Email August 16, 2015

Last Sunday (Pentecost 11, August 9, 2015)   

August 16 – 10am, Godly Play (preschool through second grade)

August 16 – 11am, Holy Eucharist, Rite II, Jonathan Myrick Daniels commemoration 

August 19 – 3:30-5pm, Village Harvest Distribution

Calendar 

This Sunday at St. Peter’s – Servers, Readings   

Roger and Eunice are off to Staten Island- Aug 12

Catherine brought coffee and saw Roger and Eunice off to Staten Island from Fredericksburg just after 9am Aug 12. Roger’s Mom had taken them to the station.  They looked eager to get the coffee for the 5 hour ride ahead.  Here is a small photo gallery of the send off.

For the fourth year, they are going to assist with the Staten Island Moravian Clothing distribution. The process of the clothing distribution is divided into collection, sorting and distribution and takes place over several months. Catherine’s sister is a Moravian Minister and originated the event over a decade ago.

There are four Moravian churches on Staten Island that collect clothing  from late March through May. They ask the clothing is separated into male and female. Then, for a week in May (1oam-8pm) they work to sort all the clothing by gender and size and box it up until the clothing distribution in August.   The distribution beginning Thursday Aug 13 takes place over 3 days this year at Brighton Heights Reformed Church. Here’s how the distribution unfolds:

Boy Scout Troop 26 helps them move tables, supplies, and our boxes and boxes of clothing from Castleton Hill Moravian over to Brighton Heights Reformed Church. Thursday is setup day – tables, boxes, clothes on the racks. On Friday, they are open to the families from the local shelter and to clients of Arbor, a near-by back to work program. Clients gather in the Fellowship Hall of the church .A volunteer “personal shopper” takes each person into the gym to pick out clothing. With the clothes organized on the tables and racks and volunteers to assist, things move along fairly quickly. On Saturday they are open to the public all day and serve families from all over Staten Island. The need is great. At the end of the day they pack up the remaining clothing which typically will go to various agencies

They have different churches come to to volunteer as a mission project. This year a group is coming from North Carolina. There is a "day off" for visiting the sites in NY.  On Sunday, at Castleton Hil Moravian where Catherine’s sister is a minister, there is a "thank you" portion of their service which provides a wonderful conclusion and reflection of the work over the previous days. 

Final week -For the Village Harvest, Aug. 19, we need…:

Please choose between cereal, grits and oatmeal. Bring them to the church to the back pew by Aug. 16. Thank you for your contributions. It brings everyone who contributes into this ministry whether you are at the distribution or not.

This issue focuses on two civil rights pioneers, one white (Jonathan Myrick Daniels) and one black (Elbert Williams), one from 1965 (Daniels), one from the 1940 (Williams).  We will remember Daniels in church on Sunday, August 16.  In fact the service is all about him – a different lectionary, hymns and a sermon about him. In this issue we also take up the cause of Williams.   Daniels’ killer was prosecuted but cleared by an all-white jury. No one was ever prosecuted in Williams’ murder.

“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” – President Lyndon B. Johnson

The common story is the struggle for voting rights. Voting rights were provided in the 15th amendment in 1870. It states that the right to vote cannot be denied by the federal or state governments based on race. However, soon after, some states begin to enact measures such as voting taxes and literacy tests that had the effect of effectively limiting the ability to  register to vote.  It hit potential black voters the worst. Violence and other intimidation tactics were also used.

The Voting Rights act which both men were fighting for was passed 50 years ago this month in 1965. It forbids states from imposing discriminatory restrictions on who can vote, and provides mechanisms for the federal government to enforce its provisions. The legislation was passed largely under pressure from protests and marches earlier that year challenging Alabama officials who injured and killed people during African American voter registration efforts. The march on Selma beginning in  March, 1965  was part of these efforts and one that Daniels was called to support.

The drama at Selma was the final journey in his life. He stayed with issues until they were resolved and were close to the people he served. One untold story is how he was adopted by a black family in Alabama and became part of their lives. Throughout his life Daniels showed a pattern of putting himself in the place of others who were defenseless and in need. He found the cross offered true freedom to dedicate his life to God’s will, the cause at hand and to find a new freedom – that of loving even though who tear gassed him.   

We are still not there with the vote. 50 years later we are still dealing with tactics that can limit the vote. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which established a formula for Congress to use when determining if a state or voting jurisdiction requires prior approval before changing its voting laws. Under Section 5 of the act nine—mostly Southern—states with a history of discrimination must get clearance from Congress before changing voting rules to make sure racial minorities are not negatively affected. While the 5–4 decision did not invalidate Section 5, it made it toothless. Fallout from the ruling was swift, with several states quickly moving to change their voting laws.

In response to the Shelby County v. Holder ruling, several states, including Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina, passed laws that limited voting times or required photo ID at the polls. In October, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked law a photo ID law in Wisconsin. The Court, however, in September overturned a federal appeals court ruling that restored a week of early voting and allowed same-day registration in Ohio.

What will it take to complete the original intent of the 15th amendment ?

Who Was Jonathan Daniels ?

A Letter from Bishop Johnston, July 17, 2015:

"Since 1991, he has been commemorated in our Lesser Feasts and Fasts, and now in Holy Women Holy Men. The day of his commemoration is August 14. Jonathan is one of only two Americans enshrined as "Modern Martyrs" in Canterbury Cathedral, the other being Dr. Martin Luther King, who himself praised Daniels’ act as "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry."

"Therefore, I am designating Sunday, August 16, being the Sunday closest to Jonathan’s Prayer Book day, as our diocesan-wide commemoration of one of our most inspiring witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the last five decades"

Links:

Somebody must visit the sick, and the lonely, and the frightened , and the sorrowing. Somebody must comfort the discouraged, and argue lovingly and convincingly with the anguished doubter. Somebody must remind the sick soul that healing is within his grasp and urge him to take the medicine when his disease seems more attractive. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send ? And who will go for us ?" The said I "Here am I. Send me." – Jonathan M. Daniels – Sermon St. James Episcopal, Keene, NH

A summary of his biography follows: 

Jonathan Myrick Daniels was born in New Hampshire in 1939, one of two offspring of a Congregationalist physician. When in high school, he had a bad fall which put him in the hospital for about a month. It was a time of reflection. Soon after, he joined the Episcopal Church and also began to take his studies seriously, and to consider the possibility of entering the priesthood.

After high school, he enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia where at first he seemed a misfit, but managed to stick it out, and was elected Valedictorian of his graduating class.

In the fall of 1961 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston to study English literature, and in the spring of 1962, while attending Easter services at the Church of the Advent in Boston, he underwent a conversion experience and renewal of grace. Soon after, he made a definite decision to study for the priesthood, and after a year of work to repair the family finances, he enrolled at Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1963, expecting to graduate in the spring of 1966.

In March 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asked students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama to push for voting rights legislation. He and others left on Thursday for Selma, intending to stay only that weekend; but he and a friend missed the bus back, and began to reflect on how an in-and-out visit like theirs looked to those living in Selma, and decided that they must stay longer. They went home to request permission to spend the rest of the term in Selma, studying on their own and returning to take their examinations.

Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of Negroes, mostly high school students, to church with him in an effort to integrate the St. Paul’s Episcopal Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many parishioners openly resented their presence, and put their pastor squarely in the middle. (He was integrationist enough to risk his job by accommodating Jon’s group as far as he did, but not integrationist enough to satisfy Jon.) (Our bishop Shannon Johnston served this church as his first congregation). 

As time went on, Jonathan’s anger flared up not only in confronting the white power structure but also dealing with reluctance of Christians to speak against the racial inequalities.  

However, Jonathan gradually saw his work in terms of a larger purpose – the way of the cross. – "ultimately the revolution to which I am committed is the way of the Cross."  

He was coming to a new realization that as a “soldier of the Cross” he was “totally free- at least to give my life, if that had to be, with joy and thankfulness and eagerness for the Kingdom."

He began to tie in concepts of freedom in terms of doing God’s will -obedience.

"The Gospel is less and less a matter primary of the intellect. And more and more a matter of living and dying and living anew.” 

"When the Christian first begins to answer with his own feeble love the overwhelming Love of God, he finds himself animated by an attitude that is equally “holy obedience” and “perfect freedom.” In that freedom which is holy obedience, the Christian has only one principle, only one agenda. And that is the dynamic of life –in-response to the loving, judging , healing, merciful revelation by God Himself of His Holy Will."  

In Camden after a tear gas bombing he found a new depth to the freedom of obedience-

"I think it was when I got tear-gassed leading a march in Camden that I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were not free: it was not the cruelty was sweet to them (though I’m afraid it is) but that they didn’t know what else to do. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy, they were human beings too…"

“Last week in Camden I began to discover a new freedom in the Cross: freedom to love the enemy. And in that freedom, the freedom (without hypocrisy) to will and to try to set him free…As I go about my primary business of attempting to negotiate with the white power structure…, there is a new factor – I rather think a new Presence – in our conversations: the “strategy of love.”

On Friday 13 August Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they were bailed out. (They had agreed that none would accept bail until there was bail money for all.). The prisoners were released on August 20 but were not provided with any means of transportation back to Selma.

Stranded in the 100 degree heat, Daniels and the others sought a cool drink at a nearby store Varner’s Cash Grocery Store.  This store was one of the few shops in the area that didn’t impose a “whites only” policy. However, they were met at the door by Special Deputy Tom Coleman with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he aimed the gun of 17 year old Ruby Sales in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself. (Whether he stepped between her and the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed instantly.

As Daniels’ companions ran for safety, Coleman fired again, critically injuring Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest from Chicago, who survived. 

Not long before his death he wrote:  

"I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my Bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God. I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one’s motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it. " 

"As Judy (seminarian friend) and I said the daily offices day by day, we became More and more aware of the living reality of the invisible "communion of saints"–of the beloved comunity in Cambridge who were saying the offices too, of the ones gathered around a near-distant throne in heaven–who blend with theirs our faltering songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white men, with all of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfils and "ends" all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably One."

There was large scale public outcry over the shooting; and deep shock that a white unarmed trainee priest could be shot and killed by a policeman for protecting an unarmed girl.  As was the case in numerous race-related crimes during the civil rights era, an all-white jury acquitted Coleman when the defense produced witnesses who claimed that Daniels had a knife and Morrisroe had a pistol and that Coleman was acting in self-defense. The shootings and Coleman’s acquittal were condemned across the country.   

Describing the incident, Dr Martin Luther King said that “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”

Daniels was added to the Episcopal Church Calendar of Saints and Martyrs in 1994 to be remembered each Aug. 14, one of 15 martyrs recognized by the church in the 20th century. This is the 50th anniversary of the original shooting. Bishop Johnston will be attending a pilgrimage marking this 50th anniversary in Alabama, from Montgomery to Hayneville.  The grocery store has been demolished  but a historical marker will be dedicated.  

The procession will then return to the Courthouse Square for prayer at a memorial erected in his honour by his alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute; before concluding at the Courthouse with a service of Holy Communion in the courtroom where Coleman was tried and acquitted. Presiding Bishop elect Michael Curry will preach. 

What happened to Ruby Sales? Sales went on to attend Episcopal Theological School in Massachusetts which Daniels had attended (now Episcopal Divinity School). She has worked as a human rights advocate in Washington, D.C. She founded The SpiritHouse Project, a non-profit organization and inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.

The Rev. Gillian Barr in a Evensong in honor of Daniel in Providence RI provides an apt summary of Daniels. "He was a young adult who wasn’t sure what he was meant to do with his life. He had academic gifts, a sense of compassion, and a faith which had wavered from strong to weak to strong. He was searching—searching for a way to live out his values of compassion and his faith rather than just studying them in a book. He was living in intentional community, first at VMI, then at EDS, and then finally with activists in Alabama. His studies, and his prayer life, and his community all led him to see more clearly the beauty and dignity in the faces of all around him, even those who looked very different and came from very different backgrounds than the quiet boy from Keene, NH."

Jonathan M. Daniels honored at National Cathedral

Links:

Soon, an 8-inch-high likeness of Daniels will be ready for viewing by the 300,000 people from around the world who tour the National Cathedral each year. The carving, located about 11 feet off the ground at the base of an archway molding, will be part of the cathedral’s Human Rights Porch, putting Daniels in the same company as Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks.

Daniels was chosen in part because of his relative obscurity.

“He was young at the time, a lay person, and he saw a need and he went out and met it,” cathedral spokesman Kevin Eckstrom said. “In 1965, he saw a need to go assist African-Americans across the South, and he did that. On that day he died, he saw a more immediate need to save Ruby Sales’ life, and he did that.”

Daniels, originally from New Hampshire, was a student at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge when he and several of his classmates answered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy to help finish the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965, two days after state troopers beat marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday

After more than three years of consideration, church and cathedral officials settled on Daniels for the third of four stone portraits overlooking the Human Rights Porch.

“Part of the idea was to have a lesser-known saint in with Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks, so it was a deliberate choice to find somebody within our own ranks that we could lift up and memorialize,” Eckstrom said. The fourth person has not been chosen.

At the cathedral, stone carver Sean Callahan has spent the last couple of weeks on scaffolding, chiseling Daniels’ image into a square stone block at the end of the molding around the arch. Callahan is working from a clay sculpture done by North Carolina artist Chas Fagan.

Using a three-dimensional mapping tool to measure and mark the contours of Fagan’s work, Callahan carves the limestone with a mason’s touch and an artist’s eye.

“I know a lot of Episcopalians hold (Daniels) in high esteem, which puts the pressure on to do it right,” said Callahan, 50, of Silver Spring, Maryland.

He plans to finish in August, and a formal dedication ceremony is planned for October. Sales is expected to attend the ceremony, Eckstrom said.

50 Years Ago – Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Links:

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended in three weeks with three events that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge.

Then civil rights leaders sought court protection for a third, full-scale march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., weighed the right of mobility against the right to march and ruled in favor of the demonstrators. "The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups…," said Judge Johnson, "and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways."

On Sunday, March 21, about 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. By the time they reached the capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong. Less than five months after the last of the three marches, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965–a  redress of grievances. 

The most important permanent provisions are Section 2, which bans racial discrimination in voting nationwide, and Sections 4 and 201, which ban literacy tests nationwide. The most important temporary provisions – provisions that get periodically reauthorized by Congress – are:

  • Section 5, which requires certain state and local governments (called "covered jurisdictions") to "preclear" proposed changes in voting or election procedures with either the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and
  • Section 203, which requires that certain state and local jurisdictions provide assistance in languages other than English to voters who are not literate or fluent in English.
  • Sections 6-9, which give the U.S. Attorney General the power to send federal examiners and observers to monitor elections

How voting can be stymied ?

1. 1965  – Registration practices  

From the movie "Selma"

2. Today – Voter ID  

Frontline today examines Voter ID’s

"Rolling Back the Voting Rights Act" – NY Times magazine

A 2014 study by the Government Accountability Office found that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout by 2 to 3 percent during the 2012 election, enough to swing a close vote, with the highest drop-off among young, black and newly registered voters. 

On the other side,  public opinion polls have shown strong support for voter ID laws amongst voters in the United States.  Voter ID laws are in place in 34 states.  Twelve states now require voters to show some form of photo identification.  A recent study in 2014 by Jesse Richman and David Earnest, professors at Old Dominion University, suggested there are enough non-citizens to make a difference  in close races. 

Lectionary for Jonathan Daniels Sunday

Due to the commemoration a special lectionary will substitute for Pentecost 12B:

The lectionary readings are here  or individually: 

Old Testament – Proverbs 4:20-27
Psalm – Psalm 85:7-13
Epistle –Galatians 3:22-28
Gospel – Luke 1:46-55  "The Magnificat"

The highlight is the Magnificat which held special meaning for Daniels. Just after the  "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, March 7. He wrote the following:

"My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary’s glad song. "He hath showed strength with his arm." As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled "moment" that would, in retrospect, remind me of others–particularly one at Easter three years ago. Then it came. "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things." I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin’s song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.

Mary’s song is one where a young girl rejoices that despite being lowly "the humble and meek" she will be have a part of redeeming mankind. She understands that she is now personally caught up in the larger story of God acting on God’s passion for the plight of the weak, the hungry, the oppressed, the lowly. She is now to be a partner in God’s work of liberation and redemption. She knows that God consistently uses the least likely, the least powerful, to be instruments of God’s will.

Daniels’ life showed a pattern of putting himself in the place of others who were defenseless and in need. The pattern was evident even at VMI, where as an upperclassman he was known to have compassion on and defend first-year cadets as they endured the brutal hazing of the VMI “Rat Line.” During seminary he went beyond the call of duty in his field work study in Providence RI he gave up his entire weekend to tutor black children.

His decision to go to Selma, though it perhaps took some people by surprise, was really just his compassion expanding in a greater circle. When the initial fervor of the Selma marches faded and most of the white northerners had returned to the safety and routines of their homes, Jonathan looked at the local poor black activists still fighting and risking their livelihoods and lives, and realized he could not abandon them.

From an Earlier Generation –Story of another Civil Rights worker- Elbert Williams (1940)

On June 20, 1940, in the rural agricultural town of Brownsville, in Haywood County, Tennessee, Elbert Williams, charter member of the Brownsville NAACP Branch, became the first NAACP official in the nation murdered for his civil rights work for his efforts to win the vote for Blacks.   Blacks had not voted in Haywood County since 1884.

Elbert Williams was kidnapped from his home by police at night, jailed, and interrogated about whether he was planning an NAACP meeting. No court had issued a warrant for his arrest, no officer had probable cause,

After police kidnapped, jailed, and interrogated Elbert Williams about his plan for an NAACP meeting, he disappeared. Elbert did not return home. Elbert did not show for work the next day as the boiler fireman at the Sunshine Laundry where he had worked for years tending the fire that boiled the water that created the steam that powered the laundry. Elbert was dead.

As June 23 dawned Elbert Williams’s widow Annie, was summoned to the banks of the Hatchie River. She was told, come to the river, they have found a body. There Annie saw her husband bloated, bruised, and beaten. Annie saw what looked to her like two bullet holes in her husband’s chest.

The Department of Justice ordered a prosecution, then mysteriously reversed itself, and closed the case. Thurgood Marshall, who had gathered evidence in Brownsville and turned it over to the Department of Justice was livid and extremely critical of the decision not to prosecute.  He found that FBI agents had taken Tip Hunter, a city police officer, to question witnesses. No one has yet been prosecuted for Elbert Williams’s murder.

Enter retired lawyer Jim Emison has recently appealed to Justice Department asking to reopen Williams’ case, which was never solved.

‘We should do everything we can do to see who killed this man,’ Emison said. ‘If there is anybody in a group that may have done it that’s still living, they need to be brought to justice.’

Emison’s obsession with Williams’ death grew more out of what he didn’t hear than what he did .When he was a child, Emison sometimes heard his father, grandfather and uncle — all lawyers — talk about lynchings and other atrocities against African Americans.

In 2012, Emison was researching a story he planned to write about a court case when he came across an online article about two lynchings in 1937 and 1940.

The latter was Williams’ killing. Emison ordered FBI and Department of Justice case files from the US National Archives. To his surprise, officials there sent him un-redacted copies.

The records showed that Brownsville police, upset because the local NAACP branch was registering blacks to vote, had led an effort to force its members out of town.

Then-U.S. Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge said in a letter to US District Attorney William Clanahan that the ‘obvious purpose’ of the police and others had been to ‘frighten the entire colored population of Brownsville and thus prevent qualified Negroes from exercising their franchise.’

Some of the members left town, but Williams stayed behind. When the police got a tip that he was planning an NAACP meeting at his home, a group of men led by police officer Tip Hunter went to his residence, said they needed to question him outside and then took him away. Williams’ body was found three days later in the nearby Hatchie River.

In June, 2015 Williams was remembered in histrongs hometown with a historical marker in his memory. 

Emison wants the case reopened and Williams’ body exhumed, despite some resistance from a few people in the community, including one who told him "the past ought to be left to die, and not resurrected."

But Emison has ignored them. He’s spent hours interviewing Williams’ descendants, relatives of NAACP members from the branch and even family members of two police officers — both now deceased — who went to Williams’ home that night. Relatives of the officers declined interviews with The Associated Press.

Emison even has suspicions about the killers. He believes exhuming the body could lead to a murder weapon, considering Williams’ wife said she saw what looked like bullet holes in his chest. Emison recently turned his findings over to Justice Department officials who he said are giving Williams’ case serious consideration despite the department’s announcement last year that it will likely stop prosecuting civil rights-era murders that occurred in the South.

Beyond Voting Rights: The State of Black Schools

It was a year ago Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.

From author Nikole Hannah-Jones -"Most black children will not be killed by the police. But millions of them will go to a school like Michael Brown’s: segregated, impoverished and failing. The nearly all-black, almost entirely poor Normandy school district from which Brown graduated just eight days before he was killed placed dead last on its accreditation assessment in the 2013-2014 school year." From the New York Times

President Jimmy Carter’s Curiously Full Life

Link to podcast

The Ephesians reading in the original Pentecost 12 lectionary week starts out this way – "Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. "  Huffington Post did an interview with Carter who personifies this scripture.

Now, in his 90th year, President Carter has released a book aptly titled A Full Life, Reflections at 90 that offers an intimate look at the social, emotional and spiritual experiences. He has led a full life -husband, father, farmer, Sunday school teacher, governor, president, Nobel Prize winner, peacemaker and humanitarian. He also did the art work for his book. Finally, it is revealed he has been writing for much of his life.

The podcast conversation (link above) ranges from the rise of the religious right, his love for his wife, the role of poetry in his life to his understanding of death and the importance of living life fully right now.

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