God and Hillary Clinton Read Online Free Page B

Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight , and other art house films of the time. 5
    Clearly the freethinking, freewheeling Jones was not afraid to make waves. The point was to make real “the feelings of others,” as one student remembered, and to enliven the “practical conscience and content” of their faith. 6 If that was the goal, Jones certainly achieved it. One of the youths, Rick Ricketts, whom Hillary had known since she was eight years old, recalled the lively discussions Jones generated: “I remember when he brought an atheist to the group for a debate with a Christian over the existence of God,” said Ricketts of Jones’s class. “There was also a discussion of teenage pregnancy, which got the whole congregation upset.” 7
    Black and White
    While many of Jones’s teachings were designed to increase the students’ general sense of cultural perspective and awareness, he put a lot of emphasis on the church’s role within the racial struggles of the time. Racial awareness and activism were integral to Jones’s aim of raising social consciousness among the adolescents, and it was a point that Hillary responded to with a great deal of enthusiasm.
    â€œIn Park Ridge then,” said Jones, “you wouldn’t know there were black people in the world.” 8 And so, Jones made it his goal to give them firsthand experiences with the larger world. It was not enoughto learn about things from books, films, and poetry; Jones wanted his students to live these teachings, to see their faith interacting with the world around them.
    He drove the youngsters to a community center on the Southside, where he brought them together with inner-city youth and assembled them all around a print of Picasso’s Guernica that Jones had brought along and propped up against a chair. The painting graphically depicts a bombing raid by pro-Franco forces on a village during the Spanish Civil War. The minister opened an edgy dialogue over war and violence, asking questions like, “What strikes you about this?” “Any imagery?” “If you had to title this painting with a current piece of music, what would it be?” “Have you ever experienced anything like this?” 9
    As Hillary and her friends spoke of the horrors of war in the abstract, the inner-city kids related the mayhem to their everyday lives. One girl looked at the painting and, to the shock of the Park Ridgers, chimed in, “Just last week, my uncle drove up and parked on the street and some guy came up to him and said you can’t park there, that’s my parking place, and my uncle resisted him and the guy pulled out a gun and shot him.” 10 The girl’s response jolted the white-bread kids.
    Jones’s goal was accomplished. And whether his pupils, or even he, knew it or fully grasped it, he was preparing them for the social upheaval about to befall them and America before the decade ended. 11
    Amid the radical dialogue and rhetoric of Jones, there was another influential young adult who was battling for the heart, mind, and soul of Hillary Rodham and her peers—Hillary’s teacher Paul Carlson, a conservative Republican and staunch anti-Communist. Carlson remembers returning to Park Ridge after graduate school and going to the Methodist church to hear Jones speak. He was alarmed by what he heard. “I approached him after the service and suggested we get together. I was teaching at Maine East [High School] at the time andwas concerned. I had lunch with him the next day and explained that I wasn’t at all amused with his message, that it was not a Christian speech. He really gave me no defense of what he had said.” 12
    Referring to the trip to the Southside of Chicago, Carlson complained that Jones’s intention was to take Hillary and her white friends to the slums to blame them and their class for the conditions of the inner city and to fill them with white