[Dialogue] Hillary Clinton and Tillich

[chagnon at comcast.net]

Lucille Chagnon here...
     Several years ago I asked if anyone knew if Hillary Clinton had attended an RS-I when she was a teen, something I had heard about as a possibility from colleagues way back.  I don't know if it was in response to that that David Reese sent a long e-mail about a meeting of EI colleagues with Rev. Don Jones, Hillary's mentor, near Mary Coggeshall's NJ home.  
    This week's Newsweek has an article, which I copied below, about Hillary and her mentor, complete with mention of E. E. Cummings and Tillich. 
    I had kept David's e-mail and I copied that below the Newsweek article.

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Newsweek        February 12, 2007 issue, page 30    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16960621/site/newsweek/

Hillary's Religious Roots
At 13, she met a Methodist minister who became a lifelong friend.

By Susannah Meadows

If Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush have anything in common, it is a deeply rooted wariness of outsiders. Both the president and the woman who hopes to succeed him have always relied on a small, closed circle of friends and advisers who have been with them for years. So it's not surprising that there are so many familiar faces on Clinton's new campaign team. Ad maker Mandy Grunwald, pollster Mark Penn, strategist Ann Lewis and others are loyalists from Bill Clinton's White House.

There is another person on Hillary's shortlist of confidants who goes back farther than any of them, but whom you've probably never heard of. The Rev. Don Jones, a Methodist minister who is now 75, was perhaps Hillary's earliest spiritual and political mentor. She has written of her "lifelong friendship" with him. It was Jones who first awakened young Hillary to the civil rights movement and counseled her on questions of faith. They continued to be in touch as Hillary became a national figure. Years later, he helped her through the darkest period in her life, the aftermath of her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Precocious and confident, 13-year-old Hillary was an active member of her Methodist church in Park Ridge, Ill., when Jones arrived in 1961 to lead the youth group. Fresh from the seminary, he was anything but stuffy in his red Chevy Impala convertible. He carried the Bible, but also the collected poems of E. E. Cummings. Hillary, politically aware even then, was a budding Republican who took after her staunchly conservative father. In long discussions at the church, Jones introduced Hillary to the left. The young minister was determined to show his white, privileged parishioners the world beyond their suburban town. He took them to the South Side of Chicago to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak. Jones introduced each of them to the civil rights leader.

But the conversation wasn't all politics. "Hillary would come up to talk to me after I preached and make comments about the sermon, how the hymns, prayers and Biblical passages were coordinated with the message," Jones tells NEWSWEEK. Jones hewed closely to the social-justice tradition of the Methodist Church, preaching that helping those in need was a means of practicing their faith. "I think she responded to my ministry in part for its intellectual content," Jones says. "Her heart responded to the social responsibility aspects."

Not everyone appreciated the minister's lessons. Within two years, the conservative members of the congregation asked him to leave. Jones landed at Drew University in Madison, N.J., where he spent his career teaching theology. They were in communication while Hillary was in high school and later at Wellesley. During her time as First Lady, he visited the White House nine times. After Bill Clinton admitted his affair with Lewinsky, Jones gave Hillary a Paul Tillich sermon about grace, and how it comes to you when you feel great pain. Jones says he hoped Hillary would pass the words on to her husband. "It was my secret agenda," he says. Sure enough, five days later, Jones received a thank-you note from the president. Last year he saw the Clintons at their home in Chappaqua, N.Y. The senator had called him to invite her old friend to her mother's birthday party.

Though she's been accused of adopting a religious patina for political gain, her relationship with Jones shows that from the time she was young, Hillary was thinking seriously about her faith. She clearly talks more about religion these days, as many politicians do—but her connection to Jones reveals that her Christianity has always been at the center of her identity. "She's not using the language of prayer and God for the first time," says Jones. "While there may be a political dimension, it's authentic."

Jones describes Hillary's beliefs as falling, like her politics, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Unlike the extreme left, she understands the limitations of human beings, he says. And unlike the extreme right, he argues, she believes in humanity's potential. She does take seriously the doctrine of original sin. And after a lifetime in politics, she's seen plenty of it.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

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from David Reese  Nov. 2003

Hi, each of you have been talking about Hillary and RS-1 probabilities way 
back in the 60's.  The book is:  HILLARY CLINTON by Judith Warner, released in 
January of '93.  It is a paperback by Signet.

Reading it soon after the Clinton election, I got excited by the same thing 
some of you are recalling.  Page 18 begins a description of her youth minister, 
Don Jones, "currently a professor of religion at Drew University in New 
Jersey".   Jones is described as 'fresh out of Drew U. Theological School'.

He describes taking the lily white youth group into the inner city, meeting 
with black and Hispanic groups.  At Drew, the piece says, that  Jones studied 
under Paul Tillich.  That he exposed the kids to Picasso, e. e. cummings and 
Stephen Crane.  Screened films like "Requiem For a Heavyweight and the 400 
Blows". 

"I took a print of Picasso's Guernica, took it into the inner city, set it on 
the back of a chair, and asked both groups, the city group and the suburban 
group to look at the painting and not say anything, and then we talked about it 
in terms of their experience."   And on.......'what strikes you?', 'what 
grabs you?'

The writer continues:   "Jones introduced Hillary in small doses to the 
difficult theological writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul 
Tillich".

Now, all this convinced me that Don Jones had been to a PLC so I called Drew 
U., got his number and talked with him for a while.  Since there was to be an 
ICA meeting fairly soon in New Jersey and some of us were going to stay at 
Mary Coggleshall's home, I got in touch with Ray Caruso and Mary and they agreed 
it would be good to set up a meeting with Don Jones.

Mary may have done the actual arranging.  Ray, Mary, Don Jones and I, and 
maybe another person or so, had lunch with Don and later reported back to the ICA 
meeting.
(My notes of that time are buried somewhere in files packed away out in the 
garage.)

It was a fascinating and informing time.  He talked about telling Joe 
Matthews of his plans to get a PhD and Joe dismissing that plan with something like, 
"Come and be with us, it will be better for you than any PhD".

He was still in touch from time to time with Hillary.  By mail.  He talked 
about Japanese TV crews looking him up, taking him to those places in South 
Chicago where the youth groups had gone and pressing him for details.  Preparing 
to leave us after the lunch, he promised that whenever he met with Hillary 
later in the years, he would recall to her the sources in the Ecumenical Institute 
to which he had exposed the youth and her in their church group.

David Walters, I never got the impression that Hillary had attended a full 
fledged RS-l or that her family had been involved with RS-l.  Ray Caruso was 
there and could have other opinions.   Mary Coggleshall, too, could have more 
details of the meeting. All of us were excited to hear these details of her youth 
experience but I don't recall anything ever coming of it.  Anyone could 
probably find the book among old books of that time. 

--
Lucille T. Chagnon, M.Ed.
Literacy Acceleration Consultants
408 River Road, Wilmington, DE 19809-2731
302-762-0282    fax -0285
chagnon at comcast.net      www.teachtwo.net