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SARA TOTH – EDITOR

Most of us know Aesop’s classic fables from childhood — but even the classics stand to be reinvented sometimes.

Enter David Gonzalez, a storyteller, musician, poet and actor who’s bringing an interactive afternoon of stories to the grounds for Chautauquans of all ages with “Aesop Bops!” at 6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 22 in Smith Wilkes Hall.

“It’s classic stories done with a fresh twist, and it’s really a wonderful intergenerational experience,” Gonzalez said. “Parents and grandparents will know these stories — but not in this way, and sometimes the little ones had never heard them before, so it’s a very fresh, intergenerational storytelling bonanza.”

It would be a mistake to say that Gonzalez will be the only performer at Smith Wilkes on Sunday. He’s lined up an event filled with audience participation and imaginations running wild, and he can’t predict which way it will go — right, left, up or down?

“These shows unfold beat by beat, moment by moment,” he said. “The thing about live performance is that it makes the present moment so very precious. … We’re diving headlong into that moment we’re sharing.”

Sharing those spontaneous moments with an audience is, indeed, precious after a year of virtual performances.

“We we can see and hear each other, we create an environment that’s not three-dimensional, it’s six-dimensional. We are activating our own imaginations, sharing imaginations — and understanding these stories through our own lens, and other people’s points of view,” he said. “So much can go on. So much that can never happen virtually.”

By the end of the show, Gonzalez said, young people in the audience won’t just know the stories of “The Lion and the Mouse” or “The Fisherman’s Wife” — they’ll actually feel like they had a part in creating those stories.

“There’s a ton of laughter and communal sharing and participation, and the kids end up doing the stories along with me,” Gonzalez said. “They end up taking these stories home with them. They own those stories when we’re done.”

This isn’t the first time Gonzalez has performed on the grounds — he did a stint with the Family Entertainment Series in 2017 — and he finds himself drawn to Chautauqua because of a few simple words: “Exploring the best in humanity.”

“My work is eliciting wonder and supporting the exploration of joy and wisdom through a range of stories,” he said. 

MARY LEE TALBOT – STAFF WRITER

“Do you have the time?” the Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper asked the congregation at the 9 a.m. Friday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. “I think this phrase is on the way to extinction. We were once able to ask strangers, but now we have our own timekeepers in our hand.”

Harper’s sermon title was “The Fierce Urgency of Now.” The Scripture reading was Romans 13:11-14.

She continued, “We have never been better equipped to know what the time is. But there is time and then there is time. There is knowing and then there is knowing. Paul is calling the Roman Christians to a larger framework — what is called for in response to the current moment.”

The Christians in Rome were at the heart of an empire that believed “might made right.” It was a brutal regime that rewarded the wealthy and powerful and let the poor go hungry, Harper said.

“The Roman Christians had a high and risky calling,” Harper told the congregation. “In the face of the politics of brutality, they practiced the politics of gentleness. In the face of the military, they wore the armor of light and love. Paul urged them to wake from sleep and live as Christ’s followers.”

She called “Do you know what time it is?” an arresting phase. The Roman Christians knew their calling and needed to shed their fear in order to live with the fierce love of Jesus. “While Paul thought Jesus was returning soon, and literally, we know that we need to live not as the unwise, but live in the way of insight,” she told the congregation.

On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon at the Riverside Church denouncing the Vietnam War. Some of his aides did not want him to veer from the subject of racism, but King understood the intersection of racism, materialism and militarism. 

“He understood ‘the fierce urgency of now,’ ” Harper said to the congregation. “There is such a thing as being too late. In the invisible book of life, did we want nonviolent coexistence or violent destruction? Now is the time for us to face this fierce urgency. We have choices in how we care for the earth, for the vulnerable. We are a nation with vast power, and, like the Roman Christians, we have a high and risky calling.” 

Harper urged the congregation to practice the politics of gentleness and to put on the armor of light and love, to wake from a spiritual slumber. “We can hit the snooze button or meet the day. This fierce urgency is not from panic, but grounded in trust, faith and wisdom that we know what time it is.”

When Harper arrived in Chautauqua, she was a bit put off by the Miller Bell Tower ringing every 15 minutes. “My first thought was, ‘I hope this doesn’t go on all night. We don’t need any loud, old bells.’ I have come to cherish the bells, because they provide an opportunity to mark literal time, but feel it deeply as a community, four times an hour to stop and pay attention to the now.”

The bells awake Chautauquans from spiritual slumber to their high and risky calling, Harper said. 

“When I heard the carillonneur play ‘God of Grace and God of Glory’ on the bells,” Harper said, “I thought of the words Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding pastor of the Riverside Church, wrote: ‘Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour. … Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days.’ ”

As the pandemic grinds on, as the people in Haiti and Afghanistan suffer, as people in this nation face troubles, Harper said, “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage. I am grateful to our God to share this appointed time, this week with you as we seek to live truly, deeply, urgently. Thanks for sharing this brief leg of the journey. The bell is tolling, calling us to fierce urgency. May the good, gracious and wise God be with you until we meet again.”

The Rev. Mary Lee Talbot presided. Sue Tannehill, who was part of the committee to create the new Quaker House at Chautauqua, read the Scripture. For the prelude, Joshua Stafford, Jared Jacobsen Chair for Organist and director of sacred music, played an improvisation. Members of the Motet Choir sang “Come, Let Us Anew,” music by Mack Wilberg and words by Charles Wesley. The postlude was “Toccata,” from Symphony No. 5, by Charles-Marie Widor. Support for this week’s services was provided by the Edmund R. Robb-Walter C. Shaw Endowment and the Randall-Hall Memorial Chaplaincy.

COLUMN BY MICHAEL E. HILL

Resilience.

If there was ever a word to describe the fact that we are at Week Nine of our Summer Assembly, “resilience” may be the perfect choice. For all we have been through over the past year and a half to get to this place, where we can conclude an entirely in-person season, it seems more than appropriate that we conclude our Summer Assembly exploring this one word that says so much more about you, me and our global society.

This week we look at some compelling questions: What drives people to keep going when forces outside their control work against them? And what does that tell us about our humanity and hope for the future? We close our 2021 season looking at the resilience that emerged during a tumultuous 2020. From a global pandemic to the quest for racial equality, we reflect on a revealing, historic period by lifting up the stories and the lessons of those who refused to give up, give in or go away.

Our guides this week could not be more perfect. Lynsey Addario is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who covers conflict zones across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. In 2000, she traveled to Afghanistan to document life under the Taliban. Given the past week’s events, I can only imagine what she might share with us. Francoise Adan is the Chief Whole Health and Wellbeing Officer for University Hospitals and the director for the UH Connor Integrative Health Network. She will explore a model of resilience she formalized for health care and how we might think about resilience in the midst of a global pandemic. Keisha N. Blain is an award-winning historian of the 20th century with specializations in African-American history, the modern African Diaspora, and women’s and gender studies. She will bring all of this to a riveting discussion of resistance and resilience in the face of racism. And we end the week with Evan Osnos, a National Book Award-winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker, who will take all we’ve been through to discuss the resilience of American Democracy and where we go from here.

Sometimes our morning lecture theme is so appropriate, it only makes sense to carry it forward into our companion Interfaith Lecture Series, which also explores the topic of resilience this week, and the questions remain the same. In these set of conversations, we add a faith dimension through the words and stories of Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Meyers, who has served as the Rabbi and Cantor for the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the site of one of the worst attacks on a Jewish place of worship in the United States. Irish-born international bestseller Colum McCann who uses modern-day narratives to explore the resilience from the grief of tremendous loss, and we conclude with a Chautauqua — and personal! — favorite, Diana Butler Bass. Dr. Bass is an award-winning author, popular speaker and preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality. I know her words of wisdom will be a fitting and moving coda to this group’s reflections.

And while we are in this deep and appropriate discussion about resilience, we know one of the tools is to have fun and to experience joy! We will get that this week with a dream lineup of four great big-name concerts: The Roots + Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue on Saturday, Old Crow Medicine Show on Thursday, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit on Friday, and Smokey Robinson next Saturday, Aug. 28. I’m truly excited to see Jason Isbell, as my brother-in-law Paul has been promoting him at family dinners for a while. This week we also continue to build the impressive roster of guest dance companies that Chautauqua engages, as Parsons Dance visits the Amphitheater stage Monday evening. Our own Chautauqua Theater Company closes Thurgood with two performances this weekend. And as we progress through the week we mark the closing of the amazing exhibitions at our two world-class Chautauqua Visual Arts galleries — be sure to walk through the Fowler-Kellogg and Strohl art centers before they close toward the end of the week (you can find individual exhibition closing dates in this week’s yellow program listing insert).

Finally, I hope you will enjoy the bounty of our home Chautauqua County region as presented in our Culinary Week celebration at Miller Park, near Miller Bell Tower. We’re honored to provide a space for two local festivals — Jamestown’s Scandinavian Festival and St. James Italian Festival — to fundraise and showcase their wonderful food and culture, not to mention fund-raise, after two years of cancelations. Plus, we’ll have many of the beloved food, drink and craft vendors you may have come to know in previous years’ festivals on Bestor Plaza. (And if you need to work off any of those fantastic food offerings, don’t forget about the myriad ways you can experience Chautauqua’s recreation pillar!)

While I know it took great resilience to get to this place in our Chautauqua journey, being back together amidst the backdrop of a continuing pandemic, I also know that it’s been a joy for our team to be with you again. I’ll have one last chance to reflect in my last column of the season, this one bringing the words from our youngest Chautauquans. Watching them makes being resilient worth it all!

Have a great Week Nine, friends!

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

There can’t be anything beyond the physical world. That’s what Bruce Greyson believed growing up in a scientific, materialistic household and into young adulthood. 

As he began psychiatric training, patients told him stories about when they nearly died, which he tried to treat with respect, but assumed could not be real. 

Then more people told him similar stories. And more. By 1975, his colleague, Raymond Moody, wrote Life After Life, a book that coined the term “near-death experience.” Greyson felt inclined as a scientist to study and research these experiences. 

Fifty years later, Greyson has published his findings in his book After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, also the title of his Interfaith Lecture on Tuesday in the Amphitheater, part of Week Eight’s theme “The Human Soul: An Ineffable Mystery.” 

“I’ve come to appreciate over the decades how important these experiences are to the experiencers themselves, and to scientists, and to all of us,” said Greyson, who is a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Several problems exist in studying near-death experiences, he said. First is a biased sample, in that Greyson and other researchers relied on experiencers coming forward on their own. 

“We heard blissful accounts of surviving death and joining deceased loved ones in the afterworld,” he said. “So we assumed these blissful experiences were all there was until years later. We started interviewing everybody in the hospital with a close brush with death, and we started hearing other stories that weren’t the same. Some weren’t very blissful. Others were downright unpleasant.”

Another issue was that people didn’t have the words to describe what happened, he said. Greyson and other researchers then insisted they try metaphors. Some people described long, dark enclosed structures they traveled through to get to the other side, he said. In the West, people might call that a tunnel, while those in the East described a well or a cave.

A third problem is many people are reluctant to discuss their near-death experience, he said. Either people will be afraid of ridicule, being labeled mentally ill, or simply misunderstood. Sometimes they feel it is too sacred or personal to speak of aloud. The next problem was distinguishing these experiences between reality and fantasy.

“We have accounts now from all over the world from different cultures, as well as the Judeo-Christian culture and Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim countries; we have accounts going back from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt which are essentially the same experience,” he said.

Regardless of religion, culture or time period, people report the same thing, Greyson said. 

“I’ve gotten lots of accounts from atheists who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but there he was,’ ” he said.

Memories of near-death experiences, unlike other memories, remain stable throughout time. Greyson has asked some people to tell the experience again, 30 or 40 years after their first report, and the stories do not change, he said. 

“Most near-death experiencers say this experience they had was realer than real,” he said, “that what happened in this other realm or dimension was more real than talking to me right now.”

One scale that measured near-death experiences with memories of dreams, fantasies or things people thought were going to happen but didn’t, demonstrated that these experiences are often more real than memories of real events, he said. Greyson then highlighted some of the common features of near-death experiences. 

One is a consistent change in thought processes, he said. People report thinking faster and clearer than ever, no sense of time, a sudden sense of complete understanding, and a review of their entire lives, he said. Sometimes they even see life literally from other people’s perspectives. 

Greyson described a 30-year-old man named Tom whose chest was crushed when the truck he was working underneath fell on him. While recalling his entire life, he remembered being a teenager when a drunk man ran out in front of his truck.

Tom was infuriated with the man and rolled down his window to let him know. The drunk man came over and slapped Tom across the face, and Tom got out and beat the man. In his near-death experience, Tom recalled this from the point-of-view of the drunken man. 

“He felt his nose getting bloodied, he felt his teeth going through his lower lip, he felt the humiliation of being beaten up by a teenager,” Greyson said.

Near-death experiences also involve a consistent change in feeling and emotions, he said, including an overwhelming sense of peace, well-being, joy, cosmic unity and being one with everything. They report a feeling of unconditional love from a being of light, which Greyson said they often call a divine being. Additionally, there are paranormal features. People see colors and hear sounds they never experienced on earth, including hearing things going on far away and visions of the future.

One day, Al, a man in his mid-50s, had horrible chest pain, Greyson said. After rushing to the emergency room and being evaluated, Al was prepared by doctors for an emergency quadruple bypass surgery. During the operation, he remembered leaving his body and looking down at the room, seeing his open chest and the doctor flapping his arms like a bird. 

Greyson thought this was ridiculous and didn’t believe the claim, but Al insisted. Greyson called the surgeon. The surgeon admitted that while watching and supervising assistants, he keeps his hands up to his chest and points to things using his elbows so he won’t touch anything unsterilized.

People also often report seeing another realm or dimension, meeting a mystical being and deceased loved ones. Greyson said as a psychiatrist, he is more impressed with how people’s lives change after near-death experiences. 

“I make my living trying to help people change their lives,” he said. “It’s not easy. It takes a lot of hard work over a long period of time. Then, here’s this experience, which often takes seconds or a fraction of a second, which instantaneously seems to transform attitudes, beliefs or values.” 

People often report a decreased fear of death or no fear of death whatsoever after near-death experiences, Greyson said, frightening him that these people would become suicidal. He found out, though — by interviewing everyone in his hospital with a suicide attempt — those who reached a near-death experience were now less suicidal than those who didn’t. 

“They said they came back from their near-death experience with a sense that there’s a meaning and purpose to everything,” he said. 

This same revelation does not occur for those who get close to death but do not have a near-death experience, he said. Those people, instead, are much more afraid of losing their life. 

“If a patient has a heart attack and the doctor says, ‘I want you to stop smoking, give up fatty foods,’ the patient says, ‘OK, I don’t want to die,’ ” Greyson said. “If the doctor tells a near-death experiencer that if they don’t give that up they’re going to die, they say, ‘Yeah, so?’ ”

Near-death experiencers also report a decreased need for material possessions, power, prestige, fame and competition, he said, noting they still enjoy them, but are not addicted like many people. Greyson shared one study that showed highly significant changes in attitudes toward spirituality, attitudes toward death, quests for meaning and attitudes toward life. The same study showed, to a lesser extent, changes in concern for others, self-acceptance and concern for worldly goals. The only things that didn’t change were a sense of religiousness and concern for global and societal issues, he said.

An enhanced sense of spirituality is another common effect of near-death experiences. People may still enjoy going to church, he said, but they often report that the God in their near-death experience was much bigger and different than the God taught in church. 

With spirituality, people feel much more compassionate to others, seeing everyone as connected, he said, relating it back to the golden rule. 

Tom, who beat up the drunk man, realized he was no different from him — they were connected. 

“He made (Tom) realize the golden rule is not just a guideline,” Greyson said. “It’s a law of nature.”

Scientists do try to measure spiritual growth, but Greyson qualified none as being that great. Yet one chart showed people who have a near-death experience show high spiritual growth compared to those who almost died but didn’t report a near-death experience. Neither group had a difference in spiritual decline. Better religious well-being, or one’s relationship to the divine, was shown as highly correlated to near-death experiences, while existential well-being, or relationships with people and things, was not significantly changed. With daily spiritual experiences, such as feeling touched by a sunset or beautiful music, people before near-death experiences or getting close to death were not much different. Afterward, those with near-death experiences reported much higher spiritual connections with these daily events, Greyson said.

A similar difference exists between the two groups with a change in spiritual and religious beliefs, he said.

An objective scale of compassionate love, another part of spirituality, showed a strong correlation with near-death experiences. Those who had experiences had changes in caring for others, accepting others and a willingness to sacrifice, he said. 

“The more depth there is to the experience, the more spiritual change you feel,” he said.

Near-death experiences also bring about changes in behavior, such as changing relationships or careers.. Take Joe, a policeman who had a near-death experience (not work-related). After he was resuscitated, he realized he couldn’t work a job where he might have to shoot someone. He left the police force, went back to school and became a high school teacher.

Sometimes, people are sad or angry when they return to life.

“They say, ‘This is a miserable place to live, I was great over there, I don’t want to be back here,’” Greyson said. “Some people have problems with other people’s reactions to them. They may feel they’re ridiculed or laughed at by other people, or alternatively they may feel like they’re put on a pedestal by other people.”

Greyson said people argue that near-death experiences are either physical or spiritual. He finds these philosophical questions pointless to his role as a scientist. 

In a study that involved brain scans of nuns praying to God, parts of the brain that lit up were interpreted differently. Neuroscientists believed it was the part of the brain that produced an image of God, while the nuns thought it was the part of the brain where God talked to them. 

“My viewpoint is you can’t have one without the other,” Greyson said. 

He then addressed how the mind and brain interact. He said it’s clear the brain produces thoughts — when intoxicated, it’s harder to think clearly.

“That doesn’t happen in near-death experiences — people whose thinking is clearer than ever and can form memories when brains are not capable of doing that,” he said. 

The brain acts as a filter for the mind, he said. One common analogy is trying to listen to every single one of the thousands of radio stations at once. It would be impossible to understand what’s going on, he said, but a radio tuner can single everything down to one radio station. The brain works the same, he said. 

Similarly, eyes do not see all of the electromagnetic spectrum, but only the wavelengths that humans need to see to survive, he said. The brain evolved to focus on thoughts needed to survive, he said.

“That raises the question: What is the mind?” he said. “As a scientist, I can tell you I have no idea.”

Humans have always sensed they have a soul, spirit or life force, he said, referencing Ori Soltes’ Monday lecture. 

“It’s something we have to believe in,” Greyson said. “Near-death experiencers would say it’s not a matter of belief — it’s experience.”

Greyson then discussed if humans survive bodily death. Al could leave his body when his brain wasn’t functioning, and many say they encountered deceased loved ones. Some debunkers say it’s wishful thinking. Greyson has a counterargument. 

Jack, a 25-year-old, was admitted to the hospital with severe pneumonia and repeated respiratory arrest, Greyson said. He was at the hospital for a week and was friendly with his primary nurse. She was leaving for a long weekend, and while she was gone, Jack had another arrest where he needed to be resuscitated. 

He had a near-death experience where he ran into the nurse on vacation. She told him to go back to his body, and to tell her parents she was sorry she wrecked the red MGB. Jack woke up and tried to tell another nurse this story, who walked out of the room immediately.

“Turned out, this young nurse had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday,” Greyson said. “Her parents surprised her with the gift of a red MGB. She got excited, jumped in the car, took it for a drive, lost control and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly.”

It was impossible for Jack to know she died, or how. But he met her in his near-death experience, which occurred after her death. Something was still alive and could communicate with Jack, Greyson said. In other stories, people encounter loved ones who died decades ago. 

Greyson came back to the problem of metaphors. People cannot describe the warm being of light that radiates unconditional love, but Judeo-Christians may call it God, noting it’s not the God they learned. People from other religions would not use the term “God,” he said.

“Some people who reject the word ‘God’ still believe in some all-powering force or all-powering spirit that guides us all together,” he said.

Also true of the metaphor problem, he said, is the brain cannot process what happened. One person said their memory was flattened or simplified. 

“I believe this flattening happens because the human brain cannot understand a world so much more complex and possibly so alien,” he said. “When I read about people having seen streets of gold, it’s amusing, because that would be a flattened example of a complex visual reference.”

Greyson listed six things he wanted people to take away from his lecture. First is that near-death experiences are common — about 5% of people worldwide have had one. Second is that they are normal and not a sign of mental illness. Third is that profound aftereffects must be acknowledged and addressed. Fourth is that the mind can function independently of the brain, meaning fifth, the mind may function beyond death. 

Sixth, humans are all interconnected.

“Near-death experiencers, as Tom said, see this golden rule not as a rule we’re supposed to follow, but as a law of nature,” Greyson said. “Living in concert with it makes life much more meaningful and much more fulfilling.” 

NICK DANLAG – STAFF WRITER

During World War II, the Netherlands faced nine months of starvation because the country decided to protest the transport of Nazi troops. The country’s future children would face a strange phenomenon: higher rates of metabolic issues like hypertension and diabetes.

“If there is no food, something like diabetes is actually adaptive. It’s beneficial. You’re able to hold onto the sugar that you are taking in, but when we’re living in the land of plenty, that’s when it becomes a problem,” said Bianca Jones Marlin. “So scientists started to see this emergence of a metabolic memory of the past living on (in people) who had never experienced the trauma.”

Marlin is the principal investigator at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, where she researches the mechanism of transgenerational inheritance of environmental information. At 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday in the Amphitheater, Marlin presented her lecture, titled “Nature, Nurture and the Science of Parenthood,” as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight’s theme of “The Human Brain: Our Greatest Mystery.” Marlin discussed her own research on oxytocin in the brains of mother and virgin mice, how fears can be passed down through generations, and what her work might entail for humans. 

Human babies show their emotions by laughing and crying, and other young mammals perform the same actions, especially when signaling for care. Take mice pups, which are the subject of much of Marlin’s work. These critters become cold very quickly, so whenever they are removed from the nest, they make ultrasonic vocalizations, which humans can’t hear, for help.

“I want you to know that it’s not allowed in the Marlin Lab to abuse mice,” Marlin said. “We use mice with such care and appreciation for the life that they give to us, so we can give life to humanity.”

While mother mice are quick to bring the young pups back to the nest, mice that have not given birth, which Marlin called virgin mice, are unlikely to do so. Virgin mice are more likely to leave the pups out in the cold, or sometimes cannibalize them. 

So Marlin and other researchers wanted to know why there was this difference between mother and virgin mice, and where their brains vary. 

She thought oxytocin was at the center of all this. Oxytocin is released through activities like talking, eye contact and soft touch, but also during birth. 

“Given we see a change in virgins to mothers, is oxytocin the magical ingredient that makes that happen?” Marlin said. “Given the first sound that a mother will hear after birth is the sound of the litter crying, is the auditory cortex, which is the area of the brain that processes sound, the area in which the magic happens?”

Every three hours for three days, Marlin would inject a virgin mouse, while under anesthesia, with oxytocin. Throughout the days, Marlin would remove a pup from the nest and place it elsewhere in the cage. What her team found was that virgin mice, who formerly did not retrieve the pups, were learning to after they were  treated with oxytocin. The virgin mice would also have to be housed with mother mice for some time in order to achieve the best results. 

“I think this is a very important point when we think about parenthood, network, community and support,” Marlin said. “Nature has us set up to be expert caregivers, but not on our own. There’s a learning component, and there’s a communication and society component that’s essential.”

Marlin’s team mapped the oxytocin receptors in mice brains.

“We were astounded by what we saw,” Marlin said. “We saw oxytocin receptors in the left and oxytocin receptors in the right auditory cortex. However, when we looked at them together, we noticed something. There were more oxytocin receptors in the left brain than in the right.”

Marlin said the left side of the brain had twice the amount of receptors as the right. This sent “chills” through Marlin’s research team, because this meant they found “a communication center, that also expressed oxytocin receptors that was lateralized,” like human brains.

Then they wanted to make sure this change in oxytocin in mice brains was necessary for spurring on more retrieval of pups, so they deactivated that part of the brain in mother mice for a day. Mother mice that used to retrieve pups stopped doing so, and Marlin and her team found that the area of mice’s brains that told them to retrieve the pups was, indeed, the left auditory center. 

Marlin then talked about her own upbringing, and why she does her work. Her parents were foster parents, so she had many nonbiological siblings.

“When we went to bed, I would hear stories of why they were in foster care, stories of abuse, stories of neglect, stories of a broken system that had separated them from their parents when they didn’t need to be,” Marlin said, and noted her own family in the audience. “Now as an adult, I realized this is what motivated my work in parental care and parental behavior. So I thank them, and my mom is here, in the corner over there. Hi, Mom.”

Marlin’s research now focuses on how trauma in parents affects brain structures and sensory experiences in their future offspring, which is called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

One of her studies involved almonds. She would put male mice in a cage; one side would have the scent of almonds and produce a small electric shock on the mice’s feet, while the other side had nothing. The male mice would avoid that side of the cage, and she noticed their offspring would, too. 

She ended with a quote from artist Kehinde Wiley: “We are wired to care about the needs of others. I think that is in our DNA.”

As part of the Q-and-A session, Amy Gardner, vice president of advancement and campaign director, asked Marlin if there was a difference between left- and right-handed mothers on the side of auditory perception in the brain. 

“The majority of the animals, 70% of the mice, who had the quieting of the left auditory hearing centers, did not retrieve, but there was 30% that consistently did,” Marlin said. “Similarly, when we silenced the right, a large percentage of them continued retrieving, but a small percentage didn’t.”

This leads her to believe that the same could be true for humans.

Gardner asked Marlin if there was a difference between how male mice retrieved pups versus female mice. 

Marlin said that while females took about 3-12 hours to start retrieving the pups after the oxytocin treatment, male mice took about three days. 

Gardner then asked Marlin if there was any research done on transgenics and the impact of structural racism. 

“We’re looking at a targeted approach. It’s a jump to really call a foot shock ‘trauma.’ I have all my students test the foot shocks and feel it on their hands,” Marlin said. “The mice are tested with the foot shock five times a day for three days, so 15 light foot shocks, 15 walking around on the carpet and touching a doorknob.”

But, Marlin said this could potentially change the mice’s sperm makeup and impact the second generation. 

“We could just think about the chronic stressors like systemic racism and how much more that could be affecting the brain and the body,” Marlin said. “That’s a question that is scary, but important.”

NICHOLE JIANG – STAFF WRITER

Creating music and opportunity through the arts is the heart of what the Sphinx Organization strives for. This organization aims to address the underrepresentation of people of color in the classical music world by supporting  diversity from music education,  to the artists onstage and the works being performed. The organization includes several different performing programs, including the Sphinx Virtuosi, a professional chamber orchestra of 18 Black and Latinx musicians. Several members of the Sphinx Virtuous, known as the Sphinx Artists, will perform at 8:15 p.m. Aug. 19 in the Amphitheater. 

Founded in 1997, the Detroit-based organization has helped transform countless lives through the arts. The name itself comes from the mythical Sphinx that represents power and wisdom. These characteristics reflect not just the members of the organization, but the music and art that is being created. 

“One of the amazing things I’ve been able to do is both teach students of color, and also perform. One of my favorites is the Carnegie Hall gala every year,” said Jannina Barefield Norpoth, a violinist of Sphinx Artists. “Sphinx has always made an incredible effort to do a lot of engagement, and get a lot of students from different schools to come. These kids show up at Carnegie Hall, and most of them have never been here before, and then when this orchestra of all Black and Latinx string players walk out on stage, you would think it was like a rock star walking into an arena.”

The organization also offers music education as a way to open new doors and opportunities. 

“Many of these students, they’re the only person of color at their school in their program, and they go through this affirmation of identity because they question themselves, like, ‘Do I belong here, and do I belong in this situation?’ ” Norpoth said. “Many of them have actually experienced discrimination from their teachers or their classmates, and so coming into this program, they get this sense of affirmation, and then they get the sense of belonging, and they have this confidence that they then are able to bring back to their communities.”

The world of classical music tends to lack diversity and representation of people of color, and the Sphinx Organization hopes to change that. 

“The organization’s mission is to promote diversity in classical music. And that’s changing who’s on the stage, that’s helping prepare people for jobs, that’s changing people’s perception of musicians of color, and it’s also sharing music by composers of color that people might not have heard before — works that haven’t made their place in the repertoire, perhaps, the way they ought to have,” Norpoth said. 

These aspects are what make tonight’s performance so dynamic, as the community gets to experience newer pieces that usually don’t get the chance to be heard.  

“This program that we’re playing, it’s a really fun and exciting program. The first work is actually by a Sphinx alumni. It’s a really beautiful piece, and we open the program with that,” Norpoth said. “We’re also playing Coleridge Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1, which is a really great piece. He was very well versed in both jazz and classical, and his music is really bluesy and beautiful. It’s very classical and reminiscent of Bach and the way he uses fugues, but also infuses all these jazz and blues harmonies into the piece.”

The program also spotlights the cellist Tommy Mesa, who will perform a solo piece, “Seven,” by composer Andrea Casarrubios. 

“She’s such a talented composer and it’s a super gorgeous piece. It’s my favorite part of the program,” Norpoth said. 

The program will also include traditional classical repertoire that the audience will be able to recognize. These include Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and the final movement of Dvořák’s American String Quartet.

Featuring newer works on tonight’s program is a way to showcase a broader repertoire, and spotlight the talents of composers and musicians that aren’t represented equally onstage. 

“I love Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, but there’s just so much repertoire that makes up classical music,” Norpoth said. “There are … so many incredible artists who are writing music right now for classical musicians. That is exciting, and there’s so many women composers and composers of color. Because of the nature of classical music and existing for so many hundreds of years, and going through time periods, it would be very difficult to be a woman in classical music and to be a Black person in classical music,” she said. 

“In spite of that, there’s a lot of music that actually exists, and it either just didn’t become popular because people didn’t take it seriously, or they didn’t publish it — but it’s findable and really worth looking for and performing.”

Musicians from the Sphinx Organization have performed for Chautauqua in the past. However, tonight’s performance is the first time for this group of musicians, and they’re excited to share their message through music with the community, using the more intimate setting of a chamber ensemble. 

“I play in the chamber ensemble all the time. It’s what I love to do because it’s like the classical version of a rock band. It’s a small ensemble but you also get your solo moments, and you get this more intimate experience of playing music with just a few people,” Norpoth said. “It’s kind of like being surrounded by friends and also playing music, so for me, it’s really the best.”

SARAH VEST – STAFF WRITER

There are two kinds of death: That of the body and that of the mind. The Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper confronts this idea in her daily dealings with people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. 

Harper is the author of Week Eight’s Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle book, On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, HuffPost, North American Review, CALYX and the Journal of Religion and Abuse. She received the New Delta Review Nonfiction Prize in 2013 and the Orison Anthology’s 2017 Nonfiction Award. 

Harper is an ordained Baptist minister and completed her master of divinity degree at Wake Forest University and her chaplaincy residency at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. Harper served as the nursing home chaplain at a continuing care retirement community on the New Jersey shore for seven years. She is currently the Minister of Older Adults at The Riverside Church in the City of New York and the chaplain-in-residence at Chautauqua for Week Eight.

In the introduction to her book On Vanishing, Harper writes: “Heart disease impairs circulation. Kidney disease impairs filtration. But brain disease impairs communication. By distinctly and directly impacting our abilities to relate with ourselves and others, it confronts us with the fact of our humanness: to be human is to be limited, even in our most cherished capacities.” 

It is this fact of humanity that Harper deals with in her book and that she will be focusing on in her lecture at 3:30 p.m. EDT Aug. 19 on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. 

Harper has spent a great deal of her career — and an entire book — on dealing with and trying to highlight counternarratives to what people usually think about when they think about brain diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. 

According to Harper, the dominant narrative is that people are “fading away … not only in certain capacities, but their most essential selves.” As people progress in dementia, they become less and less of who they are, and are thought of as shadows. Harper wants to focus on and tell stories about dementia that highlight how these people are still present.

Harper said that another phrase commonly used to describe dementia is “the death that leaves the body behind.” This kind of phrasing is deeply dehumanizing for people who have been diagnosed with brain diseases and feeds into a culture of mistreatment from caregivers. 

“We know that people with dementia suffer from abuse and neglect at much higher rates than their peers. We know that people lose friends when they receive a diagnosis and disclose that diagnosis, that they suffer loneliness at higher rates, that there’s a host of negative treatments — infantilization or talking around or over people,” Harper said. “So all this leads to me asking the question: Whose soul is being sucked away?”

Harper comes from a Christian tradition that works with social justice issues, a mindset that she said has helped her in learning how to care for and work with people with dementia. She also feels that there needs to be a stronger focus on cognitive justice. She said a universal idea among Christians is that people are made in the image of God, and that that image stays with them and does not fade or disappear based on a person’s abilities. As a result, she thinks that faith is a huge resource that can be used to lift people up. 

Although many things became more difficult when the world moved online, Harper said pivoting to Zoom has allowed people with dementia and their care partners to connect with the church in a way she hadn’t imagined. People who struggled to attend in person were suddenly at every service. She described one congregant with dementia whose granddaughter would set her up on Zoom and place the headphones over her ears. This weekly ritual is an example of the kind of connections that it is possible to maintain with people who have dementia. 

For Harper, creating counternarratives has been a struggle from the beginning. Even years after she began her journey, creating a “patchwork quilt” of stories about people with dementia, she can find herself slipping back into the stereotypes. 

“I’m always trying to hold up the mirror to reflect back on my assumptions about what makes someone fully human and what makes myself fully human,” Harper said. “This (disease) isn’t just who you are, what you can do, or what you can say, or what you can think; but who you are is also something larger, held in a larger field of compassion and relationships and love.”

SARAH VEST – STAFF WRITER

What if you could turn the lights on in your home with no more effort than it takes to think about it? That kind of technology is on its way to the consumer market, and Nita Farahany, today’s morning lecturer, is worried about what that means for people’s privacy. 

Farahany is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and a philosophy professor at Duke University, as well as the founding director of Duke University Science & Society, chair of the Duke Master of Arts in Bioethics & Science Policy and principal investigator of SLAP Lab. In 2010, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and served until 2017. Farahany received her bachelor of arts degree in genetics, cell and developmental biology at Dartmouth College, a juris doctor and master of arts degree from Duke, as well as a doctoral degree in philosophy.

Farahany is currently studying neurotechnology, specifically consumer neurotechnology. This kind of technology decodes brain activity and then uses pattern classification — otherwise known as artificial intelligence — to make sense of the data. Her morning lecture at 10:30 a.m. Aug. 19 streamed into the Amphitheater will focus on the extraordinary ways in which people can now access and change their brains, but also the kinds of rights individuals may need to have protected in order to maximize the benefits of neurotechnology while minimizing the potential harms that arise from opening a black box in the brain. 

Due to a significant family health risk, Farahany pre-recorded her lecture and will participate in a live Q-and-A from her home. The program will be broadcast live in the Amp as well as the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. The program will be moderated on the Amphitheater stage by Chautauqua President Michael E. Hill and Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education.

According to Farahany, there are two kinds of neurotechnology that are being marketed for consumer use. 

The first is electroencephalography (EEG) technology, which reads the electrical activity in a person’s brain as they have a thought, do a calculation or experience an emotion. 

When you have a thought, your brain has hundreds of thousands neurons that fire, Farahany said. Each of those neurons gives off a small electrical discharge that forms distinctive patterns depending on what kind of thought a person has. Then artificial intelligence software reads the pattern and can tell what the thought was based on the pattern. This could be used to detect when a driver is tired, for example. 

The second kind of neurotechnology is electromyography (EMG) technology. Instead of focusing on the electrical impulses in a person’s brain, EMG focuses on the neurons that control the muscles in a person’s body, called motor neurons. According to Farahany, these kinds of electrical patterns could be decoded through something a person was wearing on their wrist. 

Farahany uses typing as an example of EMG technology. If a person wanted to type a word, a wristlet could decode the electrical impulses to determine what word they were going to type. 

According to Farahany, big companies from Facebook to Apple are making big bets and investments in these kinds of technologies. There are even companies, like Neuralink, that are dedicated to developing EEG and EMG technology. 

“All of that, from my perspective, adds up to a likely future where neurotechnology will become the new platform that we use to interact with other technology in the world,” Farahany said. “Instead of using a mouse or keyboard, you will use a neurotechnology device to type or to communicate with your friends. You might just think about turning on the lights in your house, rather than getting up and walking over there to turn them on.”

She calls all these technologies “exciting and promising,” but they also introduce new risks. The device could pick up on not only what a person intended to type, but a broader set of emotions and thoughts than they intended to communicate. The question that leads to is who has the right to that kind of data and how do lawmakers ensure people are able to enjoy the benefits of the technology while protecting people’s thoughts?

Even though this kind of neurotechnology sounds like it has been plucked from a science fiction novel, it is already being used commercially. According to Farahany, this technology is being used by employers and large corporations, as well as in educational settings, though it is not yet in widespread use. The data is already being collected and commodified. 

“If we want to have at least a right to mental privacy, if we want to have a final fortress in our brain, we need to do something about this now,” Farahany said. 

Despite her fears over user privacy, Farahany thinks that there are huge upsides to developing and using neurotechnology. With neurotechnology, someone with epilepsy would be able to detect a seizure an hour before it happened. People who are diabetic would be able to track insulin levels through the brain in less invasive and more accurate ways that the current needle method. It could improve the quality of life and adaptive skills of people with autism spectrum disorder.

“Being able to decode the human brain is critical to being able to address mental disease, to being able to improve our output and improve our mental health,” Farahany said. “Unless we can really decode and understand what’s happening in the brain, there’s no hope of being able to address some of the greatest ills that face humanity.”

MARY LEE TALBOT – STAFF WRITER

“The disciples, on two occasions, witnessed the feeding of multitudes and collected baskets full of leftovers. They had every evidence to trust Jesus and to distrust Harod and the temple leaders, but they still did not get it,” said the Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper. She preached at the 9 a.m. Wednesday service of worship in the Amphitheater. Her sermon title was “The Challenge of Understanding.” The Scripture text was Mark 8:14-21.

The disciples could only think of literal bread; there was not enough bread to feed everyone. “They were so dense and spiritually obtuse,” she said. “How could they not get it? I want to shake them and ask, ‘Why is it so hard to see, to hear, to perceive?’ ”

Harper recalled her own spiritual density. “I still doubt that blessings will be around the corner when they have been around the corner. I doubt love will show up when love has always shown up. I have knowledge, but not understanding.”

One night a coworker asked Harper for money to pay the highway tolls to get home. Harper thought she had just forgotten the cash and gave her three dollars. “She had not forgotten the money; she did not have it, period. I had not connected the dots. Her husband was out of work, day care for the children was expensive, she had been out of work. I did not perceive and did not ask if she needed money for food, for gas to get to and from work, to pay the tolls in the morning.”

She continued, “I understood the literal content of her request, but not the deeper meaning. Like the disciples, I missed the larger point. I was too focused on the toll that I missed the bigger need. It is unjust that some have more than they need and others not enough.”

Albert Einstein said, “any fool can know, the point is to understand.” Harper said there is a yawning gap between knowing and understanding. “We know about many things but we don’t understand how to change and be changed.”

The disciples knew there were 12 baskets of bread left over from the first feeding and seven baskets of bread from the second. “They passed the pop quiz, but failed the test,” she said. “They missed the greater lesson. They could recall the information but did not understand what it meant.”

There are people who understand loyalty and kindness better than others, even though their cognitive ability is less. People can feel the emotion in music even if they can’t speak about it. “My grandfather was still trying to help others with their walkers, or pick someone up off the floor when he could not articulate, but understood, what was needed to help,” Harper said.

She told the congregation, “We can know cognitive facts but understanding is knowing what needs to be done and let it transform our daily practices. Last June we knew what we saw in the video — kneeling for nine minutes on someone’s neck, crying for mama. We knew it was wrong. As white, American Christians we need to understand the wanton violence and subtle forms of racism against Black Americans. We need to listen deeply and with humility, to change and be changed.”

St. Anselm said faith is seeking understanding, not knowledge. Faith seeks to understand the relationship with God in the individual and in the whole social order. “We have our blind spots, especially to our original sin of racism. To seek understanding, to move toward life-giving, is our high calling. Understanding is the deep knowledge roped in our soul, in God and in community,” she said to the congregation.

The disciples passed the pop quiz but failed the test. But Jesus did not kick them out of school. 

“Jesus never demoted them or dropped them; he was willing to keep working with them,” Harper said. “That action gives me hope that Jesus will stick with us, too. We have to keep practicing our spiritual ABCs, keep trying, keep failing, keep trying harder. The Spirit of wisdom abides, especially when we don’t understand.”  

The Rev. Mary Lee Talbot presided. Welling Hall, retired Plowshares Professor of Peace Studies at Earlham College, read the Scripture. For the prelude, Joshua Stafford, who holds the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist and is director of sacred music, played “Träumerei,” by Robert Schumann. Members of the Motet Choir sang “God be in My Head,” with music by David Evan Thomas and words from the Sarum Primer. The postlude was “Now Thank We All Our God,” with music by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Virgil Fox. The Edmund R. Robb-Walter C. Shaw Endowment and the Randell-Hall Memorial Chaplaincy provide support for this weeks services and chaplain.

DAVID KWIATKOWSKI – STAFF WRITER

Amidst all the uncertainty of this year’s programming, one thing is for certain: Chautauqua Theater Company’s New Play Workshops are back this season.

CTC Managing Director Sarah Clare Corporandy has loved seeing this program blossom over the years, especially since all theater programs shifted online during 2020.

“We’re laying the pathway for the bridge for those plays to go from one step to the next, and that’s core to our action,” Corporandy said. “To be able to do it in any form is really important, and I’m always reminded how much Chautauquans love it when we get in the room with the new playwrights because … they have questions, they want to talk about it.”

The New Play Workshops are supported by the Roe Green Foundation; Corporandy said that Green, the foundation’s CEO, has been “a great supporter for over 10 years.” 

“She’s a really important part of that process and another wonderful example to me of — (we’ve got) artists, we’ve got actors, we’ve got writers, we’ve got administrators and technicians, we have community members, we have donors — all of these people coming together because we care about the work,” Corporandy said.

The week of New Play Workshops started Monday at the Jessica Trapasso Memorial Pavilion at Children’s School, when playwright Juliette Carrillo saw her new play Tailbone read aloud for the first time. Tailbone follows a woman named Anabelle who is determined to take her next relationship in baby steps, but when her new beau gets flooded out of his apartment, she’s quick to suggest he stay with her. 

Despite the strained circumstances and Anabelle’s overly zealous imagination, it could be an ideal match — only the always-present otherworldly roommate has his own intentions. An inquiry into what we do to avoid true intimacy, Tailbone is part comedy, part mystery, and part spiritual quest.

“It’ll be the first time I hear it, so I’m really excited about that, and I’m really excited to have a live audience and have a conversation with (people) about it,” Carrillo said Monday. “That will actually help me take the play to the next level. That’s what I’m hoping for. Of course, like any playwright, I’m hoping that it will eventually be in production.”

Tailbone is different than Carrillo’s previous works as it has a smaller cast, but carries the throughline she has in her plays of exploring hidden worlds in humanity.

“I wanted to do a small comedy with three people, and I wanted it to be relationship focused,” Carrillo said. “One of the things that I’m most interested in is the kind of worlds that we cannot see and heightened realities.” 

At 4 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall, playwright Kristoffer Diaz will be debuting a reworked draft of his new play Rebecca Oaxaca Lays Down A Bunt. The play follows a woman named Ella who can’t wait to start her new job as the upstairs concierge at a sleek hotel. Catering to celebrity guests is her dream — but it’s hard to keep track of which guests are in which room, which guest is the biggest celebrity and which party-loving guests need extra supervision. Diaz got the idea to skewer the fame-obsessed society of America early in his career when he stayed in several hotels while traveling for work.

“(I was) always sort of struck by hotels in really interesting places, kind of weird places sometimes,” Diaz said. “Being around rich and famous people for the first time, there’s a whole different way of approaching life and a certain sense of entitlement sometimes and a certain sense of what the good life means to different people. I come from working-class folks and it’s always somebody’s job to take care of those people who are living the good life.”

Like Carrillo’s Tailbone, Rebecca Oaxaca Lays Down A Bunt is a comedy, a departure from Diaz’s other plays.

“Comedy is hard to do in a quick-reading scenario like this,” Diaz said. “We’re going to be hearing this new draft for the first time. … I tend to write about big serious ideas and things like that and there are serious ideas underneath here, (but) largely, this one is fun and super silly.”

Corporandy believes that playwrights getting to hear their works read aloud for the first time and hearing feedback is the “beautiful transaction” of the New Play Workshop.

“(Getting) to ask the audience some questions about things that they are still working on, or things they are wondering to (get) a sense of what their intention was for the play is coming through, is such a gift to the playwright,” she said.

NICK DANLAG – STAFF WRITER

Norman Ornstein had some questions for his Amphitheater audience: How many of them know someone who has a mental illness, and how many know someone with a very serious mental illness? Then he asked the people who did not raise their hands: Why were they lying? 

“The fact is that mental illness touches virtually every family in this society,” said Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the vice president of the Matthew Harris Ornstein Memorial Foundation, named in memory of his son Matthew. 

And just like every family, Ornstein said, his own has been touched by mental illness.

“I’ll try and keep my composure as much as I can,” Ornstein said, “but our son, Matthew, was a brilliant, funny, warm and compassionate person who was a national champion high school debater, went to Princeton and excelled, was out in Hollywood having success when, at age 24, he had a psychotic break.”

Ornstein said his son and family went through 10 years of pain because of a broken system, from health care to court systems, that are not fit to support people with mental illness. His son was one of them, and “had no insight into the fact that he had an illness,” which is called anosognosia.

“He believed that for some reason, which he could not fathom, God had come for him and had taken his soul, but left his body behind inadvertently, and it was a struggle to recapture God’s grace and get back his soul,” Ornstein said. “The idea of taking medicine or getting treatment was anathema to him, because it would be taking the easy way out, and God would not approve.”

Ornstein was naive, he said, and thought medication would be a magic bullet. But in reality, it was one of many steps. 

“Now, for the rest of us, as we tried, we got no help from a system that did not provide any avenue for family members to intervene, but also left him on his own, because of the assumption that he was a person with freedom and agency,” Ornstein said. 

Ornstein said his son suffered from a “double whammy” of mental illness and cigarette addiction.

“He died in a hotel room of carbon monoxide poisoning. An accidental death, but a death that was not preordained, that did not have to happen,” Ornstein said. “And as my wife has said many times, he died with his civil liberties intact.”

His family and he had two options, he said: “Curl up in a ball into the corner and just grieve,” or, as President Joe Biden said, “Turn our grief into purpose.”

The fact is that mental illness touches virtually every family in this society.

—Norman Ornstein
Emeritus Scholar,
American Enterprise Institute

At 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 17 in the Amp, Ornstein joined Steven Leifman and Thomas Insel in a panel discussion about the state of mental health in the U.S. and ways forward through reforms in health care and criminal justice. Leifman is an associate administrative judge of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, and Insel is the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The three spoke as part of Week Eight’s theme of “The Human Brain: Our Greatest Mystery.”

Leifman said most judges received no training on how to approach working with people with mental illness.

“The criminal justice system in America is the repository for many failed public policies, and there is no greater failed public policy than our treatment toward people with serious mental illnesses,” Leifman said. “But none of that was taught to me before I started.”

Early in Leifman’s career on the bench, he handled low-level charges for people who were still in custody. Most commonly, the people he saw in his court were defendants who had serious mental illnesses who did not know how to get out of jail.

As a young judge right before a trial, Insel was approached by the parents of the defendant. The mom was crying and the dad was shaking and begged him to do whatever he could to help their son. Their son was a nationally ranked debater in high school, a Harvard graduate and had been cycling through the criminal justice system. 

As a relatively new judge, Leifman thought he had more power than he actually did. 

“I deal in logic, and I knew if you got arrested and had a heart attack, there was an amazing health care system you would go to and you would get really good care, and I said, ‘Well, it must be the same for people with mental illnesses,’” Leifman said. “So I promised them that I would get their son help. The worst mistake I ever made as a judge.”

As Leifman started to go back to the courtroom, the mother stopped him, and said, “With all due respect, I think my son knows more about mental health than you do.” 

“Excuse me?” Leifman said. 

Her son was the former head of psychiatry at Jackson Memorial Hospital, until one day he had his first psychotic breakdown. He did not show up to work, thought he needed to be closer to God ­— which is called religious ideation — cashed in his life insurance policy, flew to Israel, was later deported for running around naked in the Orthodox sections of Jerusalem, and was now homeless.

In the trial, Leifman could see nothing wrong with the defendant; he was thoughtful and more respectful than the lawyers, to the point where Leifman thought that it might be the parents who were the problem. So Leifman asked him how, if there was nothing wrong with him, a Harvard-educated doctor ended up in his position. He triggered a psychotic breakdown in the defendant.

“It took me a long time to understand that I caused his psychotic episode. He never told me that he was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, and as soon as I said those words to him, his brilliant, fast mind made the assumption that I must have been part of the CIA conspiracy, because how else would I know?” Leifman said. “And the one person he thought he could trust in the courtroom, the judge, had let him down.”

Leifman later did what his predecessor told him to do and ordered psychological evaluations, and all three came back that the defendant was incompetent to stand trial and met the criteria for involuntary hospitalization. Leifman was about to order he be put in a mental hospital and put on medication, when a lawyer informed him that, as a local judge, he did not have the authority to do so. 

Leifman’s only option was to send him back into society.

“This is the state of our mental health system in America. Not only did I not fulfill the promise I had made to his parents, I put him at risk, I put the community at risk, I probably put my job at risk, God forbid, (if) he went out and did something terrible, or something terrible happened to him,” Leifman said. “But I followed the law that day.”

The criminal justice system in America is the repository for many failed public policies, and there is no greater failed public policy than our treatment toward people with serious mental illnesses. But none of that was taught to me before I started.

—Steven Leifman
Associate Administrative Judge,
Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of Florida

Insel said stories like this are not the exception. For people in mental health crises, they are far more likely, he said, to go into the criminal justice system than into the health care system. 

But he said this wasn’t inevitable, and there are plenty of good treatments throughout the world and in the U.S. — and though a lot of the focus is put onto medications, they are only a small part of treatment. 

Fifty years ago, he said, people with mental illness were not funneled into the criminal justice system.

“We didn’t send people to jail,” Insel said. “We didn’t assume that this was the job of a judge or a warden or a prison. We actually had health care for them. We had a community mental health system — wasn’t perfect, lots of problems there, too little of it actually dealt with the people who had the greatest needs.”

In the 1850s, he said society moved people with mental illness from the prisons into hospitals. He said people were at least safe in these hospitals, but were not well treated in many places, though sometimes they were. Public support for these systems decayed into the 1900s, and in 1963, President John F. Kennedy said people with mental illness and people in these hospitals should no longer “be alien to our affections.”

“All of that changed in about 1980, when the Reagan Administration basically demolished the community mental health system, which wasn’t working all that great anyway,” Insel said. “By that time, it needed to be rebuilt, and they decided to simply gut it.”

Since then, Insel said, in the U.S., beds in hospitals dedicated for people with mental illness dropped from 600,000 to 39,000, while the amount of people has only gone up, especially within unhoused and formerly incarcerated populations. 

Insel said everyone sees pieces of this “extraordinary injustice,” from people who are homeless to overcrowded jails. 

“What we don’t understand is that much of the root cause of those social ills, and sometimes the extreme poverty that we hear about, is untreated mental illness,” Insel said. “Yet, this is entirely treatable. I shouldn’t say entirely, but it’s mostly treatable. We can do so much better if we care about it and if we know about it.”

In 2000, Leifman had meetings in Miami with police, health care workers and politicians who recognized the need for reforms around how institutions treated people with mental illness. Leifman worked to educate police officers on how to work with people in crisis through a 40-hour training program.

“Over the last 10 years, we kept data on the two largest agencies, Miami and Miami-Dade. Those two agencies alone handled 105,268 cases, and out of the 105,000-plus mental health cases, they only made 198 arrests,” Leifman said. “The number of arrests in Miami-Dade went from 118,000 arrests per year before our program to just 53,000. After we did all of our training,  the program saved the county 300 years of jail-bed days.”

What Leifman and others did not expect from their work was for the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder within police officers to go down. He said police officers often do not want to seek mental health treatment within their own department for fear of ridicule, so part of their reforms was creating a better pipeline for officers to seek treatment in other departments.

What we don’t understand is that much of the root cause of those social ills … is untreated mental illness. Yet, this is entirely treatable. I shouldn’t say entirely, but it’s mostly treatable. We can do so much better if we care about it and if we know about it.

—Thomas Insel
Former Director,
National Institute of Mental Health

Another reform making its way through on the federal level is the mental health crisis line, 988. Insel said that across the country, as soon as states enact it, people can call this number to receive mental health support from a nurse, a social worker and a peer, who Leifman called the “secret sauce of the program.”

“The first thing we have to do is not to convince someone to take medication. We have to convince somebody that they want to live,” Leifman said. “By the time they end up in jail with these illnesses, they’ve given up on life. They don’t really want to breathe. They’ve lost all hope. They have no dreams. They’ve been treated like garbage by all of us, and the systems that we send them to whether it’s civil or criminal,” Leifman said.

While 988 responders will have a direct line to the police, they will not have a police officer with them when they first arrive on the scene. 

“We know that about 6% of calls will require police involvement. But that means 94% of the time, we’re going to handle this in a different way,” Insel said. 

Leifman said the next reform which might be added is more virtual crisis response. He said people in rural areas may not have access to a quick response from 988, so adding a way of treatment through phone could increase accessibility. 

Then Leifman talked about a project in the works with the University of South Florida. Leifman’s team asked them to identify a smaller group of repeat offenders with mental illness. He expected a group of 1,000 people, but USF narrowed the group down to 97 people who, over five years, were arrested 2,200 times, spent 27,000 days in Dade County Jail and cost taxpayers $14.7 million.

“Whether you’re a compassionate, empathetic person who just is horrified by this — which we all should be — or you’re really concerned about your taxes, we are all on the same page on this, because we are wasting it,” Leifman said. “Do you know what it costs in America for this problem? Over a trillion dollars a year to incarcerate this population in direct and indirect costs. Seventy percent of the people in jail have a mental illness, or substance use disorder, or both.”

Leifman said the work has been so successful that one of the jails in the area was closed because fewer people with mental illness were funneled into the system and more formerly incarcerated people received the help they needed. This is saving Miami-Dade County $12 million a year.

And because the work was so successful, Leifman and his group were approved funding for a new short-term mental health service. It is a seven-story building with 200 beds, with every service needed, from a crisis stabilization unit to a short-term residential facility, primary, dental and eye clinic, a tattoo remover, a courtroom, and programs run by people with mental illnesses to teach self-sufficiency.

“Instead of just kicking people to the curb once we’ve adjudicated their case, we will gently reintegrate them back into the community with the support that they need to maintain their recovery,” Leifman said. “People can recover. This is not a death sentence.”

The three panelists want more people to get involved in this work.

“We just have to start thinking about these like other illnesses,” Leifman said. “You wouldn’t let someone with cancer or heart disease lay out on the street and walk by them. And I don’t know why we’re not madder about it. I don’t want to be the angriest man in the room. It is so offensive because we, as judges and the police, we see this every single day.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Georgetown University theology, art history, philosophy and political history professor Ori Z. Soltes took the Amphitheater stage on Aug. 16 to discuss the soul, one of his many areas of expertise. 

Soltes, who has authored over 280 books, articles, exhibition catalogues and essay and served as Chautauqua theologian in 2007, opened Week Eight’s Interfaith Lecture Series, “The Human Soul: An Ineffable Mystery,” with his lecture titled “What Are We? Three Early Visions and Versions of the Soul,” though he added a fourth vision. 

He reassured his audience, early and throughout, that the beginning of knowledge usually brings an awareness that one doesn’t know, which can be painful for some and invigorating for others. 

Egypt

Ancient Egyptians’ concept of the soul is complex, with seven different parts that have overlapping traits, Soltes said.

The most common of these is the ba, or personality, which is depicted in Egyptian art as a bird hovering over the body that then moves on after death, he said.

“It decides, you decide — it’s in part dependent on how you live your life whether you will remain forever and ever thereafter in this other spiritual reality,” he said. “Or, you may decide, it may decide, circumstances may decide you come back in a newly incarnate form.”

Ironically, pharaohs did not have the same options as ordinary Egyptians because the pharaoh was understood as a god incarnate, he said. When the pharaoh died, the ba went to the successor and so on. Ordinary Egyptians, rather, may not come back again and move on to the other realm, he said.

The ba comes from a heaven called nut, he said. 

“On the other side of many coffins, you have a depiction of nut as this kind of bluish, skyish being with four limbs in the four directions — east, west, north and south — and completely (covered) with myriad, myriad stars,” he said. 

These stars weren’t just little dots, but individual and distinct to represent souls, he said. 

“Likely, it is the individual souls who are the ancestral spirits of the one who is mummified within that coffin who is looking at eternity,” he said.

The ba is in union with the ka, which Soltes called the desire aspect of the soul and moral sensibility.

“It’s all animated by another aspect of the soul called khu, who I would render as divine spark,” he said. 

The ba can be thought of as the heart, while the khu as the mind, he said. There is also the khaibit, a shadow aspect of the soul that stays between the gate of life and death, which the ba must pass by in order to reach nut or go back and reincarnate, he said. 

When bodies were mummified in ancient Egypt, the lungs, stomach, intestines and liver were preserved in jars, but the heart was left inside the body, he said. 

“The heart is understood to be so intimately connected to the body that it can’t be extracted,” he said. “If you extract it from that mummified body, somehow something would be amiss in what happens to the ba, which is an aspect of the soul which has a body connection.”

Genesis

Genesis 2:7 – “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that He had done. The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Soltes opened his second section with reference to this passage. Prior to it, in Genesis 1:27, the creature, Adam, was said to be created in God’s image, he said. In Genesis 2:1, we know God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh — a number deeply important to the Egyptians, Soltes said. 

A difference exists — God is a singular being in Christianity, while Egypt’s story is much more complicated, he said.

The breath of life described in Genesis 2:7 is known as neshama in Hebrew, translating to soul or spirit. The ground, or earth, in Hebrew is called adamah, hence Adam. The Latin word for soul, anima, can be used to describe Adam as animated, or alive, he said. 

Later in the Bible, though, comes the word nephesh, another translation of soul that Soltes said is similar to the Egyptian ba. The Bible also laters mentions ruah, or wind, which Soltes said could imply the breath. 

The meaning of all this does not come from the Bible, but rather through interpretations of it, he said. 

“In the understanding that evolved into Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this breathing, this neshama, breathed into this cloud of earth is understood to be a soul, which is understood to be a bit of God in all of us,” he said. “That’s what these traditions understand the soul to be.”

If God is immortal and imperishable, then so too are humans who have God within them, Soltes said about these faiths.

Another important aspect of the soul to these traditions is free will, he said. In the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden apple, Soltes described it as God telling Adam, before Eve was created, not to eat the apple. Adam then incorrectly interpreted this to Eve, telling her not to touch the apple.

“How could they disobey God’s command unless they had free will?” asked Soltes. 

Free will was never considered in ancient Egypt, he said. 

Greeks

When Odysseus, in The Odyssey, is at the edge of reality, he is able to open a passage between the living and the dead, Soltes said. 

There, he is reunited with his deceased mother, and he tries to embrace her multiple times, unable to each time. 

Greeks’ understanding of the soul is that something remains that looks like someone is alive, but there is no substance, he said. 

Odysseus also meets Achilles, who he assumes must be having a great afterlife given all his praise during life. 

“Achilles ruefully said, ‘I would rather be the poorest man on earth, a slave to someone (who) doesn’t own a stitch of property, than be king of all the underworld,’ ” Soltes said. “The Greek sense at that point of what it is that remains is something remaining in great discomfort. To have my bodily forms but not my bodily functions is a source of unhappiness.”

This perspective shifted with Socrates. Socrates was sentenced to death for impiety of the gods and corruption of the youth — essentially, he continuously asked questions that those in power were unable to answer, frustrating them, Soltes said.

Socrates was excited to die, though, because he believed the soul was immortal, Soltes said. Furthermore, he believed the soul was the better part of humans. 

This is completely opposite to The Odyssey, in which the ghost of Achilles wished he had lived a much longer life.

“Socrates can’t wait to be deprived of the body, which he finds an impediment to what his soul has been doing his whole life — to which we infer by soul he means something like mind — because he’s been inquiring through his whole life what is truth, what is virtue, what is justice, what is love, what is friendship, what is good,” Soltes said.

In death, Socrates believed he would no longer be impeded by physical barriers like food, drink, sleep, sex or going to the bathroom, Soltes said.

When Plato was alive several hundred years later, he used Socrates as a mechanism for getting at issues old and new, Soltes said. 

Three components of the soul are brought up here, from pure reason, or logos, to the opposite part of the soul, which is desire. In the middle is a component that deals with emotion and honor, he said.

“That middle state also mediates against doing crazy things that I have an appetite to do, or being robotic or being governed entirely by reason,” he said. “I think both Socrates and Plato very clearly understand that we are hardly a species governed by reason alone.”

Similar to these three components overlapping are the seven aspects that Egyptians believed in, though they are not the same, he said.

Greeks also believed that nobody was more powerful than fate. In The Iliad, Zeus, the most powerful Greek god, wants to save his son on the battlefield but knows that he cannot predict the outcome of his involvement, Soltes said. 

“Even Zeus has to desist from what he would like to do because of fate,” he said. “The soul, with its tripartite understanding, is understood to be devised of elements of what is predetermined and what I am free willed to make happen for myself.”

Hinduism and Buddhism

In Eastern beliefs, there is a large understanding of the Brahma, or the first god in the Hindu triumvirate, Soltes said. Some groups are more familiar with other gods in Hinduism than others, from Vishnu to Shiva to Krishna, he said. 

“If I am a Krishnite, I understand Krishna to be a constant avatar of being of Brahma, but I don’t disacknowledge all of the other manifestations,” he said. “It’s just they haven’t fully arrived as Krishna has.”

The text that describes that more succinctly is the Bhagavad Gita, or divine song, which he called a revealed text. In the Sanskrit language, this is Shruti, or that which is heard. 

Yet it’s found in Mahabharata, an epic poem that is not heard, but Smriti, or that which is remembered, he said. 

The content, he said, is a prince who has decided to go into battle to regain his throne, but then stops because he realized he was fighting against family, friends and neighbors, Soltes said. 

Krisha gives wisdom to the prince, essentially saying if he killed his cousin he would not kill the soul, but instead the body, Soltes said. 

“The truth is, the body is an illusion,” he said. “The body is what in Sanskrit is called maya. The reality of what is us is what’s called atman.”

The soul doesn’t die, but gets reincarnated in an ongoing cycle. If one does good things in one life, they will be reincarnated into a better life, and vice versa if one is bad, which is called karma. 

When one ends up in a condition of nirvana, or spiritual perfection, they are released, which is called moksha.

“It’s like a droplet of water that is subsumed back in the sea of being,” he said. “Once that happens, you no longer can see that droplet of water. When I achieve that condition of nirvana, I who achieves it ceases to be an I.”

Buddhism is partly built on Hinduism, he said, but the personified God, names and concepts are not involved. Consequently, Soltes said Buddhism, in a sense, is not a religion. 

“It’s not trying to tie me back to a God that is personified. … Buddha is not a God, it means enlightened,” he said. “But by having achieved enlightenment in the primary text of Buddhism, we understand he, in fact, transcends God.”

Buddha does not deny gods, but they are not where humans came from or are trying to return to; rather, it’s the sea of being, Soltes said.

What are we?

“We are what we as a species have come to believe ourselves to be, or perhaps what something other than ourselves has embedded in our consciousness,” Soltes said.

Humans have decided what we are over the course of our existence, based on egos, the brain, soul, heart, spirit, mind, God and gods. 

“We cannot know, but it’s also part of our human essence to keep on trying to know,” Soltes said. “I don’t know if that’s part of our soul or something else, but it’s certainly an ongoing process — sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.” 

NICHOLE JIANG – STAFF WRITER

When you think of a violin or viola, the melodies of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart most likely come to mind. This is not the case for American hip-hop duo, Black Violin, who combine classical and hip-hop music together to create a musical experience like no other. The duo returns to Chautauqua to once again captivate the audience with a high-energy performance at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 18 in the Amphitheater. 

Childhood friends Kevin Sylvester and Wilner Baptiste from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, formed Black Violin to create music in a way that had never been done before. Their original vision was to become musical producers, but that changed into performing and creating music themselves. 

“We wanted to incorporate classical music in a way that no one’s ever done, and that was the motivation,” said Baptiste, Black Violin’s violist. “We were just doing things that were normal to us, but people really liked the idea of hip-hop and classical fusion. We started performing with local artists and started noticing people were very intrigued by (our music), and then we started focusing on us as artists.”

Since then, the duo has performed with Alicia Keys for the Billboard Awards, opened for the Wu-Tang Clan and composed the music for the Fox series “Pitch.” They have also performed with other notable artists such as Alessia Cara, 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne.

Baptiste began his musical journey at a summer program, where he originally wanted to learn how to play saxophone. However, it was as if Baptiste was destined to play the viola instead. 

“The story is that I wanted to play the sax. I went up to the band teacher at a summer program to sign up, and the string teacher was in the same room. They both looked at each other and they said let’s play golf, whoever wins this golf game gets this kid in their class. So the band teacher obviously lost, and I got put into the string class,” Baptiste said. “I fell in love with it, and have been playing for 27 years now.”

The duo has much respect for the traditional classical repertoire, but the fusion of classical and hip-hop is what feels most natural to them. 

“I have no objections to playing classical. Back in those days, early 2000s, when classical music was kind of pretty much gone and had almost no existence in South Florida … as a classical musician, it just wasn’t there, and, so we would play hip-hop on the violin in clubs and play little gigs here and there,” Baptiste said. “It just kind of grew into what it is now. Playing classical music has always had this almost elite level … and being in that environment, as a Black dude, it’s not always the safe thing. It’s almost a defense mechanism to just do what you want to do, play what you want to play, and that’s hip-hop. Hip-hop is defiant, and that’s the road that we took.”

Beside the addition of hip-hop to classical instruments that sets Black Violin apart, there are various other aspects that make this group special. 

“I think what sets us apart is our intentionality. We’re very intentional about how we present ourselves and how our music is projected,” Baptiste said. “We don’t compromise when it comes to us and our integrity and what we represent. It’s a movement. It’s bigger than us, so we make sure that we are in line with who we are, and then everything else follows.”

The name Black Violin itself also holds a special meaning to the duo. 

“Kevin, when he first started college, his viola professor, Chauncey Patterson, gave him a tape. It was an album called Black Violin by a guy named Stuff Smith, and (when we were) coming up with a name, he said that name, and I was like, that’s it,” Baptiste said. “The album’s called Black Violin, and it changed our perspective in terms of what the violin is capable of and also what a Black dude is capable of. And it just made sense to continue that legacy.”

Through music, the duo has been able to break barriers and pave the way for the future of classical music. However, they also have their own message that they want to send each time they step on a stage. 

“Our message is the typical cliches you hear: Never judge a book by its cover, and you can do anything you want. All those things we think about with classical and hip-hop music, and the idea of those two things coming together to make sense, is impossible — and we made it possible,” Baptiste said. “I think our mission is, no matter who you are or where you’re from, you’re capable of great things. You see us, two big Black guys playing this instrument, and we’re breaking stereotypes one stage at a time.”

Their mission goes beyond the stage. The duo also has the Black Violin Foundation, helping young students reach their own goals. 

“The foundation is kind of an extension of what we already do. It focuses on equity, inclusion and helping kids, Black and brown, that don’t necessarily have the access to these instruments,” Baptiste said. “We focus on helping them and providing them with an instrument and the means to go to music camps and lessons.” 

The foundation puts an emphasis on providing equal opportunity and provides scholarships each year. 

“That is really just extending our Black Violin motto a bit more, and just making sure we help those kids that have the drive who may not necessarily have the access,” Baptiste said.  “We had that. We had our teachers that just really saw something in us, and this helped us get to that next level, whether it’s helping us get a train ticket to a music camp or an instrument. We had those things so we want to be able to provide that for the kids.”

Tonight’s performance is a “high-energy and fun show for everyone,” Baptiste said. The duo will perform most of their original albums from Stereotype to Take the Stairs, with a few covers, as well. 

“We’re looking forward to it, and just looking forward to being on stage,” Baptiste said. “This is our fifth show on this tour, and this is our first tour in 17 months, so we’re just looking forward to being onstage and connecting with people.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

What is “post” about postliberal theology? Nancey Murphy, with her late husband, wondered that at a conference with several lectures dedicated to the subject. 

“We realized these were philosophers who, in a sense, were redefining the questions that had plagued modern philosophy for 300 years,” she said. 

Modern philosophers believed there needed to be a solid foundation in order to build knowledge, she said. Then, she went on, the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine helped question that. 

Postmodern philosophers, like Quine, see knowledge more like a web or net in that it is all interconnected, she said. 

“When we’re dealing with knowledge problems, we’re never starting from nothing and building all the way from the ground up,” she said. 

Murphy, a senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, will present her lecture “We Are Our Souls: Multi-Aspect Monism in Christian Thought” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 18 in the Amphitheater, the final Week Eight Interfaith Lecture themed “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.”

Murphy has given over 200 lectures around the world, including in Iceland, South Africa, China, Australia, Russia and Iran. She has written and edited dozens of books and volumes. In 1992, she won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence for her first book, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning.

She will use postmodern philosophy to tackle this week’s theme. One way to think of postmodern philosophy, she said, is language. 

The word “dog,” for example, is the familiar four-legged furry pet — this is simple, she said.

“What about when you get to abstract concepts?” she said. “What do they refer to? How do we get their meaning? The answer is not to think of the word over here on one side and language over there on the other.” 

It’s to recognize language itself as a part of our world. They are already interwoven. It’s not ever a problem of starting from scratch. … It’s a problem of finding words.”

For her lecture, Murphy said there will be overlap with Ori Soltes’ Interfaith Lecture from Monday (see Page 5).  

In the first section, she will discuss the soul in Christianity from Biblical times through the rest of the millennium. 

Biblical scholars believed the soul was not separate from the body, but rather a part of a whole person’s being, she said, making it a monistic viewpoint instead of dualistic. She will then discuss how this was later influenced by Greek philosophy, putting a dualistic lens on Christian teaching. 

Catholics were influenced by Aristotle, Murphy said, who believed plants and animals had souls which had similar aspects as a human soul. Plants provide the powers for growth and reproducing, and animals provide desires like thirst and emotions, she said. 

Protestants and Catholics carried on this teaching until the beginning of the 20th century, she said, when Biblical scholars realized the same word could have different interpretations by people who lived centuries apart, she said. They thought life after death meant bodily resurrection. 

Today, people question if humans even have souls.

“Do we actually need to have a soul to explain our abilities?” Murphy said. “Or is it just because we have such an incredibly complex, flexible brain in such complex cultures, with a long history of thinking in various ways?”

Her second section will answer the question of how humans started believing in an inner spirituality rather than bodies acting in the world, she said. 

Murphy will also discuss near-death experiences, like Interfaith Lecturer Bruce Greyson did on Tuesday, and whether that idea supports dualism. 

Postmodern philosophy may help dispel some mystery with the soul, she said. 

“The soul is only a mystery if you don’t know all the history,” Murphy said. “What is really the mystery is: What does it mean to be resurrected?”

NICHOLE JIANG – STAFF WRITER

The brain produces every thought, memory, feeling and action, and humans may never be able to fully understand or grasp the complexity of its inner workings. However, neuroscientist Bianca Jones Marlin has dedicated her life to researching the most complex organ in our body, and hopes to shed some light into the mysteries of the brain at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 18 in the Amphitheater. 

Marlin’s lecture will focus on how information is passed from generation to generation through transgenerational epigenetic inheritance; more specifically, how trauma in parents can affect the brain structure and sensory development of their children. Marlin’s research presented at today’s lecture is part of Week Eight’s theme of “The Human Brain: Our Greatest Mystery.”

Marlin has always been fascinated with genetics. In addition to raising her, Marlin’s biological parents were also the foster parents of several other children. This experience of growing up with both biological and nonbiological siblings influenced Marlin’s interest in science and paved the way for her scientific career. Marlin would listen to her nonbiological siblings’ stories of childhood trauma before joining her family, and Marlin became curious about how a negative relationship with one’s parents could affect a child. 

This interest and natural talent for the sciences is what led Marlin through a highly successful academic and research career. Marlin graduated from St. John’s University with dual bachelor’s degrees in biology and adolescent education. Marlin then went on to graduate from the New York University of Medicine with a doctorate in neuroscience. She is now the Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cell Research at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. 

Her work here includes the mechanism of transgenerational inheritance of environmental information. 

Through her research, Marlin discovered that a parent’s learned behavior can actually become a natural behavior in their children. Marlin’s research goal is to prove that these adaptations can be passed on to multiple generations. This work and research into learning and emotions being passed on from one generation to the next biologically, though DNA, has the potential to have a huge impact in understanding societal health and an individual’s mental health. 

Marlin has received various recognitions for her research such as the 2020 Allen Institute Next Generation Leaders, 2017 STAT Wunderkinds Award and the 2016 Donald B. Lindsley Prize. Her research has also been featured in numerous notable publications such as NPR’s “Science Friday,” The Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine’s “100 Top Stories of 2015” and National Geographic. However, it was Marlin’s research as a graduate student with parental behavior and oxytocin that truly set her apart.

Marlin’s first major scientific breakthrough was centered around oxytocin, which is known as the “love hormone” in maternal behavior. Her research linked the hormone to neural changes that were associated with learned maternal behavior. Marlin noted that when mice pups are lost, they release an ultrasonic cry that allows their mothers to come find them. However, inexperienced female mice would instead ignore the cries and at times even eat the baby. Marlin was able to find changes in the auditory cortex associated with this response, and she saw that only the left side of the auditory cortex controls this behavior and that oxytocin must be delivered to this side to speed up the retrieval of the lost babies. Marlin’s research was groundbreaking, as it showed a dedicated neural circuit and the importance of oxytocin. 

Today’s lecture will be centered around Marlin’s second major scientific finding with trauma and epigenetic mechanisms. Her team at Columbia has been researching by establishing a traumatic memory through fear in adult mice by pairing a scent with a shock. In her research, she discovered that the offspring of these mice actually avoided that same scent, even though they had never personally experienced that trauma. Marlin will also focus on how sperm cells have the potential to carry genetic memories, allowing fathers to pass on the memory of trauma to their offspring.

Marlin’s research has the potential to have groundbreaking results, and today’s lecture is a chance to take a dive deeper into the complexity of the human brain and how genetics play a larger role in our social behavior and mental well-being. 

MARY LEE TALBOT – STAFF WRITER

In the 12th century, the mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote a prayer to divine wisdom, which she called Sophia: “You of the whirling wings, / circling, encompassing energy of God: / you quicken the world in your clasp. / One wing soars in heaven, one wing sweeps the earth, / and the third flies all around us. /  Praise to Sophia! / Let all the earth praise her!”

 “Sophia is the encompassing energy of God, which gives life to the world and prompts exuberant praise,” said the Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper. “God’s name is Sophia and you ignore her at your peril. Let us lean in and attempt to listen.” Harper preached at the 9 a.m. Aug. 17 worship service in the Amphitheater. Her sermon title was “Feasting at Wisdom’s Table,” and the Scripture text was Proverbs 9:1-6.

In the Scripture, Wisdom builds a house, carves pillars, slaughters the meat, mixes the wine, sets the table and goes out into the street to call everyone to the feast.

“She is an architect, mason, chef and town crier,” Harper told the Amp congregation. “The world is quickened in her clasp. She edifies and nourishes. She calls in the simple and those without sense to dine at her table and find sustenance for the soul.”

The object of the banquet is hospitality. Wisdom invites people to come in, to take and eat, to drink up, to come inside and party. 

“Jesus was Sophia Wisdom when he was the host at the Last Supper, inviting the disciples to take and eat,” Harper said. “We break bread at Communion and Jesus described the Kingdom of God as a great banquet. Woman Wisdom became Jesus and God is the host at a celebration that is communal and festive.”

Like those who reject the invitation to the great feast, there are people who reject Woman Wisdom’s invitation. Harper said to the congregation, “With the revelry comes responsibility. We have to lay aside our immaturity and walk in the way of insight. As Paul said, we have to put away childish things. We have to take up our cross with Jesus. As the Torah says, we have to protect the widow and orphan, and as all the law and prophets say, to love God and our neighbor.”

When we sit at Woman Wisdom’s feast, Harper said, we are changed individually and communally. 

“We have to spiritually grow up from our emotional kindergarten. We live in a culture that worships youth; it is anti-aging and anti-maturity and spiritual wisdom.”

Elderhood is a source of wisdom, not always a time of decline. As minister for older adults at the Riverside Church, Harper has found that “being wise is not automatic, but experience can help. I know people who have feasted at the table of wisdom for a long time and forged their faith there.”

As an example, Harper talked about Susan, a climate change advocate at her church. She helped develop a zero-waste plan for the church, one item of which was to divest from fossil fuels. 

“Susan says that her later years are the best; she is at her most passionate. She has an inner fire to heal the world. She is teaching the rest of us to slow down and listen to what it means to leave aside immaturity and find insight,” Harper said.

“We live in a world that feasts at the juvenile and Wisdom’s feast may seem poorly attended,” Harper said. “As Fred Rogers said, ‘Always look for the helpers.’ They point to a more excellent way. Look for the helpers and seek to join their ranks. Keep a chair at Wisdom’s table. Trust the sustenance with help from the helpers and Sophia Wisdom and you will quicken in her clasp.” 

The Rev. Mary Lee Talbot presided. The Rev. Richard Meyers, pastor emeritus of Immanuel Baptist Church in Rochester, read the Scripture. The prelude was an improvisation played by Joshua Stafford, who holds the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist and is director of sacred music. Members of the Motet Choir sang “The Eyes of All,” with music by Jean Berger and words from Psalm 145:15-16. The postlude was “Fanfare,” by Antonio Soler. The Edmund R. Robb-Walter C. Shaw Fund and the Randall-Hall Memorial Chaplaincy provide funds for this week’s services and chaplain.