By JOE GRIMM
MSU School of Journalism founder of Bias Busters book series

CHICAGO—Sikh people have a wonderful, welcoming tradition that embodies the Sikhi religious value of selfless service. It is called langar and is a combination free kitchen, community meal and act of service.When the Michigan State University Bias Busters class compiled 100 Questions and Answers About Sikh Americans, we did not get to experience a langar because of COVID-19 isolation.

I got my chance during the Parliament of the World’s Religions Aug. 14-18, 2023, in Chicago. Each day of the parliament, there was a mid-day langar. The parliament attracted people from scores of religions and countries. All were welcome to experience a langar meal.

From the class’ work on the Sikh guide, I knew to expect lacto-vegetarian fare. Sikhs may choose to eat meat, but the langar is meatless. This means that Sikhs’ traditional neighbors whose religions forbid or discourage meat may join the langar. Hindus, Jains and Buddhists, embrace vegetarianism in keeping with their belief in nonviolence. The tradition was started 550 years ago by Sikh’s first leader, Guru Nanak. The meal is served for free to all regardless of religion, caste or gender.

A langar is traditionally prepared and served at a Sikh place of worship, called a Gurdwara. This gives members a regular chance to serve. The parliament’s langar was held in a tent set up just outside the McCormick Place convention center.

As at a gurdwara, participants removed their shoes and were fitted with white head scarves. Servers wore white turbans, although Sikh turbans can be of any color or pattern.

Guests could either sit on the covered ground or at a table. The meal included green salad, chapati (flatbread), dal (split peas or beans) and a refreshing cucumber dish. It was good, and servers kept plates full. There was also a sweet mango beverage.

One thing I was unprepared for was the large number of servers. Although Sikhi has about 30 million members worldwide, there are fewer than 1 million in the United States and they tend to live on the East and West coasts.

So, I asked my hosts where they live. The first man I asked said in a British accent he had come from the United Kingdom. The next person was also from the U.K. and said 105 had come on this mission the Midwest.

As I left the tent, I thanked one of the people for coming to Chicago to teach us.

A practitioner of selfless service, he said, “Thank you for letting us serve you.” Then he handed me a bottle of water.

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Care to Learn More?

Joe Grimm, the founder of the Michigan State University School of Journalism Bias Busters project, attended the 2023 Parliament and has provided us two stories and colorful photos as well.

FOCUSING ON UKRAINE is a story headlined: 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions shows the peaceful potential of our diverse faith traditions.

FOR MORE ABOUT LANGAR, the Parliament staff posted an overview of this traditional service from the Sikh community.

Joe Grimm is nationally known for his tireless commitment to diversity through journalism, both in the training and hiring of journalists and in the kinds of stories covered by newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and online publications. When asked to describe the Bias Busters project that Joe founded through the Michigan State University School of Journalism, he writes:

This series springs from the idea that good journalism should increase cross-cultural competence and understanding. Most of our guides are created by Michigan State University journalism students. We use journalistic interviews to surface the simple, everyday questions that people have about each other but might be afraid to ask. We use research and reporting to get the answers and then put them where people can find them, read them and learn about each other.

These cultural competence guides are meant to be conversation starters. We want people to use these guides to get some base-line understanding and to feel more comfortable asking more questions. We put a guide to resources in every guide we make, we arrange community conversations and we are working on a facilitation guide. While the guides can answer questions in private, they are meant to spark discussions.

This 3-minute YouTube video is a quick visual tour of the 2023 Parliament.

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Within the Parliament’s Peaceful Mission Is Spiritual Support for Embattled Ukraine

By JOE GRIMM
MSU School of Journalism founder of Bias Busters book series

CHICAGO—The first Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, was billed as a national dialogue about faith. Now, the event is known as the birth of the worldwide interfaith movement. Its 2023 edition, held Aug. 14-18 in Chicago, sustains that vision in new ways.

One innovation this year: Before hundreds of people near the parliament’s conclusion, representatives from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism rallied behind Ukraine.

Sharing the stage with Christian Orthodox Archbishop Germanos of Chernivtsi, a city in southwestern Ukraine, the religious leaders pledged solidarity and support.

Symbolically, this last-day event showed how the interfaith message has survived 130 years, as well as how it has changed and faces new challenges. In 1893, Sikhs were not included in the parliament. This year, Sikhs were at center stage, supporting Ukraine. Another group absent the first time out, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had a large presence in the parliament’s marketplace.

Weaving prepared statements, music, poetry and prayer, religious leaders and performers comprised blanket support for Ukraine. The war, however, is threatening to tear apart Germanos’ Eastern Orthodox Church. With major Orthodox capitals in Moscow and Kiev, the church has been weaponized by both sides in this conflict.

Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill has said, “Any war must have guns and ideas. In this war, the Kremlin has provided the guns, and I believe the Russian Orthodox Church is providing the ideas.” A Russian strike in July badly damaged Ukraine’s landmark Transfiguration Cathedral.

On the other side of the conflict, the Ukrainian government has ordered 1,000 Orthodox monks suspected of being loyal to Russia out of their state-owned monastery in the capital of Kiev. And, to further distance itself from Moscow, Ukraine recently changed its official date for Orthodox Christmas from the Russian date of Jan. 7 to the western date of Dec. 25.

In his brief, warm response to the parliament’s expressions of solidarity, the archbishop thanked world religions for the friendship that he said he hopes leads to unity. He also acknowledged the Ukrainian diaspora which has brought his country’s people to Chicago.

Music for this special program was provided by the Chicago Bandura Ensemble.

The bandura is a Ukrainian instrument with as many as 65 strings. It is tuned like a piano and plays like a cross between a guitar and a harp.

On the day after Germanos acknowledged support, a Russian missile attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv struck a central square, a university and a theater. At least seven were killed and almost 130 injured.

CNN reported that Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, said the strike occurred as people were leaving church with “baskets of blessed apples.” The day is a major holiday on the Orthodox calendar, as apples and honey were being consecrated for The Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus.

A surprising ending for the Ukrainian event spoke to the interfaith nature of the parliament. A shofar ram’s horn was blown, recognizing that the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana is coming soon.

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Care to Learn More?

Joe Grimm, the founder of the Michigan State University School of Journalism Bias Busters project, attended the 2023 Parliament and has provided us two stories and colorful photos as well. In addition to this story, he also sent us:

A REPORT HIGHLIGHTING one of the most important religious groups participating in the Parliament is this second story: Sikhs show the world their spiritual commitment to service at the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Joe Grimm is nationally known for his tireless commitment to diversity through journalism, both in the training and hiring of journalists and in the kinds of stories covered by newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and online publications. When asked to describe the Bias Busters project that Joe founded through the Michigan State University School of Journalism, he writes:

This series springs from the idea that good journalism should increase cross-cultural competence and understanding. Most of our guides are created by Michigan State University journalism students. We use journalistic interviews to surface the simple, everyday questions that people have about each other but might be afraid to ask. We use research and reporting to get the answers and then put them where people can find them, read them and learn about each other.

These cultural competence guides are meant to be conversation starters. We want people to use these guides to get some base-line understanding and to feel more comfortable asking more questions. We put a guide to resources in every guide we make, we arrange community conversations and we are working on a facilitation guide. While the guides can answer questions in private, they are meant to spark discussions.

By MARK JACOBS
Contributing Columnist

For many years I have had a room in my house dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.

It is adorned exclusively with a variety of Lincoln-related memorabilia, photos and books, and is referred to, of course, as our “Lincoln Room.” Some people find it intriguing, others think it’s humorous, and some just think it’s weird.

I don’t care what they think. I love that room. I take my Lincoln very seriously.

I am hardly alone. About 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, more than any other person in history except Jesus Christ. There are monuments to Lincoln throughout the U.S. and around the world, from Mexico to Moscow. The man who once described his youth as nothing more than “the short and simple annals of the poor” continues to hold a fascination to millions of people, some 158 years after his death.

Anyone who has seriously studied Lincoln—from the recognized experts to the casual fans—understands what Lincoln historian Doris Kearns Goodwin meant when she said, “The more I study Lincoln the more I love him.”

We have learned that he was the unlikeliest of heroes who just happened to find himself at the center of the most momentous period in American history.

Historians typically rate Lincoln as the greatest president of all-time, but the path of his life hardly suggested that greatness would be his destiny. His personal life was often in shambles, beset by death, failures and profound sadness. He was regularly dismissed, ridiculed and underestimated. He had very few friends.

Yet he somehow persevered and will be forever credited for saving the U.S. and re-shaping the world. His death at age 56 by an assassin’s bullet—on Good Friday, no less—just a few days after finally achieving victory in the brutal Civil War, only adds to the Shakespearean drama of his life.

For years I only focused on Lincoln’s legendary accomplishments, which were indeed lengthy: self-taught, successful country lawyer, extraordinary orator and writer of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, considered the greatest speech in U.S. history, and so on. Many Americans know about these things, if only on a surface level.

But I have come to realize that these accomplishments are only half the story. The real Lincoln story, to me, is how a man plagued with so many personal struggles could function—and miraculously, triumph—under such extraordinary circumstances. We can all relate to dealing with setbacks, but Lincoln’s struggles seem incomprehensible, almost fiction-like, as if he were the central character in a Greek tragedy.

He had always known sadness. His mother died when he was 9, his father was abusive, his only sibling died when he was 19, his first love—which many experts believe was the only true love of his life—died when he was 26. Two of his children died at young ages. He lost 8 elections, had a nervous breakdown and had to declare bankruptcy.

He often spoke about suicide during those early years, once causing a friend to write, “Lincoln went crazy … had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—it was terrible.”

Lincoln himself wrote at the time: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

When he won the presidential election of 1860, he was the most hated man in half the country. The South didn’t just oppose him, they despised him. An Atlanta newspaper wrote that the South “will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.” A slew of Southern states immediately succeeded from the Union, thus making civil war imminent.

Despite his Inauguration plea to the South that “We must not be enemies,” a full-scale war broke out within weeks, and no one thought Lincoln was up to the task, including his own cabinet.

He suffered from insomnia and would often roam the streets of Washington alone at night. The war that many expected to last just a few weeks dragged on with a steady and staggering number of casualties. In all, over 2% of the American population died in the Civil War. As a percentage of America’s population today that number would be well over 6,000,000 people.

Lincoln attempted to project confidence, but the weight of his burdens took a huge emotional toll on him. At one particularly dark time in 1863 he wrote, “If there is a place worse than hell, I’m in it.”

His marriage was not a source of comfort or stability. Mary Lincoln was prone to erratic behavior and bouts of depression. They had already lost a child, Edward (“Eddie”), who was 3 years old when he died from tuberculosis. During Lincoln’s first full year in office, his beloved son, Willie, died at age 11 from typhoid fever. The boy’s death devastated the Lincolns, and they never recovered. Lincoln was seen sobbing and Mary was inconsolable. She later hosted a series of seances to speak with Willie, which Lincoln sometimes attended.

But Lincoln had little time to grieve, as the war showed no signs of letting up. Many of his closest advisers counseled him to negotiate a peace with the South—to essentially surrender—but he was steadfast in his belief that the preservation of the union was non-negotiable.

A lesser man—essentially anyone else—would have easily succumbed to the temptation to allow the nation to split into two. Had he done so, the world would have surely taken on a different trajectory.

Historians have long speculated that if the South had become a separate country, North America would have eventually been comprised of a collection of different countries, just like Europe. If so, then the absence of a strong United States would have likely changed the outcome of the two global wars that ensued in the following century.

It is thus not hyperbole to suggest that Lincoln ultimately saved not only the U.S. but altered the course of world history.

Where did Lincoln’s strength come from? He was not a religious man. He once famously said “when I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.“ Perhaps it was his sense of humor that allowed him to overcome adversity, even if it masked a deeper melancholy.

When once accused of being nothing more than a two-faced politician, Lincoln smiled, pointed to his face and said, “if I really had two faces, do you think I’d wear this one?”

When asked how he dealt with the reality that so many people hated him, he would say “there’s always some fleas a dog can’t reach.”

Lincoln’s legacy as the man who freed the slaves and saved the Union is forever preserved. But there is another legacy that will always astonish me. In the face of endless tragedies and dire circumstances all around him, he was somehow able to clear his mind, persevere, and defeat any obstacle that threatened to destroy him.

That’s a powerful life lesson that we—and this nation—would do well to remember today and forever.

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Mark Jacobs is an attorney and long-time community activist. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity and the co-founder and chair of the Legal Referral Service at Jewish Family Services, a pro bono program that has provided legal aid to people in need for the past 15 years. 

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Care to Read More in our Fourth of July 2023 series on Lincoln?

Whatever you choose to read next, you will find the following links to the other 2023 columns at the bottom of each page:

Lincoln scholar Duncan Newcomer’s introduction to this series includes a salute to Braver Angels, a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to de-polarizing American politics that is gathering from across the country for a major conference at Gettysburg this week.

Duncan also writes about: What were Lincoln’s hopes for our nation?

And, he explores: What were Lincoln’s core values?

Then, journalist and author Bill Tammeus writes about how Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address still calls us to reach out to one another.

Journalist and author Martin Davis asks: Are our battle-scarred American roads capable of carrying us toward unity?

Author and leadership coach Larry Buxton writes about: Growing up and growing wise with Abraham Lincoln

Columnist and editor Judith Pratt recalls: Hearing our Civil War stories shared generation to generation.

Attorney and community activist Mark Jacobs writes about: How Lincoln’s astonishing resilience and perseverance inspires me today

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Want the book?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions.

 

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By JUDITH PRATT
Contributing Columnist

The battlefield at Gettysburg has always been part of my life.

As a child, our family would often go to Devil’s Den to play on the boulders, visit in spring to enjoy the beautiful red bud trees in bloom, walk over the sacred ground (although we children didn’t understand what that meant) with the dry leaves rustling under our feet in autumn, have snow ball fights on Little Round Top in winter.

Not until I was older did I understand what really happened there and how critical that battle was for the preservation of our democracy.

In the meantime, my friend and neighbor, Daddy Bream he was called, would tell me stories. He was undoubtedly the oldest person I had ever met, even older than my grandparents. One day he told me about the soldiers marching past his family’s farm. The grapevine had warned that they were coming—and they were starving!

At age 7, he was sent deep into the forest with the family’s horses, loaded with everything his parents could tie onto them, everything they couldn’t afford to lose. And he was ordered to stay there until told to return to the farm. He didn’t remember how long he stayed there, but it seemed like forever, he said.

That was the very early summer of 1863.

Several months later, his father told him that he was heading to town to hear President Lincoln speak. The two of them saddled up for the ten-mile ride and found quite a crowd when they arrived at the new National Cemetery.

Papa wanted to get close enough to hear the President, so my friend was charged with staying with the horses. From horseback, he could see President Lincoln, but he couldn’t hear.

And then, he recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to me, having committed it to memory—just like we all did. I felt as though I had been there too!

Now that I am old, although at least a decade younger than he was then, I feel so very fortunate to be the oldest of the six of us children who were Daddy Bream’s posse. Of all of us, only I remember those stories and have that feeling that I was there.

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Judith Pratt is best known to our readers as the chief editor of her husband, contributing columnist and author Benjamin Pratt, who wrote A Guide for Caregivers.

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Care to Read More in our Fourth of July 2023 series on Lincoln?

Whatever you choose to read next, you will find the following links to the other 2023 columns at the bottom of each page:

Lincoln scholar Duncan Newcomer’s introduction to this series includes a salute to Braver Angels, a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to de-polarizing American politics that is gathering from across the country for a major conference at Gettysburg this week.

Duncan also writes about: What were Lincoln’s hopes for our nation?

And, he explores: What were Lincoln’s core values?

Then, journalist and author Bill Tammeus writes about how Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address still calls us to reach out to one another.

Journalist and author Martin Davis asks: Are our battle-scarred American roads capable of carrying us toward unity?

Author and leadership coach Larry Buxton writes about: Growing up and growing wise with Abraham Lincoln

Columnist and editor Judith Pratt recalls: Hearing our Civil War stories shared generation to generation.

Attorney and community activist Mark Jacobs writes about: How Lincoln’s astonishing resilience and perseverance inspires me today

.

.

Want the book?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions.

 

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