Lessons from Elite Leaders: Speaking in Different Registers at Work, Part 5 of 8 @TheHighCalling

People are afraid of evangelicals. Why? Laity Leadership Senior Fellow D. Michael Lindsay says his latest research shows that those outside the evangelical fold have fears about evangelicals based on two things:

  1. They’re afraid evangelicals won’t do the  things they say they’ll do.
  2. They’re afraid evangelicals will do some of the things they say they’ll do.

For example, people don’t believe it when an evangelical leader says, “I draw on my faith; it gives me a sense of meaning and purpose; it sacrilizes my work and helps me face some of the challenges that come my way, but I’m not here to convert you or force faith down your throat, or manipulate the work place so that it becomes like a church.”

Likewise, if they’re asked a generic question like, “Do you think evangelicals are trying to take over the country?” they may say yes. But when they’re asked about particular evangelicals they have encountered in leadership, they generally express positive attitudes. The exception is in the political realm, where Lindsay finds significant polarization. He says, “I bracket that off because I don’t know how, as a social analyst, to separate out someone’s faith from their politics. I think so much of how we respond relates to how those things work hand in hand in the political sector.”

He says we need to learn how to “speak in different registers” at work in order to alleviate these fears. …

To find out what he means, read the whole article at The High Calling.

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 Posted on March 7, 2011 by

 Community, Culture, Ethics, Leadership, Politics, Public Square, Vocation, Walkin' the Talk

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Lessons from Elite Leaders: Faith Postures in the Workplace, Part 4 of 8 @TheHighCalling

Whether a leader takes a pragmatic, heroic, circumspect, or brazen approach in the workplace, there are risks and benefits to be considered. Laity Leadership Senior Fellow D. Michael Lindsay identifies these four faith postures that leaders take at work and says none of them is necessarily better than the others, but each presents different challenges and opportunities for leaders who seek to be faithful in their calling.

Ninety-three percent of the leaders that Lindsay interviewed for his new PLATINUM Study said their coworkers know about their faith, but many of them take a pragmatic approach to expressing it in hostile work environments. In “Accounting by Faith,” a 2010 article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Lindsay and co-author Bradley Smith wrote, “Pragmatic elites prefer a strategy of incremental witness to all-or-nothing conversion campaigns.” …

Go to The High Calling to find out how Sherron Watkins’ faith informed her Enron whistleblowing, how a That 70s show producer feels about his work, what it doesn’t cost an NFL player to be a bold witness, and more from prominent Christians living out their faith at work.

 Posted on February 28, 2011 by

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A Religious Treasure Trove at Princeton University @NJShorePatch

Who knew the Ivy League gem offered a wealth of free public religion events?

As a girl growing up in Point Pleasant Beach, I didn’t give much thought to Princeton University. It was the 1970s and I was, shall we say, distracted. If I thought about our state’s Ivy League jewel at all, I saw it as an inaccessable, dusty treasure chest full of academic stuffiness and snobbery.

If we’re lucky, we grow up and find out the world’s gems are much more accessable than we ever imagined. What a delight it was then, a few years ago, to learn that Princeton has a thriving faith community and offers a bounty of free public religion events.

It’s a pleasant 45 minute drive west on Route 33 and across Route 1 to the university from coastal Monmouth County and a great way to spend an afternoon or evening while enriching one’s understanding of the religious landscape. …

Read about some upcoming events here. Plus, where to park, eat, and shop in Princeton.

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 Posted on February 23, 2011 by

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Lessons from Elite Leaders: Bearing Witness at Work through Generosity, Part 3 of 8 @TheHighCalling

People of faith are called to use their influence and power to work toward the common good. Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow D. Michael Lindsay says his new PLATINUM Study on elite leaders tells an important story about how leaders can work toward the common good through workplace generosity.

The story of David Grizzle, Chief Counsel for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), stood out to Lindsay from his interviews of some 500 leaders. Grizzle had a long career at Continental Airlines, retiring in 2008 as senior vice president of customer experience. (The High Calling interviewed Grizzle in 2006.)

In the late 1990s, Grizzle brokered a landmark marketing deal between Continental and Northwest Airlines that transformed the industry, according to Lindsay. Continental and Northwest sold seats on each other’s airplanes and shared reciprocal agreements in their frequent flyer programs that laid the groundwork for the mergers and consolidations that have since become standard in the airline industry. …

Read the whole thing at The High Calling.

 Posted on February 21, 2011 by

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Lessons from Elite Leaders: Mentors, Money, & Personal Devlopment, Part 2 of 8 @TheHighCalling

In part 2 of my series on lessons from elite leaders, I take on the thorny topic of leveraging relationships to one’s own advantage. Here’s a peek:

If you want to be an elite leader, you’ll need mentors, money, and personal development. Building upon research reported in his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow and Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay mined this startling new data about the factors that help elite leaders advance in their careers. In his new PLATINUM Study (PLATINUM stands for Public Leaders in America Today the Inquiry into their Networks, Upbringing, and Motivations), Lindsay reports that mentors, money, and personal development are vital to career growth. …

Find out how at The High Calling. Part 1 on limts, accountability, and marriage is here. Be sure to peruse the comments; there’s some good discussion going on.

 Posted on February 16, 2011 by

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Deceit & Hidden Cameras in the Abortion Debate @TheHuffingtonPost

As a Christian, a pro-lifer, and a journalist, I’m ambivalent about the Planned Parenthood hidden camera sting that was perpetrated here in central New Jersey and reported sporadically by news outlets this week. The California based anti-abortion activist group Live Action sent two actors into a clinic posing as sex traffickers and recorded an employee doling out unethical, dangerous, and illegal advice that would keep the duo in business.

As a Christian I’m uncomfortable with both the failure of the office worker to report the couple to authorities and the entrapment of her by the activists. When is it appropriate to lie? The biblical stories of the midwives who refused to kill male infants as commanded by Egypt’s pharaoh and Rahab’s deception that saved Jewish spies in Jericho both seem to affirm lying when it’s done to save lives, but I question whether or not any lives will be saved as a result of this action.

As a pro-lifer, I doubt this kind of activism ultimately advances the goal of reducing abortion. On one hand, undeniable truth is exposed. On the other, the bad will it inspires is a serious blow to the common ground efforts that I believe hold the best hope of actually bringing down the abortion rate in the United States. Also, as pro-lifer Rachael Laramore writes at Slate,

“Planned Parenthood should be responsible for the actions of its employees. It should at least be held to the same standards that the left wants crisis-pregnancy centers held to–no false advertising, no erroneous medical information. But it’s extremely unlikely that there are multitudes of men walking into Planned Parenthood trying to get cheap abortions for their sex workers. And the young women who count on the group’s cheap birth control will be the ones who are harmed if Planned Parenthood loses its federal funding.”

As a journalist, I’m ambivalent about the use of hidden cameras and deception. At the journalism resource Poynter.org, several articles address the ethical problems inherent in using deception to reveal truth. When it comes to using hidden cameras, an article by Bob Steele offers the following factors to consider:

The Importance Threshold

“Since we are in the business of pursuing truth, there is more than a hint of hypocrisy when we use some form of deceit to pursue the truth. We can only justify that inconsistency and the use of deception when we truly serve a greater principle, such as pursuing a highly important and otherwise elusive truth. Therein lies the first standard for deciding when it is appropriate to use hidden cameras. To justify deception we must be pursuing exceptionally important information. It must be of vital public interest, such as preventing profound harm to individuals or revealing great system failure.”

Tools of Last Resort

“This covert method of newsgathering amplifies any accusations we make. We must insure that the tone and emphasis of hidden camera video meet standards for factual accuracy and contextual authenticity.”

Trinagulate & Test Assumptions

“We must devote enough resources, time and attention to gather the right facts and make sure our facts are right. We must supplement the surreptitious video with insightful observations, seeing and retaining important details of a scene that might not be captured by the camera.”

Know and Respect the Law

“We must pay close attention to the legal land mines in hidden camera reporting. Stations must develop sound strategies that recognize matters of defamation and privacy, including false light and intrusion torts. We can be vigorous in our reporting if we are clear on the law regarding fraud, trespass and surreptitious recording of audio. The law appropriately protects citizens. We should honor the law while also responsibly serving the public.”

Live Action’s amateur investigative work meets the Importance Threshold in my opinion, but I’m not sure it meets the other three criteria. A quick search of the bios on its website reveals that no one on the leadership team has journalistic training. Their success causes me to not only question the veracity and ethics of the work, it makes me lament the fact that more professionals aren’t doing excellent, unbiased reporting like this from ProPublica’s Marian Wang.

In the New Jersey case, the first outcome is that one woman lost her job. While she seems incredibly callous in the video, I assume that hers is a tragically misguided attempt to minimize the consequences of sex trafficking on underage girls who are beyond her reach, or as one commenter at GetReligion suggests, perhaps to get them into the clinic away from the pimps so that they can be helped.

Hidden camera video doesn’t reveal what is in a person’s mind and I don’t believe this is a singular story. The woman identified in the video as Amy Woodruff is culpable for her actions, but she has also become a convenient scapegoat. It’s understandable that pro-life activists wouldn’t be interested in what it means for Woodruff’s family for her to lose a job they believe is immoral, but as a Christian I am concerned about the harm that was done to them in the name of the cause.

*Update: Three additional videos have been released from clinics in Virginia.

Update 2/7: This article has now been published at The Huffington Post.

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 Posted on February 5, 2011 by

 Bioethics, Culture, Democracy, Ethics, Faith, Journalism, Medicine, Politics, Public Square, Science, Social Action, The Huffington Post, Vocation, Walkin' the Talk

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Prosperity Gospel: Will Jesus Buy Me a Double Wide or What? @TheHuffingtonPost

I had a great time interviewing Karen Zacharias for this article. She’s not only a wonderful storyteller who writes about things that matter, she’s also feisty, generous, and smart. You should read her book; it’s engaging and thoughtful. I’m following it up with her memoir: After the Flag Has Been Folded: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost to War—and the Mother Who Held Her Family Together. Here we are, two incredulous faith-filled women, taking on the prosperity preachers:

In her new book, Will Jesus Buy Me A Double-Wide? (‘Cause I Need More Room For My Plasma TV), veteran journalist Karen Spears Zacharias takes on prosperity gospel hucksters. What began as a humorous look at a troubling phenomenon took a serious turn when the U.S. economy tanked in 2008, and another when Zacharias lost her job. Prosperity preaching wasn’t just something to report on; it was a personal attack on her faith.

I know what that’s like. After Janet Jackson scandalized U.S. audiences by exposing her breast at the 2004 Superbowl, I wrote an essay on the indecency of Christian television. In it, I critiqued a married televangelist couple’s shows. A producer from one of those shows invited me to be a guest for what she thought would be a “lively discussion.” I politely declined. The host e-mailed me directly. She took me to task, saying my article was misleading and that I was pompous. Never mind that she had claimed gold was literally raining down in her studio in one of the episodes I examined. She wrote, “The bottom line is that you have a small theological box that you live in and it wouldn’t matter what I said because until you open your mind and heart to the supernatural things of God, you will be quite content writing your cynical judgmental articles and watching your public television station,” which her network was suing to purchase against its wishes.

In her trumped up thinking, the fourth estate is spiritually bankrupt. I don’t see that any more than I saw the gold on my TV screen. Instead, I see prosperity theology as truncated, deceptive and dangerous, as do many Christians and as does Zacharias. In the introduction to her collection of stories about how people view the relationship between God and money, she writes, “It’s a terrible theology for the poor and downtrodden. When hard times hit, it must mean that God is put out with us. We’ve been unfaithful or otherwise not measured up.” Her scope is broader than any particular denomination, however. “We Americans,” she writes, “want to believe that God loves us best of all and that all of our nation’s riches are the result of our faithfulness to God. … Entitlement theology may very well be the bastard-child born from the mating of Calvinism’s strong work ethic with Capitalism’s get-all-the-goods-you-can mentality.” Ouch!

Zacharias is a braver woman than I am. She did a 700 Club interview about her book with Pat Robertson’s son Gordon. As the interview unfolded, Robertson said, “In reading your book, I notice that you don’t particularly like TV preachers and I was trying hard not to take it personal, but you’re really starting to skewer some of my friends in here.” To which Zacharias retorted, “Some of your friends in there deserve to be skewered.” A friendly debate about Joel Osteen ensued and Zacharias concluded, “When you go before the masses and tell them that their ‘best life now‘ is tied up into the things that they own, the size of their garage or anything materially oriented, I think you’re missing it.” In the book, she says, “If there’s a secret to living your best life now, it’s this: Stop imagining all the ways in which the universe can serve you and start figuring out how you can serve others.”

I talked to Zacharias as she was preparing to travel from her home in Oregon to Washington D.C. for board meetings of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Fund and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation. She serves both organizations for good reason: her father was killed in Vietnam when she was just a girl. (She tells that story in her memoir, After the Flag Has Been Folded: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost to War — and the Mother Who Held Her Family Together.)

She said, “The thing I’m trying to address here is not just about money. It’s about saying to the 14-year-old girl whose father died in Vietnam that I didn’t measure up, that I wasn’t enough or that my mother wasn’t. [There is in prosperity theology] no taking into account that the Vietnam War had more to do with capitalism than it had to do with Christianity.”

She continued, “The problem with the whole formula of God’s faithfulness plus my obedience equals untold riches is that it’s a great formula as long as life’s going your way. …The moment it all comes crashing down, you don’t have a faith because that God doesn’t exist anymore.”

One of the many compelling stories Zacharias tells in Will Jesus Buy Me A Double-Wide? is about a friend of hers who she calls “the Redhead.” After the Redhead was diagnosed with cancer, her husband lost his job. She cleaned houses so they could afford to attend their child’s wedding in Australia. Zacharias grew up in a single-wide trailer and yet couldn’t imagine herself cleaning other people’s toilets, much less envision her elegant friend doing it. The Redhead told her that she prayed for her clients as she did her work. “It’s a kingdom choice to live with a grateful heart in the midst of all this,” she said. Zacharias reflects, “That’s not the power of positive thinking; it’s saying, ‘No matter what, I trust You.’ …That seems to me to be what faith is about.”

I’ve always thought that if I could have faith in light of other people’s suffering, then I best not second guess it in the face of my own. Zacharias and I have this in common. The television host and me, not so much; she closed her e-mail by saying she was content to let God judge between us and hold us accountable for our sins. I’m pretty sure that was a prayer for God to rain judgment down on me.

Check out what Huffington Post readers are saying here.



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 Posted on November 19, 2010 by

 Books, church life, Community, Ethics, Faith, Leadership, Psychology, Redemption, Social Action, The Huffington Post, Theology, Walkin' the Talk

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The Abortion Debate: Open Hearts, Open Minds and Tragedy as a Fair Minded Word @TheHuffingtonPost

Fordam University bioethicist Charles Camosy introduced Open Hearts, Open Minds and Fair Minded Words: A Conference on Life and Choice in the Abortion Debate at Princeton University on October 15, 2010 by saying that it wasn’t the conference any of its organizers wanted or envisioned. Instead many compromises were made between him and his colleagues Peter Singer (Princeton), Frances Kissling (University of Pennsylvania) and Jennifer Miller (Bioethics International) as they thought about how to find common ground amidst the debate.

In his introduction, Camosy, who is pro-life, outlined three goals: 1. better map disagreements; 2. find common ground across divides; 3. have open hearts and open minds. Kissling, who is pro-choice, compared her pre-event anxiety to preparing for a wedding that both families believe is a horrible mistake. (Perhaps such fears were eased as the conference unfolded because there were security guards at the doors on the first day but not the second.)

After the conference, Camosy described it as largely successful in meeting these goals despite pockets of incivility, while Evangelical participant David Gushee (MacAfee School of Theology, Mercer University) described it as an audacious attempt that largely failed to find common ground.

Gushee was on the first panel, “Bridging the Abortion Divide: Recurring Challenges, Emerging Opportunities,” with his Common Ground colleague Rachel Laser, Mary Jacksteit of the Public Conversations Project (which initially attempted to bridge the abortion divide in the 1990s) and both Kissling and Miller. While I learned a lot from each discussion, theirs was the only one I attended that didn’t devolve into a remix of worn-out debates. Perhaps this is because all five speakers were already committed to the goal of exploring shared values.

Laser (who is pro-choice) and Gushee (who is pro-life) became friends through their work on an abortion governing document that was submitted to President Obama’s transition team. They described themselves as comrades in arms who bonded as they fended off friendly fire from their respective sides.

In his opening remarks, Gushee described abortion as a tragedy. Kissling objected to this definition. She said the moral right of women to make decisions about reproduction is essential for them to be recognized as human beings and while she respects the “category of fetal life,” she doesn’t “have a sense of individual fetuses as possessing high value.” Even so, she’s troubled by what she sees as a coarsening of discourse over the issue.

Gushee’s use of the term tragedy initially struck me as emotionally loaded too. I did not choose abortion when I had an unplanned pregnancy, but several members of my social circle did in similar circumstances and only one of them seems to have experienced it as a tragedy. The rest have occasionally communicated feelings of guilt about their abortions, but not regret.

I have written for Christianity Today from a strongly pro-life perspective and yet I’m not sure I ever thought of abortion as tragedy either. Instead, I’ve thought of it and continue to think of it as morally wrong. When I think of tragedy now-a-days, I tend to think of my son Gabriel’s suicide. The issues are related in that he didn’t have the right to take his own life any more than I had the right to take it and yet they are different because he was mentally impaired by Depression when he did so. (Despite notions to the contrary, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says suicide is overwhelmingly a function of mental illness rather than free will.)

Because Gabriel’s death left his brother with no siblings in this world, I’ve become increasingly grateful for his cousins, several of whom were conceived outside of marriage and whose biological parents either never married or married and later divorced. That is a different kind of heartbreak, and yet all these young people are flourishing as are our bonds with one another despite the complications and pain common to all blended and broken families.

My gratitude for them has gotten me thinking about those other children who are missing from my social network because of abortion. I experience Gabriel’s death as tragic because I had the opportunity to know and love him, while I experience those children as mere absences because I never got the chance to know them. I’ve subjectified them as thoroughly as Kissling has.

This is an oft-cited problem with discussions about abortion that pit the life of the unborn child against the welfare of the mother. Women can speak for themselves while unborn children can’t and we are incapable of fully comprehending what we are missing, even if we can glimpse it from the joy other children bring us.

I talked to Gushee about his use of the word tragedy. He said it may not have been the most philosophically precise description, but he was trying to communicate that abortion reflects a deep brokenness in the human condition. This sounds exactly right.

When I think about how tragic my son’s death is, I’m reminded that I would much rather live with the anguish it causes me than envision a life in which I never knew him. Abortion is a tragedy in and of itself, regardless of whether or not we as individuals or we as a society feel that it is so.

1 Corinthians 13:12 says we see things imperfectly in our finite understanding, but one day we will see with perfect clarity. Only then will our perception of abortion match reality.

Check out reader reaction to this reflection at The Huffington Post.

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 Posted on October 30, 2010 by

 Bioethics, Community, Ethics, Faith, Family, Friendship, Gabriel Gifford Scheller, grief, Leadership, Philosophy, Public Square, Theology, Walkin' the Talk

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The Politics of Hunger @UrbanFaith

Ambivalent about exercising your patriotic duty on Tuesday? I was too, until I interviewed the winner of the World Food Prize and learned why this election is so important to hungry Americans. Here’s the intro:

Hunger is a devastating problem in third-world countries, but according to Bread for the World president David Beckmann, one-quarter of all African Americans live in poverty right here in the U.S. That’s why he believes vanquishing poverty should be at the top of our “Christian” political agendas — and why he’s urging people to vote on Tuesday.

David Beckmann is president of Bread for the World and the recent winner of the 2010 World Food Prize. In addition to being an anti-hunger activist, he is a Lutheran minister and an economist who formerly worked at the World Bank. His latest book is Exodus from Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger. UrbanFaith columnist Christine Scheller interviewed Rev. Beckmann about his work, hunger in the African American community, and why we should be aware of the federal policies that influence issues of poverty in America. …

And a compelling exchange from our conversation:

I tend to think that living in the United States, hunger is more invisible. How has it changed you working for the World Bank and Bread for the World?

What’s most striking is that the world as a whole has made remarkable progress against hunger, poverty and disease. I believe in God and I see that hundreds of millions of people have escaped from poverty in places like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Brazil and Britain. That’s why, for me, it makes sense that this is God moving in our history. And then I come back to the U.S.A. where we haven’t made any progress against hunger and poverty since about 1973 and it informs, I think, the U.S. situation. If Brazil and Bangladesh can reduce poverty, it’s clear that we could do it in the U.S. We just haven’t tried for a while. But we did try as a nation. In the ’60s and the early ’70s, we had economic growth and we had a concerted effort under both Johnson and Nixon to reduce hunger and poverty and we cut poverty in half. So it’s doable here too. … I think the fact that we work on world poverty and domestic poverty together makes it all much clearer that our problem in this country is lack of commitment.

Read the whole thing here, and don’t forget to vote.

This interview was reprinted with permission at The Huffington Post on November 2, 2010.

 Posted on October 29, 2010 by

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Domestic Abuse: Coming to a Church Near You @Her.meneutics

Sin by Silence Poster“How long am I to remain in this relationship?” This is the haunting question 65-year-old Glenda Crosley asks in the documentary, Sin by Silence, about the abusive husband she killed in 1986. She has been in prison for as long as she was married — 24 years — and wonders when her ordeal will be over.

In the film, shot almost entirely inside the California Institution for Women, Crosley says the first time her husband, Sam, “truly got physical” was when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. He shoved her into a wall. Eventually she came to believe that the violence wouldn’t end until one of them was dead. According to The Bakersfield Californian, at the time of Sam’s murder, the couple was separated and having an argument in a parking lot. When Sam walked away from her car to the trunk of his, she believed he was going to get the tire iron he had threatened her with the week before. She rammed him once, drove away, then turned her car and hit him again. He died at the scene.

Elizabeth Leonard, author of Convicted Survivors and professor at Vanguard University, a Christian college in Costa Mesa, California, says in the film that women who leave abusive relationships are often subject to “separation assault” and are 75 percent more likely to be murdered than before they left. So the answer to the question: Why didn’t she just leave? is not a simple one. …

Learn why not (and what you can do to help stop domestic violence) by reading the whole article here.

 Posted on October 11, 2010 by

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On the Bridge: A Conversation Between a Pro-Lifer and an Embryonic Stem Cell Researcher @TheHuffingtonPost

hESCs@CHOC

When I investigated human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research for Christianity Today in 2005, the debate about the ethics of the science was heated and tense. I was a pro-lifer who’s child had an incurable disease. What I wanted to know was: what would I do if hESCs could cure my child’s Neurofibromatosis? As part of that investigation, I spent ten days attending a National Institutes of Health (NIH) training course for post-doctoral scientists at Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) in Southern California. Every other attendee was there to learn how to create and grow stem cell lines from five day old human embryos (blastocysts). Because it was an NIH funded course, no new embryos were destroyed to grow the lines the researchers manipulated.

I was the invited guest of Phil Schwartz, who is both director of the Human Neural Stem Cell Resource at CHOC and a Christian opposed to embryo destruction. Schwartz ran the course with Jeanne Loring, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. Loring is a cell biologist who has been working with hESCs since 1997. Before that, she worked with another Christian, Francis Collins, on mapping the human genome. She describes herself as a “cultural Catholic,” but practices no religion and has never had any doubts about the ethics of her hESC work.

In 2008, Schwartz invited me to attend the course again and I did. The political tenor had changed considerably with the advent of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are derived from adult somatic cells and thus are not controversial.

Writing on the Center for Genetics and Society’s blog, Project Director on Biotechnology Accountability Jesse Reynolds predicted,

“With the end of stem cell research as a political vehicle, its advocates are likely to temper expectations. They’ll not just move out the goalposts on the timeline towards treatments, but the touted uses of stem cells will shift from potential cellular therapies to models of human diseases in Petri dishes and better drug testing methods. These new purposes will win fewer votes than ‘your own personal biological repair kit,’ but they are also much more realistic.”

And yet, here we are again, with advocates lamenting a lawsuit that brought a temporary injunction against NIH funding of hESC research. (The injunction was quickly reversed.) So, I called Jeanne Loring and asked her thoughts on the lawsuit and the current state of the field. Here’s that interview, edited for space:

SCHELLER: What do you think of the legal situation?

LORING: For scientists, the embryonic stem cells have been the basis for all of the research, including the induced pluripotent stem cell research. Also, they’ve had a lot of influence over adult stem cell research, although I don’t think those guys would admit it. … There’s a gradual growing excitement … because of what you can do with them. So we have people with all sorts of different skills that are all focusing on hESCs or iPSCs or stem cells in general. What the legislation does is it puts a halt to an awful lot of research that’s ongoing right now. Maybe in another ten years, it wouldn’t have such an impact because people would have already done all these things and it would all be in the hands of companies, but right now it’s in a really frantic research phase. We’re discovering things all the time. It’s the worst possible time to have money taken away.

SCHELLER: Who brought case?

LORING: A researcher who used to be at [Harvard] MIT. Harvard [MIT] denied him tenure and he went on a hunger strike. That’s what he was famous for. I knew I’d heard of him before.

SCHELLER: Was he opposed to the research on ethical grounds?

LORING: There are two people: a woman from Louisiana, I believe, opposing the research on ethical grounds and this guy. In legal terms, in order to get an injunction, you have to show financial harm. He said he was being financially damaged because hESC research was unfairly competing with adult stem cell research at NIH. It’s outrageous. It’s foolish. It’s silly. Because research funded by the NIH is funded on merit and there’s no one pot for all stem cell research that gets divided up differently. There’s a big pot for all sorts of research and depending on the stage of the science and the urgency of the need, the research dollars go in a lot of different directions. Adult stem cell research gets far more funding than embryonic stem cell research and it continues to, mostly because it’s already well established.

SCHELLER: Do you think the spinal cord hESC therapy human trials that have been approved by the FDA [the first of their kind] at the Reeve-Irvine research Center in Southern California will work?LORING: I don’t know. Scientifically, I think there’s a possibility. As a scientist, what I really want are for those cells to not harm anybody because it’s a Phase One trial and the object of a Phase One trial is to show that it doesn’t do any harm, and that will be a huge step forward if they can show that.

SCHELLER: In 2008, we heard from Geron Corporation funded Oxford scientist Paul Fairchild that the immune challenge with hESCs wouldn’t be overcome. Has that changed?

LORING: No. They are going to have an immune problem, but they’re going to treat it like an organ transplant. They’re going to use the minimum amount of immune suppression that they can get away with. … This is not a fix for immune rejection. I just got a grant to develop of way to trick the immune system into thinking transplanted cells are theirs. There are several projects going on along those lines. The cells themselves are not going to move into another body and not cause a reaction, which is actually good because if your immune system is not aware of something and that cell became cancerous, you couldn’t do anything about it.

SCHELLER: California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) co-founder Robert Klein is the father of a diabetic child. I’ve never understood the trade off of insulin dependency for immune suppression that diabetic patients would potentially make if hESC therapies become available. Do you grapple with that at all?

LORING: Sure. Ranking diseases is always difficult. A lot of what diseases are going to be treated with cell therapy really depends on a balance between how serious they are and how deadly they are and how easily they can be treated with cells. So, diabetes seems to be, relatively among all diseases, probably easier than most to treat, but it’s not life-threatening. So you have to get a really good therapy, but definitely require immune suppression before you would actually use it.

SCHELLER: So there’s a benefit/risk analysis?

LORING: Yeah, that’s right. So there is progress to be made. All this immune system stuff is sort of catching fire now, so people are not going to just stand by and let the immune system reject everything. They’re going to try to modify the immune system, not with immune suppression, but in a way that will last. Now people are also encapsulating cells so that the immune system can’t get at them.

SCHELLER: They’re still able to function when they’re encapsulated?

LORING: Yeah, in diabetes they certainly are because all they have to do is react to glucose in the blood and make insulin.

SCHELLER: Last time I talked to you, you sounded more excited about iPSCs than hESCs.

LORING: I am more excited for a lot of reasons about iPSCs because you can make them from any individual. As far as the way they act in the culture dish, they’re exactly the same as embryonic stem cells. You have the same problems and the same advantages.

SCHELLER: Is it much harder to get them to turn into other cell types than it is with hESCs?

LORING: No. It’s very easy to get them to turn into other cell types. They’re essentially equivalent. If you look at 100 iPSCs and 100 hESCs, you’ll find there are outliers in both groups–cells that are difficult or act funny. But on the average, among those 200 cell lines, you really couldn’t tell them apart.

SCHELLER: 2009 was the last NIH funded course you directed with Phil Schwartz. Is there no longer a need to train scientists?

LORING: My lab is still running courses. We’re doing it semi-independently and also for CIRM. They are more popular than ever. We modified them so we are actually offering them every couple of months because there are so many people in line waiting to take them.

SCHELLER: So it’s not the case then, as it was in 2005, that you have more cell lines than scientists to do the research?

LORING: No, it’s not like that at all. People really want to get involved in this field. We still teach embryonic stem cell culture methods because that is still the fundamental technology that underlies all of this work.

SCHELLER: Do you need new hESC lines?

LORING: No, I don’t need to make hESCs. This is a dilemma. You make hESC lines from five-day old blastocystes that have been donated by people in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. I’ve been getting repeated frantic emails from people who want to donate their embryos. I don’t really have any need for them, but I’m feeling like I should start a bank. The alternative is throwing them away. Nobody’s going to adopt the embryos, so they’re paying to have them stay frozen and they want to see some good come of them. I want to start a bank. It’s just that I don’t have funding for it. I’m cooperating with an IVF physician who’s temporarily taking the embryos in. We definitely don’t need to make embryonic stem cell lines. There are probably 400 around now. All you have to do is call somebody and ask them for them.

SCHELLER: At the 2008 course, an IVF physician called his field “Cowboy Science” because of the lack of regulation. It seems to me that this lack of regulation may be a bigger ethical problem than hESC research because it creates the excess embryos.

LORING: I have no objection to increasing regulation of IVF. It’s like any medical practice. It shouldn’t be hurt by oversight.

SCHELLER: We also heard about the potential for exploitation of egg donors in 2008.

LORING: The egg donation issue in 2008 was very hot. That’s died out considerably with the advent of iPSCs because people were looking for alternative sources for pluripotent cells and now there is an alternative source.

SCHELLER: As you know, I first investigated this topic because my first pregnancy was unplanned and I didn’t believe I had the right to end it. My child was then born with Neurofibromatosis. So I had an ethical dilemma to think about when hESC research first emerged.

LORING: Yeah, I understand. I obviously don’t feel it in my heart, but I understand.

SCHELLER: How would you describe your ethical convictions about hESC research?

LORING: I find it completely ethical. I have absolutely no problems with it. It isn’t abortion, so my opinion about abortion is irrelevant. The fact that these embryos would be thrown away and not used for research, I think it would be unethical not to use them.

SCHELLER: You’ve never had any doubts?

LORING: I’ve never had a doubt.

SCHELLER: How long have you been doing this research?

LORING: I started in 1997 in northern California. I started my own company to make hESCs. I didn’t know then that there were so many embryos being thrown away every day. So it made me nervous to have embryos in the lab and I made sure that I got good cell lines out of them. It would still do that to me now. They are really precious, but if you can’t do anything else with them. I was interviewed by a reporter for a Christian newspaper maybe a year ago, I actually wanted to talk to this guy because I wanted to suggest that the churches should put up embryo banks because there’s no adoption for embryos. It would be like starting an orphanage. If they want to keep the embryos from being used for research or being thrown away, then they should set up a bank, a freezer somewhere and just keep them.

SCHELLER: And then do what with them?

LORING: Whatever they want.

SCHELLER: In other words, they should take responsibility for their convictions?

LORING: Exactly. Nobody took me up on it. I’m happy to say that again though.

SCHELLER: People say similar things to pro-life Christians about abortion.

LORING: This would be really simple, though, simple and cheap because you don’t have to raise them. All you have to do is keep them frozen. And then you can figure out what should happen to them after that. That’s not my problem.

SCHELLER: Do you get any flack from your Catholic relatives about your work?

LORING: No. As you know, many Catholics also think birth control is okay and a lot think IVF is fine. So it all follows from that. My relatives are pretty intelligent people, so I don’t get any trouble from them. There might be an outlier somewhere, but not a close relative.

SCHELLER: Thanks for talking to me Jeanne. I always appreciate the fact that you shed light rather than heat on this issue.

LORING: If somebody wants controversy, they’re going to have to go somewhere else.

Check out the reaction to this interview at The Huffington Post.

 Posted on October 5, 2010 by

 Bioethics, Democracy, Ethics, neurofibromatosis, Public Square, Science, The Huffington Post

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Ordained Into Wet Cement: What Does ‘Anglican’ Mean? Not @TheRevealer after all

Way back in August, when Becky Garrison wrote a little article “Ordained Into the Abstract: What Does Anglican Mean?” for The Revealer, which describes itself as “a daily review of religion and media,” I tweeted that I disagreed with her point of view and her description of evangelicals in the piece. An editor at the review direct messaged me asking if I would consider writing a response, which I did. Amidst the busy September religion news cycle, my response was left to grow stale.

Then this weekend, while I was tweeting away at the Religion Newswriters Association annual conference in Denver, I received an email from the editor asking me to revise my response. She said she could intuit from the piece what my political positions are on homosexuality and women’s ordination and she challenged me to come out with them and speak up for injustice where I find it. I replied that people choose their churches for complex reasons and that it would be wrong to assume anything about my positions based on where I go to church, because I’ve never entirely agreed with the values of a church I’ve attended and that remains true now. I also said that as a journalist, I feel no responsibility to be on the record about all any of my personal convictions.

As it happens, on the way home from Denver, I read an article about Anglican-Episcopal splintering over homosexuality in a lofty religion journal. The writer did a good job giving voice to both sides of the issue, but I could easily discern from the sources he quoted in his sidebar and who he gave the last word to in the main article that his sympathies lie with liberal Episcopalians on this issue. It also happens that Facebook recently suggested this writer as a “friend” for me. From his profile picture with another man and the comments that accompanied it, I just as easily discerned that he is gay. I wondered as I was flying through the night if the neutral tone masking his personal stake in the issue isn’t more of a problem than terminology or my own unwillingness to state a bias that I do not possess about an issue in which I have much less personal stake. It all seems so odd to me.

In the end I decided that the revisions the editor requested would be too time consuming, given that I will not be paid for the work. So here is my very stale response to Becky Garrison’s contention that it is wrong to call breakaway priests and churches Anglican.

In her Revealer article, “Ordained Into the Abstract: What does ‘Anglican’ Mean?” my friend and fellow Episcopalian, Becky Garrison, says the term Anglican has been distorted by conservative evangelicals and traditionalists who have left the Episcopal church over the issues of homosexual ordination and the blessing of same sex unions. She views the alternate bodies they’ve created as imposters and wishes media outlets would stop bestowing the purebred label on these rogue priests and provinces.

I do not pretend to know what’s in the minds of others, but I do know that the Episcopal Church’s decisions regarding homosexuality are viewed as symptoms of the denomination’s departure from orthodoxy rather than its cause by many conservatives. Becky knows this. It diminishes discourse, in my opinion, to misconstrue the motives of those with whom one disagrees.

We’re all guilty at times of careless generalizations, but when Becky links to an interview by fellow Episcopalian David Neff in Christianity Today as a kind of circumstantial evidence of media complicity in this crime, I must cry foul on her crying foul. What her assessment sounds like  is less a critical analysis than an ardent fan blaming a biased umpire for deciding a call in the other team’s favor.

I myself was confirmed an Anglican at St. James Church in Newport Beach, CA, when it was affiliated with the Diocese of Luwero, Uganda, after it left the Episcopal Church. When my membership was transferred to an Episcopal church last year, the diocese didn’t question the validity of my confirmation or ask me to be re-confirmed now that St. James has aligned itself with an upstart North American Anglican organization. It’s a good thing too, because I would have refused. However much our presiding bishop disagrees with traditionalists, he still apparently views us all as Anglicans. Why the Rev. Doctor Maggi Dawn (who Becky cites) should hold more sway in regard to who is and who isn’t an Anglican than him or Ugandan Archbishop Henry Luke Orombe under whom I was confirmed, I cannot imagine.

If Becky wants to appeal to an individual at all, perhaps it ought to be Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who, in the wake of the Episcopal Church’s consecration of its second gay bishop said her election “raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.”Additionally, the Anglican Church issued a statement to the Episcopal News Service saying the consecration “shows that the TEC [the Episcopal Church] has now explicitly decided to walk apart from most of the rest of the Communion.”

Now, I respect the fact that Becky is a cradle Episcopalian while I am a church hopping mixed-breed evangelical, but I honestly don’t get her appeal to Anglican history either. Ours is a branch of Christianity that was founded in dissent and our democratic forbears were given special consideration, not to mention a unique name, because it was impossible for them to swear fealty to the English crown. We North American Anglicans are, for better and worse, acting in accord with our heritage, both political and ecclesial. In attempting to widen her argument to include Newsweek’s use of the term Presbyterian to describe Redeemer Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller, Becky demonstrates nothing so much as that denominational splintering is writ large in Protestant DNA.

Had my friend appealed to the 1930 Lambeth Conference statement as Anglicans Online did instead of maligning evangelicals and appealing to Lambeth generally, I might have given her argument more sway, though I still would have disagreed. Here’s how Anglicans Online describes its decision to label The Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) as “Not in the Communion”:

“When a person or parish leaves a national church, for whatever reasons—doctrinal, personal, spiritual, theological—it does just that: it leaves. The leaving is tantamount to saying: ‘This entity has become something I can no longer be a part of’. That decision prima facie breaks communion.

In these days of easy transport and effortless technology, of course it is possible to virtually affiliate with another part of the Anglican Communion that seems to be more in line with one’s own thinking. But unless one physically moves oneself or one’s parish to that geographically-defined national church, one cannot claim to be in communion through some sort of virtual relationship.

Perhaps the definition of a national church or province will need to be altered, to take into effect the increasing globalisation of the communion through the Internet and what that means to the understanding of ‘diocese’ or ‘episcope’. As yet, that redefinition has not taken place.”

But can redefinition be far off?

A more interesting subject for this type of critique would be The Huffington Post Religion channel headline: “Interview with Toni Tortirilla, Female Catholic Priest.” The accompanying Religion News Service (RNS) article clearly states that Tortirilla was ordained in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement. It proceeds to say that “within a year of her 2007 ordination, the Vatican said women who attempted to be ordained—and those who tried to ordain them—were automatically excommunicated.” The Pope can do that sort of thing, so it seems to me that The Huffington Post is being intentionally provocative in describing Tortirilla as a Catholic priest. In comparison, describing internationally recognized Anglicans by their preferred name isn’t controversial.

While Becky advocates careful use of terms, she herself is careless. In her conclusion, for example, she writes, “This battle over the blessing of same sex unions and ordination of gay clergy needs to be placed in the larger context of the culture wars being waged by fundamentalist Christians against the rising forces of ‘secular humanism.’ In the eyes of these righteous warriors, their chief enemies are feminists, gay activists and others who advance what they perceive to be the ‘secular humanist’ agenda.” Suddenly she is no longer talking about evangelicals involved in an intra-denominational dispute. Now their actions are a function of fundamentalists fighting secular humanism. As an evangelical Anglican, I must protest.

 13 Comments

 Posted on September 28, 2010 by

 church life, Community, Ethics, Faith, Friendship, Journalism, Leadership, Theology, Vocation, Walkin' the Talk

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