[Dialogue] Hillary Clinton and Tillich

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Hi Lucille,

Believe it or not we(Doris and Charles)had dinner this
past Saturday night, February 3, with Don and Beverly
Warren.  The name may not ring a bell with most
readers, but the Warrens were one of the seven
families who moved from the Christian Faith and Life
and Community in Austin to the Ecumenical Institute in
Evanston inn 1962.  During the conversation around
dinner the subject of Hillary Clinton and the often
referred to RS-1. He stated that he was the one of the
teachers of that event, and that it was not in either
Evanston or Chicago's West Side, but rather at the
Park Ridge Methodist Church.  He also stated that he
then arranged with the youth pastor for the Park Ridge
youth group to meet with a group of inner city youth
somewhere in the Chicago, and that there was more than
one meeting.

The Warrens left the staff of EI in the early summer
of 1964 shortly before Doris and I arrived in late
August.  Don Warren came to Bloomington as Dean of the
School of Education in 1990 and continued in that
position for many years.  He then retired, but still
teaches some.  I think you can trust his words about
the Hillary having had and EI course (youth RS-I).
Grace and Peace, 
Charles (and Doris has read this and concurs) 
--- chagnon at comcast.net wrote:

> 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.
> 
> --------------------
> 
> 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.
> 
> ---------
> 
> 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 
=== message truncated ===>
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