Interfaith Lecture Preview

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Nobody knows what happens to us when we die, but Bruce Greyson, through research and observations spanning a half-century, may have a decent guess  at least of what happens right before death. 

Greyson’s March 2021 book, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, presents his findings from the last 50 years. It is also the focal point of his Interfaith Lecture at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 17 in the Amphitheater, part of Week Eight’s theme, “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.”

At first, Greyson was skeptical of any such experience. He had grown up in a scientific household with a materialistic, tangible perspective on the world.

“When I started my psychiatric training, I started meeting psychiatric patients who described to me things like leaving their bodies when they were close to death, and seeing things accurately from that perspective,” Greyson said. “That just made no sense to me at all. I assumed they were hallucinating.”

Then, Greyson’s colleague, Raymond A. Moody Jr., published Life After Life, which coined the term “near-death experiences.”

These stories sounded familiar to Greyson.

“I realized these stories I was hearing from my patients were a part of a huge phenomenon that’s occurring around the world,” he said. “That meant we should try to study them, not ignore them.”

Thus began his own personal exploration of near-death experiences. 

“The more cases I collected, the more unexplainable they seemed to me,” he said. “I started trying to make sense of them all. Fifty years later, I’m still trying to make sense of it.”

He knew one thing for certain: The materialistic mindset he grew up with and took to college was no longer plausible, at least in this endeavor. 

Among his discoveries over the years, a surprising one was the commonality of near-death experiences. About 5% of people have had one, he said, or about one in every 20 people. 

Another interesting discovery for him was these experiences had nothing to do with mental illness.

“They’re normal experiences that happen to normal people under unusual circumstances,” he said. 

Near-death experiences also suggest the mind and brain are two separate entities, he said. 

“We have people thinking more clearly than ever and seeing and forming memories when the brain is not capable of doing those things, when the brain is compromised,” he said. 

He wonders if this is still possible when the brain itself dies.

Now a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the co-founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Greyson hopes to give a sense of spiritual lessons people can learn from near-death experiences during his lecture.

Near-death experiences should teach people that they are not separate individuals, but rather a part of something greater, he said. 

“Therefore, we have some responsibility to treat each other kindly and to take care of each other, as well as the rest of the natural world,” he said. “That living life according to the golden rule makes our life much more meaningful and fulfilling.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Often a speaker at Chautauqua’s Interfaith Lecture Series has one or two primary areas of expertise, or studies of interest. Not Ori Z. Soltes.

Soltes is a professor of theology, art history, philosophy and political history at Georgetown University. 

Over the course of his life, he has been asked by various institutions to teach courses outside of his comfort zone, he said, but he simply couldn’t say no to a physically, intellectually or emotionally challenging endeavor. 

Going back to his freshman year of college, Soltes remembers eagerly and passionately learning as much as he could.

“I felt like a kid let loose in a candy store,” he said. “There were all these things I hadn’t even thought about that I was interested in learning about. I was always taking seven or eight courses when the standard course load was four. … Fortunately, I have a lot of energy, so I could work without a lot of sleep.”

After a couple of years in school, Soltes said he had enough credit hours to graduate, but he stayed all four years. He still wasn’t satisfied.

“I felt like I still didn’t know anything,” he said. “I thought that if I went on to get a Ph.D. and become a professor, I could be an eternal student without the stigma attached to that phrase. The scam is they think they’re paying me to teach — but they’re really paying me to go on learning.”

Theology and philosophy have remained some of his strongest interests. He also teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization, is the former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum and he was theologian-in-residence at Chautauqua in 2007. 

Soltes returns to Chautauqua at 1 p.m. Monday, Aug. 16 to present his lecture “What Are We? Three Early Visions and Versions of the Soul,” the opening Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series themed “The Human Soul: An Ineffable Mystery.”

The soul, he said, is a universal idea. 

“There are so many different ways in which humans in different times and places have thought about the soul, and part of that relates to how and why in different times and places there are different forms of religion, different concepts of God, all ultimately rising from the same theories of issues and considerations of what it is we as a specific think and worry about,” he said.

People hold different beliefs based on a seemingly endless range of factors, he said. It can be based on topography and geography, the type of community where one grows up and one’s particular personality. 

“It’s a kaleidoscope of issues and ideas that over time and space we’ve come up with, but they can all be traced back to a singular series of concerns,” he said. 

Judaism and Christianity are good examples, he said, because they have several similarities but also some key differences. Recognizing those similarities, and especially differences, should not make one feel like their belief or knowledge is threatened, he said.

“In the end, what I believe and what you believe, we believe because we believe that,” he said. 

In math, two plus two equalling four is an indisputable subject, but topics like the soul and God goes beyond humans’ concrete understanding of the world, he said. 

“If I understand that, I cannot just be accepting, but be embracing of the fact that your perspective and mine are different without feeling that somehow means I’ve reduced my connection to my sense of those things,” he said. 

Once, Soltes was asked to teach a course on the Middle East, so he became interested in that region. He realized that the Arab-Israeli conflict, as it was billed to him, was an oversimplification, he said. 

The conflict is not just about Arabs and Israelis, he said, but the terminology is interesting, he said. In the 7th or 8th century, when Mohammad was alive, there were pagans, Jews and Christians, some of whom became Muslims, he said. 

Too often, he said, politicians, pundits and academics create this oversimplified narrative. 

“It’s a much more complex reality with a much, much longer history that I found myself framing than most of what I read about the region,” he said. 

Soltes is the type of person who can dig deeply into multiple projects and subjects at once, he said. When he is feeling strained by one, instead of taking a break and having nothing else to do, he refocuses on another project. Eventually, he comes back to the original feeling refreshed.

As a professor, he loves seeing the “a-ha” moments from students and hearing the questions they ask. He can get the same feeling from a public lecture, too, he said. 

Eventually, for some topics, he felt certain things weren’t being said — ideas he wanted to share. So, he began writing books. He has now authored over 280 books, articles, exhibition catalogues and essays. 

Despite his lecture billed at three visions, he said he will actually discuss four. 

Soltes will begin with the ancient Egyptians and describe what went on in that period, then translating that to the first two chapters of Genesis, he said. That will be followed by how people like Socrates and Plato thought about the soul. Lastly, he will look at religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.

Humans have always seen themselves as beings with a soul, not just compared with rocks and plants, but against other animals, too, he said. Ideas of the self may help explain why that is, he said. 

“What I want people to come away with, in essence, is (that) the soul is a large part of what we think we are,” he said. “I want people to come away with a sense of commonality, diversity and, I guess above all, humility.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Ross Douthat understands his unique role as a conservative opinion columnist at The New York Times.

“Our readership, as you may have heard, is somewhat liberal,” he said. “I think I have a somewhat distinctive role where I’m, more than a lot of columnists, writing for people who tend to disagree with me somewhat.”

Douthat said he expects a similar situation at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 11 in the Amphitheater when he will present his lecture “Secularism and Stagnation: How Our Economy Became Decadent,” because he suspects most of his audience will be politically left-leaning.

But Douthat will still ask everyone from both sides of the political spectrum to find middle ground. 

Giving the last Week Seven Interfaith Lecture themed “Creating an Economy that Works for All,” Douthat said he will explain how decadence, a focal point in his 2020 book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, means economic, cultural and political stagnation. 

Moreover, he will talk about how this stagnation manifests itself in the economy, and how problems like declining birth rates in developed countries or the opioid epidemic are connected between the economy, culture and politics. 

At the Times, Douthat writes two columns each week, typically about politics, religion, moral values and higher education. His recent columns include “How Strong Is Trump’s Grip on the G.O.P?” “The Ungovernable Catholic Church,” and “How to Reach the Unvaccinated.”

“I see part of my job as trying to find a certain amount of common ground in our extremely polarized era,” he said. “Part of my job is to sort of challenge my readers’ preconceptions about the nature of the world.”

In his forthcoming book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, Douthat details his six-year-long battle with a chronic form of lyme disease, an illness caused by certain types of ticks. 

“Most people get better with a couple courses of antibiotics, and some highly debated percentages of people don’t get better,” he said. “There’s a huge debate within American medicine about what this means — whether people who don’t get better are still sick with lyme disease, or whether they have some sort of post-treatment syndrome that isn’t directly connected to an infection.”

Although he focused on lyme disease in the memoir, he hopes it adds to a larger discussion about mysterious long-term symptoms, particularly with those associated with COVID-19.

That book will be released in October.

The pandemic has also caused a strange period in economic policymaking, he said.

“Because of COVID, we’ve done all kinds of things we’ve never done before,” he said, “like shut down the entire economy, and spend enormous sums of money paying people not to work for extended periods of time.”

Douthat thinks there is a narrative among Democrats and left-leaning people that the U.S. has just experienced another Gilded Age, where the rich have gotten richer and others have struggled. 

“Therefore, (they think) a lot of our problems can be simply solved by redistributing wealth from the super-rich to the rest of society,” he said. “I think there is a palace for certain kinds of redistribution, but I’m hoping to convince people that our problems are more about stagnation than they are about wild, out-of-control growth.”

Issues with inequality might be better addressed with a more dynamic economy, he said, while noting he doesn’t have an exact answer on how to achieve that, though he doesn’t think anyone is entirely sure.

Both the right and the left tend to associate issues with either social, cultural or economic trends. Douthat will instead argue that these are all associated with one another.

“There’s a tendency on both the right and the left to only take one side of the story — so if something is wrong in American society, the right blames the culture and the left blames the economy,” he said. “Actually, they’re usually bound together in this way where you have to see the problem in both senses in order to get closer to solutions.”

Fewer Americans marrying or having as many kids is one example of this, he said. The right might argue it’s an issue with individualism and the breakdown of traditional values, while the left might argue people can’t afford to have kids, he said.

“I’d like everyone to consider the possibility that both things could be true,” he said. 

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

In 1972, Benjamin Friedman walked into Harvard University for his first year of teaching. This upcoming school year, he will walk into Harvard again for his 50th year of teaching, now as the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy. 

He’s spent even more time at Harvard, though — he received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in economics there. 

“I am very aware of what an extraordinary privilege it has been to spend my entire academic career at an institution where I have such amazingly talented and energetic colleagues,” Friedman said, “and also such a splendid group of interesting, energetic and also very talented students.”

In his time, he’s written over a dozen books and more than 150 articles in professional journals. Of his writings, he’s published a few books for the general public, including Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, released this past January. 

Friedman will present his lecture based on and named after this book at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 10 in the Amphitheater. It is part of Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series themed “Creating an Economy that Works for All.”

Over the last half-century at Harvard, Friedman said he’s noticed a positive shift in the types of students who come to the university.

“The students are enormously more energetic and talented than they were 50 years ago,” he said, referring especially to undergraduates.

 He is not 100% sure why that is the case, but he has a few theories. One of those is that students are simply better today than they were before.

Another possibility is Harvard’s more diverse pool of students, he said. When he was an undergraduate student, he said most students came from schools in New York or New England, particularly prep schools.

“That percentage is way down, and it’s matched by an increase in the number of people from elsewhere in the United States and elsewhere in the world,” he said. “I think the reach of the college in terms of the kinds of people it attracts is much greater now.”

Moreover, Harvard has a gigantic pool of applicants with little room to swim. He estimated around 50,000 students apply each year, and only around 1,650 are accepted, meaning an average of around 3% of applicants are accepted.  

Friedman’s two other books for a general audience are The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005) and Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After (1988). 

His 2021 book is a history of ideas, he said, whereas his last book was about the interaction of economics with social and political history.

“Importantly, in this (new) book, it turned out that the role of religious thinking was not just powerful, but central in the emergence and subsequent evolution of economic ideas that I was exploring,” he said. 

Although he mentioned religion and religious thinking in his previous books, it did not have as much of a spotlight as it does in this newest one. 

Additionally, he covers a wider range of history in his new book, exploring the timeline from the Bible through the New Testament, to the early church fathers, the Reformation, the evolution of religious history, the 18th century and to the present day, he said. In his last book, his earliest data was from the early 1800s, he said. 

“The book comes right up so the last chapter very frontally addresses the role of religious thinking in our current day debate on economics and economic policy in the political sphere in the United States,” he said. 

Friedman did not get data from the 2020 election when he was finishing the book, but does have data up to the 2016 election, he said. 

For his lecture, he wants to highlight religion’s influence on the economy.

“The unifying theme is that religious thinking has been a very powerful influence on the early development of and subsequent evolution of economic thinking, right from the beginning of modern economics,” he said. 

The common narrative, he said, was modern, Western economics is based on the Enlightenment, and that he agreed. 

“But then people normally go on from there to conclude that because the Enlightenment was not about religion. … If anything the Enlightenment is seen as a movement away from religion, therefore people conclude that the development of economics in our modern sense has nothing to do with religion,” he said. 

Friedman hopes he disproved this idea in his book, and will argue why in today’s lecture.

Looking at modern day, he still sees a significant religious influence on the economy, especially in the United States, and he will also discuss that.

“Religious thinking has been and continues to be very important,” he said, “even in this realm where it’s normally not taken to be important.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Sr. Joan Chittister is set to return to Chautauqua at 1 p.m. Monday, Aug. 9 in the Amphitheater.

“Sr. Joan has been a blessing for Chautauqua for over 35 years, and she is so beloved here,” said Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno. “She is one of only a few who receive a standing ovation just for walking out onto the stage.”

Opening Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series themed “Creating an Economy that Works for All,” Chittister will present her lecture “To Exist, A Society Based on Money Needs a Population Based on Heart.” Chittister is a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania. Her awards, distinctions and titles are seemingly countless. 

“For 50 years, she has passionately advocated on behalf of peace, human rights, women’s issues and church renewals,” according to her website. 

“A much sought-after speaker, counselor and clear voice that bridges all religions, she is also a best-selling author of more than 60 books, hundreds of articles and an online column for the National Catholic Reporter,” her bio reads.

She has won numerous awards for her works, including 16 Catholic Press Association awards. Her latest release, 2019’s The Time Is Now: A Call for Uncommon Courage, will soon be followed by The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life, set to release on Sept. 21.

“The activist, nun, and esteemed spiritual voice who has twice appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday (in 2015 and 2019) sounds the call to create a monastery within ourselves — to cultivate wisdom and resilience so that we may join God in the work of renewal, restoration, and justice right where we are,” reads the book’s synopsis by Penguin Random House.

Chittister is a founding member of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, which is partnered with the United Nations. Last year, Chittister’s Interfaith Lecture, held on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, was during a week on feminism, and her lecture was titled “A Woman’s Life: A Good Event/Bad Event World.”

Her name is etched in Erie’s history, too. The Joan Chittister Lecture Series began in 2014 at Mercyhurst University in Erie, along with the founding of the Helen Boyle Memorial Archive in Honor of Joan D. Chittister, according to her website. She was the prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie for 12 years. She received her master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and her doctorate from Pennsylvania State University for speech communications theory. In 1996, she was an elected fellow at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University. 

Rovegno said that Chittister is the perfect keynote speaker for this week’s theme. 

“The Benedictine spirituality has shaped her life and work with a deeply compassionate heart that cares for others in all ways — spiritual, physical and material,” Rovegno said. “Sr. Joan is a pragmatist who has never failed to speak truth to power.”

Chittister understands the world’s culture is centered around materiality, Rovegno said.

“Her lecture title,” Rovegno said, “… arises from her lifelong work of proclaiming, in her own inimitable style and power, a preferential option for the poor.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Sometimes, the mere presence of Jose Arellano and Steve Avalos is enough to impact someone’s life. 

While in Chautauqua this week, Arellano said a neighbor introduced himself. The man grew up in a predominantly white community as a person of color and had been coming to Chautauqua for around a decade. Just seeing Arellano and Avalos on the grounds impacted the man’s life.

This gives Arellano and Avalos the inspiration to go back to Los Angeles-based Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation and reentry program in the world, where they are co-directors of case management and navigation.

The Homeboys will take the Amphitheater stage at 1 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 5 for their lecture “The Power of Empathy: Live It or Create it.” It is the final Week Six Interfaith Lecture themed “Building a Culture of Empathy.”

Before becoming Homeboy “navigators” — who help “trainees” by assisting with the transition out of the gang lifestyle and culture — Arellano and Avalos were trainees themselves.

Arellano’s family was in gang culture. Despite excelling at school, Arellano got involved with a gang by age 12. Three years later, he was in jail for the first time. 

Arellano said there was always someone to give him hope even in the darkest times, including when he was facing a life sentence in prison.

“I had given up,” Arellano said. “I felt it in my soul, like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ and I remember I couldn’t even get out of bed, I couldn’t eat.”

His cellmate was an older man from Pakistan. 

“I remember he tapped my bunk one day, and he said to me, ‘I can’t sit by and watch you do this to yourself,’ ” Arellano said. “I got up and said, ‘Watch me do what to myself?’ He said, ‘Watch you go through what you’re going through. You know what your problem is? You don’t keep your mind and your body in the same place. Your body is in here, but your mind is out there. If you keep your mind and your body in the same place, you will have perfect peace.’ ”

That changed his life. 

“I said, ‘Damn, how even in this dingy cell do I get blessed with this human being that in one of my most hopeless states, he was able to infuse hope in me?’ ” Arellano said. “That’s been the story of my life.”

Arellano and Avalos met about eight years ago, working through the program in Los Angeles separately. 

“We both had separate roles in the organization early on, and just kind of seeing him and where he was at, he walked it, he talked it, so I always found inspiration from him, but we never really talked much,” Arellano said.

At Homeboy Industries, problem-solving as navigators is a complicated and complex task. 

“It’s complex trauma, so it can’t just be so simple a solution sometimes,” Arellano said. “We really have to assess every situation because we’re dealing with people’s lives. Human beings, we’re complicated, and our population, they come from extreme trauma and poverty and some of the stuff they go through on the daily and some of the stuff they’ve been through is very complicated. There’s a lot of layers to it.”

Avalos said his relationship with Arellano has strengthened from working together with trainees, leadership and sitting in counsel. 

“A lot of times we disagree and then we come to a middle. It’s good,” Avalos said. “Sometimes, I don’t see it his way until the end, and sometimes I do. It’s one of those relationships, but we know our intentions.”

Ultimately, both want an intentional process while working with trainees.

“We don’t want to just make decisions rapidly,” Arellano said. “We want to talk through every process with the individual. We want to be sure they feel seen, that they feel heard and they have a part in their transformation, as well.”

Avalos loves the work he does at Homeboy, and he feels more drained when he isn’t working. He doesn’t even see it as work, he said.

“You see a lot of gang members or people you would maybe avoid, or walk on the other side of the street, and then you realize how kind and compassionate they are — and when they’re not, it’s because they’re broken,” Avalos said. “When you start to see those things, that changes everything.”

Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno compared the Homeboys’ story to that of Tuesday’s speaker, Edgar Rodriguez, the pastor and police chief from Moville, Iowa.

“Their stories are the rest of the story, where we’ve got the chief of police who does this compassionate policing, and Jose and Steve have both been recipients of that compassion,” she said. “Homeboy Industries walks the talk of caring and compassion in the way we wish every organization, every church, every company and every community would live and be and do.”

The two will take turns sharing their stories and wisdom at today’s lecture, she said. 

When someone makes a wrong decision, people tend to dehumanize them, unless it’s their child or someone they are close to, Avalos said. He wants that same perspective applied to everyone, even strangers. 

Experiences shape people, Arellano said, so finding one positive experience or relationship in a sea of negative experiences can change someone’s life. 

“It will reshape the way you see yourself, and it will help reshape the way you see the world,” he said.

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Edgar Rodriguez is perhaps one of the most important people in the city of Moville. There, a place with a population under 2,000 people on the western edge of Iowa, near the state’s tripoint border with Nebraska and South Dakota, he holds two distinctive positions: the lead pastor of New Hope Evangelical Church and the city’s police chief.

It seems natural to him.

Born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Rodriguez moved to the next town over, Eagle Pass, Texas, when he was a toddler. After high school, he served for four years in the Marine Corps. 

In 2010, Rodriguez, his wife — whom he met in the Marine Corps — and their five children moved to Moville. The goal: revitalize Moville Evangelical Church into New Hope. Three years later, he joined the county’s sheriff’s department. 

Rodriguez will enter Chautauqua’s Amphitheater at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 3 to present “Empathy: The Key for Human Survival,” part of Week Six’s Interfaith Lecture Series themed “Building a Culture of Empathy.”

Both of his roles have plenty of overlap, he said.

“I do a lot of community policing and connect with as many people as possible,” Rodriguez said. “They know me as a pastor, so when they see me in my police gear, it doesn’t really change or faze them much. They talk to me just as easy as they do as a pastor.”

Getting to talk with people doubles as his ministry, he said. 

“They know me as a pastor, so they’ll tell me about personal things and ask me personal questions and ask for advice and prayer,” he said. “I get to do that while I’m on duty.”

Despite Moville’s small size, it’s a hub within the county, hosting the county fair and drawing in people from neighboring towns. It’s half an hour from Sioux City, Iowa, an hour and a half from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and three hours from Iowa’s capital and biggest city, Des Moines. 

U.S. Highway 20 (a 3,365-mile coast-to-coast route) has only one four-way stop, which is in Moville. Rodriguez said it causes a couple fatal accidents each year — part of his job is monitoring the intersection (Rodriguez had to pause his interview with the Daily because a car ran the stop sign, nearly colliding with two other vehicles, he said).

Rodriguez said his ministry is serving, loving and helping people.

“It’s serving through the church, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with people and helping people grow in their faith,” he said. “That’s been my life.”

He said he gives plenty of advice to those as a police officer.

“I’ve led a lot of people to Christ heading down to jail in the back of my car,” he said. 

Sometimes, he does have to be forceful with people who have had difficult pasts. 

“A lot of times, you deal with people and they don’t know anything other than the hard life they’ve led,” he said. “A life of lie after lie after lie, just trying to get out of things. A drug life, that’s all they know. An abusive life, that’s all they know.”

Even in those situations, Rodriguez’s patience, sympathy, empathy and understanding are a short reach away. 

“Once I deal with the law side of things, then I deal with the human side of things,” he said. “Sometimes, it has to be in that order. I have to be safe first, then I can give them my heart. I look forward to those moments, and I get them often.”

At the church, he also focuses a lot on community life. He said a local family had a child in an Omaha, Nebraska, hospital, two hours away, and are finally coming home. They’ve been reaching out to let the family know the community is praying for them, even if they can’t see it, he said. 

Rodriguez’s empathetic heart will be at the heart of his lecture today. He said humans need connection, encouragement, understanding and recognition. Too often nowadays, he said, people react too quickly to mistakes others make. 

“In this fast-paced world, people don’t give each other their time anymore,” he said. 

He will use stories from his life and how God prepared him for this life and being empathetic to help others in his lecture, he said. 

“I hope when people leave my talk, they can think better on how they view people, and not so quickly judge people by their actions, but take a step back and ask why,” he said. “Why did they do that? Why did this happen to them? Why are they living this way? There’s a big story behind that immediate action.”

People should exercise sympathy and empathy, or perhaps empathy followed by sympathy, before judging others, he said. 

“Let’s be good human beings,” he said. “Let’s encourage one another, let’s root for one another and let’s believe in one another. I think that’s what we’re missing in our society today.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Faith has almost always been a part of Brian McLaren’s life. Conversely, so has doubt.

“I am a committed Christian, but doubt has been my companion really throughout my whole life,” McLaren said.

Faith and doubt are the highlights of McLaren’s latest book, Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It, which came out in January. 

McLaren, although born one hour east in Olean, New York, in 1957, will make his first in-person visit to Chautauqua. He will present his lecture “Studios of Empathy: Why, What, and How?,” at 1 p.m. Monday, Aug. 2 in the Amphitheater, the first of three Interfaith Lectures for Week Six themed “Building a Culture of Empathy.”

His recent book is deeply personal to him, he said.

“I grew up in settings where doubt was something to be ashamed of, maybe hidden or covered up, and I came to understand in my own life that doubt wasn’t the enemy of faith, but pretending wasn’t good for your faith,” he said. “On a personal level, that’s important.”

Although raised in the church, McLaren felt himself drifting away from Christianity during his teenage years. 

Then, one night changed his life.

“I was lying under a clear, starry sky one night and had an acute sense of not just looking up and seeing beauty, but of being seen by that beauty, seen and known and loved,” he said. “I felt that love fill me, so powerfully that it felt a little scary — more than my human heart could handle.”

Later that night, McLaren saw his friends with the same level of beauty and love.

“From that night forward, I have felt in my deepest self the truth of what John said in the New Testament, that God is love, whoever lives in love lives in God,” he said. 

His career since then has been focused on helping people find the most loving versions of themselves, he said. He was a pastor for over 20 years, and he is currently a faculty member at The Living School for Action and Contemplation. McLaren has received two honorary doctoral degrees, one from Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver in 2004 and another from Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal) in 2010.

For all these years, people have come to McLaren, bringing with them their questions, problems and doubts. He’s seen a steady increase recently, though.

“In the last six or seven years, I’ve just seen an almost tsunami of people needing to talk about their questions and doubts,” he said. “People are watching the way a lot of Christians have been involved in politics, culminating really on Jan. 6 when we saw ‘Jesus Saves’ flags not far from gallows being raised to hang somebody. All of this created somewhere between a crisis and catastrophe for many people in their faith.”

McLaren sees empathy as a way forward. As he is the first interfaith lecturer for this week’s theme, he wants to set a theological, psychological and historical framework about empathy.

“I want to talk about the possibility of our faith communities across religious traditions becoming places that actually build a culture of empathy,” he said. 

He calls these studios of empathy, meant to help the community at large. 

One of the issues with empathy right now is that nobody necessarily thinks it is their job to wake up each day and figure out how to build a culture of empathy, he said. He hopes people walk away with a sense of wanting to create that culture.

“I would hope each person who is present goes away feeling like, ‘This is my job,’ ” he said. 

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Although confined to Zoom last year like most other people, comedian Benji Lovitt is used to going out and about all around the world.

Born in Dallas, Lovitt, who is Jewish, visited Israel several times with a Jewish youth group. He later spent his gap year there. He loved visiting every time, he said. 

By the age of 30, Lovitt was living in New York City — but he didn’t like it. 

“I had this idea that I’ve got nothing tying me down, so why not spend some time in Israel?” he said. “If I don’t do it now, I might regret it forever.”

That was in 2006, and Lovitt still lives in Israel. He’s also performed in the United States, South Africa, Australia, England and more. 

“It’s a blast to be on stage,” he said. “There’s no shortage of material when you’re an immigrant, especially an American in Israel.”

Lovitt has returned to the United States to present his lecture “The Power of Humor: Laughing to Keep from Crying,” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, July 28 in the Amphitheater. 

It is the final Interfaith Lecture Series for Week Five, themed “The Authentic Comedic Voice: Truth Born of Struggle,” a week in partnership with the National Comedy Center.

“We sort of say it’s a Jewish tradition to laugh to deal with adversity,” Lovitt said. 

While he enjoys Israel, Lovitt said, it was difficult adjusting to life there when he first moved. 

“Most immigrants don’t make it,” he said. “They end up going back to their own country because it’s one of the most unnatural things in the world to transplant yourself to the other side of the planet. Humor has been a great tool to deal with my experience here.”

Lovitt said Jewish history involved thousands of years of persecution, and a sense of humor is something that’s helped Jews through adversity. Israel as a country, too, gives Lovitt plenty of stand-up material, he said.

“Israel is where the East meets the West, where old meets new, where religion meets secular,” he said. “It’s a young country, and when you’re an immigrant with an outside pair of eyes, everything is different, so it’s not hard to come up with things to laugh at or comment on.”

His outsider points of view have been published across Israeli media and in USA Today, BBC Radio, Time and The Atlantic. Now that Lovitt has learned about himself and his character on stage — which he said was the hardest part of his career — he feels comfortable making jokes about more serious topics.

“There’s almost nothing that can’t be mocked if done appropriately by a professional,” he said. “I feel like this is the year when the world sort of figured that out.”

COVID-19 halted most normal aspects of life, but Lovitt said people didn’t stop laughing. He’ll discuss this, plus his experiences in Israel, during his lecture.

“We have to laugh or we’ll lose our minds,” he said. “We should never feel guilt laughing, even during tough times. Just as it’s perfectly human to cry, it’s equally human to laugh.”

Lovitt felt comfortable laughing through the pandemic because of this mindset, and he was happy to see others were understanding that mindset.

“The feedback I got from the public was, ‘Yes, we need to laugh. We need you to entertain us because we’re suffering here,’ ” he said. 

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Leighann Lord had not one, but two first loves: writing and theater. For the last couple of decades, she’s pursued both loves as a stand-up comedian.

“I love writing,” Lord said. “I love getting an idea, then writing about it, then developing it on stage in front of people to see whether it works or not. And when it does, oh my gosh, there’s no feeling like that. It’s absolute magic.”

At 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 27 in the Amphitheater, Lord will give a mix of a stand-up routine and a lecture, titled “I’m Not Funny, I’m Brave.” It’s part of Week Five’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Authentic Comedic Voice: Truth Born of Struggle.”

She joked that her intention is to make people laugh, but if they don’t, then she’ll call it a lecture.

“That uncomfortable silence? I intended that,” she said with a laugh.

Lord has been in love with stand-up for about as long as she can remember.

“As a kid, I loved watching stand-up,” she said. “There was something about it — the ability to tell truths through laughter is a gift.”

Ultimately, Lord attended Baruch College at City University of New York, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and creative writing. She was then accepted into City University’s master of fine arts program, but she declined the offer. 

Instead, Lord entered the corporate world for five years.

“I was miserable, absolutely miserable,” she said.

Whereas plenty of people get stage fright, Lord found the corporate world terrifying.

“Like, you go to work? In the same place? Every day? With the same people? Shudder, shudder, clutch the pearls. Like, I can’t,” she said.

Lord understands that others experience stage fright, but she has an opposite reaction to being onstage. 

“I’ve talked to professional actors who are terrified of stand-up because it’s a very specific thing,” she said. “You’re on stage by yourself. There’s no fourth wall. … People say to me, ‘How do you get on stage?’ and I say, ‘How do you not?’ I understand stage fright, but the first time I stood on stage to do stand-up, I felt like I found my calling. I felt like I found my safe space.”

Currently, Lord is in the midst of recording Showtime’s third iteration of “Funny Women of a Certain Age,” the same name of a group Lord frequently performs alongside. 

“This is big for me, to be attached to this special,” she said. 

Throughout COVID-19, Lord has continued working through virtual shows, but she is now busier than any time she can remember. 

“Everybody wants to go out, out, out now,” she said.

To Lord, the best part of stand-up is bringing positivity to people’s lives, especially if any audience members are going through a particularly negative period. 

“To know that on really, really good days, I’m making people either forget about their pain, or laugh about it for just a little while. It’s a very brief respite, but that’s what art and entertainment does,” she said. “What I can do through stand-up, through laughter and letting them build up the endorphins and have a good time, I feel like I’m doing something good.”

During today’s lecture, Lord will make humor out of topics that she said, on the surface, are not funny. These topics include education, religion, health, politics, family, ageism and inequality. She said people will probably wonder how she will make those funny.

“I do, and I have for a while,” she said.

Part of the equation for good comedy is tragedy, she said. 

“If you’re just having a lecture or a speech, it might not resonate in the same way that you can deliver a message or relief with laughter,” she said. 

Lord wants attendees to feel entertained and enlightened. Her lecture will be a combination of stand-up, then spending time to reflect on what was said.

“I really feel like I’m from the George Carlin school of comedy, where he joked about very serious things and made people laugh,” she said. “I feel it’s after that laughter when you take that cleansing breath and realize what you heard, and you can laugh about it — then, maybe, we can now talk about it.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Michael Krasny is an educator through and through, in the classroom and beyond. 

Starting in 1970, Krasny became a professor of literature at San Francisco State University. From there, he’s also taught at Stanford University, the University of San Francisco, the University of California and in the Fulbright International Institutes. 

A decade after becoming a professor, Krasny began surfing the airwaves, and by 1993, he was the host of KQED’s “Forum,” a live call-in show focused on news and public affairs. 

“I also talked to a lot of literary figures and people in the world of the public eye,” Krasny said. “I had the great privilege of interviewing presidents, heads of state and Nobel Prize winners, just a whole range of outstanding and extraordinary people, and also just everyday people, people just in the news.” 

Krasny retired from “Forum” in February 2021, but he said he always enjoyed it, just as anyone should enjoy what they do. 

“At first, I was nervous of being in the public eye, but I got kind of an appetite for it,” he said. “I enjoyed doing what educators do, ideally — which is communicating ideas and bringing a higher level of discourse.”

Krasny hopes to bring this type of energy at 1 p.m. Monday, July 26 in the Amphitheater for his lecture “Jewish Humor: History, Culture and Identity,” the first of Week Five’s Interfaith Lecture Series themed “The Authentic Comedic Voice: Truth Born of Struggle.”

Jewish humor has a lot of stereotypes, Krasny said, but a true one that stuck out to him is that much of Jewish humor comes out of suffering. 

“But, I realized that as a student, teacher, critic of literature, scholar of literature, that jokes — and jokes aren’t the only example of Jewish humor, there’s Jewish humor in film and television and anecdotes — were built like narratives, and had a great deal of things to be learned about Jewish identity and Jewish experience, but also about life in the broader personal sense,” he said.

Krasny explored Jewish humor in his 2016 book Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means. He is also the author of Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest.

“I think there’s a lot to be said about this idea that humor is a catharsis or release of anxiety,” he said. “It can illuminate a great ideal and provide us an understanding that once you start digging in and become an archaeologist with the language and what’s subtextually beneath the language, and the psychology of the stories or tales or jokes, there’s an immense amount there.”

When teaching literature, Krasny said he is really teaching literary theory, history, psychology, linguistics and science. He spent years with a science and humanities convergence program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, he said. 

“I enjoy writing and talking about a whole range of topics,” he said.

One of Krasny’s most enlightening teaching experiences was back in the 1970s, when he was asked to teach a course on Black literature, he said. Krasny is white, and he was hesitant to accept such a role. 

“I don’t think a white person would be asked to do that today,” he said with a laugh.

He ended up accepting the position, and emphasized to students he wasn’t pretending to be an insider or understand the Black experience from that perspective. Instead, he said he was a scholar and an outsider. Now, he is writing a book about this experience.

“It was some of the best teaching, most rewarding teaching of a lifetime,” he said.

For his lecture, Krasny hopes he provides an enlightening conversation about Jewish humor, understanding that seeing humor through an analytical lens can ruin the humorous aspect of a joke. He sees it another way.

“I’m not doing stand-up or anything like it, but something that can be uplifting, but also make people think or expand their consciousness,” he said. “I think that’s what a good talk, presentation or, frankly, a good stand-up routine should do.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Perhaps few other people could best describe American Jewish history than Rabbi Gary Phillip Zola. As the executive director of the largest free-standing research center dedicated to American Jewish history, Zola is his own living, breathing historical document. 

At 1 p.m. Wednesday, July 21 in the Amphitheater, Zola will present “American Exceptionalism versus American Jewish Exceptionalism: Actualizing Religious Freedom in U.S. History,” the final Interfaith Lecture Series of Week Four, themed “The Evolving Religious Narrative in America.”

In its 75-year history, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives has had two directors: Marcus himself, who stayed director until he died just short of his 100th birthday, and Zola. 

The archives are housed at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, which Zola said is the longest continuously running rabbinical school in the United States. 

“If you want to write or study or research Jewish life in America, it’s almost a certainty that you’re going to need to come to the American Jewish Archives,” Zola said.

Beyond this certainty, students at the college, which include those seeking a doctorate in American Jewish history, are required to use the archives as part of their curriculum. In addition, the archives serve the public and house researchers from around the world, he said. 

As executive director, Zola said he ensures he promotes the archives, encourages people to donate materials and helps raise money.

Uniquely, Zola is also the college’s Edward M. Ackerman Family Distinguished Professor of the American Jewish Experience and Reform Jewish History. Often, libraries or archives are led by librarians or administrators, but Zola is a historian and professor. 

And he loves it.

“Many people, when they think of the word ‘archives,’ they conjure up in their minds this image of a dingy closet with stacks and stacks of boring paper, and it doesn’t sound very interesting or exciting to many people,” he said. “For those of us who love history and who love learning about the past, the archives literally make you feel as though you’re in a candy store.”

Not a day goes by where Zola doesn’t find a new piece of history, he said. Even if the archives have housed a document for years, it may not be used during that period until it is needed to shine light on a topic. 

“There’s hardly a day that goes by that you don’t find amazing material,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s earth-shattering in that it really is transformational in its importance. 

“Other times, it’s little nuggets of fascinating material that are extraordinary.”

One of the most significant documents at the archives, Zola said, is the Riegner Telegram, which he said is accepted by scholars to be the first communications from Europe to the U.S. that Hitler’s Nazi regime was killing Jews.

Sent on Aug. 8, 1942, this was the first message notifying Americans of actual executions, despite the fact that Americans at the time knew of the ongoing oppression and brutalization of Jews in Europe, Zola said.

“When you look at that, and you see the original and look at that, it’s just overwhelming,” he said.

Zola will use several historical documents in his lecture to help illustrate his lecture’s purpose, which he said is to highlight one of the American Jewish community’s most important contributions to the U.S.

The community, Zola said, has played a significant role in making the country follow through on statements and promises made in America’s founding documents.

“American Jews have been uniquely positioned, though we’re a tiny minority, to have been and continue to be leading advocates for the expansion of civil rights and of liberty, equality and pursuit of happiness in America,” he said.

For anyone who visits the archives, even those who don’t read or study history, it is always an overwhelming experience to see preserved, important documents, Zola said. Perhaps, however, nobody appreciates it more than the living, breathing historical document himself.

“I love studying the past,” he said. “I love these documents.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Every day is an adventure for Michael Martin. 

As the executive director for Native American Community Services of Erie and Niagara Counties, which he said is a growing, multifaceted organization serving both Native and non-Native populations, no day is the same and each day brings its own set of challenges.

“I see challenges as opportunities,” Martin said. “Ever since I became executive director (in 2004), we’ve been able to grow the organization and ensure its sustainability. We’ve been innovated in terms of creating new approaches and programs to solving long-standing issues and underlying factors. It’s exciting.”

At 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 20 in the Amphitheater, Martin will present his lecture, “The Doctrine of Discovery: An Unjust Imperative, Born Out of Religious Justification — A Presentation of the Tragic and Lasting Consequences of Supremacy,” the second Interfaith Lecture for Week Four’s theme of “The Evolving Religious Narrative of America.”

Originally from Western New York, Martin left for another career after working at NACS in college. He returned so his son could be raised in the same community as him, and he ultimately came full circle with his return to NACS. 

Despite his organization’s efforts, community members — particularly the Native community — still face intergenerational challenges, Martin said.  

“Over the last decade, we’ve put a focus on not just solving systematic issues, but trying to root out and address underlying factors in the community. And we found out for other communities, too, a lot of times there are these intergenerational impacts,” he said.

In 2009, Martin said, NACS created a documentary, “Unseen Tears,” which focused on those intergenerational and underlying issues in Western New York.

He said understanding those factors helps people understand “why we are the way we are.”

With facing historical trauma, Martin said one of the key questions, which he will discuss in his presentation, is not asking what is wrong with somebody, but what happened to them. 

“Everyone has a story, and all populations of people have had experience with trauma, current and historical,” Martin said. “And, some people have a different resiliency. Some can handle trauma, and for others a simple thing can send them into chaos.”

Learning about those factors made a huge difference, Martin said, in programs and approaches in addition to outcomes for the people NACS serves. 

Martin said NACS, in a way, “wants to put itself out of business” by solving these underlying issues. But, it has added new programming that goes beyond this mission, such as language programming and teaching tradition concepts. 

“It’s not just about resolving underlying issues, but building community and creating opportunity and creating pride in traditional and cultural teachings,” he said.

In his lecture, Martin said he will discuss the consequences of supremacy from the Doctrine of Discovery, which Christians gave as justification for taking land that didn’t belong to them, dating back to the 1400s. The Supreme Court still uses it today to justify some rulings, Martin said.

Martin hopes people realize there are more similarities between humans than differences, especially when it comes to basic needs. 

“I’m looking for opening people’s eyes and hearts and get us back to the original teachings of how we were supposed to be together as humans,” he said. “If we trace all of our creation stories back, we probably all got those same original instructions.”

In addition, Martin hopes that understanding the Doctrine of Discovery and its impact will help people be more informed to make more just choices.

“We need to root ourselves going forward in the future around our common humanity,” he said.

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Eboo Patel is perhaps one of the most respected people in America’s interfaith community in the present day.

Having served on President Barack Obama’s inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Patel is also the founder and president of the Interfaith Youth Core, a national nonprofit which cooperates with higher education and corporations to create the next set of leaders in a religiously diverse world, according to its website. 

At 1 p.m. Monday, July 19 in the Amphitheater, Patel will present his lecture “Interfaith America,” the first of three Interfaith Lectures in Week Four, themed “The Evolving Religious Narrative of America.”

“No one is better qualified to present this aspect of America’s future,” said Chautauqua Institution Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno. 

With the IFYC, Patel oversees and organizes what he called its big vision.

“A lot of my job is strategy,” Patel said. “It’s articulating the big vision. It’s inspiring other people around the big vision, and the big vision is interfaith America — the welcoming of America’s diverse religious identities and the nurturing of cooperation between them.”

Patel loves every aspect of pursuing this big vision.

“I love the day-to-day of my work, the strategizing, the figuring out how to team the right staff members together,” he said. “I love giving talks, I love writing — I’m just about to publish my fifth book — and I love the big vision. I love the idea of being able to contribute to something called interfaith America, which I think is the next chapter in the great story of America’s religious diversity.”

Patel’s forthcoming book, We Need to Build: Lessons From the Field For Those Who Want To Forge A Diverse Democracy, is out next May. He is also a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, with his blog titled “Conversations on Diversity.”

Not only is Patel a regular Chautauqua visitor, he said, there is a quote of his painted the wall of the Colonnade’s hallway, even though Patel doesn’t remember what it says. 

“It’s a wonderful community,” Patel said. “It takes religion seriously as a part of the human enterprise and civic enterprise of the U.S., and that’s really important.”

Rovegno finds it fortunate Patel and Chautauqua have maintained a strong relationship.

“Chautauqua has been blessed to have (Patel) and IFYC as valuable partners in our interfaith work since we held our Chautauqua International Interfaith Conference at the Ismaili Center in London in 2005, during which Eboo first joined us in this ever-expanding part of our mission,” Rovegno said.

In his lecture, Patel said he will discuss the history of Judeo-Christians, his vision of interfaith America and how Chautauqua might model his vision.

“I would like people to view themselves as creators,” Patel said, “to recognize we’re at an exciting hinge point in the history of religious diversity in America.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

The importance of reading and storytelling is on Cherie Harder’s mind. She believes the way we read and share stories needs to change for the greater good.

At 1 p.m. Wednesday, July 14 in the Amphitheater, Harder will present this idea in her lecture “Reading for Justice,” the last of the Week Three Interfaith Lecture Series for the theme of “The Ethical Foundations of a Fully Functioning Society.”

Harder is the president of the Trinity Forum, which is “contributing to the renewal of society by cultivating and promoting the best of Christian thought, and helping leaders to think, work, and lead wisely and well,” according to its website. 

She compared it to the Aspen Institute, but with a Christian view. 

“We try to provide a space for leaders to wrestle with the big questions in life, but in the context of faith,” she said. “We try to provide a platform for the best in Christian thought leadership. We host discussions, Socratic forums, lectures and conversations with people wrestling with big ideas and trying to do so Christianly.”

Before this role, Harder held a series of important roles in Washington, D.C. She served as a policy adviser for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist; special assistant to President George W. Bush; the director for policy and projects for First Lady Laura Bush; and senior counselor to the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

One of the questions of the week for her is, “What’s the relation between virtue, excellence and character in personal and societal happiness?” 

She said her past work helped her answer such a question.

“Whether coming at it from a position of legislation on Capitol Hill or at the National Endowment for the Humanities, we’re essentially trying to find the best of the humanities — the best of literature and letters which speaks to what it means to be human and what the good life is,” Harder said.

Comparing her time in Washington to the present day, Harder said reading and storytelling is more challenging now than in the past. She said reading is on a decline, which has implications for individuals and society at large.

“It seems harder to sustain the idea of a shared story that we are all a part of and that we all contribute to and have a place in,” she said. “That, I think, is one of the factors behind our increased division, polarization and instability to each other.”

Harder said stories that answer the aforementioned question help shape ideas of justice in ways that argument or laws may not. A couple examples could be Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, she said, noting that they shape ideas of what is just, virtuous and what it means to live in a flourishing society. Nowadays, she said, people read less, and have fewer shared stories.

“It’s more the sort of reading one does with a text or tweet where you’re essentially strip-mining for information and reacting, as opposed to imaginatively entering into something,” she said.

Harder expects Chautauquans will already understand the value of reading and storytelling, but she hopes they take away from her talk reading’s formative influence.

“As we as a country … try to navigate a liberal democracy that is increasingly diverse, (we need) unifying stories for coherence and flourishing,” she said. “Deep reading actually is an important part of that.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Born on the south side of Chicago and educated in American studies at Yale University, Heather McGhee was in her early 20s when she joined Demos, a think tank which pursues a just, inclusive and multiracial democracy, according to its website. 

When she joined, in 2002, Demos was just a startup. By the time McGhee was 33, in 2014, she was its president. Then, a few years later, she stepped down. She wanted to do some traveling. 

“I set out on a journey over the course of three years across the country from California to Mississippi to Maine and back again, trying to answer the questions of, not just how (the U.S.) became so unequal, but why,” McGhee said. 

This turned into McGhee’s 2021 book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, a New York Times bestseller.

“My opening question in the book is, ‘Have you ever wondered why it is that Americans can’t seem to have nice things?’ ” she said. “And by nice things, I don’t mean drive-by espresso or self-driving cars, I mean universal child care and health care and reliable modern infrastructure and wages that keep workers out of poverty — the kinds of things that other societies with a fraction of our wealth are able to figure out.”

At 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 13 in the Amphitheater, McGhee will present her lecture, named after her book, part of Week Three’s Interfaith Lecture Series, “The Ethical Foundations of a Fully Functioning Society.”

McGhee still serves as a trustee emeritus at Demos. She helped lead Demos to the national level, including two Supreme Court visits: a confirmation hearing in 2017 and arguing for voting rights in 2018. McGhee regularly appears on NBC and MSNBC programs like “Meet the Press” and “Morning Joe.”

Her book uses economics statistics, but it is more about the stories of others, she said. 

“It is propelled by dozens of human stories of people who lost their homes in the Great Recession, workers trying to unionize, community members taking on big polluters, and all finding that racial division is a common thread to our biggest challenges.”

McGhee said these challenges cause enough dysfunction in politics that everyone pays a price, including white people, hence the second part of her book’s title. It was also the subject of a TED Talk from TEDWomen in December 2019 that now has 2.3 million views.

“It is my attempt to challenge the zero-sum paradigm that would suggest there’s an ‘us versus them,’ and what’s good for us is bad for them,” she said. “I think we all lose out when we allow zero-sum thinking and discriminatory systems to distort our collective wellbeing.”

She hopes that people take away a sense of optimism from her lecture in that people can feel empowered when coming together across racial lines. It can be overwhelming to not understand why people keep sabotaging each other, making the country more divided, she said.

“I hope people take away a sense of how we got into this mess,” she said.

McGhee draws inspiration from her mother, Gail C. Christopher — a woman with her own distinguished history in health and public policy. 

Originally, McGhee said she approached the book from an economic policy standpoint, but she changed viewpoints when considering her mother’s history in policy and working on issues of racial healing.

McGhee dedicates her work to her 3-year-old, multiracial son. 

“He’s part of a generation that has no racial majority,” she said. “I think we owe it to that generation to figure this out … and make an America that is worthy of our people.”