Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Sherwin Wine - 7/26/07

Prophets traditionally don’t get much respect on their home turf, especially when they are starting a new religion. Jesus knew something about that, and so did Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons.

Like Malcolm X, they were martyred for their beliefs. Sherwin Wine escaped that fate, though he was certainly a pariah to most of Detroit’s Jewish community in the early years of his movement.

It took a lot of chutzpah for a young rabbi to proclaim he was an atheist in 1964, less than twenty years after the holocaust.  It took even more brass to start first a new congregation, then a new branch of his faith – one that was based on not having faith.

Today the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews has congregations on every continent except Antarctica and Africa.

They train their own rabbis, and put on high-powered intellectual and theological colloquia every other year. The movement was written about in Time and the New York Times before the local paper, the Jewish News, reluctantly agreed to start covering Humanistic Judaism.

Incidentally, I am neither Jewish nor intellectually equipped to judge the merits of competing theologies. What I am, however, is a writer and a teacher, with a strong prejudice in favor of knowledge.

And it is as a teacher that I most admired Sherwin Wine. He spent a great deal of time giving lectures and organizing lecture series across southeastern Michigan. In fact, he started an organization to do just that, the Center for New Thinking. He reminded me of the days when learned men would travel the country, giving lecture series that were raptly attended by thousands of people hungry for knowledge.

Sherwin Wine was still doing that. I saw him as a throwback to the age of the enlightenment, where intellectuals held forth in salons on a variety of topics. I sometimes spoke at his invitation.

The people who came were mainly open-minded and curious. They were well-read. Many of them knew how to find information on their own. But they enjoyed coming together to learn with a teacher.

Wine wasn’t perfect. He did not suffer fools gladly. Actually, he barely tolerated them at all.  But he was able to speak on topics from evolutionary biology to the modern theater. He did movie reviews and explained the great sweep of history. Not everybody loved him. Even those who admired him sometimes disagreed with him.  One newspaper editor told me “You know he didn’t know everything, and he wasn’t always right.”

But, I said, he is trying to educate the public – and is your newspaper doing what newspapers did? Is it educating your community about itself and stimulating discussion of the major issues of the day? We both knew the answer was no.

The word rabbi means, literally, teacher, and Sherwin Wine was a one-man university, helping as many of us as he could to learn more about their world and themselves. I suspect it will be a long time before this community knows how much it lost in that car accident in Morocco.

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Interview: Adam Chalom - 7/26/07

Sherwin Wine shocked Michigan’s Jewish community in 1964 when he announced that he was an atheist.  He went on to found a new branch of his religion.  By the time Rabbi Wine died in a car crash on Saturday, there were Secular Humanistic Jewish congregations all across the nation and world.  Chicago area Rabbi Adam Chalom grew up in the humanistic tradition and was trained by Rabbi Wine.

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Essay: Can We All Somehow Get Along - 7/26/06

Not long ago I was looking at American propaganda during World War II, and the way it portrayed our major enemies in that conflict, the Germans and the Japanese.

You might be surprised to learn there was a vast difference. Virtually all the European propaganda was directed, not towards the Germans as a people but to their Nazi rulers, who were presented as a nasty and fiendish yet intelligent gang.  We needed to beat them on the battlefield and conquer the nation they’d hijacked.

But the hidden message seemed to be that when that was all over, the Germans would be normal again. They might need to be punished some, but then they would be readmitted to the civilized world. We did not know much about the Holocaust then.

The way we portrayed the Japanese was entirely different. They were presented as fanatical, bloodthirsty Asiatics, cunning, ugly, and fundamentally inhuman. Last year, an editor I know had to cancel plans to reprint some of his paper’s classic front pages from World War II. He was uncomfortable with the blatant racism evident towards the Japanese in the newspaper’s very headlines. The ads were worse. One showed a cross-eyed Japanese soldier with a fiendish grin, saliva dripping from his fangs.

Thousands of Japanese-Americans on the west coast were rounded up into concentration camps, purely out of racist hysteria.

For American Muslims, the climate is, in some ways, as bad or worse than it was for the Japanese. They are members of a relatively small community outside the religious tradition of most Americans.

Suddenly, on Sept. 11, other Muslims kill thousands of Americans in a series of shocking terror attacks. The killers proclaimed they are doing this in the name of Islam, and that all Muslims should support their holy war.

This was not something calculated to make it easy for other peace-loving Americans to rally around their peace-loving Muslim neighbors – which may be what the terrorists had in mind. To his credit, President Bush swiftly and repeatedly warned against stigmatizing all Muslims as potential terrorists. But the actions of his government since then haven’t exactly made American Muslims feel as accepted as everybody else.

Five thousand young men, virtually all Muslim, were “voluntarily” interviewed by the Justice Department within a few weeks of 9/11. When Ismael Ahmed was nominated for University of Michigan regent the next year, there were hundreds of thousands who voted the straight Democratic ticket – except for him.

How we get past this, I don’t know. There are no Muslim equivalents of Sen. Daniel Inouye, a Japanese-American who lost his arm fighting for this nation in World War II.

But we need something to make us feel more like one people. The head of the Council for Islamic Organizations of Michigan suggests Muslim Americans need to more forcefully denounce terrorism. And that might be a good place to start.   

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Interview: Victor Ghalib Begg - 7/26/06

Being Muslim is central to Victor Begg’s identity.  He is a co-founder of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan.  And he has very definite views about terrorism. He thinks Muslim Americans have a religious obligation to fight it. He also thinks Muslims have a sacred duty to prevent their youth from being seduced by radical extremists.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Religion and Politics - 6/13/06

President Kennedy ended his inaugural address by suggesting that anyone trying to make the world a better place ought to ask the lord’s blessing and his help -- but that we should know “that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

That wasn’t the least bit controversial then. We believed that church and state should be separate. Indeed, JFK had to spend a lot of time during the campaign convincing the voters that his true loyalty would be to the American people, not to the Pope. But things have changed. In his spellbinding new book American Theocracy, former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips argues that the Republicans have become America’s first truly religious party -- and that this is a revolutionary and frightening development.

If you doubt that he is right, consider this. Imagine a deeply religious preacher who decides it is his Christian duty to tell his flock who they should vote for in the next election. Do you picture him as a deeply committed liberal who wants to commit politicians to stopping wars and spending more money on helping the nation and world’s poor? Or do you see him as a plump, silver-haired evangelist who tells his flock that President Bush is a man of God who will make it a high priority to prevent homosexual marriage, and hopefully name more Supreme Court justices who will help overturn Roe vs. Wade?

You know the answer. Ann Arbor surgeon Bob O’Neal does too, and isn’t happy about it. He is a Christian, and is mightily unhappy with the idea that God has been hijacked by the religious right. So he has helped found something called the Interfaith Partnership for Political Action, or IPPA. They think religious people should concentrate more on seeing that their ethical values are reflected in political decisions. That means, first of all, things like common sense and telling the truth. IPPA members include Christians of all denominations, Muslims, Jews, agnostics and non-believers. When it comes to ethical values, what they agree on is that politicians should have some, and tell us how they will use them to make decisions.

That sounds refreshingly sane. What remains to be seen is whether this group can have any impact. I have to say I am pessimistic. What they stand for is extremely subtle, and that doesn’t mesh very well with today’s attention deficit media and a citizenry that is always on stress overload, including the weekends.

H. L. Mencken, the irreverent iconoclast of 1920s journalism, once said that he thought that in a century, the only religions that would survive would be the most flamboyant and least rational. “That’s because “they give ‘em a movie. It‘s a B movie, but it is still a movie,” he said. The Interfaith Partnership doesn’t have any movies; instead, it wants to involve people in very complex theater. What remains to be seen is whether there are enough like-minded people of faith to have any effect on the process at all.

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Interview: Bob O'Neal - 6/13/06

When you are talking about politics these days and say the word “religious” it usually is followed by the word “right.”  Dr. Bob O’Neal, a plastic surgeon in Ann Arbor, doesn’t like that.  He is a Christian who thinks his faith has been hijacked and distorted by extremists, and has helped start a new group called IPPA, the Interfaith Partnership for Political Action.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: How Quickly We Forget - 5/23/06

If you have been following the media for the last year or so, you might easily have concluded that the greatest threat to human health on this planet is bird flu. So let’s look at the scorecard.

In the last nine years, avian influenza has killed 114 human beings.  AIDS kills three million a year.  Since the epidemic started, more than half a million Americans have died. They are still dying, according to our government, at the rate of 15,000 a year.

The next American to die of bird flu will also be the first American to die of bird flu. And yet – the administration is proposing to slash funding for AIDS research by more than $15 million, while pouring new billions into studying bird flu and making bird flu vaccines.

Incidentally, our government has spent nearly another billion dollars on anthrax vaccine, even though there hasn’t been another case since the terrorist anthrax envelopes in the weeks after 9/11.

Clearly, this is crazy. My guess is that there are two major reasons. First of all, thanks perhaps to the perpetual 24 hour news cycle, we and our leaders have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy. We are bored with AIDS, and need a new disease of the week. Second, AIDS still has a stigma. When it began, it mostly hit gay men and intravenous drug users, and some people actually said it was either divine retribution or some sort of Darwinian natural selection.

That started to change when winsome children like the late Ryan White got AIDS. But Mary Fisher has been possibly the most effective ambassador for enlightened understanding of what HIV can do.

Her speech before the otherwise dismal 1992 Republican National Convention was a historic moment. People started to get it when they saw that HIV could hit an intelligent, lovely young mother from one of the richest and most influential families in Michigan.

Fisher had gotten it from her now deceased ex-husband, who had no idea that he had AIDS. She still, thankfully, only has HIV. But there have now been more than 160,000 AIDS cases in this country that have been transmitted by conventional heterosexual contact.

That is becoming more and more common. We have now lost far more people to AIDS than in World War II. Yet we seem to have lost a sense of urgency about the disease, which has been far more deadly in other parts of the world.

Africa has been hardest hit. But Russia, where the health-care system is falling apart, is widely reported to be on the brink of an AIDS epidemic, with no money for the expensive drugs needed to treat it.

Much of the rest of the developing world is still largely in denial, with China only recently admitting that it had any cases at all.  Mary Fisher has her job cut out for her all right. I hope science can find a cure in time for her. In the meantime, for the good of this planet, I wish she, and her message, could be cloned.

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Interview: Mary Fisher - 5/23/06

Mary Fisher grew up in Metro Detroit.  She’s from a prominent Detroit family.  In 1992 she announced she was HIV positive and impressed many people that year with a speech at the Republican National Convention.  Since then she’s been an unofficial world ambassador for HIV awareness.  Now she’s official.  Last week, she was named special representative for the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Mary Fisher about her new role.

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12/16/05

KwanzHanaMas Chrismakwanzaka - It's the Christmas season -- but many Michiganders are members of other religious traditions traditions.  Some aren't religious at all.  And even some Christmas are conflicted about the way we celebrate the holiday.  What is the meaning of Christmas in a multicultural society?  Should we be more secular or religious?  Should we say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays"? 

Jack talks with State Senators Alan Cropsey and Gilda Jacobs; Calvin College History Professor Jim Bratt; Eide Alawan of the Islamic Center of America; and Rabbi Sherwin Wine of the Birmingham Temple.

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12/13/05

Missionary Work - This month a Michigan missionary from Zeeland was shot, kidnapped, and finally released in Haiti.  His deliverance was welcome, but his story raises questions about who modern missionaries are and what they do.  Do missionaries have a role in the 21st century world?

Jack talks with Phil Snyder, the co-founder of GLOW Ministries, who was recently taken hostage while doing missionary work in Haiti. He also talks with Ruth Tucker, a professor of Missions at the Calvin Theological Seminary, and Amanda Porterfield, a professor of religion at Florida State University.

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