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

Mon Feb 4 11:52:12 EST 2008

Definitely Barack Obama 

A.M.Noel 

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From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of Richard Alton
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 6:28 AM
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Hillary, EI, Tillich, & Monica

Dear Marshall, thank you for the thoughtful reflections on the possible
relationship between Hillary and the Ecumenical Institute, BUT the question
is who are you voting for on Tuesday????
Dick

Richard H.T. Alton International Consultants and Associates 'building global
bridges' 166 N. Humphrey Ave, Apt, 1N Oak Park, IL 60302 T:1.773.344.7172
richard.alton at gmail.com Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back
Babe Ruth

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Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 21:45:13 -0800
From: synergi at yahoo.com
To: oe at wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Oe List ...] Hillary, EI, Tillich, & Monica

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 HYPERLINK "http://wwrn.org/article.php?idd=27277"
\nhttp://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 HYPERLINK
"http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n1_v111/ai_14754648"
\nhttp://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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> > _______________________________________________
> OE mailing list
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>
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> 

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