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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the winning poetry and prose showcased in the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center’s Contests Awards Sunday, Aug. 16, on Zoom was a piece by May Kuroiwa called “Just Like the First Time” that aimed to summarize — in a single paragraph, no less — a woman’s entire life.

“(It) beautifully captures the arc of a woman’s life in a compressed flash format,” said Randon Billings Noble, the judge for the prose award and an essayist and educator. “A series of vectors, this story swirls through time and leaves the reader with the same wondering feelings as its main character.” 

This year’s judges were Noble and the poet Mathias Svalina, both of whom were in attendance at the awards ceremony. Noble and Svalina led workshops for the Chautauqua Writers’ Center on the CHQ Assembly Online Classroom during Week Seven.

“This is our first Zoom award ceremony, and we can only hope it will be our only Zoom ceremony,” said Bethanne Snodgrass, the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center contests coordinator. “We’d like to refer back to it with some humor. The writing contests have been put on in Chautauqua for almost 90 years; the Women’s Club started with poetry contests back in 1931.” 

Snodgrass said that this season, the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center contest was fortunate to be hosted online at all. 

“We’re lucky that we had already put this writing contest online,” she said. “If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here this evening. We’ve got it running through the Submittable platform pretty smoothly, and we’re hoping to do some interesting things with it in the future, as well.”

After Kuroiwa’s prose piece was read, Svalina introduced the three poetry winners to the audience; he started with Pat Owen’s poem, “Amaryllis,” which won the honorable mention in the poetry category.

“This was a poem that I really deeply related to, and felt really seen and present with,” he said. “It pairs the flowering seed and solace, and shows how a poem that meditates on the ways the life and beauty that flowers grant us can also be a balm for difficult times.”

Next, Kuroiwa read her second-place poem, “In Her Bedside Table,” which Svalina described as “perform(ing) a rare feat of reverential magic.”

“(It uses) these two small objects from a loved one’s life as tent spokes that demonstrate the wide variety and expanse of an individual,” he said. “It is a small poem on the page, but speaks enormously about its subject.”

The winner of the Mary Jean Iron Prize for Poetry was for Julie Phillips Brown’s poem, “For You, Unborn.”

“It is a poem that flings into itself, both quiet and wild, a little bit prayer and a little bit resignation,” he said. “Through leaping surprises the poem carries me effortlessly into thinking and images I could never have conceived without these words and lines.”

At the close of the ceremony, Snodgrass said that the celebration of the winner’s work had turned out to be an “amazingly moving event.”

“I really thought we’d be sorry that we got stuck on Zoom, but it’s been absolutely wonderful,” she said. 

A larger amount of mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election may force states, particularly swing states, to count the ballots into the next morning. 

Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and best-selling author, said the process may be slowed even more because some states have a rule that election officials cannot count ballots until Election Day in order to prevent fraud. Many ballots may arrive at the last minute, and states have never counted a large number of mail-in ballots before. 

“There may be totally legitimate reasons why the state election officials just haven’t counted all, or even a large fraction, of the absentee ballots on election night — and we should all be ready for that,” Bazelon said.

She said the media, herself included, has a broad responsibility to prepare audiences so they understand the process of counting every ballot, “as opposed to (audiences perceiving) some evidence that something fraudulent is going on.”

“I do worry about that potential for litigation, but I think the headline going into election day is that we should all be prepared to be patient,” Bazelon said, “and obviously watching to make sure that these results are fair and legitimate and regular — but not to be worrying that if we don’t have an immediate result.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Bazelon discussed how voting was laid out by the Founding Fathers, how the pandemic and voting suppression may affect the 2020 election, and possible Constitutional amendments that can improve American democracy, as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight theme of “Reframing the Constitution.” Her conversation, with Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, was titled “Voting and the Constitution.”

Ewalt asked Bazelon to explain how the right to vote is not explicitly protected in the Constitution.

Article One describes how senators and representatives will be elected, and the fourth section states that the time, places and manner of election will be determined by each state. The 14th Amendment expanded voting rights to Black Americans, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and the Voting Rights Act ensured that voters, particularly Black voters in the South, were not subject to “overt barriers” like poll taxes and literacy tests.

“What we still are lacking is a sense that there are limits to what states and localities can do to close polling places — for example, to change the way elections are shaped in a way that can affect representation,” Bazelon said.

Bazelon said the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County vs. Holder “really, in some ways, gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act,” by no longer requiring that the Justice Department approve changes to the electoral process by state and local governments. Since this decision, she said thousands of polling places have closed across the country, particularly in the South.

The U.S. has also had disputes over voter identification laws, and Bazelon said tens of thousands of votes were removed since Shelby County vs. Holder if the state and local election officials found that they were “inactive voters.”

“When you see these kinds of moves that really limit the franchise, (making) it harder for people to vote,” Bazelon said, “that makes me wonder if we had this Constitutional guarantee, (we might) be better equipped to address them.”

Ewalt then asked how the April 7, 2020, Wisconsin presidential primary was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think, unfortunately, that (the) Wisconsin primary was a full-on disaster,” Bazelon said.

She said at that time, in the face of COVID-19, election officials in Wisconsin were debating how to handle the election — whether to extend deadlines for absentee ballots and what to do about workers uncomfortable staffing the polls. Bazelon said that staffing problems may occur again in November, as volunteers tend to be older retirees who may be at higher risk of the virus. 

She said Wisconsin had never had more than 2-3% of the electorate vote by mail, but saw large increases in mail-in ballots for the primary.

“They just had a lot of trouble getting all the ballots out in time and then back in time,” Bazelon said. “Wisconsin, confusingly, doesn’t have a postmark requirement for returning absentee ballots, and so there were a lot of people whose ballots were not received by election day as the law required, and they were disenfranchised. This is upwards of 10,000 people.”

Another problem — with a lack of workers and concerns of the pandemic spreading — is that cities, such as Milwaukee, closed “almost every single polling place. So you saw a big city that usually has hundreds of polling places having only a handful,” she said.

“There were these very long lines of folks lining up to vote, having to spend hours, sometimes in the rain. This is not what we want to see on election day; that’s just way too big a burden,” Bazelon said. “Unfortunately, after the election, contact tracers found that dozens of people got the coronavirus, and that may have been linked to their either working or going to the polls.”

Ewalt asked what people should pay attention to in the courts in the near future related to voting rights.

Bazelon said dozens of lawsuits surrounding voting rights are occurring, such as the Republican National Committee having $20 million in reserve to spend on election litigation. She said that the committee is trying to challenge Nevada’s plan to give everyone an application for an absentee ballot and Pennsylvania’s plan for having secure drop-off boxes for collecting mail in order to take pressure off the United States Postal Service. 

She said Democrats are trying to increase enfranchisement; for example, if a person submits an absentee ballot and their signature does not look correct, they will have a chance to verify it, which is called signature curing. She compared this to the “hanging chads” of the 2000 presidential election, where many ballots were thrown out because of the way some voters punched their ballot. 

Ewalt asked Bazelon to expand on recent discussions about Constitutional amendments, like the renewed interest in the Equal Rights Amendment.

Bazelon said people are debating an amendment setting term limits for federal judges, who can potentially serve in their position for 40 to 50 years. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, she said they did not know people would want to be federal judges in the future.

“It was kind of a crappy job. (In those days) you had to literally ride a circuit on horseback around the original states to do your job,” Bazelon said. “It wasn’t particularly prestigious, and so life tenure was this extra benefit they were dangling in front of people. Also, (there were) very different average life expectancies than they have now.”

She said people are now chosen for the Supreme Court partly because of their ages, and the hope that they will stay for many decades.

“I would argue that’s just too much power to give a small number of people, to give nine people,” Bazelon said. “They get to have the final say of the meaning of the Constitution, and in many cases law, in this country for a very extended period of time.”

But if Supreme Court Justices had staggered, 18-year terms, then every president would appoint two judges.

“We wouldn’t have the same incredible Sturm und Drang over each single appointment, because it would be much more regularized, and that I think would also be healthy for our democracy,” Bazelon.

Additionally, Bazelon said she was originally dismissive of the effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment when the push was relaunched a few years ago.

“I have changed my tune about it, in part because I watched the show ‘Mrs. America,’ which was all about the original 1970s effort to pass the ERA. I understood much better what was at stake,” Bazelon said. “This is my own lack of knowing our nation’s history, I suppose, but I understood much more that it was this foundational fight, and what they were asking for was just to be treated equally.”

She said since the 1970s, when ERA was passed through Congress — but not 35 states — many of the demands of ERA supporters have become law, and it has been harder to discriminate based on sex in the United States. Bazelon said the new ERA may address pregnancy discrimination, and, potentially, “a more secure anchor for the right to access to abortion.”

Libertarianism is a philosophy centered on protecting private property, free markets and individual liberties. Robert Levy, chairman of the board of directors at the Cato Institute, said that libertarians tend to agree with conservatives regarding fiscal issues, and agree with liberals on social issues.

“Does that mean libertarians are philosophically inconsistent, because we agree with liberals sometimes, conservatives other times?” Levy said. “No — in fact, it’s conservatives and liberals who are inconsistent.”

The 10th Amendment says that the federal government may only exercise powers that are in the Constitution. Levy said that conservatives and libertarians tend to agree in a “tightly constrained view of the federal government, but there are a couple of key exceptions.”

Levy said that many conservatives, as opposed to libertarians, are willing to assign the federal government more responsibility, such as with hurricane relief, retirement systems and medical care. 

“Take a look at the totally effective-less war on drugs. If you look through the Constitution, you will find very few crimes mentioned: counterfeiting, treason and piracy,” Levy said. “Criminal law is typically left up to state and local governments, and yet conservatives believe because of the drug war … we can ignore that there’s no Constitutional authorization.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Levy discussed how libertarians agree and disagree with liberals and conservatives on the role of the federal government, and the powers the people and the Constitution gave the federal government, as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight theme of “Reframing the Constitution.” His lecture was titled “The Founding Fathers’ Vision.”

Levy said that Congress is supposed to enact laws — not the Justice Department or the Environmental Protection Agency. He said liberals would likely be against giving the Justice Department the ability to enact regulations for national security.

“When the same Congress delegates to the Environmental Protection Agency power to enact regulations, with no more guidance than to keep us safe from pollutants, the left applauds enthusiastically,” Levy said. “Now, could it be the pollutants are a greater threat than terrorists, or is it more likely that the left has this selective indignation about the role of government, reflecting an inconsistency in liberal mindset, just as there is inconsistency in the conservative mindset?”

Levy said that when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and wrote that all men are created equal, with unalienable rights, he also wrote that governments are instituted “to secure these rights.”

“Notice he said secure, not grant,” Levy said. “He said secure. We already had the rights.”

The Constitution, Levy said, is not “a code of conduct. Its purpose is to limit the power of government, and secure individual liberties. It is not the people or the citizens that are required to obey the Constitution.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt. He asked Levy if federal legislation, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, oversteps the government’s responsibilities. 

Levy said federal legislation is doing more than it should, and the ADA specifically should not be regulating as much when it comes to private parties. He said that private parties should be able to negotiate “whatever employment agreements the employer and the employee agreed to.”

“While I think that it was a bad idea, remains a bad idea (and I believe) that employment relationships should be up to the private parties involved,” Levy said, “I nonetheless recognize this isn’t on the horizon, and there’s no proposal with the Cato Institute or by any of the experts at the Cato Institute to abolish the ADA, or for that matter any of the other anti-discrimination laws.”

Ewalt asked how limited government, such as one libertarians support, can deal with large issues that the Founding Fathers never thought of, like climate change.

Levy said libertarians mostly agree that climate change exists and is partly manmade, but there are some disagreements on how detrimental global warming will be, and a vast disagreement over what actions the federal government should take.

“The new green proposals by the Democratic Party … some of those cures may be worse than the disease,” Levy said. “Libertarians do not deny that the federal government has a major role to play in climate change because climate problems could consist of some people engaging in activities that have injurious effects on other people, and government has a meaningful role to step in and stop that from occurring.”

Ewalt then asked how Americans should go about educating themselves about the Constitution. 

Levy said that it is understandable for the public not to be well-versed in the Constitution; only a few years ago, Congress passed a bill requiring all members of Congress read the Constitution.

“In fact, it was read on the floor of Congress,” Levy said. “(For) some, I’m sure, that’s the first time they were exposed to the Constitution.”

He said everyone should be required to read and study the Constitution in school, and that there should be a much greater school choice. 

“If you’re going to learn about government, the last thing in the world you want is for the government to be running the school system,” Levy said. “So far, I think privatized education is a heck of a good deal, if not exclusively, at least as a supplement to public education.”

Chiara Valle and Stelth Ng met at Chautauqua Institution in 2016 — Valle a first-year student at the School of Dance, Ng a third-year at the School of Music. 

“Chiara is the sweetest girl I’ve ever known, she has such joy for the smallest things in life,” Ng said. “The best thing about my experience with Chautauqua has been the relationships I’ve formed with people outside of my arena.”

The pair continued their collaborative work and friendship throughout Chautauqua’s 2017 season, one Valle would leave to perform in The Washington Ballet, where she started as a trainee in 2016, until she started experiencing excruciating pain in her femur. Valle was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer. She was 19. 

The typical treatment? Amputation of the leg. But knowing that Valle was a ballet dancer, her doctors decided to give it their best shot, blasting the tumor with 14 rounds of chemotherapy — one so odious it’s nicknamed “The Red Devil” — and 31 treatments of radiation.

In November 2018, Valle was cleared as NED, no evidence of disease. In March 2019, she returned to the barre.

I wanted whoever was watching it to feel like they were Chiara,” Ng said. “I wanted them to feel the burden of $3 million in medical bills. I wanted them to feel like they were the one dancing. I wanted them to feel like they were experiencing these highs and lows.”

And Ng caught the comeback on film. 

Ng’s documentary “A Ballerina’s Battle with Bone Cancer: Chiara Valle’s Fight to Keep Dancing” will premiere at 5 p.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 20, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. 

In 2019, Ng, founder of Triple Pointe Media — a production company named in honor of his work with ballerinas — traveled to New York City to capture Valle in the hospital, in the studio and cement them with the “raw moments” in between.

From the beginning, Ng said he made it clear to Valle he wanted the film to be about “her story and her story alone.”

“I wanted whoever was watching it to feel like they were Chiara,” Ng said. “I wanted them to feel the burden of $3 million in medical bills. I wanted them to feel like they were the one dancing. I wanted them to feel like they were experiencing these highs and lows.”

It’s an emotional story, Ng said. And every time he watches it, he cries. Although Ng knows he is conspicuously invested as a friend and a fellow artist, he said there is an “underlying message applicable to everyone.” 

“Part of being a dancer is so visual and when you immerse yourself in ballet, everyone is looking at you all the time and expecting to see something very specific and very perfect,” he said. “I think this documentary allows people to see beyond their expectations.” 

To think about Valle losing her leg, forcing her to stop dancing? Ng said it’s equivalent to a musician losing their hearing or a painter losing their eyesight. Or a musician losing their eyesight, as Ng did. 

When Ng was born, he could see “as well as any other kid,” and no one in his family had issues with their vision. But when he was 12 years old, he was diagnosed with cataracts in his eyes. Complications from cataract surgery in one eye caused glaucoma, a group of eye conditions that damage the optic nerve.

The impact for Ng was sudden and profound. There was a period — two years — when he couldn’t see his mother’s face.

“Playing the violin and piano lifted me out of my depression,” Ng said. 

After 16 eye surgeries over the past 15 years, Ng now has a prosthetic in one eye and no night vision or depth perception. So he can empathize with Valle’s experience — the lack of control when health hinders a seemingly boundless career. But he wants something bigger, even broader to come of his documentary. Ng hopes to make it clear that every single young artist who comes through the gates of Chautauqua has “their own story and their own struggles that are not often seen or told.” 

“For me, even if Chiara had not made it to The Washington Ballet, the fact alone that she tackled cancer head on with no regrets makes her a success story,” Ng said. “The most inspiring people, I think, are the ones who have struggled. Our struggles give us perspective, perspective gives us clarity. And clarity? Clarity gives us hope.”

People sin at an unconscious level, said Fr. Richard Rohr, similar to Buddhism’s concept of delusion. The way that Christianity has centered sin on the flesh is a distraction from identifying these delusions in the dominant understanding.

Rohr gave his lecture on evil in the flesh at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Aug. 19 — the third in Chautauqua’s Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Reframing Our Journey: A Week with Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.” First, he said that the writings of Saint Paul have led to immense misunderstandings because of the Greek word “sarx” being mistranslated to “flesh” in Saint Paul’s description of the dichotomy between flesh and spirit.

“We still think of flesh and spirit not just as enemies, but as warring against another,” Rohr said.

Rohr said that “sarx” is better understood as “ego,” a small, self-enclosed, narcissistic, self-protective self that is not maliciously evil, but tricky and untrustworthy.

“If you don’t recognize it, you will be trapped by it,” Rohr said.

As for any organization of people, Rohr said companies are inherently self-protective. They have to protect employees, to a degree, and ensure a future for the company. But they participate and benefit from the systems that people do not often see as inherently malicious, like the military-industrial complex.

Rohr said that religions’ failure now and throughout history is that they have stalled the collective ability to focus on true evil by convincing people that minor sins they commit are the root of all evil. He compared religious institutions to vacuum salesmen who conned people by sprinkling dust on their doors before knocking.

The first thing evil does, Rohr said, is disguise itself as necessary or strategic for the common good of a group.

“The only way we can really attack evil,” Rohr said, “is to see it as it is.”

Jesus also pointed out evil not in individuals, but in entire towns and communities: Jerusalem, Capernaum, the Pharisees.

Jesus called for evil to be named correctly against the wishes of kings and priests misusing power, and Rohr said that currently, journalists have the most freedom in history to broadly cover true evil against the wishes of those in power.

But people panic, Rohr said, when evil is pointed out at an institutional level like the military-industrial complex.

“I’m not talking about an individual soldier, I’m not talking about an individual health care worker, I’m not talking about an individual banker,” Rohr said. “But I am saying the system of health care, the system of banking, the penal system of incarcerating people, is almost always not so good.”

On page 13 of his book, What Do We Do With Evil?: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, he said that the spiritual journey should focus on expanding people’s freedom to do good, rather than blaming someone who has committed evil.

“That paralyzes a person even deeper in the flesh,” Rohr said. “It doesn’t liberate them from the flesh.”

While Rohr sees this in the teachings of Jesus and Paul, he doesn’t see it necessarily reflected in Christianity.

“Our notion of religion has been a set of requirements, and clergy were made into  policemen — and they were men in almost all of history. Our job was to enforce the requirements, not to entice into liberation,” Rohr said. “In fact, (liberation) is mistrusted. You’re called dangerous or a heretic if you offer people new levels of freedom, because they might make mistakes.”

But mistakes based in the flesh can also bring people closer to God. Rohr said that he believes religions are stuck in a state of unconsciousness, in the first stage of development as defined by Ken Wilbur. Part of that unconsciousness is denying that a person benefits from systems of evil.

“I have enjoyed the fruits of evil,” Rohr said. “The military-industrial complex has kept me free my whole life.”

The understanding of sin that Rohr found in the Book of Paul is that sin is unconscious. Paul’s intuition in his writings was built on Jesus, Rohr said, even though Paul never knew Jesus, and the four gospels placed in front of his in the Bible had not yet been written. Rohr said this is because Paul was dealing in basic truths that came from what Rohr calls a Universal Christ. Rohr has written about this concept in a separate book called The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe.

“To think that we can totally resist and avoid all evil is only to persist in it in a new form,” Rohr wrote.

Operating unconsciously comes from the lowest part of the brain stem, the section that controls the fight-or-flight-response. In the Old Testament, the Bible’s protagonists react with a fight response, convinced that they can eliminate evil by exposing and killing it. But Rohr sees the flight response engaged in today’s brand of unconsciousness —people deny where true evil exists.

Reflecting on Catholic art in his last trip to Europe, Rohr observed that the archangel Michael is depicted front and center in churches and cathedrals with a sword, slaying the dragon of evil. But a friend brought him to a side altar of a church in Nuremberg, Germany, to show him Saint Martha petting the dragon and smiling.

“Whatever we call evil, it’s something we have to deal with, learn from, integrate … not eliminate,” Rohr said.

Jesus did also teach this feminine side of spirituality, Rohr said, but it is not what Christianity as an institution has historically valued. The way out of true evil is found in this path Jesus took, through nonviolent resistance against a system’s lies. But this isn’t easy, Rohr said, since the majority, the crowd, can never see past the illusion of evil.

The style of vengeful justice as portrayed by the archangel Michael is often misplaced when directed at the flesh, which most world languages don’t connote as the ego, or hidden internal badness, and instead define it too literally as sex.

“Religion after religion has localized the heart of evil in sex,” Rohr said. 

For evil in the flesh specifically, Rohr said that the death of the ego is where the Saint Martha-like treatment of evil happens. Rohr said this can be done over time through prayer and contemplation in order to kill the ego that each human clings to.

“We gave the false impression that Christianity is not about dying, but it is,” Rohr said.

At 2 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 20, Rohr will explain the devil as a source of evil — evil in its most mysterious form.

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

In the 1880s, suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began writing a history of women’s suffrage — a project that was thousands of pages long. 

“It is indeed a story that is told selectively,” said Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, “and, in particular, really minimizes, downplays, overlooks — and even erases in some moments — the role that Black American women had played in the road to the 19th Amendment.”

The 19th Amendment was ratified 100 years ago to the day of Jones’ Chautauqua lecture, and she said many will hear retellings of history that are closer to myths than facts. One of these myths is that the 19th Amendment gave American women the right to vote.

“It’s fair to say that no one gives American women the vote in 1920. As some commentators have put it, American women take the vote,” Jones said. “The Constitutional amendment is a decades-long battle waged by American women in the face of fears and recalcitrant opposition.”

In addition to her work at Johns Hopkins, Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, she gave a lecture titled “The Rare Few Times the Constitution Has Been Amended,” as part of Week Eight of the Chautauqua Lecture Series theme on “Reframing the Constitution.” Jones discussed the history of voter suppression before and after the ratification of the 19th Amendment and current laws that keep American, particularly Black Americans, from the polls.

Jones said that the 19th Amendment states that a person’s sex is no longer a legitimate criteria for voting, and the word “male” was removed from U.S. voting laws. 

“Of course, there’s no guarantee in that provision. There’s no promise. There’s no requirement,” Jones said. “American women will still be kept from the polls after August of 1920 by age requirements, by residency requirements, by mental competency requirements; all of these things will continue to mediate women’s voting rights, even as sex is no longer permissible by law.”

She said that while the 15th Amendment states that race cannot be used as a criteria for voting, Southern and some western states made laws that successfully kept Black Americans from the polls. These laws included poll taxes, which was an annual fee for voters, and literacy texts, which required voters to read and provide an interpretation from the Constitution — either the federal one or an individual state’s Constitution.

“If any of you have lately looked at your Constitution and contemplated the complexity of something like the Electoral College,” Jones said, “you’ll know that many of us could not explain that provision of the Constitution, even if we could recite the words.”

Another was the Grandfather Clause, a law, Jones said, that permitted only people whose grandfather had voted before the end of the Civil War to vote. Jones said this ensured that the descendants of slaves could not vote, as the 15th Amendment was passed after the Civil War. She also said that unchecked intimidation and lynching forced many Black men away from the polls. 

“When we ask, ‘Did all American women win the vote in 1920?’ The answer is assuredly, ‘No,’” Jones said. “African-American women in too many states become equals to their fathers and their husbands, their sons, their brothers, but at the same time, they are equal only in the sense that they are equally disenfranchised, equally going to be kept from the polls.”

One example Jones gave was that, after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, officials in Kent County, Delaware, refused Black women who failed the literacy tests. And in Savannah, Georgia, election judges ruled that women were not allowed to vote because of a state law that stated voters had to be residents of a state for six months before the election, and the 19th Amendment had not been in place for six months at that time. 

Jones said Southern and western lawmakers devised laws that targeted Black women because they feared they would vote in high numbers. She said during this time, white women did not register and vote at a high rate, but Black women did, even before 1920 in states — including California and New York — where women could vote.

“African-American women had been coming to the polls for years,” Jones said. “They had proven themselves to be committed voters, proven themselves to be organized and savvy enough to overcome registration hurdles.”

In Florida, Black women created clubs that prepared one another to register and vote on Election Day. Throughout Florida, Jones said that the Klu Klux Klan organized violence against Black voters to keep them from the polls. In the city of Daytona, Jones said the terrorist organization staged an open rally, which the local paper publicized, and went from the center of the city to Bethune Cookman University in the heart of the African-American community. At Bethune, Jones said the Klan tried to intimidate the many Black college students, and community members, to prevent them from going to the polls. 

Jones said voter suppression laws currently exist, with voter ID requirements and the closing of polling stations. While these laws are “neutral on their face,” as Jones said, so were the laws that suppressed Black voters in the 1920s — and they are having a disproportionate effect on Black voters.

“I’m not a historian who thinks nothing has changed,” Jones said. “There’s too much in the story between 1920 and 2020 for us to blindly suggest that nothing has changed, even as we continue to face struggles over voting rights in our own time.”

The lecture then transitioned to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Chief of Staff and Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Shannon D. Rozner. Rozner asked Jones to comment on Sen. Kamala Harris being chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate in the presidential election. 

Jones said a lot of people commented on Harris being the first Black American woman and the first Indian-American woman to be a presidential running mate for a major party. 

“I’m someone who really thinks it’s time to retire the distinction of ‘the first,’” Jones said. “I think where we are, is in a new historical moment, one in which African-American women are emerging really as a force, rather than as first.”

Harris was among six other vice presidential hopefuls who were Black women, and Jones said around 120 Black women will run for Congress this year, which is up from 40 in 2018. 

“That tells us that African-American women are no longer tokens, are no longer ‘first.’ They have broken, if you will, the glass ceilings, and are now coming into American politics to lead,” Jones said. “I think what Sen. Harris exemplifies and gives us an opportunity to learn more about is, what does it mean when African-American women lead in American politics?”

Rozner asked Jones to react to the breaking news that President Donald Trump would pardon suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who was arrested for voting in 1872. 

“What a cynical move that is on the part of the president, when we are in the midst of wholly fumbly access to the polls for so many Americans, including American women, in November,” Jones said.

Jones said there are people in better positions to speak on Anthony’s behalf, but she thinks that Anthony would be “decrying this administration for its unwillingness to guarantee our access to the polls in November.”

“Her arrest was a badge of honor. In many ways it was a merit badge for an activist of her generation; perhaps it’s still a merit badge today for activists,” Jones said. “I’m not convinced that Susan Anthony would welcome the pardon from Donald Trump in 2020.”

The world puts evil on autopilot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the 2020 season at Chautauqua may have been drastically different from a normal year, not all of the changes brought on by the pandemic have been negative. Some have been opportunities for Chautauquans to learn, especially about the importance of having an online infrastructure.

“When we have these events — the Great American Picnic and the silent auction — not everyone gets to be here, in Chautauqua,” said Pat McDonald, the vice president of membership for the Alumni Association of the CLSC. “We’re thinking maybe even next year, we’ll do something like an online auction after the real auction, or before, so that people who aren’t able to come that week are still able to participate.”

The Alumni Association of the CLSC’s Online Auction, which began last Wednesday and ends today, Aug. 19, marks the first time in Chautauqua history that the Association’s auction has been conducted entirely virtually. And though the Great American Picnic, the Brick Walk Book Walk and Authors Among Us Book Fair have been canceled, the auction’s annual quest to raise scholarship funds remains.

“All of the money from the auction goes to scholarships for local teachers, students and librarians to take classes in the literary arts here at Chautauqua,” McDonald said. “This year, we didn’t have as many scholarship people come, of course, but our adult scholarship winners all have taken a virtual class.”

Among the many items available for bidding is an antique marble washstand from 1915, a loom and a book of Grecian History by James Richard Joy that was used in a Chautauqua course in the late 19th century. 

“We also have these really interesting oil paintings,” McDonald said. “They came out of one person’s condo — these oil paintings were in there. They’re very nice and beautifully framed. Nobody knows who did them, all we know about them is that they’re supposed to be scenes from Austria.”

For McDonald, helping to run the Online Auction — along with the auction committee — made her feel like she was contributing to “keeping the Chautauqua spirit alive.”

“She is the catalyst for the group and has pulled this all together, and she’s had the vision for the scholarships that was necessary to do all of this,” said Caroline Young, a member of the auction committee. 

McDonald said that at the very least, the Online Auction is “giving people something to think about, and clueing them in to things they might want.”

“We saw the Women’s Club doing a great job still collecting for the flea market and storing things, and we thought, ‘Gosh, they’re doing it, so maybe we can do something, too,’” she said.

Founding Father James Madison wanted to create a Constitutional system that ensured that reason prevailed over passion and prevented large assemblies from making hasty decisions. 

“That is why it is so difficult in the U.S. to pass a law or to amend the Constitution; you have to jump through lots of hoops to pass a law,” said Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center. 

An amendment to the Constitution has to be proposed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or two-thirds of the states have to call a special convention, then it has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states and signed by the president. Rosen said that the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid the creation of factions, which Madison defined as a group, either a majority or minority, that is dedicated to passion and self interest, rather than reason and public good. 

Madison thought that the size of the U.S. was an advantage, in that it made it hard for factions to organize themselves. Rosen said the original drafters of the Constitution, also called the framers, thought that elected representatives would ensure that the wisest people would pick the best policies.

“(The framers thought) it’ll be hard for passionate factions to mobilize, but it will allow cool representatives to deliberate in the public (eye),” Rosen said. “Sound like politics today? Well, of course, it doesn’t sound like politics today.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 17, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Rosen discussed how some of the Founding Fathers’ ideals are not followed in present-day politics, as well as how the the U.S. government has changed since its founding, to open the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight theme of “Reframing the Constitution.”

Madison’s idea that the size of the U.S. would make factions harder to form no longer applies, Rosen said, because technology makes it easy to find and organize with like-minded people. And on Facebook, fake news often reaches more people than real news. 

“People are more likely to share a post with inaccurate information and a really inflammatory headline without reading it, just because it seems so outrageous,” Rosen said. 

Rosen said that historians have found that the U.S. is the most polarized it has been since the Civil War. 

“In 1960 in Congress, there was a 50% overlap between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrats,” Rosen said. “Today, there is zero overlap. It means that both parties are much more extreme than they were before, and are much less likely to find common ground.”

Since the Constitution was drafted, Rosen said that political parties have risen, which Madison did not anticipate. Because everyone recognized George Washington as “someone who is above party,” Rosen said, the framers — including Madison and Alexander Hamilton — assumed that legislators would do their work without the influence of political parties. 

“Almost as soon as the system got started, it began to operate in a way that was different than the framers expected — and that was because of the rise of parties,” Rosen said.

Rosen said that discussing and listening in person is no longer how Congress makes decisions. 

“The parties are so polarized, they’re refusing to deliberate. They’re putting through major legislation on party-line votes,” Rosen said. “Both the major achievements of President Obama and President Trump, the Affordable Care Act and the tax cut, passed with zero votes from the other side.”

But this was not the case as recently as 2006, he said, when the expansion of the Voting Rights Act passed with large bipartisan support under President George W. Bush, but then “the Supreme Court struck that down in the Shelby County case.”

“Whether you agree with the majority or the dissent in the Shelby County case, it’s pretty striking, isn’t it, that as recently as 2006 we could have major bipartisan legislation?” Rosen said.

Further, the powers of the president are different than what Madison originally believed they should be. The Constitution itself gives the president very few powers, but Article Two gives the president the power to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to ensure laws are faithfully executed and to nominate ambassadors, judges and other officials with the consent of the Senate. 

Rosen said that from President Ronald Reagan to President Donald Trump, the number of executive orders issued by presidents has risen. He said that the Supreme Court has challenged executive orders, such as Obama’s executive order that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Trump’s executive order to phase out the program.

The framers, including Hamilton, who Rosen called “the rap star of the moment” due to the musical Hamilton, supported judicial review of laws. In the musical, and real life, Hamilton believed that judges should choose the will of the Constitution, which he said represented the will of the people, over ordinary laws, which represented the will of legislators. 

But people disagree if the original Constitution truly represents the will of everyone. 

“Not everyone agrees that the original Constitution, passed by a bunch of white men, many of whom were slaveholders in Philadelphia, from which African Americans and women and other groups were excluded, … does represent the will of the people,” Rosen said. 

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill. As the National Constitution Center recently partnered with The Atlantic for a project called “The Battle for the Constitution,” which argues that the nation is in a fourth battle over the document, Hill asked Rosen about the first three battles, and why he believes a new battle is occuring. 

Rosen said the first three battles were the American Revolution, the Civil War and the New Deal, and each represented a moment of rethinking principles. The Revolutionary War led to the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, then the Constitution — because the framers wanted a central government strong enough to control the country’s defense and economy, while being constrained enough to protect individual rights.

The Civil War, which Rosen called the second battle of the Constitution, led to the end of slavery and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The third battle, the New Deal, centered around the Supreme Court giving President Franklin Roosevelt broader federal powers in order to give economic aid.

Rosen said the fourth and current battle revolves around whether certain agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Protection Bureau and the United States Postal Service, should have broad scope in which to operate. He said the outcome of the presidential election will decide if this battle continues or is resolved.

Hill then asked what Rosen’s prognosis was on the divisiveness of the present moment, and what the average person should be looking at more closely.

“(We need to) move past an age of Twitter, and the cable news and making quick decisions by a soundbite, and just take the time to sit down together and look each other in the eye,” Rosen said. “Your wonderful questions and your willingness to listen to my attempts at answers are what give me hope.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some musicians were forced to explore solos during quarantine, but for Aaron Berofsky, his partners were in the next room over.

“My wife and I never intended to push our boys to be musicians, but we always realized if they did decide to pursue it, we could make really good music together as a family,” Berofsky said. “We wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Chautauqua School of Music faculty members Aaron Berofsky, violin faculty and chair of strings, and his wife, Kathryn Votapek, viola instructor and chamber music coach, are joined by their award-winning sons, pianist and composer Charles, and cellist Sebastian, to create the Berofsky Piano Quartet. 

The creation of the quartet is relatively new, as Berofsky said they didn’t have the “time to take it on” pre-pandemic. 

“Everyone is always running around to their own rehearsals, performances and competitions,” he said. “In a way, that’s the silver lining of this whole thing — suddenly, we have the time to do things we couldn’t even attempt before.”

The Berofsky Piano Quartet will perform a program “full of fun and surprises” at 4 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 17, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. The program features Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, Charles Berofsky’s “Uneasy Dreams” and Antonín Dvořák’s “Allegro con Fuoco” from Piano Quartet in E-flat major, B. 162, Op. 87.

The concert begins with “marvelous Mozart,” who wrote his Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478 in 1785, when publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister commissioned three quartets. Clocking in at 22 minutes, the piece features an addition of a viola — an instrument Mozart loved to play when he himself performed chamber music — to the traditional piano trio. 

“We have worked on this Mozart in the past, partly because Mozart is the most glorious music, but also because it is not as difficult as Brahms and Dvořák,” Berofsky said. “It gives a certain sense of ease to the start of the program, for both the audience and us as the musicians.” 

Following Mozart is Charles Berofsky’s 2017 “Uneasy Dreams.” The piano quartet is written for the standard instrumentation of violin, viola, cello and piano; the strings and piano are often juxtaposed as two separate choirs, although there are times when all instruments are combined either homophonically or “contrapuntally in bouts of energetic fury.” 

Thematically, the piece was composed in three connected sections, depicting a series of moods and images that flow from one to the other without apparent reason. 

“Through this music, Charles is explaining the experience of feeling like you are in a dream state, meaning you are not fully in control of what’s going on around you or within you,” Berofsky said. “It’s a really fun rollercoaster of emotions to play through.” 

The “grand” finale: the first movement of Dvořák’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, B. 162, Op. 87. 

“It is a big, grand, larger-than-life kind of piece,” Berofsky said. “Yes, we are only playing the first movement, but it’s as grand as the last movement. He kept up with the piece’s personality throughout its entirety.” 

The Piano Quartet in E flat major is Dvořák’s second and last work for the instrumental ensemble. Fourteen years separate this work from his previous Piano Quartet in D major, and Berofsky said it is far more “romantic and substantial” than the Mozart piece. 

“We rehearsed this piece a lot because the music is uniquely complex,” he said. “That is part of the luxury of the time we are in — we can finally work in detail with one another.” 

Berofsky said the family decided it would be a “great ender” because it serves as a prime example of the composer’s ability to introduce innovation and originality into the classical form. 

After all of the years he has played this piece in professional settings, Berofsky said he is still amazed at how “Dvořák pulled it all together.”

“The same goes for the Mozart selection,” Berofsky said. “They are not only great pieces, they are incredibly surprising in terms of harmony, voicing, or in a way that the music takes a turn you don’t expect. When you’ve played it for years and still feel like you’re learning or noticing something new each time, that’s when you know it’s good music.”

This series is made possible by Bruce W. and Sarah Hagen McWilliams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norton also said that creation isn’t done unfolding.

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

In this election season, what if a presidential candidate proclaimed that Black Lives Matter and exploded the myth of American exceptionalism and talked about American history in full, the bad and ugly as well as the good and noble?

The Rev. Brian D. McLaren posed that question in his 10:45 a.m. EDT sermon for the Sunday, Aug. 16, service of worship and sermon on the CHQ Video Assembly Platform. His sermon title was “Dismantling Supremacy,” and the scripture text was Luke 4:22-30 (NRSV) —

“All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.”’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”

McLaren called this scripture “a dramatic moment that few notice.” It is preceded by two stories. The first is about Jesus’ time in the wilderness fighting power, pride, pleasure and prestige. The second is the shortest sermon of all time, reading from the prophet Isaiah and telling the crowd that this prophecy was fulfilled.

“Instead of seeing today’s text as a postscript, what if we read the other two stories as warm-up acts for this climactic story?” McLaren asked the congregation.

This is a “local boy makes good” story. But Jesus, in telling about the work of Elijah and Elisha, is saying that Sidonian and Syrian lives matter. “God’s aperture is wider, God’s embrace more expansive than others,” McLaren said.

For his book, Why Did Jesus, Moses, The Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road?, about Christian identity in a multi-faith world, McLaren researched terrorism. He came across a story by a journalist embedded with a group of suicide bombers.

“The research made me shiver, because these people were not filled with hate for the other, but with love for their own people who were wronged and suffering. The act was not out of fury for the other, but protection for their own,” McLaren said.

He continued, “Love can be dangerous if its span is too narrow, if it is too restricted. Jesus dealt with this problem at the very beginning of his ministry. He was not here for the good of his own religion or economy. He brought God’s good news for all people.”

McLaren asked his daughter, a yoga instructor, to build a class for him that would deal with his bodily limitations.

“It hurt, but yoga is about stretching. What we don’t stretch, constricts. It happens with our hearts. If we don’t widen our embrace, our hand too easily becomes a fist,” he said.

He told the congregation that “we have to have the courage to do what Jesus did and to speak up for those being left out and adding our voice to their voices. In fact, we add our voices to God’s voice to say ‘these lives matter.’”

Don’t think you will get a “thank you” or a Nobel Prize, McLaren continued. “People will see blood and believe that you have betrayed an unwritten covenant.”

That covenant is “love us and remember who your enemies are. We are not like them and if you love them like equals, you are more dangerous than our enemies,” he said.

Every election season, there are politicians and their chaplains who hold up ideals to provide easy patriotism, cheap popularity and tell voters who to hate and who to exclude.

“We need to take from Jesus God’s love that goes beyond us and them, that is not constrained, that is not discriminatory, that is not based on worthiness, but on the well of who God is,” McLaren said.

Jesus’ revolutionary blood includes those from Sidon, Israel and Syria. “Jesus eats with those who don’t matter, heals those who don’t matter, listens to those who don’t matter and lets them touch him. They really do matter,” he said.

McLaren asked the congregation, “When your love gets shrunk, can you stretch beyond those who are like you, who think like you? Can you stretch beyond to the animal world, to the world of lakes and soil and climate?”

“Love-driven politics is disruptive and dangerous. You could get thrown off a cliff. Now go and do likewise,” he concluded.  

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president for religion and senior pastor of Chautauqua Institution, presided from the Hall of Christ. Joshua Stafford, interim organist for Chautauqua Institution, played the Tallman Tracker Organ. Michael Miller, a Chautauqua Opera Apprentice Artist, served as vocal soloist. The organ prelude, performed by Stafford, was “Inning” from Six Studies for Pedal Piano by Robert Schumann. Miller sang the gathering hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” The anthem was “For the Mountains Shall Depart,” from “Elijah,” by Felix Mendelssohn, sung by Miller. The offertory hymn was “Tell Out, My Soul,” by Walter Greatorex, words by Timothy Dudley-Smith, and sung by Miller. “A Song of Freedom,” by Charles Villiers Stanford, was the offertory anthem with Miller as the soloist. Miller sang the choral response. “Lead me, Lord,” by S.S. Wesley. Stafford played “Toccata in D Minor,” by Charles Villiers Stanford, for the postlude. This program is made possible by the Edmond E. Robb – Walter C. Shaw Fund and the Randall-Hall Memorial Chaplaincy.

Today’s offertory anthem, “A Song of Freedom,” comes from the “Six Bible Songs and Hymns” of Charles Villiers Stanford. These pieces expand on the idea of Dvorák’s “Biblical Songs,” from which we heard a setting of Psalms 61 and 63 two weeks ago. With Stanford’s more elaborate scale, gesture and colorful organ accompaniments, these pieces suggest more of a miniature cantata than a simple Bible song. This setting of Psalm 126 tells of the Israelites’ return out of captivity, praying for and prophesying future prosperity. This morning, Stafford also played Felix Mendelssohn’s beautiful setting of “For the mountains shall depart” from the oratorio “Elijah,” to which Stanford had a peculiar connection: His father sang the role of Elijah at it’s Irish premiere in 1847.

Billye is a Giant Pacific Octopus who lives in the Seattle Aquarium. Billye and other octopodes have learned to open jars — they can even open medicine bottles with childproof lids. 

“While (octopodes) have a good-sized central brain, two-thirds of their neurons are in their eight arms controlling hundreds of suckers,” said Flynn Coleman, author and international human rights attorney. “They use distributed intelligence to perform multiple tasks simultaneously and independently: something that the human brain cannot do.”

Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence is how machines can mimic the human brain, which Coleman said is thought to be the “gold standard” for organic intelligence. While the human brains have a lot of promise due to their complexity, they also present problems.

“We do not fully understand our own brains, nor do we even have a universally accepted definition of what human intelligence is,” Coleman said. “We don’t know exactly why we sleep or dream. We don’t know how we process memories. We don’t know whether we have free will, or what consciousness is or who has it.”

Coleman said these unknowns make the task of coding a human brain very difficult, so scientists may have to look toward minds of other species, such as octopodes. She said Billye’s distributed approach to problem solving may be well suited to making robots that explore distant planets.

“The range of skill ingenuity and creativity of our biological brethren on this planet is astounding,” Coleman said. “We have a proclivity to only weigh their intelligence and skill in relation to our own. This human-centric view is limiting at best and dangerous at worst.”

Coleman is the author of A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are and has worked with the United Nations, the United States federal government and organizations around the world. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 14, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, she discussed how people can make AI more empathetic, as well as the importance of non-human intelligence, to close the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Seven theme of “The Science of Us.”

Coleman said the original computer — the human brain — has 100 billion neurons and 2.5 petabytes of memory, and has served humans for around 100,000 years.

“It is hard to overlook that it needs constant fueling to perform at even minimal levels,” Coleman said. “We all know how notoriously slow it can be to boot up in the morning.”

She said people are becoming more reliant on machines and more immersed in virtual life.

“A new era is upon us, and our lives are so seamlessly merging with the digital world that many of us don’t even notice,” Coleman said. “That is, until a global pandemic thrust us into a primarily digital existence, exposing both the promise and the frailties of the technological systems we have.”

These frailties include many people having no access to a laptop or a smartphone, according to Coleman. She also said that society is more focused on advancing technology and creating AI that is better at predicting outcomes, than how these tools will define the lives of current and future generations. 

To address concerns about technology, Coleman said people need to address their own assumptions about the world, and “paradoxically, we also need to ask what technology can teach us about being human.”

Almost every major human achievement has been the result of our ability to collaborate, not the genius of some individuals, according to Coleman. 

“Experts can often be the worst forecasters because they can be dogmatically siloed in their fields, and invested in being right,” Coleman said. “However, beginners, who have a fresh take without a stake in being the best, can often help us see what specialists cannot.”

Coleman said the technology mirrors its designers, and that a diverse group of participants is necessary in creating a fair and ethical AI. 

“AI and computerization will be the biggest disruptors in the history of labor economies, and the challenges of the fast-spreading novel coronavirus have exposed the inequities in our societies, and how many essential workers are significantly undervalued and excluded,” Coleman said. “We’re going to have to reimagine our relationships with work and tap into our innate sagacity and creativity to navigate this brave new world.”

Along with octopodes, Coleman said other animals have incredible intelligence, from the memories of pigeons, spiders spinning webbed balloons to fly, and bees using dance to communicate complex information to their colonies.  

“This is possibly the last frontier of scientific invention — maybe our chance to embrace our human limitations and to expand our worldview beyond ourselves,” Coleman said. “The science of us must have the broadest possible definition. Being willing to admit other species are brilliant could be the smartest thing we can do.”

Coleman said that part of building better AI is looking at humans’ worst tendencies and improving society. 

“We don’t need to save ourselves from robots, we need to save robots from ourselves today,” Coleman said.

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President of Marketing and Communications Emily Morris. Morris asked Coleman how her work as a human rights attorney connects to her work with technology.

Coleman worked with the Genocide Prevention Center in 2001, where they used satellites to look for evidence of war crimes, such as mass burial cites. 

“I kept thinking it’s not enough, because everyone is already dead and gone,” Coleman said. “While it’s so important to have a record of abuse and the things that have happened, the worst things we can do to each other, I thought, ‘How can we do more?’”

Coleman then looked into artificial intelligence and saw the field needed a human right’s perspective, which led her to writing A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are.

Morris asked Coleman how the average person could get involved with making ethical AI.

Coleman said that the fields of programming and other technology are not the only aspects of society that need more inclusion; it’s needed at “every echelon of leadership” from the school boards to local government.

“We can, inch by inch, brick by brick, take tiny actions every single day. Your life is a million tiny moments, mostly unseen,” Coleman said. “How can you serve another today? How can you care for someone else? How can you amplify someone else’s voice? How can you stand up for social justice with whatever skills you have at hand?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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