the virus continues its replication and its travels throughout the world, indifferent to our ideologies.”

While the pandemic continues, Mattson said people who were previously defined by their mobility or displacement have faced challenges.

“Until the lockdown, many of us found it unremarkable that we could frequent malls and amusement parks, restaurants and music venues. The privileged were taking the world as their oyster, taking cruises, safaris, study tours, sporting holidays, trips to the beach,” Mattson said. “And before the lockdown, the world’s disadvantaged were struggling to flee their homes, to escape political oppression and violent occupation, to move to higher ground, or to find a source of water as climate change has rendered their homes unlivable.”

For the displaced, Mattson said the pandemic has exacerbated their conditions. And prior to the pandemic, the United States had been gradually closing its borders to others who seek to migrate or flee their home countries while simultaneously strong-arming other countries to allow U.S. intervention. Now, U.S. citizens are seeing their international travel options contract as COVID-19 continues to spread in the United States.

“So many of us in the Western world feel entitled to have both a national home that is ours, from which others are locked out, and the right to exploit the rest of the world,” Mattson said. “We demand that other nations remove their barriers to what we want. We should be able to exploit their markets, their natural resources, and we should be able to carry our ideologies and culture to their people without restriction.”

Mattson said that along with other modes of transportation, the human body is geared for forward movement, with eyes and feet directed ahead — even when losing or missing limbs. And in the Qur’an, God calls for humans to spread across the Earth as well.

In the Qur’an, God speaks in Chapter 17, verse 70: “We have conferred dignity on the children of Adam and transported them over land and sea and provided with them sustenance out of the good things of life and favored them far above much of our creation.”

Mattson said that God directs humans to remove obstacles for others, and to clean up after ourselves. The Qur’an says that wealth and children are joys and temptations for excess at the same time.

“The Qur’an encourages the enjoyment of wholesome and beautiful things, and it prohibits waste and excess,” Mattson said.

In Chapter 6, verse 141, the Qur’an states, “It is God who has brought into being gardens, the cultivated and the wild, and date palms and fields with produce of all kinds; olives and pomegranates, similar in kind and diverse. So eat of their fruit in season, but give their due on harvest day, to the tithe or some to the poor on harvest day. And do not waste, for God does not love the wasteful.”

But the Qur’an also notes that unbridled desire is insatiable. The prophet Muhammad said, “If the child of Adam has a mountain of gold, he would wish for another mountain.”

Mattson said that it was important to prioritize collecting acts of kindness rather than material things, but it’s possible to strike a balance.

“Enjoy the things, and enjoy them with others,” Mattson said. “Elevate ourselves through sharing and caring. For it is in service to others that we find the divine presence, which is our true home.”

Returning to Muhammad’s teaching on moving through the world as a traveler, Mattson said one interpretation of this teaching was to literally travel light. Muhammad also taught that each day, each person should perform an act of charity, even as simple as moving a branch from the road.

“There are so many people who would like to move to safety or like us, who like to explore human culture through education, or the natural world through travel. But their paths are blocked by barriers placed by others,” Mattson said. “To remove a branch, to make the path smoother, to clear it, is an act of charity.”

Mattson said in the 2012 documentary “Never Sorry,” about artist and activist Ai Weiwei, a group of cats lived in Weiwei’s Beijing studio. To go outside, a cat had to jump up and hit a lever to open the door. Only one cat was ever successful in hitting the lever after a few tries. When he did, instead of turning and closing the door, he left it open for all the other cats to follow him out each day.

“Cats, unlike people, never close the door after them,” Weiwei said.

Weiwei has since focused his work on human migration. In 2017, he made the documentary “Human Flow.”

“(Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers) are blocked from the natural flow of human beings that has occurred since humans were first on this earth,” Mattson said. “And we know that for a fact. From archaeology, from looking at where human beings are across the world, we know that human beings have been in movement from the beginning. And now we have this situation where we have hard barriers and people can’t move anymore.”

Mattson said the pandemic has kept everyone stuck in place, but nationalists and white supremacists already sought to keep the “other” out.

“The chant of the ethnic nationalists and the white supremacists is, ‘You will not replace us,’ the idea that there is a human ‘us’ that is so distinct and so different from all other human beings that if others come along — as humans have been doing forever — that somehow it’s like another species,” she said.

Nations have a “mythic, fabricated ‘us,’” which some of its people build a purpose onto identities that can be hateful.

“I say it’s fictional because a quick genetic test would probably prove that a lot of people’s claims are incorrect,” Mattson said.

Culture also constantly changes, yet Mattson said no one can resist attaching meaning to these identities.

Before Islam became popularized in the area, Mattson said that people in the Arabian Peninsula did not believe in an afterlife, but still sought the immortality of their name through conquering and fame.

“If they disappeared in a material sense, as long as their names were spoken, they still existed,” Mattson said. “And they were willing to violate others as long as doing so increased their numbers and their fame.”

With more people in the tribe, it also meant more people could survive and allow the person to live on in their stories.

The Qur’an stands in contrast to the empires of Babylonians, Sasanians, Sumerians, Hittites, ancient civilizations of western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, all of which are now gone. The Qur’an states that while everything on Earth will disappear, the divine presence remains.

“Eventually the kings died, the people disappeared, and their grand monuments now have crumbled,” Mattson said. “And they are sites where we go and reflect upon people of the past whose names we don’t even know. We might know the names of a king or a few kings or queens, but all of those people who came before, nothing remains of their memories or their name.”

The children of Adam, humans, can return to the original source of goodness for unity. Mattson said that people connect to others to access this on Earth, whether at a place of worship or a musical experience.

People are born into specific times and specific places, which Mattson said makes people both similar and different at the same time. And the diversity of people is celebrated in the Qur’an. 

“Our very diversity is the starting point for knowledge in ourselves and others,” Mattson said, and uncovering the history of humanity and movement of people leads back to the common origin of the divine.

Though people are varied, according to the Qur’an they all have “fitrah,” which is Arabic for a pure, good foundation. But being born into a specific history can place a person in circumstances that can either nurture or deviate from fitrah. A person might need help to return to their fitrah.

To sustain or return to fitrah and live a spiritual life on earth, Mattson said it’s important to remember that everyone is going to the same place.

“To live a spiritual life is to be like a good traveler,” Mattson said. “ … To be grateful to those who have facilitated our journey, to help others who have been on the road along with us, to respect the customs of the land we are visiting, to accept graciously what is offered, and to share it with others — and to never leave a place unless it is at least in as good a shape as we found it when we first arrived.”