[Oe List ...] Hillary, EI, Tillich, & Monica

Mon Feb 4 00:45:13 EST 2008

There is a swirl of circumstantial evidence that Hillary had at least an acquaintance with The Ecumenical Institute and RS-1.
  First, she quotes the Tillich paper herself.

  Then along came the Rev. Don Jones, a charismatic youth minister fresh out of seminary and the Navy. 

"He was filled with the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr," Clinton writes. "Bonhoeffer stressed that the role of a Christian was a moral one of total engagement in the world with the promotion of human development. Niebuhr struck a persuasive balance between a clear-eyed realism about human nature and an unrelenting passion for justice and social reform." Clinton says she had never met anyone like him. He was struck by her as well. 

"What I [saw] in her was clearly a very good searching and clear mind," Mr. Jones says in an interview. "She was already a little brain child, a budding intellectual, I would say. So her interest in my ministry and my version of the gospel and the Christian faith was to some extent intellectual. She would come up after one of our sessions and talk to me about a fine point about something I had said." 

Jones used art and literature to show his students a world beyond their "Happy Days" life. He introduced them to the writings of e.e. cummings and T.S. Eliot, to the paintings of Pablo Picasso – most memorably, his depiction of war in "Guernica" – and to important films of the day, such as Rod Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight" and François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows." Each served as a springboard for church-basement discussions on spirituality, grace, and redemption. 

>From faith to action 

Clinton was also drawn to the Methodist tradition of putting faith into action, to what Jones calls her "practical search for the relevance of Christianity." At age 15, with help from her mother and from Jones, Clinton organized babysitting brigades for the children of migrant workers who labored in the fields not far from Park Ridge. Clinton and her friends brought Kool-Aid, games, and materials for arts and crafts projects. 

Jones also took the students to meet with youth groups from black and Hispanic churches in the city. Once, he brought them into Chicago to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Orchestra Hall, and arranged for the students to meet the civil rights leader afterward. 

"Until then, I had been dimly aware of the social revolution occurring in our country, but Dr. King's words illuminated the struggle taking place and challenged our indifference," writes Clinton. 

Though Clinton remained a Republican into her college days at Wellesley, what she calls the "liberalizing" experiences that Jones provided during his two years in Park Ridge clearly made a deep impression and catalyzed her transformation into a Democrat and an activist. 

To this day, Jones – now a retired professor of social ethics at Drew University in Madison, N.J. – and some of the students from the youth group remain cherished friends. One of those fellow students, Ernie Ricketts, whom she has known since kindergarten, calls Clinton "a very good friend, a very loyal friend." 

"She called me on my 60th birthday – two days after she declared she was going to run for president," says Mr. Ricketts. "That's pretty thoughtful." 

Lewinsky scandal 

In Clinton's memoirs, it is Jones whom she singles out by name for his help in getting her through the crisis in her marriage when her husband, former President Bill Clinton, admitted to her in August 1998 that he had been unfaithful to her with intern Monica Lewinsky. "This was the most devastating, shocking, and hurtful experience of my life," she writes. 

Clinton had not asked for Jones's counsel. Rather, he took it upon himself to send a letter to her with a sermon on sin and grace by theologian Paul Tillich called "You Are Accepted," which he had read all those years ago to the youth group in Park Ridge. 

"[The sermon's] premise is how sin and grace exist through life in constant interplay; neither is possible without the other. The mystery of grace is that you cannot look for it," Clinton writes. 

Then she quotes from the Tillich sermon: "Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It happens; or it does not happen." 

Five days after he sent the letter, Jones says he received a handwritten reply from Bill Clinton saying, "Thank you, Don, for sending Hillary that wonderful sermon by Paul Tillich," and then, "Thank you for being her friend." 

"That's exactly what I intended to have happen," Jones says, "because I sent it really for Bill, more than for Hillary." 

But Jones's missive clearly had cut to Hillary Clinton's core as well. 

"Grace happens," she wrote in her memoirs, following on the Tillich quote. "Until it did, my main job was to put one foot in front of the other and get through another day."

  [see http://wwrn.org/article.php?idd=27277 for full article] 

  Hillary Rodham Clinton grew up in a conservative United Methodist family and had a youth minister who taught from Joe Matthews's Ecumenical Institute handbook and introduced her to Martin Luther King, Jr.
  [from The Christian Century http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n1_v111/ai_14754648]

  Second, she recently spoke with Joe Thomas about EI, and was very interested to hear of developments since the early days when she was a teenager in Park Ridge.

  Third, and this may be a total overstatement, no less a theological eminence than Thomas C. Oden wrote:

  Hillary’s chief mentors in Chicago included dear friends of mine, Joseph and Lynn Mathews, and their associates in the Ecumenical Institute of Austin, Texas (later to become the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago), where some of my writings were embedded in their standard curriculum. I went to Yale more than a decade before Hillary did, but we had many threads of mutual friends and almost a total congruence of values in those early days. Her former pastor and mentor, Professor Don Jones, remains my close colleague in ethics at Drew University. During her years in the White House, she belonged to one of the most politically radical local congregations among United Methodists. 
  [Thomas C. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity. HarperCollins, 2003. Page 84 ff]

  I rest my case.

  Marshall  

Charles or Doris Hahn <cdhahn at flash.net> wrote:
  Don Warren, who lives here in Bloomington (former Dean
of the School of Education here at Indiana U.) taught
the course that Hillary took. I don't think it was
RS-1 as such, but certainly had some of the elements
in it. Could also be that Don Jones took courses at
the Institute and used the wisdom with his youth
group, but that is just speculation. Don Warren's role
is reported by Don himself.

Doris Hahn

--- Lifeline248 at aol.com wrote:

> Ruth, Len, and colleague
> I recently came across a paperback biography,
> Hillary Cllinton: The 
> Inside Story by Judith Warner (1993, updated in
> 1999). I bought it precisely so 
> I could find out if her involvement with RS-1 (which
> some colleagues had 
> mentioned years ago) was direct or second-hand
> through her church. 
> Chapter 2: The author interviewed the Rev. Don
> Jones, "a Methodist 
> minister fresh out of Drew University Theological
> School who had just been 
> assigned to the Rodhams' church, First Methodist, to
> work with the parish's 
> teenagers..." He brought the kids to the
> inner-city and mentions Hillary and her 
> friends' babysitting involvement with migrant
> workers who lived in farmlands near 
> Park Ridge. 
> "Jones had studied under Tillich and had been
> exposed to creative new 
> methods of relating theology to art and culture. 
> He took these teachings with 
> him to Park Ridge, where he exposed the high school
> kids to Picasso, e.e. 
> cummings, and Stephen Crane. ... screened films like
> Requiem for a Heavyweight...." 
> What then follows is an art form conversation on
> Guernica.
> Interesting.
> Lucille Chagnon
> 
> Lucille T. Chagnon, M.Ed.
> Literacy Acceleration Consultants
> 6448 Arbor Lane - P O Box 438
> Chincoteague Island, VA 23336-0438
> 757-336-5047 fax -1391
> cell 302-561-4575
> e-mail: lifeline248 at aol.com
> www.teachtwo.net 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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