Wisconsin Public Television	University Place		When Faiths Colide	Martin Marty		12/22/12	UP911  cc >> On behalf of the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, UW Marathon County, and the UW Marathon County Foundation, we welcome you to the University of Wisconsin, Marathon County for this evening's event, the inaugural James F. Veninga Religion and Politics Lecture Series. Our first lecture entitled "When Faiths Collide, What Happens to the Common Good?" featuring Dr. Martin Marty. My name is Eric Giordano, and I am the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service. We are very grateful that you're here for tonight's event. We wish to get started right away. So it is my pleasure to introduce you at this time to the dean of UW Marathon County and a very big supporter of this program, Keith Montgomery. [APPLAUSE]  >> Welcome. Welcome to the University of Wisconsin, Marathon County, and welcome to the UW Center for Civic Engagement. I'm Keith Montgomery, campus dean. A warm welcome to Dr. Martin Marty, our speaker this evening, from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a warm welcome also to Jim Veninga, dean of this campus from 2000 to 2007. 

This UW Center for Civic Engagement is a place where people can meet to engage in constructive dialog on matters of public interest, along with the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service and programs like this one this evening, were a vision of Jim's 10 years ago. Federal, state, and county funds and the support of the UW Colleges as well as generous donations from supporters such as many of you have made this vision the reality that we enjoy this evening. Thank you all for taking the time to come this evening. Your support of this event is greatly appreciated. This lecture this evening is the first in a series of annual lectures on religion and politics, and we hope that we can count on your support as the series develops. It's now my pleasure to introduce Mark Bradley to say a few remarks on this occasion, the inaugural James Veninga lecture on religion and politics. Mark is the president of the Ritter Law Firm and is a member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Mark. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you, Keith, and welcome, everybody, to the inaugural event for the James F. Veninga Religion and Politics Lecture Series. 

The people at the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service are a rather careful group, so when they write things, they're very, very hesitant to engage in any kind of exaggeration or puffery about them and anybody associated with them. So if you look at the description of the James F. Veninga Religion and Politics Lecture Series, with great understatement it says that James F. Veninga was a the former dean of the University of Wisconsin, Marathon County who helped establish the UW Center for Civic Engagement, this lovely building, and the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service. Well, if that were written more accurately, it would say there was a group of people in central Wisconsin who helped James F. Veninga establish the UW Center for Civic Engagement and the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service. And a lot of those people are here tonight wanting to be here to honor Jim Veninga. We were the helpers. Jim Veninga was the leader. He was the visionary, and he was the absolute soul of this beautiful facility that we now have in this community. And almost everything that happens in this facility was the result of Jim Veninga's vision and Jim Veninga pushing everybody, don't say no, I want to hear you tell me how you can get this dream fulfilled. 

Well, Jim, this is going to be insurmountable. I don't want to hear that. How could this be done? Because he said other communities have done things like this. Why would we be any different? So under Jim's pushing and prodding and encouraging, when you walk into this fantastic facility, which is crowded almost every day, occupied almost every day, it makes you wonder where were all these events happening in this community before the Center for Civic Engagement was ever built. And then you walk in this building and almost everything here is connected to ideas that Jim Veninga had. The Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, another idea that just sprang from Jim Veninga's fruitful mind at a lunch at the Peking Restaurant. Why couldn't we do that? Why wouldn't we, in the center of the state of Wisconsin, be this magnet place that would give student interns and opportunity to engage with faculty members on these very difficult issues of public policy and the whole idea of how our democracy functions? Why would that be in Milwaukee? Why would that be in Madison? Why wouldn't that be right here in Wausau? And why wouldn't we have an opportunity for professors all over the state of Wisconsin to do some of their research here with the materials that we would be able to assemble and digitize and make available to everybody? And why wouldn't we have rooms where faculty members could come and enjoy fellowships? And why wouldn't we have senior fellows that we could recognize and have our students engage with them on a daily basis? And we all sat there and said, well, we don't know. [LAUGHTER] But now it is all here, and it is all here thanks to Jim Veninga. Jim, would you please stand and allow us to recognize you for everything that you have done for us. [APPLAUSE]  So when we wanted to find the most appropriate way to recognize Jim Veninga for all that he has done for this community, with his guidance, of course, we came up with this Religion and Politics Lecture Series. 

So we contacted Jim and he was off giving one of his own famous lectures and we were communicating with him and said we want a marquee speaker. We want the best in the country to come and be the inaugural presenter for the James F. Veninga Religion and Politics Lecture Series. So, this is your field. This is your specialty. You tell us. Give us your first choice, and if that doesn't work, we're just going to go to your second choice, but we are going to get the absolute best in the country to be the inaugural presenter. So Jim responded back with his first choice: Mother Teresa of Calcutta. [LAUGHTER] I said, Jim, that's going to be tough. [LAUGHTER] So we went to his second choice, and this is a person who on anybody's list in this area of study would be on the shortest of the short list, and that is Dr. Martin Marty. 

He is currently the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus status at the University of Chicago. He has taught there for 35 years. And if you visit the Divinity School there where he has taught, you will see the Martin Marty Center for Advanced Studies. Dr. Marty has been an ordained Lutheran minister since 1952, and he's the author of more than 60 books. His titles include Religious Empire, for which he won the National Book Award. He is the author of a three-volume set: Modern American Religion. And he's also the author of a book titled, One in the Many: America's Search for the Common Good. And most recently, his book World Christianity: A Global History. Dr. Marty is a columnist for and he's also a senior editor at the Christian Century. 

He is an editor of Context, which is a newsletter on religion and culture, and he's a weekly contributor to Sightings, which is an electronic editorial published by the Martin Marty Center, no less. Martin Marty has been called the master surveyor of America's religion and cultural landscape by the New York Times. And Time magazine calls him the most influential interpreter of religion in the country today. Dr. Marty is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Medal of America Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Distinguished Service Medal of the Association of Theological Schools, the Order of Lincoln Medallion, and 80 doctorate degrees. Former Senator Paul Simon, who was a rather keen observer in this area, said of Dr. Marty, "He is the Thomas Jefferson of the world of theology." And according to none other than Bill Moyers, "Dr. Marty is simply a human phenomenon." So please welcome this evening our inaugural lecturer for the James F. Veninga Religious and Politics Lecture Series, Dr. Martin Marty. [APPLAUSE]  >> A special distinction for me tonight is most of us as historians get wheeled out for centennials and bicentennials and so on... [LAUGHTER] And here I get to be the first in this lecture series. That's really great. And Jim and I have been-- he had the word humanities there, we would be there. He covered Texas, I covered Illinois, and sometimes those two worlds would meet. 

He is tremendously respected nationally for his contributions to humanities, and I like the names of what he's done here. Civic Engagement, exactly what we need. Religion and Public Policy, just what we need.  On February 4, 1979, hostages taken in the Iranian revolution, 55 of them, brought down the Carter Administration, rocked America with an understanding that something new was going on that we weren't ready for. And the head of the CIA then, Admiral Stansfield Turner, was on Issues and Answers, a Sunday noon national show, and he was asked, why didn't the CIA know this was coming? We still ask that kind of question, don't we? [LAUGHTER] Why didn't the CIA know it was coming? Aren't you supposed to watch these things? We watched everything that is of importance in Iran. We knew about their universities. We knew about village life. We knew what the women were allowed to wear and weren't allowed to wear. We knew which movies they were allowed to see. We knew all those things. 

The only thing we paid no attention to at all was its religion because everybody knows that religion has no power in the modern world. Oh. Since then we've been tracking that. I was involved by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in an eight-year, six-volume study of militants, such movements usually called fundamentalism around the world. They're everywhere. And any day you could take a large newspaper and clip all the places where there are conflicts between religious groups, usually one of them more militant than the other, and you have a very different world than the serene world we thought we had with the only problem around us was the Cold War. And we knew what cold wars were about, but we didn't know what was wars involving the human spirit and beliefs and behaviors and practices. During those eight years, my colleague Robert Appleby, who now runs the Joan Kroc Center for the study of religion, violence, and peace at Notre Dame, worked on this kind of thing. I stayed home because I taught full time, and he went to all these dangerous places, and then he'd come back and report. And we integrated all that. 

And he and I had one sentence that summarized pretty much what we were looking at. A scholar named Harold Isaacs in his book Idols of the Tribe. "Around the world there is a massive convulsive ingathering of peoples into their separatenesses and over-againstnesses to protect their pride and power and place from others who are doing exactly the the same thing, usually in the name of their god." Massive convulsive ingathering of peoples. We formed tribes that we didn't know were there. I think to most people in our part of the world there is a thing called Islam. Some people still suggest that not realizing how many hundreds and hundreds of varieties often  at war with each other. And yet we have assumption that we knew that. And if there's anything that happens when these groups collide, create difficulties, the common good suffers. The common good can be seen in many ways, but I like to think of it as something that you can achieve in the simplest set of terms. Some months ago I heard an NPR a woman interviewing a retired physician who kept his whole practice going with one difference, he accepted no funds, insurance or anything else. 

He was well into his 80s, and why are you doing this? And she couldn't catch on at all. Why are you doing this? And she thought he'd have some complex answer. Finally he said, I don't have more time, 10 seconds left. Why are you doing this? Because I am a citizen. Oh. That just covers so many kinds of things. It overcame a lot of the differences we have with each other. Many of these are very delicious differences. But in the end, he was seeking the common good. It's always complex because the common good gets interrupted by the 'other.' The 'other' is kind of a technical term. 

A Jewish philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas has written many books on the philosophy of the 'other.' We define ourselves in the light of the 'other.' He's also generated something he calls the philosophy of the face where you overcome difficulties by getting to know each other face to face. One of my favorite books on medical ethics quotes a woman who says, "My doctor cured me but she didn't heal me. She never once looked in my face." And to disrupt the common good is when, in the name of god or tribe or convulsive ingather, you have to define them always as most drastic negative terms. They don't get accurately defined, and you don't have a proper perception of them. Appleby went all over the world in these issues and he didn't find any place that you didn't find religion at the heart, both in the aspirations of people toward the common good and then the disruption as they pull off against each other. At the end of the fifth year, he began his move to Notre Dame and I toward retirement and started to summarize these. He said, you know, six years ago I was teaching nice classes at St. Xavier University in Chicago. Good students. I had a good time, but now this came along. Last week I spoke at the war college. 

I regular meet at the military academies. I'm close to the CIA. All of them are curious about these things. I'll tell you one thing, today the state department has got religion. [LAUGHTER] And if I would point out the ways in which not getting it handicapped us. We're still trying to make up for it, I really believe that we could make the case that we would not have fought the Iraq War had Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld known that there was a difference between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Really. You can read it in all his writings. We're going to take on Iraq and we will solve it. Not knowing that these two were in collision against each other, and still are and still are upsetting our peace along the way. 

So the human impulse is to take the most sacred things and say we have a corner on it, we have the monopoly, we have it all together. The most serious historian of philosophy and religion I've ever known, smartest guy I've ever known, is Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale. He knew everything. He talked 26 languages. At the National Humanities Center one time he's talking to the driver and I said, what language is that, Jary? Albanian. Albanian? Who would know Albanian? Oh, he said, once you know one of those languages, you know them all. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I don't. [LAUGHTER] Well, he's a very, very technical scholar. He writes, for example, on the doctrines and conflicts in the early Christian church. And he could spot the difference between a Sabellian patripassionist and a modalisticlithic monarchian at 20 paces. 

[LAUGHTER] He had it all down cold. Always words like that. And he was asked about whether it's a local parish or congregation, a denomination, a movement, or anything else. What disrupts in a social gathering? Have you a technical term for it? Yes I do, he said. Yes, there's a very precise term. What goes on when people get together and fight others? The technical term is football huddle. [LAUGHTER] He said, you know a very important conversation is going on and all you see are the behinds. [LAUGHTER] And that's the organization in which the sacred and the beauty of faith gets disrupted because we define it all in the light of what we have figured out or inherited. Usually what we have inherited and then added on to and made more rigid. Tradition is beautiful. 

Tradition comes from the Latin. It means what is handed in down. And there are so many beauties in tradition. I wouldn't be an historian if I didn't love tradition. I told the students this noon, I had to explain another reason I'm an historian. Quoting British historian R.H. Tawney. They asked him, why did you chose to become an historian? And he said, because I find the world so very odd and I want to know how it got that way. [LAUGHTER] And really that's what I'm on tonight. Why in the name of the beauties of the sacred do people kill each other so? Why do these things happen? Now, that's not the only part of the story, and I hope to end on a cheerier note along the way because I think there are some things that can be done. We don't just have to be victims of it and we don't have to surrender everything involved with the common good. 

I think most people who are religious are religious for positive reasons. They want to make sense of reality, of death, of eternity, of consolation, of how to raise your children, how to draw up your moral pattern, how to pray when you're ill. All those things are very, very deep, and that's why you have such huge gatherings around the world. Two billion Christians and 1.5 billion Muslims for starters. Most of them are not out to kill somebody. They're not Al-Qaeda. They're not anything of that sort. But something happens along the way that leads them to take on this character. And out of that comes faith collisions. I'm very sensitive to what I'm doing tonight, talking about collisions, because I signed a contract to be here. 

"Damage to the premises, equipment or properties of the university utilized by the artist or his staff..." I'm a one man show. [LAUGHTER] "...either intentionally or through negligence will be paid for by that person or may be deducted from his fee." And here I'm talking about collisions, what will it do? Well, what it does is destroys cities, destroys nations, destroys good will. There's a new book by Montefiore on Jerusalem. A wonderful book. A very fair-minded book. From the beginning, pre-Canaan and then the Canaan and then the people of Israel and on and on, Roman Empire, Persia first and then the Roman Empire, all the way down into the present. What Montefiore says is, to all the world, he really means the western world, the Abrahamic world, ask anybody what is the holiest city. Jerusalem. People make pilgrimages. These are the beautiful places. 

These are where the patriarchs were. You run down the street, you expect to see Rachel and Rebecca and Isaac and all those folks you've always known. If you're a Christian, you make the pilgrimage to the sites of Jesus, all so sacred, so profound. And in his book he reminds us that it is never not fighting between who's been there first or claims to be, and the next one that comes along the way. After the Muslims took it over, they thought they should be content and a few centuries later western Christians developed the Crusades, and now they were right and they wanted the holy places back. And if you read the memoirs of the great crusaders, it's not pretty like in the movies. Raymond de Agil says, "God really blessed us today. We've killed so many infidels," Muslims, "that their blood ran as high as our horses' ankles." What a wonderful way we have of praising god. And then after them come Muslims who took their turn again. And so it has gone. 

And you'll solve this only by talking in terms of the big world religions. It gets pretty close to home as well. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski once said, "Aggression, like charity, begins at home." [LAUGHTER] I write a lot about American religion and if you really want to see a scrap, look what happens in a congregation or a parish where you've got two factions or a denomination or any movement. Because people take these things very seriously, very seriously. They want to do the right thing, but they're constantly defining the 'other.' Remember? Back to the 'other.' And your group, breaking out of the huddle, gets to define what the other team is, and what it's about, and what we do with them.  The common good is disrupted then too. We could see plenty of that in the conflicts going on in American religion. Quite rarely does it take lives, although there are exceptions there, but not in mass movements. But still disruptive of the positive spirit of the people who wanted to achieve good things in civic engagement. We get tied up in knots on these terms, and that is destructive. 

So they collide. It's interesting to me to see the collisions and what happens to them in a free republic. I could really make a patriotic speech tonight because for all our faults, I think the biggest therapy for the conflict is to keep free republics alive. And that's why the hyperpolarization in our society is a danger because you are instantly shelved on one side or the other, and it's very hard to find the people who can transect across them. I'm not looking for wishy-washy middle people. I'm looking for people who know who they are, what they believe, and can understand the other, because we've made that other into a stranger. And one of the great concerns in the holy books, it's in Quran and it's certainly in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament. What do you do with a stranger? Almost no sin is more hit by the Hebrew prophets than alienating yourself from the stranger. Israel remember, you were once aliens and strangers. You must take in the stranger. 

It's a higher priority than keeping peace in your own household. We all know the word xenophobia. Xenos is stranger. Xenophobia is the fear of or the hatred of the stranger. Xenophilia, love of the stranger, is the Greek word translated, for example in the New Testament, is hospitality. What do you do? You take in the stranger. In the Christian world I've often thought it would be wonderful to have the place cards from every meal that we're told about in the New Testament. Oh, man, strangers. It was really hard for the disciples to get a seat until da Vinci wanted to paint them and they had to line up in a long thing. [LAUGHTER] Otherwise, Luke, Mark, Acts, sometimes John, who's there? Lepers are at the edge, people with contagious diseases, prostitutes, tax collectors, strangers. 

And the point of it all was you produced the common good by overcoming the differences between them. You're very respectful of what these differences are. One of my favorite illustrations, this is when they asked Jesus how could you violate the basic Jewish canon of working on the Sabbath to heal people. And he said, "The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Man meaning, men and women, humans. It was made for their day of rest, and they turned it around and make that the kind of thing that judges so that he could not heal. You'll find it in all the religions wherever compassion comes up. Collisions along the way. American history is really that from the beginning. Native American versus everybody else, beginning in Santa Fe and then beginning in New England and Virginia, always preempting. Each new immigrant group had to define itself because they were the stranger and, thus, not believed to be part of the common good. 

In 9 of the the 13 colonies, they solved this by having an official established church. Thinking it would solve it if you had an official church paid for by the government, people compelled if they do anything religion, they have to do it in those terms. Yeah. Fortunately for us, my hero, James Madison, came along. He's kind of a cool guy. We don't quote him like we quote Patrick Henry and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. His speeches were kind of dull. They say that people endured these conventions, but he had passion. And for me the clue to what happens later in things like the Bill of Rights is a letter he wrote as a young man to a friend of his named Bradford in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, you may know from the Quaker presence originally, especially did not have an established church and Virginia did. 

And Madison was writing to him, help us out. Are people are less moral in Pennsylvania where they have a pay for their own churches and call their own priests and ministers and so on, than in Virginia where it's imposed. And then cool James Madison said, I know it from memory, "The diabolical hell conceived principle by which ministers of the gospel in my county are imprisoned because they don't have a license from the established church." It didn't take too long for him and Jefferson and many others to approve this. This was a really new thing. George Washington wasn't bothered by it, though we celebrated it when it came. Patrick Henry fought against any disestablishment of the churches, but they didn't realize that when it was on its own and religious freedom came, the churches actually prospered. The people I meet in my classrooms and so on always think that, oh, those founding fathers, everybody just couldn't wait to get up in the morning and run to church. Oh, man. The best estimates we can gather by counting pews and diaries and everything else, is that at its peak in any of the counties when the nation was formed, church membership was less than 15%. It was four times as high at its peak in the early 1960s. 

But out of that distinction came wonderful things, and then each new immigration had to face it. Well, another one of my heroes is Benjamin Franklin, another one of the great founders and a very tolerant man. He's known for tolerance but he had to grow up into that. My people started coming to Pennsylvania and he thought it's a pretty nice place. The Quakers are very good people and were all English speakers. And then he said, "What shall we do with these Palatinate Boors who are coming from Germany? [LAUGHTER] There's a danger that they will Germanize us before we Anglify them." [LAUGHTER] Any English teachers here might think I'm making that up because they don't like suffixes like -ize and -ify but it's there. "They will Germanize us before we Anglify them." And he got to know them and found, in a few years, that they helped the product along, bought his magazines and papers and so on, and changed. And that's often been the process. Never easy, but it's always been a part of it. So when faiths collide, it isn't only in India and Pakistan and so on. 

It happens right here along the way. If you write a history of the successive immigrations, pre-1965, it really was not a lot of fun being an immigrant because in addition to everything else that went on, all the collisions came along the way. They could be very subtle. I grew up in Nebraska, several of us did. [LAUGHTER] Lightly populated. You'd think there'd be room for everybody. I was in a county settled by Germans and church-going Czechs from what later became Czech Republic. And I got along pretty well. We had a road called Monterey Road. You got to the county line and suddenly it became County Road M. 

Why? Because the other county was settled by Czech and they used the word free thinkers. They had been oppressed by the Hungarian empire and by the Catholic church, and they came here and they didn't want anything to do with religion. In one of my books I collected some of their stories because I grew up with them. I was in a religious county and they were an un-religious county. There were letters from parents who will say-- They're free thinkers, atheists. They say, our wonderful son, he went to a dance in Cuming County and he fell in love with this Catholic girl and he's going to marry her. He's turning religious, where did we go wrong? [LAUGHTER] Sort of the opposite of our usual plot. I have a picture of one of the cemeteries. The cemeteries have all this iron stuff, and printed on top it says, "What we are, you soon will be." [LAUGHTER] And as you leave it says, "What you are, we once were." Yeah. And the conflict there between the church-going and the non-church-going, both are their own kind of faith, would be that conflict. 

I studied them all over the country and I find them every kind of place. I have a niece who is the president of Lord of Life Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, all but three of whose members are Burmese. Fort Wayne has more Catholics and Lutherans than people. [LAUGHTER] And all the sudden you have a Burmese congregation there. I spoke in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at Coe College, and they heard I was there and they knew I had an interest in pluralism and medical ethics. When people really disagree about to do, whether you cease to provide sustenance, let somebody die, and people from about eight hospitals were there and I gave my talk on pluralism and medical ethics. A case that I'd been involved with where the head of the University of Chicago's clinical ethics, Mark Ziegler, is an orthodox Jew and a Hippocratic oath, and between the two a brain-dead Seventh-day Adventist lying there. He says, nope, not on my watch. You can't touch it. At the foot of the bed was his Seventh-day Adventist pastor who said, really, he's ready for heaven, let him go. 

At the side was Mary Carol Sullivan, a Harvard PhD in ethics and a registered nurse who complicated the issue by raising about 20 other issues. Finally the man died and solved it for us. [LAUGHTER] I told that story and they said, that's how you talk in Chicago. You've got everything in Chicago. And I said, well, I studied these things. Let's play the game of faiths in conflict. Where is the oldest mosque in continuous use in the United States? I had this one up my sleeve. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 1934, Lebanese millers came there, made Quaker oats and they stayed and they have a beautiful mosque. Until a few years ago they were even members of what was called the Church Federation. 

Everybody's good neighbor. Right north of them, faiths in conflict, is Postville, Iowa. Many of you know Postville. There's a novel about it, a movie about it. It was -- Jews butchering place for kosher butchering, but they also had smuggled in a lot of very low paid Mexicans who were airlifted out of there one day. Okay, a lot of conflict there. The old Postvillians had a lot of trouble when the town board is turning out, that's people with big beards and big hats and so on. It wasn't easy. Right south is Fairfield, Iowa. That is the home of the transcendental meditation university. 

In the middle of Iowa. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's people there trying to levitate and do all those other kind of things, and they're considered good citizens, but when they got there, it was really scary. That tends to be what happens as they get to know them. In 1924, the US passed laws on immigration which allowed in very few people and only those represented in proportion to who had been here by national groups in the 19th century. You couldn't come directly from Africa. There were no more new Africans coming, no more slaves being emancipated, and that changed. Now suddenly you could come straight from Gambia or any nation there. I'm trying to think of the one most in conflict right now. In Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, I was on a Carter commission on settling refugees and they really like these states because there was a kind of dispersal of people into areas where the beginnings of such common good understanding was present. And for whatever tenses were there, it's turned out pretty good. 

Mary Pipher, who wrote the book Reviving Ophelia, radical feminist, and her husband accepted a position in Lincoln, Nebraska, 150,000 people or so, and she got a lot of letters. Mary, you're going to move to Lincoln, Nebraska. You'll be in the middle of nowhere. Her next book was called, you could look it up, In the Middle of Everywhere. Fifty-three languages are spoken by the parents of the children in the public schools in a city of that size. It was a hospitable city and people came, not always easy, and yet there they are and they're doing very well. Catholics. It was the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Council and we were having a lot of celebrations and I enjoy that and I get to go to them and I had been to the third session of the council. But before the council, 1961, the new pope, a new spirit, really wonderful, and some adventuresome people said, let's do something. Until then, Catholics and Protestants were never allowed to discuss theology. 

We had a lot of good conferences on church and state, politics, social order, but you couldn't talk about theology. But two venturesome places worked it out. Saint John's College in Minnesota, I met somebody here today who's from there, a Benedictine place, and Notre Dame with Father Hesburgh. Here were the rules. Limited to 10 theologians who were Catholic and 10 who were non-Catholic. A limited number of guests were allowed in the room. Three press people would be allowed there. Wonderful sessions. They made books out of these along the way. And at the end, the press was invited out because if you had the permission of the president of the university, who was sitting in the room, the head of your religious order, Holy Cross and Benedictine, the local bishop, if they all approved, then at the end, with the door shut, you could light a candle and say the Lord's Prayer together if you wouldn't tell anybody you'd done it. 

[LAUGHTER] Well, once Pope John came along and the council came along, we're not only allowed to tell it, we sort of rejoiced it and it happened all over the place. But they had invented the other as the stranger until somebody with vision came along and said let's have religious engagement, civic engagement, and so on. And that seems to be the process. But these can be very subtle. While I was working on my advanced degree, I'm an ordained minister and I would preach in a lot of intercity churches, African American and blue-collar white churches, and one of these blue-collar white churches had voted 83 to 2 to move out and sell their church or give it to the jurisdiction to start a new African American church there. Would I preached there for six weeks? Well, yeah. I was a graduate student, 35 bucks a week and a chance to preach wasn't a bad deal. And then he said, you're walking into something. They just voted to move out. Oh, yeah. 

You do preach German, don't you? No. Well, two other guests had read the liturgy in German and they preached in English and they never saw me before so I would memorize six sermons-- [speaking in German] Every time they would say --, I would say --. Luther says they didn't notice the difference and it was fine. [LAUGHTER] But the terms were I was allowed to preach a series of sermons on the minor prophets, and then they would vote again. I was 24 years old. You could solve a lot of things at that age, and I could just picture the torrent of change and they voted. It had been 83 to 2 and the new vote was 85 to 3. [LAUGHTER] So my cause advanced 50% and you hardly nudged at all. [LAUGHTER] I didn't have a car and a man was driving me back to the university where we lived, looking over his shoulder all the time. He said, you know, pastor, you couldn't have been more wrong. 

All the time you were preaching you kept thinking we were German, the Germans were holding the church together. You couldn't be more wrong. We're Austrian. [LAUGHTER] If you couldn't integreate the Austrians and the Germans you couldn't do the reast. Well, they moved on and moved out in the suburbs and got new people and got a little happier along the way. There can be change. Shiite, Sunni and all these other kinds of changes. Again, the vision of the Vatican Council brought about a great deal of change. All of these local groups of church federations and so on, they're not the center where action is today, but where would we be without them? Many of the reasons they aren't the center of action nationally and internationally is because we should send them a card of thanks for what they got done already so far. Many things happened out of social processes, induced change. 

You'll often find how this was. I taught a course on tradition once at the University of Chicago jointly with Edward Shils, a great sociologist, and every student had a write a paper. One student came to me, she was a Jewish social worker. And she said, I want to write a story of ethnicity in the middle border. You're probably pretty close to the middle border, aren't you? Where Wisconsin and Minnesota meet? She wanted to write about that. Well, fine. I said, what's that have to do with you Jewish social work? I deal with the same kind of stuff. What? She found that these new western Wisconsin people, Swedes, and if a Swedish farmer would die, two weeks later they would have the widow married off to a Polish bachelor. They didn't know a word of each other's language but they had to make due. And she made a study of, oh they fought, but then they started having jokes and they had fun and they had parties and learned each other's dances and things happened along the way, and you wouldn't know the difference after a while. 

Very often it comes about in those terms. A book of two years ago by Robert Putnam called American Grace, I commend you if any of this interests you, probably the best book in sociology of religion about America in the last decade. American Grace, Robert Putnam, in which they made all these studies of why in the midst of all the conflict I'm talking about in America today, and it isn't going to go away, why do so many positive common good things also happen? How does change come? Remember the face and the other? You had to get to know them, you had to deal with them, you had to learn their world from within. There are two very interesting pages with a graph. This was a very well funded study. It wasn't just Gallup calling and who do you like. They moved to the communities and spent time with the people. They learned them and then they would take surveys. The most telling thing in the book for me was asking a Gallup type sample. Beyond your own faith, with which other faith would you feel most at home? Who would bother you least? With whom could you get along? Number one, Jews. 

Jews were the most hated group in 1924. You couldn't get into most colleges if you were a Jew. Harvard had quotas into the 1950s. Now eight of the ten top universities in the country have a Jewish president. Why did Jews have a free ride? People got to know them. They knew them through entertainment, they knew them through civic engagement, etc, and they learned their faces. Number two, who could you most live with? Catholics. Right up until Vatican II they were just, by non-Catholics, about the most hated people. Add ethnicity to it, Irish Catholic, Polish Catholic, it was really, really rough along the way. And then some change came. 

I think the election of John F. Kennedy, which was massively opposed by liberal Protestants. I write for the Christian Century, which was the flagship for liberal Protestantism, and everybody on the staff preferred Kennedy, politically, but we couldn't get our management to endorse him, which we were trying to do. Why? Because he was Catholic. Norman Vincent Peale, the most popular Protestant preacher at the time, helped organized an anti-Catholic, anti-Kennedy thing. When it was exposed, he retreated in a big hurry and he changed. This is how you learn along the way. And then Pope John XXIII, 1958, and he felt right away what a difference that was. I think the biggest one was the GI bill. Reached every class of people, every kind of person. 

You'd come home from the army where you'd been at the side of people of other faiths, GI bill says you go. I think over 90% of Catholics who went to college, and that was a very small percentage in general, went only to Catholic colleges. Now you're going to state universities, schools like this, and you bump into other kinds of people. Nothing I'm saying tonight is to say it's easy or that everybody was really nice, but you learn the face of the other along the way. And I think that's what happens that changes the collisions. I was telling some of the students this noon that my other people are Lakota Sioux from South Dakota. And one of my graduate students introduced me to them, Harvey Markowitz, a secular Jew. He was adopted by the tribe with the name Harvey Horse Looking. [LAUGHTER] There's seven Horse Lookings in the phone book there. Lives with the Jesuits who run the mission on the reservation. 

And my wife and I went out there, this is shortly after the movie Dances with Wolves, and he and Charlie Whitehead had been the consultants on language. So she was so curious, she wanted to know what this was like. So we went there, we were really hosted well. He had been in a sweat lodge on a vision quest. Thursday he came out of it. I volunteered. I've got to travel to religious things. No, Professor Marty, I know you. You couldn't stand it. Around Chicago there's sweat lodges, nice beautiful places that suburbanites build that's got a thermostat. 

You think you're really doing it. [LAUGHTER] That's not what we do. You're purple coming out of there. [LAUGHTER] And the next day, we go to the Jesuit mission and it's one of the very few places in the country where we're allowed to have a cross and the peace pipe. And then in the evening he had to hurry up to Rapid City because it was Rosh Hashanah and he had to do the Jewish things. A new Jesuit leader forced them to fire him. It seemed a little strange to have a Jew writing the history of the mission. And his successor came in and the first move he made was to invite Markowitz back, Horse Looking, back they call him, and the change that came among the peoples around there was amazing. Not easy yet, terribly deprived physical area and so on, and you still have the issue of keeping the religion of the Native American and the others, but change comes about. My thesis is that there can be change, and it's never easy but after it's over we find ourselves gradually coming to be at home. 

In any interfaith work that I do, my main quotation is from the philosopher George Santayana a hundred years ago. For me, meeting doesn't mean you stop being who you are or believing what you believe, but you have a different texture and a character once you know the other along the way. I do a lot of work with a man named Eboo Patel. He formed the Interfaith Youth Core, which is now a huge national movement. He's a Muslim of Indian extraction but born in Naperville, Illinois, a Rhodes scholar, and every time he went to civic engagement things, everybody was over 60 so he founded this group in which you had to be under 30 to be in it along the way. And it seems to work. I've done some dialogs with him in which we did one in the Jewish group, Muslim/Christian exchange, and he asked a certain question, he was asked, and I said you better turn this one over to Marty, he's the historian of Christianity. He said, I can take it. He gave a lecture on the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Why? Because he believes that the strongest such civic engagement things, interreligious events come if people who are sharing the vision of the face of the other have convictions, have communities, have identities, etc. 

You can't get into the Youth Core without identifying with your faith. Typically, on a certain campus day in the morning, 400 kids will show up and the topic will be how does your faith read texts? Or what does your faith have to say about the family? Oh, my god, I haven't the faintest idea. Mom and dad, do you know? No, we don't have any idea either. But ask a rabbi, ask a priest, use the good book. They know they're better at it than their parents were because of this engagement. I think that's how it's supposed to work and works best along the way. Finally, finally, is it worth it? Is it worth having these centers that we're celebrating here? Is it worth it when people in a community engage across these lines along the way? And I would argue that the real things that happen tend to happen through not an imposition from on top. I wouldn't dream of dreaming of knowing how right now to depolarize America just before an election, but there are a lot of things that do go on in other ways, and I think it mainly goes when you have an exemplar. We were talking earlier today about one of our exemplars, Jim, an Iowa congressman Jim Leach who's now head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. A moderate Republican who was so well known for being able to get people to talk to each other. 

I asked him the other day at an event, could you do it now? He said I don't think you could quite use that technique now. Those were normal times. [LAUGHTER] And I said, can we please have normal times back? What did he stand for? What was he? So, to close, these institutes and centers, these ventures, these engagements of citizens like we have tonight are exemplary, and then we have to ask what that means. If you had a medieval lexicon or dictionary and you looked up the word exemplum, from which we get these other words, it would say something cut out, as you excise things and so on, exemplar, and to illustrate it said, like a clearing in the woods. I like to think that's what exemplars are. What are they for? A French scholar wrote a book called Exemplum in which I learned this. First of all, a clearing in the woods is used to define. When you're in a thick woods, you don't know where you are or where you're going, where the trails are, but when you're in the clearing, here's where the woods start, here's where the clearing starts. Something goes on, a definition. And people who are exemplars and movements that are exemplars help define. 

I think that's much of what's going on in this university, college. Two, a clearing in the woods is a place where the light falls. If you've ever really been lost in a dark wood, it could be a moon-lit night and it's absolutely gone and you get to a clearing in the woods and the moon is there and you know who you are and what direction you're going and that's good too. And exemplars, you can name them, everybody has some, are the people who bring a light along the way. And I've named some of them tonight. The Pope Johns and others who went against the grain and produced something because they threw light on situations we hadn't known. That's why study is such a big part of it. That's why colleges such as this should have an interest in it and citizenry, which is really, really, really important. And the third, the clearing is the place where cultivation can go on. Again, education is it, cooperative work, cultivation, in citizenship and all the rest, generosity. 

When I picture a clearing in the woods, I picture Hodgenville, Kentucky, in a movie or picture, February 12, 1809. And a shaggy old guy named Thomas comes out, tosses some hot water out of the basin. They do that in all the movies when a baby's born. That's how you know a baby is born because the midwife or the mother or father throws that water out there. So a baby's been born. There's a cow tethered to the little cabin in a clearing in the woods. There's some corn growing. Now, if that father, Thomas Lincoln, had gone to the neighbors and said the author of the Emancipation Proclamation has just been born... [LAUGHTER] Yeah. It was true, wasn't it? It made no sense at all. 

It took years of cultivation and reading by the fireside and meeting with lawyers and going into politics and knowing the neighbors and read, read, read. Cultivation wherein he could acquire law, rhetoric, many people think he's still the finest stylist in American prose. All that came along exemplar. So, inaugurating this series, I don't know why you have such modest expectations. It's only to go on five years. Everything else around here seems to work, so let's say 10 or 15. I'll try to cost you some money. Let it be exemplars, definers, throwers of light, and cultivators. And I wish you well in it, and I thank you for inviting me. [APPLAUSE]  Thank you. 

 Thank you. They promised me we can have some give and take, and that's my favorite part. Who wants the second question? Yes. It's always hard to get that first question-- [laughter] Yes, please. And I tell ya, I didn't pay him five bucks to start this. He just happened to be sitting in front. Please. >> I would like to hear your views on the conflict between homosexuality and gay marriage an the churches of the United States and the world. >> You got a good one there. [laughter]  A lot of the division is within the United States, but the place where it's often felt-- I mentioned to somebody today that the northern world, western Europe, former Soviet Union and North America, in the last 24 hours demographers tell us, 3,000 fewer Christians. 

In sub-Sahara Africa there are 18,000 more. So that's where Christianity's growing. Muslims, every seventh person in the world is was Muslim 20 years ago, now every fifth is. Other parts of the world grow more. And when these two come together you have a lot of trouble, and it doesn't happen instantly. Some things they were way ahead of us on. I learned things while teaching in South Africa that I didn't learn in South Side of Chicago. I lost that vote 83 to 2.  But it shows up because the customs and the mores are very profoundly different. Again, I try to be a little bit light-hearted about this and think of that. 

One night the head of the Episcopal Foundation and his assistant were in our home, we were having a good time. "What's your dream?" he said, because the Episcopal church was really loosing parishes. "Oh, my dream would be that they would accept us with our stand on homosexuality. And we would accept the Anglicans of southern Africa with their polygamy." Because it's all over the place, it won't be in 20 years, it won't be in 50 years, but it there and you're accepting along the way. I think that people of that spirit could achieve a good deal along the way. I personally don't think an awful lot of that is theological. It a very deeply cultural thing. But you have that too. I was at an Africa American seminary the other day is Salisbury, Virginia at the theological seminary. Almost everyone in the room is theologically moderate and liberal and so on. 

And yet, they're African American and they know what grandma and so on had done. They have trouble because they're trying to face it. As one of them said, "Biblically, if it's a fight about the bible," and boy, the bible had a lot of good stuff in it. I have a pocket bible. There are six inches about homosexuality. Four of them are in Leviticus which no Christian pays any attention to otherwise. A couple I take seriously, in the letter in Romans by Paul. I don't think you can be flip about this. I take it seriously. But I think a lot of change is going on. 

Here again, the change comes like I was describing before. Your daughter is lesbian and you suddenly confront it, and you don't like, you don't know what to make of it. She's your daughter. A couple of years later she marries and you have grandchildren, and you've come to terms with it. Tremendous differences come on those terms. A lot of racial change came that way too. I'm not trying to solve everything tonight. I'm saying it's going to take a lot more than just arguing biblically or anything else. It's culture. Very profound. 

 Please >> Should Mitt Romney become president how do you think his religion and Mormonism would affect his presidency? >> I'm not sure I heard all of it. I heard the name Mitt Romney. I've heard that before. [laughter] >> If he were to become president, how do you think his religion of Mormonism-- >> Oh, a Mormon in the White House, yeah. I'll be very careful here, because I don't discuss contemporary politics in a talk like this. I literally don't. I don't write about it. But I can talk about the Mormon thing, and then we can see how they would apply it. I do believe that churches use Christ as the Latter Day Saints as a different religion than Christianity if you take the whole Christian spectrum, from fundamentalist to liberal. It's very different. 

It's a different God, it's a different process and so on. They're very reverent and they love Jesus and so on. But we are all in a process of becoming God, and God was, if you're been to Salt Lake City you've seen the movie, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the three human figures now glorified. I've done a lot of studies of them and I've had a lot of Mormon students who teach at Brigham Young and such places. So I've had constant chance to see this in action. They get by very nicely because they are-- Nobody wants to be converted by them, but every likes to have them as a next door neighbor. [laughter] Right? You know, they're clean, they're pure, they're all home on Monday night. [laughter] All these things. Every study you make. Some things they get by a little-- One of my Mormon students in one of my books, I said they resisted-- The New Deal came along and they said, we take of our own. 

We take of our own. And she pointed out that Utah had a higher per capita receipt of federal funds than the other states. People tend to do that in various ways. I think a great deal of many things they do. I spent a week giving lectures there a few years ago. The 12, the top guy and the other 11, had my wife and me up there a couple of times. We got off the elevator and the local Latter Day Saints said, "How can these--" You're called gentile if you're-- You can be a Jew, but in Utah you're a gentile if you're not a Mormon. "How do those gentiles get access the top people and we don't and we pay our tithe." How would it affect-- I don't thing he would dare do anything that would look unconstitutional or test the limits of it. He may do things out of that religion which is shared with other religions. I think many of his views of the family and so on grow out of attachment of the faith, but you don't have to be a Mormon to get those. 

I don't picture that'd be a big upheaval. What's interesting to me is the general prognostication, of the people I hang out with is, if he's elected he will be elected by Evangelical white Protestant men. They would be the tipping thing. Those who most hated Catholic Ryan and Mormon Romney. But again, in fitting my process here, politics, recessions on politics and religion. When politics and religion interact a lot of change comes. But I don't picture a radical change in the way Americans do things.  Anybody? She's coming with a microphone.  >> In a recent poll about religion in America it showed that Protestantism was not the majority and that people, especially young people, are not committed to a faith. One of the reasons, one of the pundit's said, or I think it was in the research, was that the young people did not like the mix that politics was coming into churches. 

They wanted to go to church to hear religion, not politics. Can you comment on that? >> I'll be glad to. The second one interests and unnerves me more than the first one, about young people not forming community ion religion. One of the larger things is explainable in a lot of ways. Partly it's demographic, or hugely demographic, but I don't want to let protestants off the hook quite that way. That is, they all married young, they had big families, they're kids did what their parents did. That's simply what was it. I was at a church near O'Hare field in Chicago and Lutherans were moving out of the Lutheran church and 16.8% in that community were Lutheran, and about 16.8%-- We lost some. A lot of people don't like me as a Lutheran so I had to recruit a few Methodists too. [laughter] What I'm getting at is it was an actual thing. 

The Depression messed up everybody. There was no talk of a religious revival. I cannot find anybody pre-WWII that said a revival was coming. That came after the war with Billy Graham-types. That and the war, very unsettled. And now, you come back, GI bill, federal loans, settle in new suburbs, new parts of the city, whatever it is and you'd simply perpetuate what you'd been involved with without necessarily going deep in what had shaped their grandparents world. I think like everything of that sort, you get grooved into a culture, and you lean back. It's not just mainline Protestants, it's the last three years of Southern Baptists, the biggest outfit of all and the strictest of the big ones, has gone way down in it's baptisms and it's commitments and so on. It's subject to some of the same kinds of things. The big exception are the Latter Day Saint. 

I told the students this noon that when you go on a Mormon mission you are taught to be ready for 1,800 doors slammed before one is friendly to you. I told them that the sociologist figured out at the Episcopal church, when they were last invited to church, the average Episcopalian invited somebody to church every 29 years. [laughter] So you're not going to get into a recruitment that way. But I think taking a lot of it for granted has been a big part of it. And again, huge population shifts. Catholicism, apart form the Mexicans, is exactly the same kind of losses. A sociologist in Chicago once said, "Everything that can happen sociologically has already happened to the Catholic church." I think in a certain way the Protestants have been catching up on that. There's some good things going on in both. I'm not saying they're rolling over and playing dead. But you can't take for granted anything automatic. 

The other one is the one that I think is harder work for people of faith. There it's really complex. I think it's part of a pattern of many, most, young people who grew up in a culture in which community is very important to a synagogue, church and so on. It's not a natural thing to do. Putnam, whom I quoted before on American grace, was very famous for a book a few years called Bowling Alone in which he noticed that there are no longer bowling leagues, there are not longer bowling teams. It's simply, you've got a free evening go get a bottle of beer and roll a ball all by yourself. That hits Masonic lodges, it hits service clubs, many, many, many kinds of things. There's been a great shift there. I think that the nature of our crisis haven't yet led people to see that they need each other. I live in the John Hancock Center on the 85th floor looking down on Chicago after a life in the city on the ground. 

It's suburbs. Great numbers of people there live alone and have no other ties. A lot of Jews never go to synagogue. A lot of Christians never go to church. They don't belong to anything. And then they get sick. I get to know a lot of them along the way. Sometimes they're truly fun because those who came with values keep them. We had a Jewish manufacturer across the hall from us, and I would drop in on him every once in a while. I got to know him well. 

His wife was dying. I got a phone call from his daughter one day. She said, he'd like to have you come over and say a prayer for her 'cause she's dying. I said, I'll be glad to, but you know I'm a Christian and how will that sit? He was lying there on his deathbed and he said, "Well, you stole the prayers from us in the first place." [laughter] So good things happen. I think any energy put in young people is changing the larger culture. I think they're closer. There are more features of pop culture, tweeting and twittering and all these kinds of things, have just caught everybody off guard. I don't think anybody's exempt from it. The Evangelicals, which prosper in the mega-churches and so on, know how precarious it is. I know a lot of them that dropped too. 

I think this is a real-- We're on a trajectory of western Europe where they've been Christian for many centuries and then it kinda wanes. That would be-- We need exemplars, and we have some, but we need a lot more work in that line. The hand back there. >> As an educator and doctor and historian, what is the biggest surprise to you, in your perception, from what you believed as that 24-year-old Lutheran minister starting out? What is the biggest change or surprise in what you've learned over these years? >> I'm going to be sure I caught it right. How did I, in my vocation, put to work-- Did I catch it right? >> With the education you've acquired with your multiple doctorates and so forth, what is the biggest change in the way you look at things and your perception from what you felt and thought you knew when you where that 24-year-old Lutheran minister? To what you think now. >> It's a crazy thing. You know, on one level I could quote Robert Frost's poem, "They would not find me different from the one they knew, only more sure of what he thought was true." [laughter] I think you dig deeper, you want to find what that is. Two days ago my 57-year-old son had a stroke. I'm on the phone every little while and he's not paralyzed but it's there. The family gathers on telephones and we exactly the prayers that I did as a minister 50 years ago. 

I get to many deathbeds where people sing old little Methodist hymns. I get very deep. Now on other levels it's tremendous changes, I think. At the University of Missouri they asked me once, what kind of Lutheran are you? [laughter] Then I said, I'm a fanatic Lutheran. [laughter] And then I defined it. There was a Chicago humorist who invented a character called Mr. Dooley. It was kind of a Catholic Will Rogers. It made fun of some of the funny things in religion. Mr. Dooley defined a fanatic as someone he knows he's doing exactly what the Lord would do if the Lord were also in possession of the facts. [laughter] I do think a more serious answer would be something like my late former colleague, the great philosopher Paul --, called the second naivete. 

When you're a little kid and these stories come at you, you just take it as they come. The biblical stories, they never had any trouble at all. They're just there. Then criticism comes, you get a second angle at them, and then you have two choices. Throw the stories away or come at them in a new way. I think that's what you tend to do. You can be both critical and naive. Faith in a certain sense, I think, requires a naivete, wonder. Look what's happening. So I feel right at home in a critical world as an historian. 

At the divinity school we say you have to have the hermeneutic of suspicion, don't trust anybody or any thing. The very first document may have messed up. But I think you affirm in the face of that along the way. When I look at the great people in the religions who know all those things and kneel, it's there. Some things change, some parts don't.  Time for one more? I got all the time you want but I shouldn't-- >> In the context of the conflict in the Middle East and the collisions among the religions there, can you offer some thoughts going forward on what kinds of things we can expect related to stability? Any sort of predictions in that particular region? >> I'm having trouble hearing. Is there something acoustically resonant? Can you all hear? >> I can speak up. I can speak up. In terms of the Middle East. >> Yeah. 

>> And all the collisions of religions in that region, I know that's a big area but, could you offer some predictions and thoughts, what we can expect in terms of political stability in that region going forward. >> Okay. Well, in the short poll it's pretty hard to be optimistic. You could be hopeful as it comes, but on the short poll a lot of things that were long buried now come to the surface. Middle East also means also Egypt and Syria and all these other places. And while it's inflamed you can't do a lot. In America the one I'm most interested in the most, of course, is Palestinian and Israel. There I hang out with a lot of people who do some bridge building, Jews and Christians. Mennonites do a wonderful job. We support a hospital in east Jerusalem along the way. 

You get close to the people there, but the larger forces almost force them to be-- If you notice, presidential candidates, how careful they are when they're talking about this. They know how delicate it is. I said to somebody at dinner, we had a good friend, Judith --, a husband and wife novelist team. They're wonderful, among our best friends, and in politics we're in total agreement and in poetry we like what the other likes. We're real close. And one time we were at dinner and my wife said that she'd been at some event, I did a dialog with former President Carter. He gets off the elevator at two minutes to one. We're to go on at 1:00. We're lined up, the mayor of Atlanta and the president of Emory University, about nine guys are there. She told him, there I was. 

President Carter came off the elevator and walked behind all these nine guys. I reached my hand out. He gave em a big hug, and, oh Harriet, I've been wanting to meet you for so long! And the woman said, how can you let anybody that loathsome touch you? He'd written that book about apartheid, which may have been a bad choice of terms. What do I do? I notice how many people in Israel, how many Jews in the US, don't do the hard line party line. They care greatly. I don't know enough. The Mennonites I know over there and the Lutherans I know over there are all peace people. But I don't know what the larger Palestinian scene would be. I don't have a good contact there. On the short poll it's hard to have great hope. 

Some of them say, when enough of them have killed enough of the others of them, maybe things will happen. But we celebrate every little glimmer, and there are some. Sometimes young people, there are agencies in America that bring young people over here, Jews and Arabs together, and then they go back. But then social pressure gets thrown at them again. I think that's an illustration of an early stage. It's what we used to do. The face of the other has to become known. The pressure is very hard to resist. Can we have one cheery question at the end? [laughter] I like to end on a higher note. It's a very good question, by the way. 

And it's exactly where we're living. But I shouldn't keep you longer. I'll be hanging around. I'll be around to say hi to anybody. I didn't imagine I know as many people around Wausau as I saw today that I know. Most of you are new to me, so I look forward to getting aquatinted with you. And again, thanks for the invitation to be the first in the series. Thank you. [applause]