Interfaith Lecture Recaps

Is religion the opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx said? Rabbi Naomi Levy doesn’t think so.

“Religion can wake you up to your power,” Levy told her virtual lecture audience at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 11. “It can spark uprisings. It can inspire revolutions. It can heal your soul. … The Bible is a dangerous book to anyone who wants to keep you down.”

Levy pre-recorded her lecture, “We Are All Reflections of the ONE: Bridging Distances Between Souls” in the backyard of her home in Venice Beach, California. The discussion aligned with the Interfaith Lecture Series theme for Week Seven, “The Spirituality of Us.”

Levy is the founder of Nashuva, a Los Angeles-based outreach community for unaffiliated Jews. After graduating from The Jewish Theological Seminary’s Rabbinical School in the first class of women in its history, she became the first female conservative rabbi to lead a congregation on the West Coast. Levy has written four bestselling books, including her 2017 book Einstein and the Rabbi: Searching for the Soul, and through Nashuva she released an album of prayers this summer, “Heaven on Earth: Songs of the Soul.”

When visiting the Museum of the Bible after a Washington D.C. conference she attended in 2019, Levy discovered a version of the Bible that missionaries used specifically for enslaved people. Published in 1807, the Slave Bible was intended to not only “save” enslaved people from the religions that they grew up with, but to oppress them and prevent them from rising up against their masters.

In this Bible, Moses did not exist. No one told the Pharaoh of Egypt, “Let my people go.” For Levy, the entire Book of Psalms was most notably missing as well.

“I lift my eyes to the mountains. Where will my help come from?”

Omitted.

“The Lord is my light, my salvation. Whom shall I fear?”

Not found.

“As we’ve been soul-searching the history of racism and injustice done to the Black community, this Slave Bible stands as a massive spiritual injustice of the highest order,” Levy said. “First, it’s an attempt to muzzle God, to put your hand over God’s mouth.”

For Levy, the power of the Book of Psalms is in Natan Sharansky’s reliance on it during his nine-year imprisonment in the former Soviet Union. In 1977, Sharansky was a Zionist activist who represented Jewish people in the Soviet Union who wanted to leave and move to Israel. The KGB sent him to a gulag for alleged high treason.

He was at first sentenced to 13 years in prison. Throughout that time, in the United States, Levy and other Jewish people protested his imprisonment as well as the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews, who were forced to practice their religion, language and culture in secret.

Sharansky spent hundreds of days in solitary confinement. His wife had given him a black, palm-sized Book of Psalms in Hebrew before he was taken, though he was secular and was not fluent in the language. While guards quickly confiscated it, he insisted it was just a book of old folk songs and begged them for days to give it back.

A guard eventually returned it — the same day he received a telegram from his mother about his father’s death. Sharansky spent over a month logically figuring out the sentences by copying letters in large font. The first sentence he solved in this puzzling translation was: “When I go through the Valley of Death I will fear no evil, because I know you will be with me.”

Occasionally guards would take the book away from him again, and he would go on hunger strikes to get it back. Nine years into his sentence, the United States arranged for his release. But when he was about to board the plane to leave, he realized they did not bring his psalms book and he collapsed in front of the press. He wouldn’t leave without it, and guards went back to retrieve it for him.

“We’ve been given all the verses, all the stories of power and liberation,” Levy said. “But so often we forget their power to help us, especially in times of trouble. Like right now in these days of corona isolation, it’s as if we’ve deleted verses from our minds and carved out a whole new set of tablets out of our fear and our resignation with our own hands.”

Levy said there is a verse for every person and situation, including the ongoing protests against racism and police brutality: “Open for me the gates of justice, and I will enter them and praise you.”

“The missionaries took these out of the Slave Bible, but they’re yours,” Levy said. “They’re here for you, and they’re here for me.”

Whether a person joins a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program or a social movement, whether they start a family or a nonprofit, whether they speak to people or trees, the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor said that while not everyone believes in a god, it is harder to live without the sacredness found in a group.

Taylor described the spirituality a person can seek in a community in her lecture, “Remember That You Are Stardust, and to Stardust You Shall Return.” The lecture was released on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 10. It was the first in the Interfaith Lecture Series theme for Week Seven, “The Spirituality of Us.”

No Q-and-A followed the lecture due to internet connection issues, since Taylor lives in rural Georgia and could not connect to Skype to speak with Vice President and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson. Robinson ended the session by thanking staff who provide upkeep for the virtual lecture experience.

“It was just a living example of how we’re all in this together,” Robinson said.

This was not Taylor’s first time speaking for the Interfaith Lecture Series. Taylor is an Episcopal priest, religions professor, and New York Times bestselling author who has also served as chaplain of the week five times at Chautauqua, and who in 2014 was a recipient of the President’s Medal. Instead of speaking in the Hall of Philosophy this year, Taylor pre-recorded her lecture in the hall of her ironing room.

Her testimony helped me realize that a spirituality of ‘us’ isn’t a luxury item for people who have all their basic needs handled,” Taylor said. “It’s a lifeline for people whose single-propeller modes of being have sputtered at alarming heights, leaving them with nothing but the sound of wind whistling in their ears.”

An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting gave new meaning to “the story of us” for Taylor, who came to celebrate her student’s first year of sobriety. A woman stood up to talk about navigating Step Two — “We came to be aware that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” — as someone who doesn’t believe in a god.

“You are the power greater than myself that can restore me to sanity,” the woman said to the group.

This moment was what first changed Taylor’s view on the spiritual power of a group.

“Her testimony helped me realize that a spirituality of ‘us’ isn’t a luxury item for people who have all their basic needs handled,” Taylor said. “It’s a lifeline for people whose single-propeller modes of being have sputtered at alarming heights, leaving them with nothing but the sound of wind whistling in their ears.”

While Taylor said “the book” in her religion sometimes comes before the people to a fault, it’s also where she and others like her draw from for strength and lessons. The Bible taught her the idea that everyone is made in the image of God.

But meeting and knowing people expands that image in Taylor’s mind and wrecks her idols.

“Without you, my image of God would be way too small and look too much like me,” Taylor said. “Without you, I might be tempted to believe that a single reading of scripture is adequate, or a single view of history complete. I might go on thinking my view is a normal one, that my skin is a neutral color, that I don’t see race, gender, class, religion.”

In the same sentence that grants humans the image of God, people are also tasked to take care of creation, to “lord” over it.

“Not to do whatever the hell they want with it, but to care for it the way the capital ‘L’ Lord would,” Taylor said, “because that’s the image in which they have been made.”

She said humans have abused what they were supposed to protect. Dominion was about making a home in the garden, naming the animals, eating green things and taking responsibility for living things that also had the living breath of God — which Taylor said means that the spirituality of “us” goes beyond humans to plants.

This became clear to Taylor when she and her husband, Ed, who thrives in a garden, moved from the city to the country 30 years ago. While still living in their city lot, Taylor would find her husband’s pole beans growing up the mailbox, a row of corn growing on the curb, broccoli in the flowerbeds and tomato plants in the window boxes. Once, she yanked trumpet squash vines that had overgrown on the front porch railing without telling him.

“You would have thought I drowned kittens,” Taylor said. “Because all those plants, they were people to Ed. They had a history, destiny, the wish to be fruitful and multiply.”

When they had to build a well before their house was built, she realized that the neighboring trees and other life would have to give up water for their cooking and cleaning. She pledged not to waste it.

“To this day, the water that comes out of my faucet is as sacred as air to me, as sacred as blessed bread and wine,” she said. “It’s my daily communion in a ‘spirituality of us.’”

Now, in the country, Ed has plenty of room. Taylor said people often ask her if she gets lonely in the country. While the question revolves around people rather than other kinds of beings, she’s never felt lonely surrounded by nature — by bird voices, the touch of wet grass on her legs and the crowd of honey bees in petunias, but also by raccoons who have killed 12 of her chickens in one night, the dogs that killed a baby rabbit and the owl that carried away one of her cats.

“I guess you could decide that a spirituality of us ought to rise above that somehow, or try to change it,” Taylor said. “Right now, I’m just trying to see my own predation and keep it in check.”

The Bible also states that God loves the stranger as much as the tribe. Deuteronomy calls for not only the orphan and the widow to be taken in and cared for, but also the  able-bodied stranger.

“It’s because the stranger doesn’t have anyone,” Taylor said. “Like the widow and the orphan, the stranger’s kinship bonds are hanging by a thread. … So the divine arm goes out and draws the stranger in, commanding the tribe to see the likeness, not the difference.”

The Bible also calls for people to devote their life to others. Taylor has understood this as life being a relay instead of a marathon, as she realizes she will not finish everything on her to-do list before she passes.

But calls to take care of others are not just found in Taylor’s religion. She said that a spirituality found in taking care of others can be found in the parent who quits everything to care for a disabled child, the poorly paid health aide who continues working in an infected nursing home while people say goodbye to their families on Zoom, and people who have been protesting for months in the face of tear gas.

The spirituality of “us” transcends religions.

“These high calls came to me through my religion, but they stuck with me because they rang bells that were already in me before I ever joined a church or learned the Lord’s Prayer,” Taylor said. “They ring bells … I hear in other places of worship and study, among other people who are so much like me.”

However, Taylor said that religious exclusivity has instilled a fear in some followers and leaders who have sidelined “others” as less than human.

“That’s why I’ve settled for blood and bones as what makes us, ‘us,’” Taylor said.

But to include plants in “us,” she said she settles on “life” as a good definition. While searching years ago for a new creation story that encompassed all others from a scientific view, she found her answer in bone composition. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said that the chemical elements of bones and all life came from literal stardust.

“When I take in this 14-billion-year-old history, which has more good guesses in it than facts, one of the more stunning reveals is that in us, the universe has become conscious of itself,” Taylor said.

The story of creation in the first Book of Genesis is not science, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller said. That doesn’t mean it should be discounted.

“It’s a religious teaching that proposes to inject meaning and value into existence,” Seidler-Feller said.

Quoting mystics, Seidler-Feller described Orthodox Judaism’s perspective on creation for Week Six’s Interfaith Friday at 2 p.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 7. Vice President of Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson joined him in a live conversation. Robinson addressed audience questions, submitted through the www.questions.chq.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020, and his own.

Seidler-Feller is director emeritus of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA, where he has served as executive director for 40 years. He was the founding director of the Hartman Fellowship for Campus Professionals and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. Seidler-Feller still serves as a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute North America and the Wexner Heritage Foundation. He also served as a rabbinic consultant for Barbra Streisand in the 1983 film “Yentl.”

In his lecture, Seidler-Feller quoted 15th-century Spanish rabbi Isaac Arama who wrote, “If the Torah was a science book, I have better and more comprehensive books of science on my shelf.”

“In other words, why would anyone want to reduce a tome of challenging, transformative, immoving and edifying — and sometimes troubling — ideas into a text full of scientific data and historic facts?” Seidler-Feller said. “The Bible answers the question of, ‘Why? And for what purpose?’”

The Book of Genesis outlines that nature, while humans are tasked with overseeing it, is a creation of God just as humans are. And humans, while all created in God’s image, are also all unique. In the Mishnah and Sanhedrin 4:5, it says that Adam was created for holy greatness. So whenever the blood of Adam is shed, it is also a crime against God.

It also calls for equality. When a master kills his slave, he has murdered a fellow image of God. And there is a noun in Chapter 2 in Genesis, usually translated as “rib,” that is later translated in Exodus as “side,” which suggests that God split Adam in two to produce Eve as an equal female, rather than being fashioned from a rib. Seidler-Feller said that this introduces sexual equality as a religious revelation.

Seidler-Feller also said that some Jews have chosen to become vegetarian because of two quotes. Chapter 1 of Genesis reads, “See I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that you see bearing fruit. They shall be yours.” In other words, humans should avoid the killing of God’s creatures. 

And in Chapter 11, Isaiah said, “The wolf shall lie down with the calf. The beast and prey, together with the little boy to herd them. The calf shall graze, their young shall lie down together and the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw.”

But the creation of the world in seven days should not be taken literally, Seidler-Feller said.

“The lesson is not that the world was created in six days, and then God rested on the seventh and therefore we must celebrate the Sabbath,” Seidler-Feller said. “Rather, because the Torah has innovated the Sabbath and added a day onto the Mesopotamian six-day cycle that neatly fit into this 30-day month, the Torah wants to sanctify and immorialize this seven-day pattern and present it to humanity as a divine mandate.”

Seidler-Feller said this was regarded as innovative at the time, because no other belief had instituted a day of rest for all, including those enslaved. This goes against the concept of a life’s purpose to toil, while the Torah called for people to fulfill their life’s purpose in the name of God. The Sabbath is meant to be a day of spiritual creativity — ideas, learning, meditation and contemplation.

In the past, the Roman hegemony accused the Jews of ruining the economy. And Seidler-Feller said that the pressure to work without end persists to this day. When he first started working at UCLA and had a group of students introduce themselves, he realized they characterized themselves by their work.

“They were stuck,” he said. “They couldn’t talk about themselves. They understood their value, their identity as being linked to their professional achievements.”

Making time for shalom — for peace — on Shabbat, Seidler-Feller said, allows people to think about how they can bring peace into the other days of the week.

“We need the Sabbath revolution more than ever,” Seidler-Feller said, “not just for Jews. It’s a day of renewal, of overcoming our total subjugation to our insatiable appetite for more, and our complete submission to technology.”

At the same time, there must be a return to physical creation on the other days of the week.

“We are humanly incapable of living on a purely spiritual level,” Seidler-Feller said.

The Habdallah, which marks the end of the Sabbath, marks the distinction between the spiritual and the physical and reintroduces humans to the holy task of building the world.

Both Seidler-Feller and Robinson agree that God made humans as “co-creators” to enhance what God is or what the world is. While Robinson said that most people he spoke with were shocked by this, Seidler-Feller said this was a common belief among Jewish mystics throughout history.

“There is a sense that God wants humanity,” Seidler-Feller said. “God needs humanity.”

In Genesis, Seidler-Feller said, the lesson in Chapter 2 is that it is not good for humans to be alone, or for God to be alone. Robinson agreed.

“One without the other would be a distortion,” Robinson said.

Seidler-Feller said it’s important to look beyond technicalities of the text. In the Garden of Eden with the forbidden fruit, he said the original sin was not the classic story of human violation and punishment but the loss of innocence — it was inevitable for humans to eat the fruit. Through creation, there is some destruction.

“If we build a house, we destroy some trees,” Seidler-Feller said.

The story, he said, is a lesson to balance destruction and creation as well as a lost dream that is meant to be held as an aspiration to return— in small steps — to harmony with God.

Part of that is to maintain community and connections with others. Both Seidler-Feller and Robinson said that attendance in faith groups they led had increased while using Zoom, highlighting the need to care for relationships and communities. This touched on Seidler-Feller’s final message.

“It is not good for a human being to be alone,” Seidler-Feller said.

Columbia University’s Ari Goldman thinks that without religious literacy, a journalist runs the risk of misinforming the public.

“When done right, journalism can educate and inform the public,” Goldman said. “When done wrong, it can spread falsehoods and reinforce stereotypes.”

Goldman recorded his lecture, “From Church Stories to Obituaries, Journalists Need Religious Literacy,” on the lawn of his bungalow in the Catskill Mountains on July 26. 

The lecture was released at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 6, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the Week Six Interfaith Lecture Series theme “Lessons in the School House.” Audience members submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal or on Twitter with #CHQ2020.

Religion news isn’t for the religion pages anymore,” Goldman said. “A sophisticated reporter knows that religion has a role in many of the great debates in our society, from abortion, to gay marriage, to healthcare, to housing, to education.”

Goldman had a consistent byline in The New York Times before he began teaching his Covering Religions course at Columbia University. He said that journalists often struggle with understanding the diversity within religions, much less the difference between them.

“People know about their own religion — well, sometimes — but people rarely know about others,” Goldman said.

In 2010, British TV host Kay Burley confused Joe Biden’s Ash Wednesday ashes for a bruise on his forehead.

“I’m a bad Catholic,” Burley said after producers informed her while she was still on air.

It’s just one example of why journalists need to understand religions to do full reporting. Goldman’s students have gone on to report on religion for the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and other publications. For 12 years, his student Maria-Paz López covered the Vatican for La Vanguardia in Spain and is now the publication’s Berlin correspondent.

Goldman’s students have also gone on to cover other topics, including economics, health care, foreign policy, the White House and education, but he said they do so knowing the importance of religion in all parts of life.

“Religion news isn’t for the religion pages anymore,” Goldman said. “A sophisticated reporter knows that religion has a role in many of the great debates in our society, from abortion, to gay marriage, to healthcare, to housing, to education.”

Goldman referred to Harvard University’s Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, who he studied with at Harvard Divinity School. She repeats this phrase often: “If you know one religion, you don’t know any.”

“She is telling us not to make assumptions about one religion based on our own,” Goldman said. 

Catholic Confirmation is not the same as a Jewish Bar Mitzvah. While some religions consider hands joined together as prayerful, Buddhists consider them to represent the meeting of the finite and infinite.

The former cornerstone of journalism, Goldman said, was objectivity — but he teaches empathetic objectivity in his courses. Communion reported objectively is people eating wafers. With empathetic objectivity reporting, the journalist communicates that for the believer, this is a sacred act of taking the body of Christ.

The Scripps Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio, has funded his class trips to Israel, Palestine, Russia, and Ukraine, where his students cover beat topics that center on different religious groups. His students have covered the last three Popes.

His spring 2020 class had planned to visit Louisiana and Mississippi to cover the diversity of religion in the U.S. South. But Columbia University shut everything down a few days before they were slated to leave on March 13.

The class pivoted to instead cover religious groups coping with the pandemic. His favorite story that came out of the course was a story on virtual water baptisms.

“The news changes, and we have to change, too,” Goldman said.

Goldman noted the increase of obituaries written worldwide with the onset of COVID-19. When deaths in the United States hit 100,000, The New York Times published 1,000 names of those who had died by coronavirus in the United States on the front page and started a new section, “Those We’ve Lost to the Coronavirus,” which is similar to the “Portraits of Grief” obituary section they published after 9/11.

And in China, independent blogs and news sites covered the deaths of workers on the front lines of the virus. Italy published between 10 and 12 pages of obituaries per day, and papers in Brazil and South Africa followed suit.

Along with empathetic objectivity, there was one last lesson Goldman said he imparts on his students.

“Every life is a story worth telling,” Goldman said.

On the day of the Chabad of Poway synagogue shooting on April 27, 2019, the late Lori Gilbert Kaye was there to sing the mourner’s kaddish in honor of her late mother.

“(The shooter) killed someone who could’ve been me,” Linda K. Wertheimer said. “I am a Jew. I go to the temple every morning to sing the mourner’s kaddish.”

Wertheimer gave her lecture, “From Fear to Hope: Childhood Experiences with Anti-Semitism/How to Teach Respect,” as part of Week Six’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Lessons in the School House.” After the lecture, which took place on Wednesday, Aug. 5, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Wertheimer answered questions from Vice President of Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson, who delivered questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020.

In 2017, Wertheimer was a writer-in-residence for a week at Chautauqua, but her earliest memory on the grounds is visiting with her parents to see Margaret Mead speak. Wertheimer is a veteran journalist, essayist and award-winning education writer. Her lecture pulled from personal experiences and cross-country reporting on religion in schools for her book, Faith Ed: Teaching about Religion in an Age of Intolerance.

“I know when it comes to religious bigotry, Jews are not the only target,” Wertheimer said. “Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus have also faced harassment because they are often seen as the Other in our predominantly Christian country.”

Muslims and Sikhs have been targeted as part of Islamophobia post-9/11. In 2012, six Sikhs were shot in a Wisconsin temple.

When Wertheimer’s family moved from New York to northeast Ohio in 1974, her personal experiences with religious discrimination would intensify in the Van Buren school system.

“All I wanted was to fit in,” Wertheimer said, reading from her book.

But within a week of attending her new elementary school, someone that Wertheimer only knew as the “church lady” cornered both Wertheimer and her brother. The church lady walked into Wertheimer’s class weekly to talk about Jesus, with figures on a flannel board. Students then raised their hands to talk about Jesus’ effect on their lives. Then they sang a song — about Jesus.

Paid by local Protestant churches, the church lady and others like her visited different schools to preach to elementary school classes. When Wertheimer’s mother asked the superintendent to ask the school board to stop these classes, the school board vetoed the request. Her parents debated on whether to pursue legal action until later that same week, when the local KKK organization had set fire to a cross in the front yard of a Black household.

Wertheimer’s teacher would sit with her in another room when the church lady came to the class. But one day, her teacher told her to sit in a broom closet and left her there until it ended. After her mother complained, Wertheimer was directed to sit in the library.

“It was hard enough being the new kid,” Wertheimer wrote. “Now, I was subject to regular interrogations by some of my peers.”

One of her classmates asked her why she didn’t stay for the church lady’s lessons. When Wertheimer told her classmate that she was Jewish, they didn’t know what that meant. Wertheimer was in elementary school at the time and couldn’t articulate it, either.

She knew less about what Judaism was and more about what her Jewishness was not in relation to Christianity. A youth minister would invite students to youth group events during lunch. Pastors led prayers in Easter and Christmas school assemblies.

At 12 years old, Wertheimer convinced her parents to let her quit Hebrew school on Sundays. Only two or three other Jewish families lived in the same town as them. The two closest synagogues were both an hour away.

When she became old enough to drive and gave a basketball teammate a ride home from practice, her teammate asked her if she believed in Jesus. Wertheimer, still Jewish, said no.

“You’ll end up in hell,” her teammate said.

Shortly after her brother Kevin was cursed at on the bus by other students, one Sunday morning her family woke up to anti-Semitic graffiti on almost every window of their house. Outside, they found a white swastika on her brother’s car, a lime green Barracuda, in the driveway.

When learning about the Holocaust in history class, the teacher read a few paragraphs from the textbook. Wertheimer said he treated it as if it happened hundreds of years ago. A student behind her leaned forward to whisper a slur, and added, “My grandfather was in the KKK.”

As an adult, Wertheimer researched court battles for her book and discovered that in 1948, 25 years before she would meet the church lady, the church lady’s role had been legally outlawed.

In 2010, she read an article about Wellesley Middle School students in the sixth grade who visited a Boston mosque as a field trip for their Global Beliefs course. A few students had been filmed actually participating in the praying when they were just there to observe.

The school scheduled another mosque visit in the next Global Beliefs course, but moved it to a less populated suburban mosque that wasn’t used for prayer during the visit. Wertheimer was able to sit in on the field trip.

“This was not indoctrination,” Wertheimer said. “This was the kind of education I had wished for my peers and myself in Ohio.”

It wasn’t just a history class. It dealt with current events and dispelled stereotypes of different religions. Wertheimer interviewed students during the course and subsequent years after they had completed it to measure the course’s effectiveness. At minimum, it delivered basic religious literacy. At maximum, it dulled the pain of past bullying that happened to students from minority faiths.

Two years after a Muslim student named Zain Tirmizi took the course, the Boston bombings took place. His family worried about both the victims of the terrorist attack and the likely backlash against Muslims.

And there was, in the form of a substitute teacher’s generalizing comments about Muslims in Tirmizi’s history class. Before Tirmizi spoke up, the substitute said, “Not all Muslims, of course.” The next day, other students told their teacher about it before Tirmizi had a chance to do it himself.

A few years before taking the course, Celia Golod, a Jewish student who was also in Tirmizi’s class, was subjected to a student who wanted to measure her nose. A year after the course, 80 of her classmates attended her bat mitzvah. They knew what the Torah was. They weren’t surprised by the yamakas.

“They had achieved basic religious literacy and could put it to practical use,” Wertheimer said.

In her interviews with people who opposed classes like the one at Wellesley, she said that most critics didn’t want any religion taught in schools out of fear.

Most objected to Islam in particular being taught. Controversy erupted in Lumberton, Texas, when teacher Sharon Peters’ geography lesson included trying on a burka, and in Tampa, Florida, when protests continued a month after Imam Hassan Shibly, who is also a lawyer, was a guest speaker for a religion course.

In Modesto, part of the Bible Belt of California, high school students are required to take a world religions course to graduate. While it’s never been very controversial, the occasional Evangelical Christian family or atheist student does object, but most comply. 

One 14-year-old Pentecostal Christian student in the course was taught in church to shun religious idols — the Modesto teacher lined her windowsill with statues from different religions — and to fear other religions. But she also wanted to get an A in the course. When Wertheimer interviewed her a decade later, the student was no longer so afraid of other religions.

On the day of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, Wertheimer was hesitant to explain it to her 10-year-old son Simon. A few years before, his dad had read My Grandfather Has a Tattoo to Simon before telling him about Simon’s paternal grandmother, who survived the Holocaust and lost her parents and brother to the Nazis.

Wertheimer and her husband want Simon to understand his role in repairing the world, but Simon is now in seventh grade and has gone without religious course offerings.

Wertheimer said there is no way to tell that religious literacy education can prevent violence, but it has a place in condemning it.

“There is clearly no panacea against hate, but if educators don’t teach about world religions and they don’t teach about the dangers of stereotypes, it’s a critical mistake,” Wertheimer said. “As a society, we’ll end up normalizing acts of hate … and we’ll miss the opportunity to empower (children) with education, so they can stand up for the Zains, the Celias and so many other religious minority youths who may face bullying because of their faith.”

With an Italian Roman Catholic mother and a humanist Jewish father, the sometimes-heated religious conversations Benjamin Marcus witnessed between his parents provided “productive tension” that helped him to form his own understanding of his religious identity.

His high school education on religion? Not so much.

“My high school did not prepare me to understand the complexity of religion in American public life, much less the complexity of religion that I was experiencing at home,” Marcus said.

Marcus, a former Presidential Scholar at the Harvard Divinity School and a graduate of the University of Cambridge and Brown University, is a specialist at the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Group. He presented his lecture “Religious Literacy in Public Schools: Embracing Complexity and Tension” at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Aug. 4, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

The lecture aligned with the Week Six theme “Lessons in the School House” for the Interfaith Lecture Series. Maureen Rovegno, Chautauqua Institution’s director of religion, led the subsequent Q-and-A with audience questions submitted through the www.questions.chq.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020.

In his role at the Religious Freedom Center, Marcus has helped to develop religious literacy programs for public schools and universities, as well as institutions including businesses, U.S. government organizations and private foundations.

Marcus said a factor that illustrates the need for religious literacy is the gradual change in the composition of religious people and in what it means to be religious. Following a trend that Chautauquans have discussed for years, a Public Religion Research Institute study reported a growing number of people who don’t identify with a religion.

“Young Americans are living in the most diverse generation in American history,” Marcus said.

Religious beliefs also change over time in social and political values with productive tension. Between 2013 and 2019, both white Evangelicals and Black Protestants experienced a historic dip in opposition to same-sex marriage.

Marcus has seen religious shifts in public opinion affect his own life. Pope Francis’ words, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” convinced Marcus’ Roman Catholic grandfather that he could accept Marcus and his brother as respectively queer and gay without conflict with his beliefs.

But Marcus said that destructive tension has also defined this moment of religious complexity. Hate crime data from organizations including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Southern Poverty Law Center have reported a rise in hate crimes against Jewish and Muslim people since 2013.

The American Academy of Religion hypothesizes that religious illiteracy is what fuels prejudice resulting in violence, and that teaching about religion can help students understand values in civic life and reduce this threat.

Evidence is found in a study by scholars Emile Lester and Patrick Roberts, who surveyed Modesto, California, students in the only district in the nation at the time that offered a religious studies course. They found that while students did not become more or less religious as a result of the course, they did recognize more the rights of others — including those they disagreed with.

Marcus said that there is also a disconnect in Americans’ understanding of what is legally allowed to be taught in schools. The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark wrote in a majority decision that while state-sponsored devotional Bible reading and prayer recitation is not constitutional, the First Amendment supports a secular study about religion in schools for its literary and historical significance.

“It might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization,” Clark wrote.

Marcus said that Harvard’s Religious Literacy Project, which Judy Beals gave a lecture on a day prior, is an example of an institution working toward expanding a model of teaching that encourages critical thinking through a religious lens. Not only does the model present to students that religions are not only internally diverse and are embedded in culture, but also change over time.

“It’s a comment on how those interpretations or expressions in those traditions are changing over time,” Marcus said.

For example, in the first half of the 19th century, white Christians in the United States were relatively divided about whether the institution of slavery fit into the morality of Christian teachings. They were similarly divided about segregation in the 1960s and now, they have split opinions on mass incarceration.

And the experience of religion does not exist separately from a person’s experience of the world. Marcus defined religious complexity in a model “3B” framework with Diane Moore, who founded Harvard’s Literacy Project. The framework connects how religious and secular beliefs, behavior according to those beliefs and belonging to a religion and other identities connects to the rest of a person’s experience in the world. 

Marcus said sociological research findings commonly report that people are more likely to come across people who are different from them at work or while shopping than at their house of worship. He said the conclusions echo a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. in a 1960 NBC interview.

“I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America,” King said.

The framework doesn’t just identify identity differences, but also maps out how each aspect informs the others in a person’s understanding of their religion. Growing up partially Roman Catholic, Marcus has observed priests commonly tell people looking to ground themselves in the Church to participate in church life through communion and confession. While Catholics center their religion through belonging to a community, Zen Buddhists seek understanding of life truths through seated meditation.

On the other hand, Marcus said that while a culture with customs of bowing to elders informs a person’s relationship to others and with God, external identities outside religion can mold it as well. According to the Rev. James Cone, the greatest source of Black theology is the Black experience, which he said was a life of humiliation and suffering defined by white supremacy.

“In a world awash with religious influence,” Marcus said, religious literacy curriculum done right also provides critical metacognitive thinking skills in reflecting on a student’s own religious identity and place in public life.

But public schools are not yet teaching religious literacy at this desired level. In a Pew Research Center study, Americans on average answered 16 out of 32 factual questions about religions correctly. In comparison, atheists, agnostics, Jewish people and Mormons answered about 20 questions correctly on average.

While basic knowledge of religion is not the only indication of religious education quality, “it is one data point that shows that education about religion falls short in this country,” Marcus said.

Americans also misunderstand what is allowed to be taught in schools. Another Pew study found that while 89% of Americans know that prayer cannot occur in schools, only 36% know that schools are permitted to offer a comparative religion course and 23% know that students can read from the Bible as literature in class.

Teachers also are not widely trained to teach religion in academic and constitutional ways. According to a PDK International Poll, Marcus said a majority of teachers and parents want schools to offer courses on religion and the Bible as literature should be offered as an elective.

“There is no meaningful ideological or political gap in support for such courses,” Marcus said.

However, Marcus did note that Bible-as-literature courses do privilege a set of Judeo-Christian texts that exclude other religions, atheists and agnostics.

Last year, Marcus organized a National Religions Center summit on religious literacy. From the summit’s discussions — between teachers, administrators, district and state coordinators, scholars, professional development providers, religious community members and textbook publishers — a white paper summarized eight action items. It called to expand and strengthen teacher education, while also creating and implementing an outreach strategy to increase the number of educators, institutions and community members who support the study of religion.

“Ultimately, religious literacy education will not thrive unless teachers feel trained and equipped on religion academically and constitutionally,” Marcus said.

Students can also organize and train teachers. Six Maryland students formed SikhKid2Kid, an organization that provides professional development training for teachers on Sikhism. Teachers receive a certificate from their district after going through the program.

But Marcus said religious literacy needs to be embedded at all levels, in public schools, universities and communities, for the sake of understanding one another.

“We have the power to decide whether the complexity of the American religious landscape will be productive and mediated by a loving commitment to one another — as it was for my family — or destructive.”

Judy Beals’ favorite quote from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is also an antithesis to Beals’ pitch for injecting religion into cultural context.

“Diplomats in my era were taught not to invite trouble, and no subject seemed more inherently treacherous than religion,” Albright said.

But Beals brought up several case studies that she said indicated a need for expanded interfaith religious education: the U.S. government’s lack of understanding of Islam spurred the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq; the international community failed to understand the significance of burial practices in West Africa, which caused an isolated Ebola virus to go global; and most Americans learn about religion not from courses, but from movies and TV shows.

“We need to teach religion in schools, but not in the way you think,” Beals said.

Beals proposed teaching religion along with nuanced cultural context in her lecture, “Teaching Religion Through New Eyes,” at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 3.

Beals’ lecture launched Week Six of the Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Lessons in the School House.” Chautauquans submitted questions during the livestream on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, through the www.questions.chq.org portal or on Twitter with #CHQ2020. Vice President for Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson joined Beals to deliver questions in a subsequent Q-and-A.

Beals is an associate director for Harvard’s Religious Literacy Project and is also an experienced human and civil rights attorney, former legislative aide in the U.S. Senate, a former state Assistant Attorney General and a nonprofit CEO.

Mainstream religion courses teach religions as if they are unchanging since inception, Beals said. While learning the basic doctrines, rituals, myths and symbols is still necessary — 66% of Americans in a study knew that the first book in the Bible was the Book of Genesis, but much less that the Dalai Lama was a Buddhist figure — religious education needs to touch on how religions affected past and present events.

“How does learning about the five pillars of Islam teach us about the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan?” Beals said. “The limitations of this are even more apparent when considering history. How can we know anything about Christian attitudes about the Crusades, the Inquisition or Christian support for chattel slavery?”

Beals said along with the negative effects of religion in history, there are also believers that use the same set of values for good.

“Though some Buddhists in Myanmar are involved in the persecution of Rohingya Muslims, others — based on their own Buddhist values and convictions — are opposing those actions,” Beals said. “And while it’s true that Evangelical Christians supported Donald Trump, others did not, including other white Christian Evangelicals. And similarly, many Muslims in Afghanistan and around the world oppose the Taliban. Understanding the diverse reasons of each of these actions is what is really important.”

Teaching religion with a non-devotional approach, which Harvard’s Religious Literacy Project proposes and provides resources for, observes multiple competing perspectives in religions without one superseding the other in importance.

One theme in this curriculum is that religions are not uniform and “internally diverse,” with a center mainstream and believers on the margins.

“Religion is a lived thing,” Beals said. “It is practiced as it is understood and adhered to by its adherents and its followers. And that means it is always changing and evolving. So two communities within the same branch may practice their religion very differently.”

A Catholic Mass in rural Uganda will differ from a Catholic Mass in France, as it would be different in the Philippines or in Latin America, Beals said. In Islam, women in some cultures are not required to wear a veil. Jewish kosher practice can be interpreted in multiple ways.

“Think about how often one hears things like, ‘Buddhists are nonviolent,’ or, ‘Islam promotes terrorism’ or, ‘Christians are socially conservative,’” Beals said. “These kinds of statements, no matter how well-meaning, are always over-broad and they are incorrect. It is too simplistic to capture the rich diversity of religious expression, and it is always something to stop when you hear it.”

Religions also change in response to historical and social conditions based on new opportunities, constraints and challenges framing those religions. While some religions claim to be unchanging over time for the sake of performing authenticity, Beals said that no person or institution remains static over time.

And it doesn’t end after a Mass, Shabbat or meditation concludes. It leaks into how nations shape their calendar and how companies grant holidays from work, as well as art, architecture, food and language. Even the U.S. justice system doesn’t go unscathed, Beals said, as it has direct ties to Calvinist ethics.

“For the practicing and the non-practicing alike, religious stories and allegories — think of the Good Samaritan, the golden rule, Mara and the Buddha, so many others — these are powerful influences of how people respond to adversity in their lives,” Beals said.

COVID-19, Beals said, is one such example of people looking to faith institutions for guidance. Some churches are operating as health care sites while others have become “super spreaders” for the virus. 

“We see a range of responses from faith communities to public health advice around public gatherings and so on. And we see that evolving and changing all of the time,” Beals said. “And frankly, I think religious services and practices will be forever changed by the coronavirus.”

Beals said that religious education should shed light on how religion is a nuanced influence on past and present moral justifications.

“Clearly throughout history and ongoing, religion has functioned to inspire and justify a range of human action, from the heinous to the heroic,” Beals said.

Done right, she said, religious literacy can also help students imagine a more just future and understand the world with religious context. One project where students came up with their own case studies included how Muslim women engage with New York Fashion Week and how Muslim astronauts pray toward Mecca while in space.

“It means they get to ask and are expected to ask the religion question anywhere,” Beals said. “They cannot assume religion is irrelevant to any situation.”

Valarie Kaur said George Floyd and 5-year-old Skylar Herbert, who was the first child to die from COVID-19 in Michigan, died of the same root cause.

“Skylar’s face and George Floyd’s face live side by side in my heart, because the same assumptions that drove the policies that made a little girl like Skylar vulnerable to this virus is the same set of assumptions that kept that white police officer driving his knee into the neck of George Floyd,” Kaur said. “It is the assumption that Black people in this country are disposable.”

Kaur said people could challenge dangerous assumptions in her lecture, “See No Stranger: The Spiritual and Political Force of Revolutionary Love,” which shares the title of her book. She delivered the live lecture at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. It was the last in Week Five’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Feminine Spirit.”

Kaur is a civil rights activist, filmmaker, lawyer and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. Since 2001, when a family friend was the first to die in a post-9/11 hate crime, Kaur has documented hate crimes against Muslim, Arab, South Asian American and Sikh communities.

When President Donald Trump was first elected and hate crimes ballooned above the post-9/11 rate, Kaur said she briefly felt like her work had been undone. But in her book and lecture, she said this moment has been both a time of death and a time of rebirth.

“It feels as though death has won,” Kaur said. “And yet I see glimpses of the world that is desperate to be born.”

Kaur studied the patterns of past protest movements while researching for her book and found patterns of what she calls revolutionary love, for oneself, for enemies and for others. It is best defined by something her grandfather used to say: “Love is dangerous. If I see you as a part of me I don’t yet know … then I must be willing to fight for you and feel grief.”

Kaur said this concept is repeated by indigenous spiritual teachers and prophets of religions and faith practices, including the Sikh Guru Nanek’s “see no strangers,” Abraham’s call to “open our tent to all” in the Old Testament, Jesus’ request to love our neighbors in the New Testament, Mohamed’s call for Muslims to take in the orphan,  and 16th-century Hindu mystic poet Mirabai, who said to love without limits.

“They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us and, therefore, who is worthy of our care and concern,” Kaur said.

When fully realized, this revolutionary love includes a social and political transition. Kaur said three practices she described in her book are most relevant to the present: grieving, raging and reimagining.

Each civil rights movement, from the rights of immigrants, women, indigenous peoples to Black lives, was rooted in solidarity of shared grieving, Kaur said.

“In response to great violence or injustice, this is not the dominant narrative, but you can always see people who rushed in to bury the dead, cut down the lynching noose, or attended the memorials to say, ‘Not in my name,’” Kaur said. “When people have no obvious reason to love each other, (yet) come together to grieve, they can give birth to new relationships — even revolutions.”

Kaur said she is seeing this now, as more white people and non-Black people than she has ever seen before support the Black Lives Matter movement. She sees social progress as cyclical, much like the cycles of pain in childbirth, which brings the outcome closer as pain intensifies.

“This moment, for so many, has felt like 1968. It has felt like 1982,” Kaur said. “But every turn through the cycle, when people rose and grieved together and fought together and raged together and organized together, it created a little bit more space for equality and justice and liberation than there was before.”

Rage is another shared feeling in this moment, Kaur said, that can be used for good. As a woman of color, she had been convinced that the opposite of love was rage, until she decided to break the silence about her sexual assault. When some family members did not want her to be open about this, Kaur’s mother was enraged on her behalf. 

The chemical a mother releases when expressing love is also the chemical released when she aggressively defends her young. But gods and prophets across religions have also expressed divine rage on behalf of the oppressed, like when Jesus flipped the tables of people taking money from others at the temple and the Hindu goddess Kali, who is both feared and loved for her protection of people as the divine mother.

“Divine rage is not vengeance,” Kaur said. “It is to reorder the world.”

Kaur said that white people and those who do not share the same struggles as those being actively oppressed are most responsible to create space for this rage, shield this suffering and help others understand.

Rage used effectively can power a shared reimagining of the world and the institutions that harm people, Kaur said.

“The greatest social reformers not only resisted oppressors. They held up a vision of what the world ought to be,” Kaur said. “Nanek (said) it. Mohamed led it. Jesus taught it. Buddha envisioned it. (Martin Luther King, Jr.) dreamt it. Dorothy Day labored for it. Mandela lived it. Gandhi died for it. Grace Lee Boggs — may we be like her — Grace Lee Boggs fought for it for seven decades. They called for us not only to unseat bad actors but to reimagine the institutions of power and order in the world.”

No matter who is elected, the day after the election, all those disaffected white people who are hailing this presidency as their ‘Great Awakening’ for white supremacy, they are not going anywhere,” Kaur said. “Somebody needs to tend to their wound. I have discovered their aggression is simply a symptom of unresolved grief.”

Beyond protesting, Kaur said people must also consider how they can help institutions in their lives make anti-racist changes, from their workplaces to industries to faith communities, over the next few years.

Reimagining also requires those who are safe and privileged to be able to listen to and love the opponents of those who are oppressed. For her book, Kaur interviewed white supremacists, prison guards, soldiers and her own former abusers.

“Every time I have sat with them, I want to resist, I want to leave. Every impulse in me says, ‘I can’t,’” Kaur said. “But when I stay, and I continue to listen, beneath the slogans and the soundbytes I begin to hear their story — and inside their story, I begin to feel their pain and see their wound.”

Oppressors harm people who are not like them, and Kaur said they do so from a place of pain and cut off their capacity to love as a result. And talking with them shows Kaur how to be a stronger activist in the future, especially in regards to the upcoming election.

“No matter who is elected, the day after the election, all those disaffected white people who are hailing this presidency as their ‘Great Awakening’ for white supremacy, they are not going anywhere,” Kaur said. “Somebody needs to tend to their wound. I have discovered their aggression is simply a symptom of unresolved grief.”

White supremacists, Kaur said, are in denial that the United States never belonged to just them and need help to understand this — especially in light of the projection that in 2045, people of color will outnumber white people in the United States.

“Someone needs to sit with them and do the work with them. It’s probably not going to be me,” Kaur said, who is Sikh. “But it might be you.”

Feminine spirituality, Mirabai Starr said, is a paradox in a world that prioritizes masculine energy and attitudes.

“The feminine inhabits this paradoxical space between form and formlessness, between interconnection and very specific embodied experience,” Starr said. “The masculine spirituality has emphasized this world, this body. Many of our spiritual practices, that most of us take for granted, are actually predicated on this belief in the illusory (feminine) quality of human experience.”

Starr delivered her lecture, “Fierce & Tender Wisdom: Reclaiming Women’s Voices Across Spiritual Traditions” at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 28, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Starr pre-recorded her lecture on July 19 in her Taos, New Mexico, home. Her discussion centered on her book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.

Starr is an international speaker and teacher on contemporary interspiritual dialogue and practice. Her spiritual journey began when she moved to the Lama Foundation at 14 years old and was influenced there by the late interspiritual scholar and teacher Ram Dass and other teachers from faith practices including Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism.

Chautauqua’s Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno led the subsequent Q-and-A with Starr, who called in from her publisher’s recording studio in Boulder, Colorado, where she is recording an audiobook version of Wild Mercy. Audience members submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020. During the Q-and-A, Starr clarified that feminine spirit is not only found in the traditional definition of a woman.

“When I am speaking about feminine spirituality and the sacred feminine, I am speaking about and to the feminine in all of us,” Starr said, including men and other gender expressions.

Starr said the feminine spirituality in all faith practices deals in relationships, emotions, ambiguity and a wild creativity that threatens masculine values of human life.

“We have, for way too long, taken … the prototype for humanity, for humanness, as white maleness,” Starr said. “The white male is the picture, the prototype, for what it is to be human. It’s time to subvert that paradigm, to dismantle it, to allow it to come undone.”

Starr used meditation as an example. Masculine meditation styles “often beat us into submission” while feminine meditation could best be described through the Hindu tradition of Hridaya, or the heart cave, where a meditator looks inward into a sanctuary space where they are able to challenge and let go of false thoughts holding them back.

“Meditation practice becomes a refuge, a sanctuary, a space of refreshment and renewal, and also an intimate coming to know the nature of our own minds so that we don’t take ourselves so seriously when it really counts,” Starr said.

Starr said in Judaism, the faith she grew up in as a child, the Shabbat on Fridays is part of an extended space of celebration that allows for a return to a spiritual space that is inherently feminine.

She said Shabbat allows people “to disentangle from the tyranny of tasks that bosses us around most of the week and allows ourselves to take some time to just be, rather than do.”

Shabbat is a return to the Shekhinah, or an in-dwelling that Starr said is a feminine spirit, which is an internal source that mirrors the unknowable divine presence found everywhere. By joining with the community, people can be realigned with God. She said this was similar to a Taoism teaching which calls for rest, so a person can develop enough patience for dust to settle and to act from a space of deep listening.

This feminine energy does not equate to submissiveness, Starr said, but a powerful silence.

“It is a space that is deeply alive and listens, tuned to the realities of what is,” Starr said.

In Taoism, Tao is something that cannot be fully defined, though some of its aspects outlined in Tao Te Ching teachings can be considered as an eternal mother. It is a classic feminine paradox of both knowing and not knowing.

Starr said Judaism’s command to keep Shabbat holy is similar to Buddhism’s refuge vow, where Buddhists are invited to take refuge in learning about the life of Buddha, Dharma (Buddha’s teachings) and the Sangha, which are teachings from the community of Buddhist practitioners.

God transcends distinctions in many faiths, including Islam, though its texts and prayers primarily use masculine language to describe God. However, Starr said, the names Rahman — mercy — and Rahim — compassion — are both names of God found in all five daily prayers and the Quran.

The root found in both words, rah, means womb.

Starr has always felt drawn to many different faith traditions, but she said now she takes greater care in acknowledging their cultural origins.

“I have always felt drawn to many different faith traditions, but I do so now without the entitlement that I used to carry as a white person in this world, that I could just help myself to the cultural treasures of any tradition that I pleased,” Starr said.

Starr’s award-winning work in creative nonfiction and translations of sacred literature of mystics includes her translations of “The Dark Night of the Soul,” a poem by Saint John of the Cross, and The Interior Castle by Saint Theresa of Ávila. She first came across the two writers when studying Spanish Christian mystic literature in college.

“The Dark Night of the Soul” describes times in life when everything dries up and there is no access to a felt sacred presence, when constructs of the self and its belief systems are deconstructed. With only masculine spirituality, Starr said these moments can feel dark and cold without a feminine spiritual presence.

“‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ is about the liberation (we experience) when we’re able to let go of our sensory and conceptual attachments, to the way we think spiritual life is supposed to be, and have a naked encounter with what is, with love itself,” Starr said.

Saint Theresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle describes the soul as she saw it from a vision — as an interior crystal, a castle with many sacred spaces inside. Theresa detailed a three-part journey of Christian mystical experience: purification, illumination and union. Purification under masculine scrutiny is defined as the task of fixing oneself to be worthy of God’s love, while the feminine acknowledges the catastrophes that naturally occur in life and calls people to show up fully in those moments.

Starr herself has found that traumatic events of loss, including the death of her brother when she was 7, her boyfriend at 14, and the death of her own 14-year-old daughter in 2001 when she was 40 years old, catapulted her spirituality into a transformation each time.

“Grief empties us,” Starr said, and allows room for a person to be an instrument for peace.

All faith traditions have a feminine spirit, so they need women as teachers to light the way, Starr said. Starr said that people, regardless of what faith or faiths they call home, should seek guidance from women teachers they know and also seek out those they may not — including those who are young, old and especially women of color, who Starr said have been radically silenced in traditions around the world.

“If you can’t find them, create them,” Starr said.

Equality. “Good event, bad event. Who knows?”

Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister framed each expansion of women’s legal rights with this question. While women gained new legal freedoms over time, remaining social and legal restrictions would keep the full expression of those freedoms just out of reach. 

After (white) women in the United States gained the right to vote in 1920, women wouldn’t be allowed to serve on juries until the 1970s. And after being encouraged to work in male-dominated fields during World War II, many were forced to give up these jobs when the war ended.

Chittister spoke at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, July 27, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. She discussed topics such as equality and its impacts at both national and global levels in her lecture “A Woman’s Life: A Good Event/Bad Event World.” She pre-recorded the lecture on July 24 in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she resides.

When Chittister was 14, she found three books on spirituality authored by women in her high school library, including a book of poems by an unnamed nun from Stanbrook. 

Now, after experiencing extensive discrimination as a woman in her own career as a nun and former Catholic high school teacher, Chittister is an award-winning author of 60 books and an international lecturer.

Chittister kicked off Week Five’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Feminine Spirit,” with a story about a farmer and his son. With each failure and success in his life — losing his horse, the horse returning with a horde of wild horses for the farm, a wild horse crippling his son and his son not dying in war as a result of his condition — the farmer said, “Good event, bad event. Who knows?” in response to his neighbors’ questions.

Chittister said this can also describe the constant give-and-take of women’s rights. When the Equal Pay Act of 1963 passed, companies worked around its requirements by giving men and women the same job responsibilities with a different job title and a higher wage for the man. This loophole wasn’t resolved until 2009 with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Similar roadblocks occurred with Title VIII, which opened up collegiate programs for women. As many women as men attended college by 1980, then women surpassed men in doctoral degrees by 2004.

But promotion and wage opportunities have not increased along with higher education. To this day, women reach their peak earning point at 40 years old with an average of $60,000 annually. Men in comparison peak at 65, earning $102,000 a year on average.

“Women got the jobs, but they didn’t get the money,” Chittister said.

Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women who make $7.25 per hour, a non-negotiable federal rate (though this varies by state). While working 40 hours a week at this rate, a single mom and two kids would be $8,000 short of a livable wage.

The United States is also one of the worst developed countries for women. In 2019, National Geographic ranked the United States as one of the worst countries in the developed world for women due to less political, economic and social opportunities and heightened personal, physical and psychological abuse which occurs despite legal protections.

“Men do not really respect women,” Chittister said. “We have found out they harass them. And when women get a job at the highest level, they too often find that the job depends not on their talents but on their sexualization. You don’t believe me? I wouldn’t believe me either. Why don’t you leave here and ask the Weinsteins, and the Aileses, and the Epsteins, and the Cosbys, and the media, and the number of offices we’ve had to empty because women weren’t safe six feet away from the door?”

Chittister said this is not just a problem of the working and domestic worlds of the United States, but also in the global shadow economy of human trafficking.

“Why don’t you ask the little girls on the roadsides out there now who are being trafficked for pleasure, left in poverty, used up and thrown away while we do little-to-nothing except maybe pretend that we don’t see them at all on Super Bowl Sunday?” Chittister said.

Chittister then cited a Pew Research Center poll which reported that 40% of women under 30 want to leave the United States.

“Our daughters have figured out that they are neither safe nor valued here,” Chittister said.

Chittister said that above all, women everywhere need education. Women make up two-thirds of the world’s illiterate. And women in many developing countries still need freedom over their own finances and marriages, as in choosing who they want to marry and gaining the right to divorce someone if needed. Forty-nine countries lack domestic abuse laws while women killed by a domestic partner make up 47% of homicides worldwide.

“Men kill women the way they kill animals,” Chittister said.

Chittister said that religions like Christianity — despite Genesis calling for men and women, both created in God’s image, to take responsibility for dominion over the world — that enshrine male gods and establish male values play a part in the patriarchy’s oppression of women.

“This moral sickness is a sickness of the soul,” Chittister said.

While the U.S. Constitution and subsequent amendments are supposed to protect the rights of women and other vulnerable groups, Chittister said that presidential executive orders and the Supreme Court have been stripping away rights for women.

“(The) Constitution is being shredded for its lack of specificity,” Chittister said.

The federal government’s lack of respect for women is presented on a global stage by maintaining trade relationships with countries who enslave women in open contract work.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Chittister said. “We have simply allowed it to be like this.”

Chittister cited the Rule of Saint Benedict from the sixth century, which was the first document in the West to define human relationships. Written in a world defined by male authority and rule, Benedict not only defined appropriate behavior of benevolent rulers to be nonviolent, non-dominant and non-authoritarian — the antithesis of Roman men who ruled the Western world at the time — but also outlined women to have similar agency.

This document outlined eight corollaries for both men and women to follow, which throughout called for men to stop putting themselves above women, who also need to speak up for their needs.

Chittister said these attitudes can be boiled down into four behaviors that need to be happen to make space for equality and in turn, a better world: Men need to listen to women, women need to speak up for their needs, men need to stop “blustering commands” at women, and women need to be treated like fully functioning adults.

Chittister said multiple times that women should not tolerate unacceptable behavior by men in their marriages, workplaces or anywhere in the world. She ended her lecture with one last warning.

“The patience of women may be what destroys women,” she said.

Black. Indigenous. Colonized. To Lisa Sharon Harper, this is Jesus.

“People of African descent and other people who have been colonized around the world, when they read the text for themselves, irrespective of what their master told them what the text meant, they see a Brown, colonized, indigenous Jesus,” Harper said. “They see a people serially enslaved and serially colonized. There is a kinship of experience and social location with every single writer of this text.”

Harper, founder and president of Freedom Road, spoke on progressive Evangelical Christianity for Week Four’s Interfaith Friday at 2 p.m. EDT July 24 on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Chautauqua Institution’s Vice President of Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson joined her in a conversation while the audience submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and through Twitter with #CHQ2020.

Robinson said the two have been friends for many years, but he had not heard Harper speak on the subject of her latest book, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. The book, which references the Book of Genesis, best fit the creation focus for this season’s Interfaith Friday series.

“When I chose this theme to bring before our Interfaith Friday presenters, I immediately thought of you because of this wonderful book,” Robinson said.

The journey to Harper’s latest book began 17 years ago on a trip across the American South with her college ministry. On a bus of 25 people and children, she retraced the Cherokee Trail of Tears before retracing the African experience in the United States, from slavery to civil rights. She hoped to understand how the Biblical concept of shalom intersects with the value for racial consideration, justice and healing.

Both legs of the trip reminded her of her own family. On the Trail of Tears, she said she recalled this history’s ties to her ancestors, who most likely escaped from the trail and hid in the nearby mountains. Slavery had also pulled her ancestors apart.

“My family was enslaved in nearly every state in the South, according to DNA,” Harper said.

Considering her family roots, Harper’s mind returned to her great-great-great grandmother Leah Ballard, the last adult enslaved woman in her family. Harper asked herself if Ballard would react to the gospel as she did.

“If I were to share my understanding of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, would that good news cause her to jump and shout for joy?” Harper said. “Would it cause her to scream hallelujah?”

By the end of that summer, Harper realized that her great-grandmother had 17 children likely because she was a breeder — “her job on the plantation, for which she never got paid, was to breed money for her master,” she said. “She lost children to the slave trade. She lost children and husbands to death.”

So if she told her Grandma Ballard that God gave her a purpose and all she had to do was pray to enter heaven, would Grandma Ballard rejoice?

“When I was honest with myself, I realized the answer was no,” Harper said.

Harper said this launched a yearlong bout of depression.

“If my entire understanding of the gospel would not be received as good news by my very family, then could it be good news?” Harper said. “If my understanding of the gospel could not be good news to the ones that need it most, I came to understand that it’s actually not good enough.”

This prompted Harper to study the Book of Genesis for 13 years. Four Hebrew words in the beginning of the Bible reframed her understanding of the gospel: tov m’od (very good), tselem (icon), radah (dominion) and dmuwth (likeness).

Greeks translated the good in tov m’od as a perfection that existed inside a person or thing. But in Hebrew, it means “overwhelming goodness” between things.

“God saw everything He had made and saw that it was not just good, but very good,” Genesis 1:31 states.

Harper said that this referred to the relationship between God and humanity, men, women, all genders, systems and all of creation.

Tselem means an icon or representative figure. “Let us make humankind in our image,” but not just in kings and queens. Some Biblical scholars believe that either Moses wrote all of the Book of Genesis or that this text was written by priests fleeing Babylonian in exile.

“No matter who you think wrote this text, the context of the writing was oppression,” Harper said. “They were oppressed while they were writing this text. They were enslaved. They were — in Moses’ case — just been enslaved. And that is what moved them to write this text.

Harper said that these people had been enslaved for 70 years and still chose “radical goodness.” They could have easily said to make either the priests or Moses in our image. 

“But they didn’t,” Harper said. “Instead, they took that power and cast it out for all humanity at exactly the moment they could have grabbed it for themselves.”

The word radah has been mistranslated to dominate earth. There are eight different ways to say “dominion” in the Book of Genesis, but this one means “to tread down,” to exercise agency and ensure the wellness of relationships between all things and protect radical goodness. Harper said that to till and keep the Garden of Eden translates to serve and protect.

“That’s what dominion looks like,” Harper said. To be human is to be made in the image of God and called to serve the world.

Harper moved onto Genesis 2, the story of the two trees. One was the Tree of Life, which Adam and Eve could eat from and live forever. The other tree was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It was distinct because the eater experienced evil in relationship to the command attached to it. Planted in the center of paradise, the tree confronted Adam and Eve with the decision to conclude that humans are in need of God, must trust God and choose God’s way to peace. They were given an opportunity to trust God and choose God’s way. By eating, they experience evil.

“The evil is the very act of not trusting God, of not choosing God’s way to peace,” Harper said.

Harper said that Shalom can only be accessed through God.

“If we trust our own way, then we forfeit God’s peace.”

Human shalom, in comparison, is broken peace. Harper said this starts the blame game between men and women. It breaks the relationship between all of dominion. It begins human mortality.

“Who wants to live forever in a broken world?” Harper said.

The stories following Genesis track the breaking up of the world. War in the Bible comes in the context of colonization. On a screen behind her, Harper flipped through images of Manifest Destiny, lynchings, exploitation of Black slave labor and Asian stereotypes, Japanese internment camps in the United States, and transgender discrimination.

“(These are the) kind of discussions, conversations about how the polis will live together that remove the other, or crush the other or twist the other or hang the other or exploit the other or exclude the other or exclude any people or people group from the capacity to exercise dominion in the world,” Harper said. “What we are also doing is we are removing, we are hiding, we are exploiting, we are crushing, we are excluding the image of God on Earth.”

Harper said images of ancient kings marked where that king ruled and indicated the health and richness of a kingdom. Meanwhile, busted, fallen images of a king indicated war against the kingdom.

“What if God understands that to be a declaration of war against that kingdom, against God’s kingdom, against God’s rule?” Harper said.

Harper said this will require the coming of the kingdom of God, or moments in the world when God’s followers show up. This would look like the message in Luke 4, when Jesus explains he’s come to free the oppressed and captives. 

“Those captives would likely have been political prisoners,” Harper said. “Because the year Jesus was born, that same year, there was an attempted insurrection in northern Galilee. And more than 2,000 men and boys were crucified in one day because they attempted to rise up against those who tried to colonize them.”

The writers of the Bible look like the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. They look like Gallatians 3 and 27. And in Gallatians 29, Paul writes to his people: “As many of you who were baptized into Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer male or female. There is no longer slave or freed, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

“It is Brown, colonized, indigenous people who are writing this text,” Harper said.

Before being baptized, Harper said a person sees others through a hierarchical lens of power. But the water washes away differences and only leaves the image of God in the other.

“It means you see their inherent dignity and you see their divine call to steward this world,” Harper said.

But it takes conscious effort to operate in a God-like way when the world is not created for it.

“This world has not been crafted around this truth,” Harper said. “It has been crafted around the lie of human hierarchy.”

To actually deliver good news to her ancestor Leah Ballard, Harper now knows what she would say to her: “The king has come to confront the kingdoms of this world that are hell-bent on crushing the image of God on Earth. And Leah, this includes you.”

“That’s some good news.”

Then Harper would turn to Leah Ballard’s master and deliver the fourth Hebrew word: dmuwth, likeness. It means an image according to our likeness. Like God, but not God. 

“Oh Leah’s master, I have good news for you,” Harper would say. “You are not actually a master. You are simply human. You have the ability to come down off of the scaffolding of human hierarchy that you have built for yourself through the constructs of race and gender and all the other hierarchical categories we have given for ourselves.”

Robinson said this would be the hardest to ask the privileged to do, to give up their power.

“It was going to demand of them the very thing they didn’t want to give up,” he said.

Harper said that the principle sin for people of European descent in the United States has been to try to be God, to try to define everything and everyone.

“When those people said that my people were three-fifths of a human being, it became so according to the law,” Harper said. “Only God should be able to make that kind of (decision). And you have an opportunity to lay down your arms and join the community of the rest of creation.”

Then she laid out a thought exercise. She guided her audience to close its eyes and imagine a person who is normally hierarchically below them. She said to find their eyes,  look beyond them and find the image of God on the other side of their eyes. Then repeat: “I see the image of God in you. Let it be so.”

Harper said that repentance was the path to right past wrongs, including the assassination of George Floyd by four officers.

“To defund the police means to move funds to create actual public safety, to repent for saying, ‘This is law enforcement,’ when actually it was never created to enforce the law,” Harper said. “It was created to contain and control Black bodies and to protect the supremacy of whiteness. That is why the police were created. So we need to repent of that structure that we have allowed to exist from 1704 all the way to present.”

Harper also referenced the Bible when Jesus says “I have people you know not of” to explain how God’s people are not only the ones who know him.

“I have come to believe that it is not just believing in a set of principles,” Harper said. “Jesus is not about principles. Jesus is about God, the kingdom of God … on Earth, the image of God being set free, and I believe that no matter where we are in the world there are people who are following the Jesus way, even if they don’t know the name of Jesus.”

For centuries, technology simply amplified humans’ physical abilities. A hammer amplifies the force of an arm. A telescope helps us see something far away. But Noreen Herzfeld said the difference in modern technology like computers and artificial intelligence programs is that they extend the human mind.

“While technologies generally reflect and refract our purposes, amplify our natural abilities, they can also get away from us, embodying a power or purpose of their own,” she said.

Herzfeld, the Nicholas and Bernice Reuter Professor of Science and Religion at St. John’s University and the College of Saint Benedict, delivered her lecture that posed the question: “Tool, Partner, or Surrogate: How Autonomous Should Our Technology Be?” The lecture, at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 23, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, returned to the Week Four Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Ethics in a Technologically Transforming World?”

Herzfeld’s academic background spans degrees in computer science and mathematics from The Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in theology from The Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. She has contributed to four books on technology and religion as an author and editor.

Herzfeld pre-recorded her lecture on July 12 in Collegeville, Colorado, and attended a Q-and-A the day it was released with Maureen Rovegno, Chautauqua Institution’s Director of Religion. Rovegno delivered audience questions submitted through the www.questions.chq.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020.

The purpose of developing any technology has always been to alter a condition or change an environment in a way that makes an action or condition easier — like taming the elements, disease, predators — and to make life more comfortable. Most recently, this has played out in COVID-19 solutions.

Herzfeld said machine learning was used to test over 6,000 existing drugs that had already passed clinical trials to see if they could be repurposed to fight COVID-19. Google’s DeepMind team trained a neural network to predict protein structures associated with the virus to help develop a vaccine.

Technology can be useful, but it can also re-shape the society it was created in. 

“Often we’re the ones who have to bend to technology, not vice versa,” Herzfeld said.

Technology can also alter its environment. Herzfeld cited German existentialist Martin Heidegger, who said that when a craftsman constructed a chair out of wood, he didn’t change the inside of the wood to create the chair. But a genetically engineered bacterium is new to the “natural order.”

Herzfeld looked to the Christian book of Genesis to explain the relationship between God’s creation and human creation, which are linked because God created humans in his image. Genesis 1 also gives humans dominion over everything in nature.

“We, too, are destined to be creators because we are in God’s image,” Herzfeld said.

But for Herzfeld, some Biblical scholars take the mandates in Genesis for humans being made in God’s image and having dominion over Earth too far when they view humans as deputies for God on Earth. Negative consequences can arise in human relationships, she said, as when Cain kills his brother Abel in Genesis 4-9. And the development of agriculture thanks to technology led to hubris and the construction of the Tower of Babel, which further divided people.

Herzfeld said that creation, both by God and humans, has three relationships. There is God’s image of himself, God’s relationship with humans as his creation, and humans’ relationships with one another. The story of Noah’s ark is an example of technology used to successfully augment these relationships between Noah and his family, the animals and his covenant with God.

“Human nature is only completely full when we are in relationship with God and one another,” Herzfeld said.

The closest relationship that humans have that emulates God’s hierarchical relationship with humans is the creation of artificial intelligence and robots. Herzfeld said she is not sure this is what we want, lauding the Amish for their careful consideration of technology they do bring into their communities.

“Contrary to popular conception, the Amish have not ‘stopped the clock,’” Herzfeld said. “They accept some technologies and reject others.”

The Amish use phones, but don’t install one in every home because it would discourage face-to-face conversations. They use refrigerated milk tanks, but don’t install one in every kitchen.

For every piece of technology they consider, the Amish ask if it provides tangible benefits — but also if it would hamper the relationships in the community.

Herzfeld said another way to look at how artificial intelligence could work for humans is to reframe the technology as “intelligence augmentation,” a term coined by Douglas Engelbart. Artificial intelligence indicates a surrogate in a human task relating to holding God-given dominion over the world, while intelligence augmentation describes a tool under human supervision and control.

Though artificial intelligence programs can execute human decisions, most can’t reason with these decisions.

“A machine with true agency would have a further ability to reason independently about its own actions and unpredictably change course should it consider those actions unethical or in violation of some overarching value or intention,” Herzfeld said.

Philosophers Michael and Susan Anderson have three rules for determining if a robot or program is a moral agent: they must not be under direct control by another agent or user, they choose to interact with their environment, and fulfill a social role or relationship with responsibilities. In the example of a robot health caregiver, Herzfeld said it fulfills the first two, but is not aware of its responsibility to the patient.

But there are also robots and programs with high autonomy in settings with serious consequences and moral implications. In warfare, lethal autonomous weapons systems operate on algorithms, making life-and-death decisions without synchronous human control.

For example, the AEGIS Weapon System is a naval air defense system used by the United States, Australia, Japan, Norway, the Republic of Korea and Spain. It searches and guides missiles in the air, on the surface and underwater. It chooses where and when to fire on its own.

Another example is the Cargo II, a 15-pound multicopter drone that tracks and engages targets using facial recognition technology. Drones can operate in swarms of 20 led by one head drone, which can be operated on its own or by a human.

Herzfeld said that Turkey has ordered 500, and the drone could have attack capabilities.

While providing cost-efficient benefits for commanders — since drones work without getting tired, don’t need to be paid and can work in harsh conditions — Herzfeld said the costs to the larger human community are comparable to the use of nuclear weaponry, which redefined the ethics of war for ethicists and theologians. It is unclear if a drone’s lack of emotion would make war atrocities more or less likely, or if a drone could shrug off human control and turn on the person it was previously taking orders from.

“A species with multiple ways of destroying itself or its environment has to grow smart,” Herzfeld said. “It has to have the wisdom not to do so. Essentially, it becomes a race between the development of technology and the development of morality. If technology wins, we lose.”

Whether people regard artificial intelligence as a tool that can turn into either a future friend or a threat, Jason Thacker said the technology is already here.

“The reality is that AI is everywhere in our society, and if you don’t believe me I dare you to say something like, ‘Hey Siri,’ or, ‘Hey Alexa,’ because ultimately something around you will likely light up,” Thacker said. “Whether it’s wearable tech like a watch or smartphones, something around you is connected to the cloud and connected to these AI systems.”

Thacker delivered his lecture “The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity” at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, July 21, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. The name of Thacker’s lecture matches his book and was part of the Week Four Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Ethics in a Technologically Transforming World?”

Maureen Rovegno, Chautauqua’s director of religion, led the subsequent Q-and-A while the audience submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and through Twitter with #CHQ2020.

“Your faith-based ethics give you that joyful kind of optimism that counteracts the pessimism that many people have started to feel — that technology is taking over areas and directions that have shadow sides to them,” Rovegno said.

Thacker is Chair of Research in Technology Ethics at The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He said his work with the ERLC revolves around the message in the Book of Matthew, specifically Matthew 22.

“The ethical system in Matthew 22 is more robust than any challenges we will face and any innovations that will come,” Thacker said.

He holds a Master of Divinity from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Ethics and Public Theology at the seminary. In the meantime, he writes articles on technology ethics for the ERLC site and has also written for Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition and other online sites. His work with the ERLC’s document, “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles,” was featured on Slate.

Thacker said that new technology is not actually bringing up new questions.

“Questions that are posed by today’s technologies like artificial intelligence actually aren’t new at all,” Thacker said. “This is because AI doesn’t really cause us to ask new questions of humanity, per se, but to ask age-old questions of new opportunities. It’s the same old vices and sins and proclivities we’ve always dealt with in humanity, but with new opportunities before us.”

Thacker said that artificial intelligence poses two questions. What does it mean to be human? And what is the role of technology in our lives?

What being human means, for Thacker, is based on the fact that in Christianity, God created humans in his likeness and image. Others, however, have claimed that religions are no longer necessary to guide ethics because of science’s progress.

“Many secular folks will caricature faith as believing in something without fact or knowledge, but fail to see that science itself has some faith to it,” Thacker said. “Because we’re not only able to explain what is seen, we have to identify the design behind it.”

Thacker cited Professor John Lennox of Oxford, who said that past philosophers and scientists — including Galileo and Isaac Newton — believed that God created the laws of nature, which drove their scientific inquiries and major breakthroughs.

As an ethicist, Thacker thinks about his work in a similar way.

“I simply cannot buy into this role of autonomous thinking untethered from any natural law framework of the world with a creator god at the center,” Thacker said. “I simply find it unsustainable and unconvincing ethically, as well as unsustainable with the pursuit of truth and the way this world works and what it means to be human.”

Thacker looks to the Book of Genesis to answer the old questions. In the story of creation, God created everything and made humans separate from the rest of the world, including animals, in his image to take dominion over all things and be stewards of the world. Thacker believes technology allows for humans to fulfill this role.

“This creativity and these abilities to make things to aid us in our role as image-bearers is the core of what technology is,” Thacker said. “ … But these tools and technologies are made by fallible and sinful human hands, and they are quick to show the brokenness of this world.”

Thacker said that tools can be used to lord power over others and dehumanize them, and therefore dishonor God. It reflects Cain’s sin in the Bible, when he used his strength, given by God in order to work, to kill his brother Abel instead.

Along with the promise of what technology can do, it can also open up new ways to hurt others.

“It expands what is possible for us to do, and ultimately we are the ones who are responsible for it, not the tools themselves,” Thacker said.

Pulling morality from the Bible allows for Christians to be unfettered by changing social mores over time, Thacker said. Christians instead seek to love God and their neighbor as fellow image-bearers.

Thacker said that technologies that follow a natural order, aligning with protecting God’s creation, fulfill proper uses.

“There are so many God-honoring benefits in these technologies,” Thacker said.

Thacker said technology, including technology used in warfare, has uses in protecting people as fellow image-bearers, regardless of differences.

“And so that’s why I’ll stand up for Uighur Muslims in China, just like I’ll stand up for the person next door or the elderly lady down the street or the baby in the womb,” Thacker said. “It’s because of this concept of human dignity in the image of God.”

As a Christian, Thacker is not afraid of any negative outcome from humans’ misuse of technology because of the message in the Book of Revelations, the final book in the New Testament that describes Jesus returning to Earth to save believers once again.

“I don’t fear killer robots, or massive job loss, or catastrophic downturn, because I know that my God is reigning and ruling and holding the entire universe together in his hand,” Thacker said. “There is nothing that will catch my God off-guard, and nothing that will stop his plans for this world.”

The fall of Adam and Eve by “playing God” could mirror how human civilization eventually falls, Dr. Gerard Magill said in his lecture at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, July 20. 

Magill connected the Biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to the possible ends of the world in his lecture “Technology, Ethics, & Imagination” on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. His presentation was the first in the Week Four theme for the Interfaith Lecture Series, “Ethics in a Technologically Transforming World?”

Magill contributes his expertise in multiple roles in ethics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Since 2007, Magill has held the Vernon F. Gallagher Chair for the Integration of Science, Theology, Philosophy, and Law at the university, where he is a tenured Professor in the Center for Healthcare Ethics. Magill is also a board member for Duquesne’s Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law. His name is credited in 10 books on medical ethics, often with an added layer of religious morality, as an author, co-author and editor.

Perceiving any future outcome requires imagination, Magill said in his lecture, because the “image” only exists in theory until it takes place in reality. He used the situation of considering someone for marriage as an example.

“We get this image: ‘I can spend my life with this person. This is mesmerizing me. And I get the data and the rationality and the reasonableness (to support this),’” Magill said. “So you come to the conclusion, ‘Yes, we should marry. I’m sure about this.’”

Magill said a person imagines a future with someone just as people imagine God. But when thinking about God, people can set logic and reasoning traps for themselves when it comes to technology.

“What we assume to be normal is the result of major breakthroughs that past civilizations would have been mesmerized by,” Magill said.

The existence of technology that borders on playing God, Magill said, does not always mean it should be used. But people can also use new technology to protect life, God’s creation.

“Save the life that can be saved,” Magill said multiple times throughout his lecture.

He used “maternal and fetal” conflicts as an example of a difficult ethical situation. In a hypothetical situation where a doctor discovers that a womb is cancerous and would kill the mother before the baby could be born, there is a difference between foresight and intent.

“(The mother and the doctor) foresee with assuredness that the baby will die, but it cannot survive out of the womb,” Magill said. “But that knowledge has got nothing to do with intent. Because the mum knows in advance that the baby will die does not mean the mum wants the death. It’s a very important ethical distinction.”

Magill used another example of a woman who was against abortion, but had pulmonary hypertension — a condition that is common in women and can be fatal. Faced with life-threatening complications, she agreed for the doctor to evacuate her womb at 11 weeks.

“They could have tried to save both, but it’s almost certain that both would have died,” Magill said.

The debates surrounding frozen embryos, early adoption, in-vitro fertilization, and surrogate motherhood provide another ethical challenge. Frozen embryos become a situation of rescue ethics because they carry potential for creating kids that can be adopted by a third party.

Magill then switched gears to describe the conundrums in end-of-life situations created by technology. He began with the case of Terri Schiavo, who fell into a permanent vegetative state after cardiac arrest. For 15 years, her parents and her husband Michael fought in court over her parents’ wishes to keep her alive indefinitely with a feeding tube, while her husband said that she would not have wished to stay alive in that way. Eventually the court ruled to allow her to be removed from life support.

Magill said there are thousands of patients like Schiavo who can be kept alive for years. He cited the Christian prayer for a peaceful death, to die quietly in one’s sleep, which stands in conflict with modern technology’s ability to extend life past this point. But technology can also allow the outcome of a peaceful death through managing disease until the end.

“It’s simply about removing technology at the correct point to let the body slip away peacefully, without suffering, without pain and with the dignity of the family being there,” Magill said.

Magill then switched back to technology that can control the beginning of life: human genomics.

About 20 years ago, hundreds of millions of dollars funded the sequencing of the first human genome. To go to a facility and sequence your own human genome today takes five hours and $1,000. Magill said it will take less and less over time to do this, and could eventually only cost $100.

Currently, hospitals track 27 traits in newborn babies to ensure proper healthcare, though it’s possible to map a baby’s entire genome sequence. Magill said that Americans are more resistant to this, while Europeans are already doing this because of what he called a “solidarity mindset.” By collecting the full genomes of a mass population, doctors can detect early-onset conditions and disease likelihood, while also locating treatment solutions within the same genome.

Making health decisions for minors, who are not legally allowed to make their own decisions until they become 18, can also become thorny. Magill used the example of a young teen who wanted to stop her cancer treatments but lost her case in court with her parents. When she turned 18, she decided to continue the treatments after all.

But the case of the Nash family brings up the ethics of making decisions on behalf of an embryo. Their child, Molly, was projected to die early from Fanconi anemia. To save her, they chose to implant via IVF an embryo without Fanconi anemia traits specifically to birth a second child, Adam. The umbilical cord and blood from the pregnancy was donated to Molly, and Adam would later donate stem cells to Molly.

Magill said this could easily become a difficult situation. The younger sibling had to donate blood over time and later donate spinal fluid, which is painful.

“What if he said, ‘I can’t do this for my sister anymore’?” Magill said.

Magill continued with CRISPR, a gene editing tool that works like computer shortcuts to edit genes. First it finds all parts of the DNA in every cell of the body that it’s looking for, then replaces it with a desired trait. A doctor in China, against the wishes of his own country, the United States and the United Kingdom, used CRISPR to edit the genes of two young girls to protect them from HIV. The doctor altered other genes in the process and is now in jail for “playing God.”

But the newest platform for ethical discourse, Magill said, is data science. Artificial intelligence uses algorithms to collect huge amounts of data for targeted marketing and other purposes. And AI is already transitioning into machine learning, where computers are able to speak, train and guide each other without humans. Eventually, they will be able to work thousands of times faster than a computer chip.

The use of 5G technology allows for machines to collect data at record speeds and reach conclusions faster. China is moving the fastest in implementing 5G, and its citizens already use devices — instead of currency — to pay for goods and services. China reaps massive amounts of data this way.

Pharmaceutical companies are using data science and genomic science to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. Through genomic science, scientists were able to find a possible trait for a vaccine quickly, while computational models — not doctors — quickly deduced possible solutions. 

But the collection of health data, which is normally protected by healthcare organizations, reaches Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies through their partnerships with those healthcare organizations. While these huge corporations are working for free to help these organizations with algorithms, their minimum requirement is access to 100% of the data ,with nothing anonymized. Magill said these companies in turn use it for themselves.

“If (machines) begin to do things for us — supposedly ‘for our welfare’ — we are now talking about in the not-so-distant future the concept of transhumanism, human enhancement,” Magill said.

However, he did say this would likely not happen in this generation.

“We are in the portal from the old world, where it was kind of straightforward medicine — ‘I went to see the doctor, got the stethoscope, got the injection, got the surgery’ — through this portal to machine learning that is going to be able to do things and suggest things and be able to treat the somatic and the general level, thereby changing the species and moving it forward,” Magill said.

After 500 million years of history leading up to this technology, Magill said it is now possible to end the human species within 100 years of gene editing going too far.

But Magill shifted the topic again to the matter of the eventual vaccine for COVID-19, which he said was not as vicious as other viruses but still a threat. 

“This is not about me getting sick and dying,” Magill said. “This is about populations getting sick and dying. These can be stark numbers.”

He said the rise in pandemics is directly linked with pollution, which actually allows viruses and other problems to arise. As early as 2050, rising sea levels will force thousands to move out of Eurasia, which will be an even larger number coming into Europe than its most recent struggle to support Syrian refugees fleeing war.

“It’s not just genomics that can kill us, it’s not just algorithms that can threaten us,” Magill said. “It’s also just the air we breathe, the planet we live in. We can pollute it to the point of destroying it.”

Considering all the ways humankind could die, Magill said humankind could fall the same way Adam and Eve did.

“If we killed ourselves in these ways, the planet would recover,” Magill said. “… It’s just that it would survive without humanity. And maybe that’s the story of the fall. Not of the past, but of the future.”

Wayman and Eryl Kubicka answered questions about creation with their “non-understanding of creation” as Zen Buddhists For Week Three’s Interfaith Friday.

The lecture was broadcast at 2 p.m. EDT Friday, July 17, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Audience members also participated by submitting questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and through Twitter with #CHQ2020. Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s Vice President of Religion and senior pastor, joined in the live virtual conversation and delivered audience questions.

Eryl and Wayman have taught Buddhist meditation in Chautauqua’s Mystic Heart Meditation Program for 10 years. Wayman, an ordained Buddhist priest since 2010, runs the Rochester Zen Center’s retreat in New York, teaching meditation and overseeing training. Eryl teaches meditation and coordinates the youth program for the center. 

They each became interested in Buddhism and meditation before meeting each other in the province of Quang Nyi in Vietnam. Wayman was part of an American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) team located there to build and run a rehabilitation center for injured civilians.

Eryl met Wayman when she joined the team in 1969 as a physical therapist and practicing Buddhist. They were married in 1970, and have practiced Zen meditation for four decades. They first studied under the guidance of Roshi Philip Kapleau, who helped Wayman with post-Vietnam PTSD through meditation, and under the current abbot, Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede.

Wayman began the lecture with the opening story from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: an old anecdote where an elderly woman speaks up at the end of a prominent astronomer’s public lecture. She tells him his understanding of how the universe works — the moon revolves around the Earth, which revolves around the sun with other planets, while various galaxies exist far and wide — is not true, because the world is flat and rests on the back of a turtle. The astronomer asks what the turtle is standing on, and she says, “‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down.’

“Why do we think we know better than that?” Wayman said.

Zen Buddhism is about being content with not knowing all the answers.

“I think most Zen Buddhists would affirm that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know very much about the universe, and what ultimately could be behind this creation,” Wayman said. “Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a great deal of scientific thinking or religious thinking that cannot tell us what is likely true, and what is exactly not true, and especially what is of value.”

Being content in the present while accepting change is another priority in Zen Buddhism.

“Regarding creation, we can probably surmise that nothing will stay as it is forever,” Wayman said. “But that does not likely apply to laws that govern change, development and interaction. Personally, it has become more clear to me that I will not be around forever.”

Wayman turned to science to fully answer questions about creation, citing astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, who said that from a symmetrical universe, nothing after the Big Bang happened broke up in equal amounts. An excess of matter was created, but the existence of anti-matter is still an unanswered question.

“Until (technology reveals otherwise), we can be certain that there is no anti-matter in the universe, but no one knows why,” Wayman said.

Wayman said that for non-Buddhists, many Zen Buddhist teachings can be confusing and can feel like the turtles mentioned in Hawking’s story. He dropped common sayings from fundamental Zen Buddhist writings like, “Form here is only emptiness, emptiness only form;” and, “Feeling, thought and choice. Consciousness itself is the same as this.”

Emptiness is a state to be achieved in Zen Buddhism.

“Here are empty all of the primal void,” goes a Zen Buddhist Dharma, or a teaching. “None are born or die, neither stained or pure. Nor do they wax or wane.”

Zazen samadhi is an awakening experience in Zen Buddhism in which a person releases their ego.

Wayman said it is achieved through “constant meditation and prayer to the point of complete self-forgetfulness. It takes years of work in meditation.”

While this is given a name within Buddhism, the faith does not own this state exclusively. Wayman mentioned Byron Katie as a secular American author who describes how she has achieved this herself. And Christians might describe this same feeling as the love of God. 

Wayman and Eryl were exposed to Zen Buddhism later in life. Eryl grew up in the Church of England while Wayman grew up in a Unitarian Church in Chicago. But recalling the message on the ceiling of his Sunday school, “God is love,” Wayman said there are similarities.

“I don’t think we’re at a different place here in Buddhism,” Wayman said.

Robinson inquired about the geographic differences in Buddhism practices, specifically between the East, where it originated, and in the West as a budding practice. 

“The tradition is monastic, so that already sets the stage for a certain kind of practice,” Eryl said. “But each time the tradition moves to a new culture, it has to adapt. That’s still in the beginnings here in America, of Buddhists learning how to mix the lay-practice, because that’s really mostly what it is here.”

There are varying levels of seriousness in Buddhists who live where Buddhism is common, which is similar to how Christians who grew up in faith communities take it less seriously or forgo it as adults.

In the West, meditation has become a big draw for new Buddhists, and Wayman said it’s because meditation works.

“You see the difference in your life,” Wayman said. “How you respond to problems, how you can handle others,  and the ease with which you can feel other people with all those things that used to be difficult, now become easier and easier as you practice meditation.”

Meditation helps return to a silent mind.

“(Letting thoughts settle) gives you a gap,” Eryl said. “Let’s say you get angry. You have a little, one tiny centimeter of time when you can choose whether you react or you respond.”

Wayman noted that meditation and praying had similar uses of re-centering a person back to their original silent mind.

Robinson agreed, recalling when a spiritual director had told him that before praying, he should imagine he’s getting on a bus and forgot to get off on the right stop. So he has to get out, return to where he started and “wait for God.”

The difference between Buddhism and Christianity, the Kubickas said, is that Buddhism is better defined as a practice.

“We don’t have stuff we need to believe in, but we do need to work on becoming quieter,” Wayman said. “That’s the work.”

Eryl also said that being kind to oneself during meditation or prayer is also important.

“When you retrace your steps to the bus stop, you don’t want to be criticizing yourself,” Eryl said. “Because that judging mind is always there waiting to say, ‘Oh, you’re such a poor meditator.’ That’s the tricky little gremlin up there.”

Concentration of the mind, and as Wayman says, discarding of “random thought-ing,” is the purpose and practice of meditation. One way to achieve this is by focusing on a word and nothing else.

Robinson said this would be personally difficult for him.

“It’s like telling someone not to think about their nose and that’s immediately where their mind goes,” Robinson said.

This got a laugh from the Kubickas. They also suggested following the breath and counting breaths in meditation to focus.

It’s terribly important to be present with everything and not to escape with your thoughts,” Wayman said. “Be present with pain. Be present with love. Be present with talking with somebody. Be present with walking the dog. Be present with lifting up a glass to drink. That’s the way we work on living.”

Robinson asked about personal responsibility to others in Buddhism, since meditation is often practiced on an individual level, but can also be used in social causes such as climate change and the Black Lives Matter movement protesting police brutality. 

Buddhists also practice group meditation, and also have a duty to help others since everything is seen as being interconnected.

“There is no duality in Zen Buddhism,” Eryl said. “So if we’re all one, then you cannot ignore, you can’t be indifferent. Pragmatism and indifference can just be another way of avoiding what you should be doing.”

The same goes for dealing with tragedy.

“It’s terribly important to be present with everything and not to escape with your thoughts,” Wayman said. “Be present with pain. Be present with love. Be present with talking with somebody. Be present with walking the dog. Be present with lifting up a glass to drink. That’s the way we work on living.”

Eryl pointed out that the only symbol in Buddhism is the circle, which represents oneness between all beings, including those that are not human.

“If we are the divine nature, not as a god concept, but if we are the divine nature, we’re all connected,” Eryl said. “And so everything is interrelated, interconnected, and so what happens to you actually happens to me, too.”

The final enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is that nothing exists. A question came in from the virtual audience that brought an understanding to the concept of “nothing.”

“Might Buddhism infer that ‘nothing’ is the foundational reality that other traditions feel the impulse to call God?” the questioner asked.

To the Kubickas, enlightenment as defined in Buddhism can be achieved through other belief systems.

“Fundamentally, it’s the same mystics,” Eryl said. “It’s where all the same streams lead into the ocean somehow.”

The concept of time, beginnings and endings is seen in a new light in Zen Buddhism, which includes the belief in rebirth and emphasizes the importance of the present moment.

“Everything is in flux,” Eryl said. “We’re like energy in flux, and so change is our nature.”

Robinson said Buddhism’s emphasis on staying present reminded him of how he guides couples through pre-marital counseling. He tells couples that his goal is “for them to be present in their own wedding” without worrying about small details like flower arrangements or how people in the crowd might feel while they’re at the altar.

“It seems to me that Buddhism invites each person to attend each moment,” Robinson said.

One of the 10 Commandments states, “thou shalt not make yourself any carved idol of anything that is in heaven or the earth.” But from micrography designs to Jerusalem-inspired architecture, Jewish folk artist David Moss makes art without material boundaries, thanks to Judaism’s creative limitations.

At 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, July 14, Moss presented his lecture “A Glimpse into the Divine?” on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of Week Three’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme: “Art: A Glimpse into the Divine.”

The question mark in the title of his lecture is a crucial difference in how Moss talks about his distinctly Jewish work.

My work must therefore somehow convey the sharpness of a Talmudic insight, the creativity of a surprising new Biblical commentary, the imagination of a midrashic fantasy,” Moss said.

In comparison to Christianity, which has identifiable art symbols such as the lily that refer to Christ, “Jewish culture is focused not on the arts of the eye, but the ‘oh’s’ of the ear: literature, music, narrative, poetry, law, legend and commentary,” Moss said. “Yet here I stand before you as a Jewish visual artist.”

His work revolves around the human call for the hiddur mitzvah, the beautification of the Commandments: If you need an object for religious purposes, let it be beautiful.

“My work must therefore somehow convey the sharpness of a Talmudic insight, the creativity of a surprising new Biblical commentary, the imagination of a midrashic fantasy,” Moss said.

His work began when he moved to Israel after college in 1968 — not with formal artistic training, but when a friend wrote out the Hebrew alphabet for him. Moss’ fascination with calligraphy launched a hobby of giving an artful ketubah, or a Jewish marriage contract written in Aramaic, to friends as wedding gifts.

By the time Moss learned about ketubah history, it had essentially become paperwork signed by the couple and a rabbi. The purpose had remained the same, to protect the woman’s rights during marriage and after marriage in the case of divorce or the husband’s death, but the reflection of the beauty of the marriage itself had been stripped.

“Its text is about as romantic as any insurance policy,” Moss said, but the accompanying artistry in past ketubahs was what illustrated the beauty of love and marriage.

In the past, the art form of the ketubah existed across the Jewish diaspora, from Italy, Tunisia and Persia, but had died out over time after the invention of printing. 

Interest in Moss’ ketubahs spread through word of mouth, and he eventually started creating them on commission. By now, he has created hundreds of personalized ketubahs across three generations. He created one for his granddaughter’s wedding, and couples who had already been married with a plain ketubah have asked him for a stylized ketubah after the fact, and Moss invented anniversary ketubahs without legal signatures. Hundreds more ketubah artists have sprung up since he began his work.

He uses traditional folk art techniques, but each ketubah is different based on an extensive interview with the couple on their relationship and as individuals. 

“I believe they vary so much because it is not about me as an artist, but about the couples themselves,” Moss said

For some, he cuts out Aramaic calligraphy like a detailed paper snowflake. Many feature Jewish micrography, an ancient art form where designs are created with intricate, small Hebrew text. One ketubah tells the story of the creation of man and woman on the sixth day. It was customary in the ketubahs of old to feature or mention Jerusalem, and many of Moss’ do this also. Others are more contemporary.

He often chooses religious quotes specific to the couple. For a couple who collected Chinese art, Moss wrote in Chinese calligraphy the words from Proverbs 18: “He who has found a good wife has found very well.” 

When Moss discovered a man who had given his wife of 25 years flowers every week for the Shabbat, Moss calculated how many the husband had given her at that point and illustrated 1,300 flowers into their anniversary ketubah.

Moss’ work is not limited to the ketubah. Through Bet-Alpha Editions, he has published three different illustrated versions of the Book of Haggadah, which is used in retelling the story of Passover, and a book of his ketubah work in Love Letters: A Celebration of Love and Marriage. He created a collage for children that tells the story of the sacrifice of Isaac using 10 different colors and no words, and said that kids as young as 7 have gone through it once and can recite the entire tale from memory afterward. He also created a comic book in Hebrew for teens with translations as footnotes.

Partnering with woodworker Noah Greenberg, Moss ventured into woodwork in order to beautify traditional lecterns and items traditionally stored inside them for daily, weekly and annual holiday rituals. Moss and Greenberg’s design of the Tree of Life lectern and objects inside can be found in Jewish homes, synagogues and museums.

Moss has no boundaries in his work because he started without formal training, so he had no problem transitioning into architecture. He has designed meaningful installations for the United Jewish Appeal Federation building in Manhattan, a thoughtful construction that blended Jewish values with inclusivity in the student building of the UCLA Hillel Foundation in Los Angeles, California, and geographically directed buildings and walkways of the Akiba-Yavneh Academy in Dallas, Texas, that point toward Israel.

In addition to publishing, personalized commissions, and a 70-strong subscription service for annual surprise works for half-market price, his work with Kol HaOt, an organization he co-founded that teaches Jewish traditions and values through art, engages kids and teachers at summer camps and schools.

Summer camps can identify a concern and execute a way to address or even solve it through art. One camp created a Jewish-specific recycling logo with the slogan, “I am the world’s keeper” (based on the phrase, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”). The kids painted the logo on trash cans and designed matching stickers to place above water fountains and toilet paper dispensers around the campus. Another camp created an inclusivity space for anyone who felt sad and needed a hug — regardless of sexual orientation or any other aspect of their identity.

Despite not having formal training himself, Kol HaOt runs an annual program called the Teachers’ Institute in the Arts for teachers in North America. It’s designed to show teachers how to incorporate Jewish lessons into art, and vice versa.

Moss’ career started with a fascination of Hebrew letters. His fascination is rooted in the belief that God created the alphabet before creating the world itself. Despite creating commissions all over the world, the heart of his work remains in lettering and is physically in Jerusalem. He answered Chautauqua’s questions, which the audience could submit to questions.chq.org or on Twitter with #CHQ2020, from his home in a Jerusalem artist community. Maureen Rovegno, Chautauqua Institution’s director of religion, delivered questions.

“Everything you showed us was one surprise after another,” Rovegno said.