KIM LAWTON, anchor: Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?

CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before, some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming, and who need assistance this year over the other years we’ve been in business.

LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?

Candy Hill

HILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and a country as great as this country, we shouldn’t have people doing that.

LAWTON: And this is a function of the economy and all of the repercussions of that?

HILL: I think this is a perfect storm. We see the economy and the people that we serve certainly were struggling before the collapse of Wall Street, but they’re, they were struggling first and will be the last to recover in this recovery.

LAWTON: And to what extent is it difficult in these tough economic times to make appeals for groups like yours, to say to people, give money to hungry people when individuals might be thinking, you know, I don’t know how I’m going to feed my own family?

HILL: Exactly. Well, what I would say as Americans we’ve always risen to the occasion, and this is one of these occasions. Our neighbors are suffering and we need to dig deep into our own pockets. The government has a role to play, all of us have a role to play, and we need to reach out and help each other during this really tough time.

LAWTON: Well, speaking of the government’s role, the U.S. government is urging people to give more in this new initiative, but is that enough? I mean, is it enough for individuals to give $20 dollars, a $100 dollars or whatever, or do we need systematic changes in policy?

HILL: Well, I think long term we need systematic changes, but you know that’s a long term strategy and right now we have a short term problem, and so we need people to give and we also need the government to step up and do its part as well.

LAWTON: Are you pleased that the administration is having this initiative?

HILL: Absolutely, because I think it brings, it highlights always when the administration speaks on something and gives information, it helps connect to the things that we’re doing on the ground and so this initiative certainly, I think will highlight the need, but also the really creative things that are happening across America to try and meet the needs of individual people.

LAWTON: Yours is a faith-based organization, a lot of groups are trying to help the hungry, what is the specific role for religious groups and those from the faith community?

HILL: Well certainly we have a 2,000-year tradition that we’re supposed to feed the hungry and we take that very seriously and so, we’ve been doing this for decades across the country and we see it as a moral issue that people shouldn’t have to go hungry in a country as rich as ours, and we’re going to continue to try and meet the needs of people in local communities across this nation.

LAWTON: Again, we hear all the time people are hungry, people are hungry, the poor are always with us, are their solutions? Is it possible to end hunger?

HILL: I absolutely believe it, and certainly the government is calling on that and Congress is as well. We have to think creatively, we have to think about 21st century solutions to 21st century problems and the safety net in this country is badly torn and weakened and we need to not just fix it. A repair is not sufficient. We really need to think about how do we eliminate the need for programs like food stamps, and like donations to feed the hungry through a food bank or a soup kitchen, and if we have the political will in this country we can change this. You know, Bobby Kennedy forty years ago called attention in the Mississippi Delta to children being hungry, and yet today you and I are sitting here having the same conversation four decades later. We just need to rise to the occasion and have the political will to change it.

LAWTON: All right, Candy Hill, thank you very much.

HILL: Thank you as well.

Click here to view the original July 24, 2009 story.

JANE STROM: Happy Birthday.

AL (Jane Strom’s father): Thank you.

JANE STROM: Do you know how old you are?

AL: Yeah.

JANE STROM: How old are you?

AL: I don’t know.

JANE STROM: How old are you? You are 90, 90 years old…

LUCKY SEVERSON (Contributing Correspondent): Not long ago, Dr. Joel Strom and his wife, Jane, were so convinced that Jane’s father was close to death, notwithstanding the attention he was receiving from ten specialists, they put him in a hospice, and then he got better.

DR. JOEL STROM (Cardiologist and Professor, University of South Florida Medical School): Part of it was that he had one person who took care of him. They cut out all the referrals because they didn’t expect him to live long, and they cut out all the medicines.

SEVERSON: Dr. Strom is a cardiologist and a professor at the University of South Florida Medical School. Like every doctor we spoke with, Strom is fed up with the health care system.

DR. STROM: It’s not a broken system. There is no system. Medical care is haphazard. Medical care is disorganized. There are pockets of superb care. There are pockets of very mediocre care.

SEVERSON: If Medicare costs are any measure, Miami-Dade County should have the best senior care in the country. The federal health program spends over $16,000 a year per patient. That’s about double the 2006 national average. Brian Keeley is the CEO of Baptist Health South Florida, the largest nonprofit health care system in that part of the state. He says huge Medicare costs do not translate to better health care.

BRIAN KEELEY (CEO, Baptist Health South Florida): We know that more can be injurious to people, and more health care services, more aggressively providing those services, can result in lower levels of care.

SEVERSON: He says there are several factors that bloat health care costs in the Miami area.

KEELEY: There’s a huge imbalance between the number of specialists and primary care physicians, and we have such a high percentage of specialists down over here, they utilize resources more, technology more.

SEVERSON: Dr. Strom, a specialist himself, says one reason there is such a shortage of primary care physicians is that Medicare doesn’t reimburse them enough for patient visits.

DR. STROM: If you spend a lot of time with a patient you will starve to death as a physician because you will only get paid for a certain amount of time. In fact, a lot of physicians will actually steer patients to their offices to have tests performed, because they collect both the professional component, and if they own the equipment, the technical component.

SEVERSON: Dr. Gloria Weinberg is a geriatrician and chair of the department of medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach. She says when young doctors, fresh out of medical school and burdened with school loans, discover how much less a primary physician earns, they choose a specialty where they can make more money.

DR. GLORIA WEINBERG (Geriatrician and Chair, Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center): If you look at the reimbursement, you are going to come away after paying expenses, if you are lucky, with $40 or $50 an hour. That’s not going to help the youngsters go into a field of medicine and pay off loans and do everything else that needs to be done.

SEVERSON: Here in Miami, a typical senior citizen will see a doctor 106 times during the last 2 years of their lives. Not just one doctor, several—specialists who will then prescribe a battery of expensive tests and procedures: MRIs, ultrasounds, CAT scans, and an astonishing assortment of drugs. It’s because that’s the kind of care patients around here often demand. Dr. Weinberg:

DR. WEINBERG: Patients are very sophisticated. They come, and they say, “I have a headache.” You take a headache history. They are not satisfied if you say, “You don’t need a scan.” They want a scan. If you are pushed, and you are suspicious enough, and perhaps you suggest a CT, which is less expensive than an MR, some of them will come to you and say, “I want an MR. I hear it’s more sensitive.” We have had patients in our center tell us, “If you don’t do what I’m asking I’m going to sue you.”

SEVERSON: The threat of lawsuits forces many doctors to practice defensive medicine, ordering more tests and procedures to protect themselves from being sued. Health care professionals here cited malpractice suits as another factor behind spiraling costs, and Medicare fraud in South Florida, particularly in the home health care industry, has been described as rampant.

KEELEY: The Miami Herald reported about a month ago that the FBI and CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] indicated that fraud was about $2.5 billion per year in Miami-Dade County. That, in and of itself, is a huge, huge difference, comparing our cost structure to the rest of the country.

SEVERSON: About 50 million Americans are uninsured, and that includes 30 percent of the population around Miami. Many of that number are undocumented and in the US illegally. Whatever their status, most who need care end up in a hospital emergency room where, by law, they cannot be refused treatment.

DR. WEINBERG: It’s our ethical responsibility to treat that patient as we would any other. That patient can go down the path of having a cardiac catheterization, ultimately having a pacemaker, a defibrillator at $30,000, ongoing medical care, and then we face the problem, when we discharge the patient, where does the patient get the follow-up care, and the hospital doesn’t get reimbursed for it.

SEVERSON: Perhaps the biggest chunk of Medicare expenditures, something like 30 percent, goes to end-of-life care for aging Americans. Professor Anita Cava directs the University of Miami business ethics program. She says Americans need to rethink the way we look at end-of-life medical care.

PROFESSOR ANITA CAVA (Director, University of Miami Business Ethics Program): I think we in the United States really need to reconsider our relationship with end of life and to realize it’s a natural process and that perhaps ending life in a more humane and comfortable way at home with family, rather than trying to prolong it for another day or week or month, is perhaps the best way to go.

SEVERSON: Joe Gasperovich would take exception to the ethical argument for withholding expensive medical treatment for aging, failing Americans. He was born in 1919 and would prefer to prolong his life as long as possible.

SEVERSON (speaking to Joe Gasperovich): If they say we need to go do a $1,000 CAT scan, is there a point, an age you reach where you should say no, I’ve lived 90 years?

MR. GASPEROVICH: No, I want more.

SEVERSON: You want more years?

MR. GASPEROVICH: Everybody—nobody want to die.

SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says the decisions about the ethics of distributive justice for society as a whole are often much more difficult when the doctor is meeting with a patient one-on-one.

DR. WEINBERG: The health care dollars, an inordinate amount, go to taking care of people in the last 6 months of their lives. But how do you know when those last 6 months are? You have a person who has worked all their life, paid taxes, done very well, and now they are 80, and they have a heart attack. That may be the person who lives 10 or 15 more years. Are we going to say no just because of age? That’s a very, very slippery slope.

SEVERSON: There is a huge ethical discussion about who should make these end-of-life decisions—the patient, the family, doctors, the government? Brian Keeley says some decisions are easier to make. For instance, Medicare should only reimburse for treatments and drugs that are known to work.

KEELEY: It ought to be evidence-based. If something is proven not to work, I don’t think the federal government ought to be paying for it. I don’t think anybody ought to be paying for it, except for the private patient.

SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says too many patients receive expensive treatments and surgery in their final years that very likely won’t prolong their life.

DR. WEINBERG: So if you have an Alzheimer patient who, your own belief may be, it’s time to let this person go naturally, and the family is telling you, “I’m the surrogate, and I’m insisting that a feeding tube be put in,” you cannot make the decision not to put the feeding tube on your own, even though you think it’s futile care, at least in the state of Florida.

SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says her 95- year-old mother has a living will that stipulates she will not be kept alive on a ventilator. Brian Keeley says preparing for end of life is not something that’s culturally accepted in South Florida.

KEELEY: Other parts of the country where people plan for end-of-life care, with the use of hospices and palliative care and what have you—down here there’s less usage for that, so people go to die in the hospitals.

SEVERSON: Everyone seems to agree that health care reform is urgently needed and that health care should be a right and not a privilege and that it should extend to everyone. They also agree that South Florida is a good place to start.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Miami.

Note: Since this story first aired in July 2009, Dr. Joel Stroms’ father-in-law, Al Godin, passed away.

Click here to view the original April 10, 2009 story and additional Wintley Phipps videos.

Pastor WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing at National Prayer Service, Washington National Cathedral):  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . .”

KIM LAWTON:  Grammy-nominated Gospel singer Wintley Phipps is a familiar voice at big national events. At President Barack Obama’s National Prayer Service following his Inauguration, Phipps’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” brought the entire National Cathedral audience, including the new president and first lady, to their feet. But he says it’s just as meaningful to him when he sings in places like prisons.

Pastor  PHIPPS: There is a sense that you’re giving hope to people who really need it.

LAWTON:  For Phipps, who is also a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, music is a ministry and, he says, one of the deepest expressions of his Christian faith.

Pastor PHIPPS: Music is almost to me an echo of the sounds of the divine world, and when you hear these sounds, it stirs something deeply spiritual within you.  Music also is the most powerful way of impressing the human mind with hope.

LAWTON: Hope has been a hallmark not only of Phipps’s musical career, but in his charitable efforts as well.  In 1998, Phipps founded the Dream Academy, a national nonprofit for at-risk kids. Born in Trinidad, he says hope was crucial in overcoming his own at-risk childhood.

Pastor PHIPPS: I was born to a troubled home, and I used to get away from my parents’ troubles — I had a little red tricycle, and I’d go in the back yard of my house, and I would turn the tricycle on its side and use one of the backside wheels as a steering wheel, and I would sit there for hours, and I would dream that I was flying to faraway places in the world and meeting important people when I was six, seven years old, and then I wanted to be like Tom Jones.  I’d go around the house singing, “It’s not unusual to be loved.”  I just wanted to be Tom. But something was missing to me.

LAWTON: Despite a difficult family life, Phipps says his mother always prayed for him and told him that God had a special plan for his life.  As a teenager, Phipps embraced her faith as his own.

Pastor PHIPPS:  t the age of 16, God walked into my life and said, “I’ve seen your dreams. Give me your dreams, and I’ll let you see what I’ve been dreaming for you.”

Singing at National Prayer Service

LAWTON:  He attended an historically black Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he met Linda, now his wife of 32 years.  Then, Phipps says, God began providing opportunities for him to sing in national venues such as a 1984 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” with Jesse Jackson.  He came to the attention of Billy Graham’s team and became a frequent performer at the evangelist’s crusades.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing in Washington): “Talk about a child that do love Jesus.”

LAWTON: Phipps also became a favorite in Washington. He’s sung for every president since Ronald Reagan.

Pastor PHIPPS: I’ve never had a manager or never had an agent, and yet some of the most wonderful moments that a singer could ever dream of have happened to me, and I believe it’s providential.

LAWTON: The idea for the Dream Academy came after he got involved with a prison ministry.

Pastor PHIPPS: I did not know that so many young men in prison looked like my sons. , and when I saw it I was shaken. One of every three young black men in America between the ages of 18 and 30 are in prison today or supervised by the court system either on probation or parole.

LAWTON: Phipps then learned that 60 percent of the young people who end up in prison are the children of prisoners. He wanted to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration. The Dream Academy offers after-school mentoring and interactive academic tutoring to children of prisoners and kids falling behind at school.

Pastor PHIPPS: One of the most exciting things that can ever happen in a child’s life is to know that , “You mean God thinks about me?  Or God dreams about me?”  And he’s got a dream for my life?”  And when you catch a little glimpse of what that dream is, wow, it changes everything.

LAWTON:  Phipps has enlisted the support of some of his famous connections for the project.  One of his biggest benefactors is his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey.  The lesson of faith, he says, is that things aren’t always as they seem and that hardship can be overcome.  In these uncertain economic times, he’s released a new music DVD called “No Need to Fear.”

LAWTON:  It’s a theme he finds throughout the old spirituals that he often performs.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing): “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . .”

The Negro spiritual teaches us that you’re going come up rough sides of mountains, and you’re going to have difficulties.  But faith gives you that ability to weather any storm.

(singing): “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?”

LAWTON:  It’s the core theme as well for the song that has become his signature, “Amazing Grace.”  He finds great spiritual lessons in the history of the song.

Pastor PHIPPS:  A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano, and they just keep recurring.  Probably the most famous white spiritual that’s built on this slave scale was written by a man by the name of John Newton who, before he became a Christian, used to be the captain of a slave ship and many believe heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant (hums “Amazing Grace”).  And it has a haunting, haunting, plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage, and we feel it. We feel it. It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.

(performing “Amazing Grace” on stage): “To sing God’s praise than when we’ve  first begun. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Amen.”

LAWTON: Another lesson, he says, on how hope always triumphs. I’m Kim Lawton in Vero Beach, Florida.

RAFAEL PI ROMAN, correspondent: Even at the end of her short life, when it became harder and harder for her to walk, Flannery O’Connor went to Mass nearly every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, in central Georgia. She lived with her mother in an old plantation house surrounded by 1500 acres of pasture and woods. In her room after church she would write all morning, facing the back of a tall chest so that she would see no distractions. Her output was not massive—two short novels, two collections of short stories, a number of essays, and a lot of letters. But today many consider her one of America’s greatest writers. Since O’Connor’s death, more than 50 books have been written about her, one of them by Ralph Wood of Baylor University.

PROFESSOR RALPH WOOD (Author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South): Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickenson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.

Prof. Ralph Wood

ROMAN: What makes her increasing popularity even more surprising in these secular times is the fact that O’Connor was a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic whose subject, in her words, was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor was the only child in a respected and well-off family. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds, and when she was a little girl a newsreel cameraman came down to film a chicken Flannery claimed could walk backwards. Later on, her hobby centered on peacocks, a bird she saw as her personal symbol, according to her biographer, Brad Gooch.

BRAD GOOCH (Author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor): I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here was all this beauty which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was the symbol of Christ and the church so, you know, it all lined up for her and the peacocks.

ROMAN: As a young woman, O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, to the exclusive Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and then to New York City and Connecticut, writing all the way. Then, at the age of 25, she was forced to return home because, like her father before her, she was dying of lupus. It was back in Georgia in the 1950s that she discovered the characters for her stories.

WOOD: Not the cotton belt, not the tobacco belt, but the ugly word the Bible belt, and for O’Connor that was the glory of her region. These were the emarginated people on the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places.

ROMAN: She wrote that her Christ-haunted characters are so cut off from orthodox Catholicism that they don’t have a guide and that they are actually involved in a do-it-yourself religion that is kind of comical, sadly comical.

WOOD: She said, look, these are my brothers and sisters. They are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated gospel, a gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them.  I cannot dismiss them, saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically.

ROMAN: Father Thomas Joseph White is a Dominican priest whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by O’Conner’s fiction.

FATHER THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, OP (Theology Instructor, Dominican House of Studies): You don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are, you know, the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God.

ROMAN: From these people her stories emerged. In “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and in twenty short stories, she told dark tales of murder and bigotry and madness, of a preacher of the Church without Christ who puts out his own eyes. Some have asked, is this Christian?

WOOD: She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess, but she says there is one and only one quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that is the love of God, and she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

ROMAN: Talk about the importance of grace and mystery in her work.

WOOD: Mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her. For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of what and who God is.

Brad Gooch

ROMAN: As the civil rights movement changed attitudes and language, O’Connor was sharply criticized for using the N word in her writing.

GOOCH: She couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak.

WOOD: For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the south in the sense that it was the single-most important test which we as white Christians failed. For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God.

ROMAN: In recent years, O’Connor has become a favorite not only of writers and scholars but of artists and entertainers of all stripes, including Bruce Springsteen, Bono, the Coen brothers, and even Conan O’Brien and the creators of the hit TV series “Lost.”

Professor Bruce Gentry teaches at O’Conner’s alma mater, Georgia College and State University, and edits the Flannery O’Conner Review.

PROFESSOR BRUCE GENTRY (Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review): She always talks about waking people up to the mystery of the world, and I think that puts her in a position that is similar to a lot of people in popular culture. You know, they want to create something substantial, but they also want to do it for a popular audience.

ROMAN: In the process of writing his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch says he came to admire her discipline and determination, particularly during the final months of her life.

GOOCH: She was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death. She’s working on stories which she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites. So all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive.

ROMAN: O’Connor’s admirers wonder what her legacy will be in years to come. Some say that will depend on whether future readers will understand a writer who saw “the action of grace in territory held by the devil.”

I’m Rafael Pi Roman for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

REV. CHRISTINE WILEY (Covenant Baptist Church): We pray for health, O God, that you would pour your spirit into them and heal their bodies, O God.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Reverend Christine Wiley has been ministering to AIDS patients in Washington, DC since the early1980s. Back then people were dying from a disease they didn’t understand and had no idea how it was spreading. Reverend Wiley first met AIDS patients when she allowed the health clinic across the street to move into her church when the clinic’s roof fell in.

WILEY: What I found was a profound privilege of being able to work with people who had contracted this disease, and being able to talk with them to help them get to a place where they had hope and understood that they were still loved by God.

Rev. Christine Wiley

SEVERSON: Twenty years later, Reverend Wiley is still preaching and teaching about HIV-AIDS, which we now know a lot about. We know that it’s preventable and treatable, and yet it has reached epidemic levels in the nation’s capital. The most recent statistics are sobering. Three percent of local residents have HIV or AIDS—triple the number that is generally considered a “severe” epidemic. But among African-Americans residents, the overall rate is above four percent, which is higher even than parts of West Africa. And among the District’s black men the infection rate is even more alarming—almost seven percent. Authorities are worried that the number is actually higher because so many residents are spreading the virus without knowledge they’re infected. This is Bishop Rainey Cheeks at the Inner Light Ministries Sunday worship service.

BISHOP RAINEY CHEEKS (Inner Light Ministries): We live in a city that has the highest infection rate in the country. We live in Ward 8, and it has the highest infection rate in the city, and here we still operate in a state of ignorance, and the Scripture tell us “my people perish for lack of knowledge.”

SEVERSON: Bishop Cheeks is not your typical preacher. He is openly gay and has been HIV-positive for 25 years.

CHEEKS: People would say, what would Jesus do? And I say stop asking that question. Do what he did. Heal people. Love people. He said feed, clothe, shelter people. That is all HIV is asking us to do.

SEVERSON: The church has long been the most influential institution in the African-American community. But Bishop Cheeks says when it comes to AIDS, too many black pastors have been silent, or preaching when they should have been teaching.

CHEEKS: Throughout our history, the information has always been disseminated through the church. Imagine if all the churches on Sunday morning gave just the facts and where they could go get help. How many people would we reach?

Bishop Rainey Cheeks

WILEY (preaching): Have you ever felt persecuted just for living, just for being who you are?

SEVERSON: At the Covenant Baptist Church, Rev. Wiley, who has a doctorate in pastoral psychotherapy, tells her members who have the disease that they are not sinners, that God loves them, and she explains ways to safeguard against the virus to anyone who will listen. Some think the epidemic has passed and don’t want to listen. Some don’t want to know. That’s why Rev. Wiley offers weekly AIDS testing like this, right in church. She says she discovered that many African Americans do not view the black church as a safe place to get counseling about AIDS.

WILEY: There is such a heavy stigma. Then often it’s not talked about. And, of course, within the context of the church one of the things that is difficult is interpretation of Scripture. Many persons within the black church, generally speaking, are very conservative. We find that the issue of sex is not talked about at all in many, many churches, and so if you don’t talk about sex it’s difficult to even talk about risky behavior.

SEVERSON: Bishop Harry Jackson’s Hope Christian Church is typical of many black churches, if not most. Many members here consider drug abuse, premarital sex, and homosexual activity as sins.

BISHOP HARRY JACKSON (Hope Christian Church): Black clergy typically are very conservative socially, and they are much more liberal in terms of other issues. But the heart of the black church is the preaching, and the preaching has to be from the Bible, and that biblical message has been the source of the conservatism of the church, and it’s also the strength.

JACKSON (speaking at rally): And I would rather be biblically courageous than politically correct.

SEVERSON: Bishop Jackson has been a leading spokesman in the District in favor of marriage only between a man and a woman. He agrees that black pastors have not done enough, but sees the problem more as the breakup of the black family.

JACKSON: We haven’t done the preventative work that puts it in the mind of a young teenage girl or boy, hey, you shouldn’t have sex this early. You’re having all the babies out of wedlock, all these things, and I’ve got to take responsibility for it. The only institution that stands between our community and what I’m going to call basically the destruction of family as we know it today is the church.

WILEY: We’ve got to talk about drug addiction. We’ve got to talk about sex. We’ve got to talk about relationships, because women who are heterosexual and have relationships are also having relationships with men who sleep with men.

SEVERSON: Nationwide, the leading cause of HIV-AIDS is still men having sex with men. But here in the District the principal mode of transmission for new cases is heterosexual for both men and women, and 70 percent of those infected are over 40 years old.

CHEEKS: We put condoms out right here in the church on Sunday. You can walk and pick them up right here, and people go, isn’t that a little extreme? Well, what do you call extreme? Saving someone’s life?

SEVERSON: Bishop Jackson remains skeptical about the reliability of condoms and is firmly convinced that abstinence only is the best policy. He blames much of the problem on immoral behavior and the prevailing culture.

JACKSON: The moral message is not being grasped. The culture is shaping much more what happens in the black church. If I say it this way, in all deference to our stars, Beyonce may be listened to more than the bishop.

SEVERSON: And the bishop has no intention of bending his message about the sin of premarital and homosexual sex, although he doesn’t oppose testing and wants his church to do more to help those who are infected.

WILEY: Even with a person who is a conservative we still have to acknowledge that there is a disease in our community, and it has not gotten better. It has gotten worse.

JACKSON: It may be that we’re going to reach people that trust us and trust our interpretation of Scriptures. But if you don’t believe the Gospel as we believe it, maybe you will not feel comfortable coming to us for help, and maybe that’s where someone else has to work, and my point would be we at least need to touch the people we can touch, and I’m not so sure we’re touching them yet.

SEVERSON: On that point they would all agree.

CHEEKS: I’m more concerned with how do we save our community more than I need to be right or any of that. How do we save our community? And then we can have all the other theological debates later on. But right now, we are in trouble.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The festival of Eid al-Adha begins with sacrifice. Those participating in the hajj, and all other Muslim families with the financial means, slaughter a sheep, lamb, goat, camel, or cow.

DAWUD WALID (Council on American Islamic Relations Michigan): This sacrifice is in remembrance of what the Qu’ran says, as well as the Bible, of when Abraham was inspired or he had a dream that he was to sacrifice one of his sons, and then God told Abraham that he did not have to sacrifice his son, and a ram came, and Abraham then sacrificed the ram.

LAWTON: American Muslims typically buy meat slaughtered according to Islamic requirements from a market or grocery store. The immediate family eats one-third of the meat. Another third is shared with the larger community of friends and relatives, and the rest is donated to the poor.

WALID: It’s a religious obligation for us to give to other people. We would not be good Muslims or following our religion, because the third pillar of Islam is charity, so we’re obligated to give charity.

LAWTON: In the United States, recipients include places such as Gleaner’s Community Food Bank of southeastern Michigan. They partner with over 400 outlets in their network of feeding programs to distribute thousands of pounds of frozen lamb meat donated by the Muslim community annually.

JOHN KASTLER (Gleaner’s Community Food Bank): It’s a high-protein item, and it’s certainly the type of food product that we really like to provide during the winter months where you get a nice, hearty meal out of the donation. Groups like the Salvation Army, the Cabbage & Soup Kitchen, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and different feeding programs around town will be able to enjoy this blessing.

LAWTON: Through the soup kitchens they operate, mosques and Islamic centers also serve as distribution sites. Those who come in to pray are offered bags of lamb to take home, as are all non-Muslims seeking food assistance.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Before President Obama left for Asia he visited Fort Hood in Texas, where 13 members of the military were killed allegedly by an Army psychiatrist who is an American-born Muslim:

President Obama at Fort Hood memorial service: “No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world and the next.”

The Fort Hood killings have raised questions about whether the accused shooter’s zeal about Islam could have played any role in the tragedy and about being Muslim in the US military.  Imam Yahya Hendi is the Muslim chaplain at both the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and at Georgetown University in Washington. He had met Major Hasan.

Imam, welcome. Is there anything in what you’ve heard or read about Major Hasan that could explain to you what happened?

The Obamas at Fort Hood memorial service

AM YAHYA HENDI: Actually, no. It is a shock for me. I met Major Hasan a few times, and every time I met him I understood him to be a loyal American, loving of his country, and he wanted to join the military in support of America.

ABERNETHY: Is there anything about his being a very devout Muslim that could explain to you his shooting?

HENDI: For me it was….

ABERNETHY: …his alleged shooting.

HENDI: For me, what happened on that Thursday (November 5) has nothing to do with Islam. Islam does not stand in support of such shooting. Actually, according to Islamic law what he did was criminal, immoral, and unethical and against the teachings of Islam in every way, shape, and form.

ABERNETHY: When he apparently—when he began shooting he shouted out “Allahu akbar” in Arabic—God is great.

HENDI: Yeah. You know Muslims use that phrase, “Allahu akbar,” like “Oh, gosh” in English, “Oh, my Lord, Oh, my God.” It does not really have a religious motivation always and all the time.

ABERNETHY: You have counseled a lot of Muslim soldiers and sailors and marines. Is there any conflict for some of them, at least sometimes, between being Muslim and then having to go some place where they are fighting Muslims?

HENDI: You know, overall most of the soldiers we have, Muslim soldiers in the US military, are loyal Americans and have joined the military, again, to defeat terrorism, to defeat extremism. After all, on September 11 we were attacked, and Islam gives Muslims and America the right to defend itself against terrorism and, therefore, Muslims should be proud and are proud of their service in the US military.

ABERNETHY: There’s a concept, if I understand it correctly, within Islam called the ummah, which is a sense of intense brotherhood with all other Muslims. Now does that conflict with having to go into Afghanistan?

HENDI: Actually, no. If I love my brother and when my brother does something wrong, Islam requires me to stop him from his wrongdoing. You know, Prophet Muhammad—and in the Koran we are told that we have to enjoin good and forbid evil. What happened on September 11 and the aftermath of that terrorism, extremism, what is happening in Pakistan, suicide bombing, and in Afghanistan is against the teachings of Islam, and Muslims are required to join any military in self-defense and to defeat terrorism.

ABERNETHY: What about in the Muslim community in this country? What’s going on there since the shootings?

HENDI: You know, American Muslims feel proud of being American, but at the same time are suspected on daily basis. Their religion is under siege; the community is under siege because of suspects. What we want America to do is to understand that we are a part of the fabric of America. We love America, our country, and we want to fight with everyone in defense of America.

ABERNETHY: Imam Yahya Hendi, many thanks.

HENDI: Thank you.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This past week (November 9) the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it’s constitutional to sentence juveniles who commit crimes other than murder to life in prison without parole. Tim O’Brien reports.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young had just turned 15 when he committed a string of hotel robberies in the Tampa area, acting at the direction of 25-year-old Jacques Bethea, a neighborhood drug dealer with a long arrest record.  Bethea would hold the gun. Young would take the money.

KENNETH YOUNG: The only thing he told me to do was get the money and the tapes, and that was it.

O’BRIEN:  What tapes?

YOUNG:  Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security camera?

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN:  And you did that?

YOUNG:  Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young says he had little choice. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine and had stolen drugs from Bethea. He believed her life was in danger.

YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

YOUNG: Kill her.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along.

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother blames herself for her son’s problems.

STEPHANIE YOUNG:  Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, I mean …

O’BRIEN: But that didn’t keep Kenneth from being sentenced to life in prison with no parole.

JUDGE J. ROGERS PADGETT: What we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge J. Rogers Padgett

PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him, so we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Florida, like many states, allows prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults for serious crimes, and the state legislature did away with all parole in 1995. As a result, there are now 77 inmates in the state serving life without parole for non-homicides committed when they were under 18, more than in all other states combined. Paolo Annino runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University:

PAOLO ANNINO: This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children. Do we want to do that as a society? Do we want to ignore our Western traditions?

O’BRIEN: This week (November 9) the U.S. Supreme Court took up that question in two separate cases involving Terrence Graham, who at age 17 committed armed burglaries while on parole for a previous armed robbery, and Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of raping and robbing a 72-year-old woman when he was only 13.

BRYAN STEVENSON: We don’t think there’s any dispute that sentencing a 13-year-old to life in prison without parole is unusual. It’s happened only twice for non-homicides. We also think that to say to any child of 13 that you’re only fit to die in prison is cruel.

O’BRIEN: But Stevenson ran into some skeptical justices, including Antonin Scalia: “I don’t see why it is any crueler to an adolescent that it is to an adult… Where do you draw the line?” Justice Sam Alito: “What about …brutal rapes, assaults that render the victim paraplegic but not dead …the person shows no remorse… the worst case you could possibly imagine? That person must at some point be made eligible for parole? “You are correct, your honor,” answered Brian Gowdy, the attorney for Terrence Graham.

BRIAN GOWDY: If the court rules in Terrence’s favor, about one hundred persons who committed crimes as adolescents will benefit by getting a chance to show some day that they have changed, and that’s all we’re asking for. Not for immediate release, but a chance to show that the kid has changed.

Brian Gowdy

O’BRIEN: In court, Gowdy pointed to a landmark Supreme Court ruling four years ago in which the justices rejected the death penalty for juvenile offenders, relying heavily on evidence showing that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do. Several justices observed that that was a death penalty case, and death is different.

GOWDY: Death is different, but not in any critical respects when you’re talking about an adolescent. Both sentences condemn the adolescent to die in prison, both give up on the kid, both determine that the adolescent can’t be changed,  and both say that, based on an adolescent mistake, you can never live in civil society.

O’BRIEN: The attorney for Florida said the state’s sentencing practices were aimed at addressing a serious crime problem and that such policy decisions should not be second-guessed by federal judges.

SCOTT MAKAR (Florida Solicitor General): That’s a quintessential states’ judgment, and 21 states have said no to parole and our position is that the court shouldn’t impose something on the states that the states themselves have rejected.

O’BRIEN: Chief Justice John Roberts proposed a compromise requiring judges and juries to consider a defendant’s youth, but allowing life without parole in extreme cases. Defense lawyers dismissed the idea as too little.

STEVENSON: Because poor kids and minority kids and disadvantaged kids are always the ones who end up with these harsh sentence.

O’BRIEN: Conservatives on the court dismissed it as too much. Meanwhile, back in Florida, Kenneth Young and more than a hundred other prison inmates nationwide serving life without parole for crimes they committed as children got some support from what might seem to be an unlikely source. The judge who sentenced Young, J. Rogers Padgett, has come out against laws that deny parole to juveniles in non-homicide cases.

PADGETT: If I went and talked to Kenneth, I might have sympathy, too, because I firmly believe the Department of Corrections ought to be given the latitude to determine when these people are ready to go. What do I know? At the time of sentencing I’m doing a snapshot, so what do I know?

O’BRIEN: The justices appeared sharply divided, making any decision unlikely before the end of the term next June. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

ABERNETHY: Among those who have filed briefs with the court are 20 religious groups that argued that the values of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion are central to their faiths. They said judges have a responsibility to consider those values, along with the possibility of rehabilitation, especially for juveniles. They urged what they call “restorative justice.”

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.

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