WACO (ABP)—An expert in the field of disability ministry says theological seminaries are doing little to prepare ministers to deal with the estimated one in five Americans living with some kind of disability.

“There is almost nothing in the seminaries in America to prepare religious leaders for the people they are going to meet in their congregations,” said Kathleen Deyer Bolduc, a nationally recognized author and speaker about disability’s impact on families and ways in which churches can become more welcoming of families that live with disability. “We’re really just scratching the surface. This should be a key component of theological education, and we are not there yet.”

Diana Garland, dean of the Baylor University School of Social Work, agreed that disability ministry is largely missing in theological education but challenged the notion that theology schools can teach everything that church leaders need to know.

“I think this is a much bigger issue than how much we can train our pastors,” Garland said. “It’s more important that we educate our congregations.”

She reached a similar conclusion when researching the issue of clergy sexual misconduct, Garland added.

“It needs to be there (in the seminaries), but that’s not enough,” she said. “We need to rethink congregational leadership, and it’s not just pastors.”

For one thing, Garland said, many ministers do not attend seminary, so theological education has no influence on them.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (ABP)—Churches that do a good job of including members with special needs like autism often reap side benefits of a positive witness to their community and sometimes even numerical growth, says an expert in disability ministries.

“I’m beginning to hear more and more stories of congregations who are saying, ‘Out of our inclusive work with people with autism and their families, it’s changing us as well and for the better,’“ said Bill Gaventa, director of community and congregational supports at the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities in New Brunswick, N.J.

“Spiritually,” he explained, “but also people are talking about that in terms of numbers and church growth, because of people who have felt welcome and are coming and the word has gotten out that this is a welcoming place and congregation.”

Special-needs ministry is a two-way street, he stressed.

“Part of this is about helping people and children with autism to learn how to be members of different faith communities, but it’s also about helping that whole faith community to realize what it means for anybody to be a member of that community,” he said. “It’s a dual process of helping somebody to learn the culture but also helping a community to look at its own culture.”

Special-needs ministry is not just to the child or adult with disabilities, Gaventa said. It also reaches the wider family and broader network of caregivers and others whose lives intersect with the individual and family.

“If you ask families to tell you their church stories, in my experience, you never get anything that’s lukewarm,” he said. “Positive stories, families will tell to others, to their relatives, to their extended family, to their caregivers, to therapists, school teachers about how important their faith community has been. And the same thing with the negative stories; when a congregation somehow shuts its door or something that is hurtful happens, that kind of stuff gets out quickly among networks these days, often with the speed of light, it seems like.”

Responding to a member with special needs is “where a faith community has to decide what kind of witness it wants to provide out to the wider community,” Gaventa said.

Ministry in congregations often begins with people being afraid and not knowing what to do with someone with a disability, he said. From there, it moves to some form of ministry to or for special people. As church members get to know those families and individuals, they will say: “Don’t do anything special for us. Just include us. You may have to do some special things to help that happen, but just include us. That’s the gift that we most need.”

Gaventa urges churches to think holistically about ministry with people with special needs. Rather than viewing it as a religious-education or a worship issue, he advises making as many opportunities as possible for inclusion and connection within the congregation.

“See the whole congregation and its activities as a resource,” he said. “Just because somebody may not be able to participate in one particular thing very well doesn’t mean that they couldn’t participate somewhere else.”

Entry points may need to be “customized” in different ways, he added. Gaventa recommends starting not with a whole program, but by focusing on one person at a time. Opportunities might include children’s or adult education or including special-needs individuals in membership rituals like communion.

“The question is not whether to get caught up in what is the doctrinal or absolutely politically correct approach, but work with what’s needed and the gifts you have and the strengths you have,” he said. “It’s not a question of one or the other. It’s a question of both/and and making as many opportunities for inclusion and connection as possible within the congregation.”

Gaventa warned, however, that there are pitfalls to be avoided.

Parents often feel at fault if something happens to one of their children, he noted. Everyone deals with biblical interpretations about whether they did something wrong to cause something to be wrong with their child and theological questions such as “Where is God?” and “What is the source of my faith?”

The last thing they need, he said, is to explicitly or implicitly hear messages so often experienced by people with disabilities and their families: “What did you do to cause this?” and “If your faith was stronger, it could be cured or fixed.’

“Both of those, I think, we need to name them for what they are, and some people call that a kind of spiritual abuse,” Gaventa said. “We wouldn’t want people to say that to us about things that happen to us, and it’s really just other people’s attempts to find answers to questions that are not easily answered.

“But when you walk in that door that sense of welcome and inclusion is there, a sense that ‘You’re part of our faith family; we’ll figure it out with you as we go along; you’re welcome,’ that’s a huge gift for families and for people.”

NASHVILLE (ABP)—My 24-year-old son is a certified nursing assistant who provides care for three children—two with intellectual disabilities—four nights a week while their single mother is at work.

One “benefit” of such a noble-sounding but low-paying job is that he cannot afford a place of his own and lives at home. For that reason, I happened to be in the loop last Halloween that he was helping take the kids trick-or-treating and suggested he bring them by our home.

We had heard a lot about the family, so we invited them in to get acquainted. Somewhere along the line—assuming they already had plans with relatives—I invited them back for Thanksgiving. The mom jumped at the offer. (I gather people with autism don’t get invited many places.) It went well enough that we had them back for Christmas and again this past Easter.

Recently, I shared the story with Kathleen Deyer Bolduc, a nationally recognized expert in the area of ministry to people with disabilities and author of Autism & Alleluias, a book that relates spiritual lessons learned from parenting her 24-year-old son, who suffers from autism, intellectual disabilities and an anxiety disorder.

“It is amazing how meeting one or two people with any kind of disability totally shatters our preconceptions and fears,” she commented.

She said she had a similar experience when her sister-in-law brought one adult with autism and another with Down Syndrome to her home for Thanksgiving. That was in the 1980s, before Bolduc’s son was born, and she often thinks God brought them to her and her husband to prepare them for life with Joel.

Not everyone has the expertise or ability to do something significant about a problem as big as helping families deal with disabilities, she said, but “anybody can be a friend.”

Bolduc says that’s what she tells people when she’s speaking at inclusion conferences. “You don’t need to sign on for something big,” she said. “Just invite someone for dinner or a movie or to go bowling.”

CINCINNATI (ABP)— Kathleen Deyer Bolduc, a nationally recognized author and speaker in the field of disability ministry, said she was unprepared to parent a special-needs child before the birth of her third son.

Now 24, Joel has autism, intellectual disabilities and an anxiety disorder. She tells the story of their life together in Autism & Alleluias, a new book by Judson Press.

“There is a lot of pain involved in parenting a child with autism,” Bolduc said in an April webcast scheduled during Autism Awareness Month to promote her new book. “There’s a lot of joy, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t look at the grief that’s involved.”

“I can also say at the same time that living with autism, more than anything else in my life, has brought me to a closer relationship with God. It really has brought me to a gut-level understanding of the Lord’s words to Paul in 2 Corinthians, when he said: ‘My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness.’

“Once I came to an acceptance of that truth, once I figured out that I couldn’t do it all on my own, that I needed God’s power to gift me with the strength I needed to parent Joel, Joel became one of the most spiritual teachers in my life.”

In one of the stories told in the book, Bolduc describes a particularly harrowing morning that started with Joel rushing out of the house barefoot and in his pajamas with the temperature in the 30s. It escalated into an emotional meltdown for Joel and reduced her to tears. Approaching her and reaching a hand toward her, instead of grabbing for her glasses as he sometimes does when he is anxious, Joel patted her face. “We need Jesus,” he said.

“We do need Jesus,” Bolduc said in the webcast. “And Jesus is with Joel, no matter how difficult things get.”

Bolduc emphasized the most important spiritual lesson her son has taught her is that God’s love is unconditional.

“God loves me just as I am. I don’t have to try so hard,” she said. “And God loves Joel just the way he is. I don’t have to fix Joel. God loves him just as he is. Such a huge burden lifted with that realization.”

Parents of children with disabilities long for a church where their sons and daughters are loved and accepted just as they are, regardless of their behavior or their ability to achieve, Bolduc said. Those that do, she said, receive a lot in return.

When Joel was about 8 or 9, she says in the book, his behavior caused Bolduc and her husband to give up on sending him to Sunday school. They learned that if they sat on the front row, where he could not kick the pew in front of him, they could usually make it at least through the congregational singing.

During communion, she said Joel would typically act out in ways so that it “was not really a spiritual experience, to say the least.” One particular Sunday, however, the pastor raised the plate in the air and recited, “This is the body of Christ, broken for you” and then the cup, saying, “And this is the blood of Christ, poured out that you might live.”

Joel stood up and clapped his hands to his chest and said: “For me! For me!” He turned around and said the same thing to the people behind him.

“Joel gave a gift to the whole church that day, when he turned around,” Bolduc recalled. “He was announcing to everybody: ‘Wake up! Open up your eyes and look at the sacrament with brand new eyes. This is for you, and this is for me. This is for all of us together.’ I think it was just an amazing lesson that my son had to teach the congregation that day.”

Another teachable mo-ment came when Bolduc’s family made a commitment to attend an African-American congregation honoring Martin Luther King Jr. During the music, Joel did what he usually did in their Presbyterian church. He worshipped with his whole body, bouncing and dancing in the aisle. This time, though, others were doing it, too.

“A proverbial light bulb went on in my head,” she said. “I thought, ‘You know, you just can’t fit a square peg into a round hole.’ All of these years of trying to make Joel fit into our worship service, it’s craziness.”

That created a dilemma for the family. “Do we leave a church that we love, or do we try to help the church see what Joel has to bring?” They chose the latter.

“I’m glad to say that our church has changed,” Bolduc said. “And I like to think that it’s changed partially because of Joel—and Peter and Jeremy and Matt, who are three other guys with developmental disabilities—and what they’ve brought to us.

“We have a contemporary service now that is much more relaxed,” she said. “Matt walks around and greets people. He doesn’t care what part of the service it is; if he sees you and he hasn’t said ‘hi’ yet, he’s coming on up. Peter dances during the worship songs.

“Joel stands up when everyone else is sitting down, if he wants to, and people are telling me, quite often, how much joy they get out of worshipping with Joel, Peter, Matt and Jeremy. There are some real gifts if we open up our eyes to them.”

“Joel has changed me, and Joel has changed our church,” Bolduc said. “If you open up your hands and your hearts and your minds and your attitudes, and you open up your church doors to those with disability, transformation will take place.”

WASHINGTON (ABP)—A longtime advocate for people with disabilities said the greatest barriers to including special-needs individuals in churches are not architectural or language but rather barriers of attitude.

“We have within us prejudices,” said Ginny Thornburgh, director of an interfaith initiative for the American Association of People with Disabilities. “We have negative stereotypes within us; we have false assumptions within us. And these things must be addressed, and they must be addressed over a lifetime.”

Thornburgh, who is married to Dick Thornburgh, the former governor of Pennsylvania, U.S. attorney general and under-secretary general of the United Nations, said the most effective way to break down barriers of attitude is to strike a friendship with one person who has a disability.

“Once you have one friend and it’s a genuine friend—you know that person, you know them well, you know their likes and dislikes—then you are more confident to have a second friend and move on to a person with a disability who has a different type of disability,” she said. “These attitudinal barriers have to be addressed and have to be addressed all of our life.”

One of Thornburgh’s four sons, Peter, 50, has both physical and intellectual disabilities. She describes him as a “man of faith active in his church.” Largely because of him, she has advocated for people with disabilities more than 40 years.

Thornburgh advised churches to form a task force or committee—including members who have disabilities—to perform an audit of barriers to inclusion of all members and develop short- and long-term goals to remove them.

“Are there designated parking places?” she asked. “Is there a ramped entrance? Is it easy to get in the door? Is there an automatic door opener? Are there pew cuts so I can easily with my wheelchair or scooter slide in a spot and share a hymnbook with my husband? Is there a ramp to the chancel, a ramp to the altar? Is there an ADA-compliant restroom?”

Thornburgh noted July 26 is the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, a landmark piece of civil-rights legislation. “When I say an ADA-compliant bathroom, that means a bathroom that someone with even a large chair would be able to enter easily and use,” she said. “Those things can’t be put on hold. You can’t expect people who use wheelchairs to come if they can’t go to the restroom.”

Communication barriers are solved by having materials like church bulletins in alternative formats like audio tape or Braille, she noted. A sign-language interpreter means everything to someone who is deaf, not only during the worship service but so they can be fully engaged during social time. Improved sound and lighting systems are important helps to persons losing sensory capacities due to age.

Another category of disabilities is psychiatric. It includes bipolar disorder, depression and other diagnoses. Intellectual disabilities is a broad category.

“The hardest thing for folks in churches is that often the disability is not apparent,” Thornburgh said. “You don’t know that a person who is quiet in the pew actually has chronic pain or has any number of other non-apparent disabilities.”

Often, that is true with older adults, who don’t think of themselves as having disabilities, she added. “They’ll say ‘I use hearing aids’ or ‘I use a walker’ or ‘I don’t see as well anymore,’ but they’re not as comfortable as those of us who have worked in the disability field to the term disability.

“Our older adults are our most steadfast, contributing members. And often, they’ll stop attending because of poor hearing or poor lighting or the lack of railings. As you begin to look at your congregation in terms of disability needs, they are essential to make sure they are fully included and fully welcome.

“There are no barriers in God’s love. There should be no barriers in God’s house.”

LOS ANGELES (RNS)—If Jesus were to take a Myers-Briggs personality test, would he rank as an introvert or an extrovert? He was, after all, popular with crowds, but he often retreated to pray in solitude.

As an undergrad, Daniel Perett wrestled with similar questions as a member of the evangelical InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Middlebury College. He soon discovered his introverted personality clashed with the group’s prayer-and-share ethos.

“The expectation is if you really are having a spiritual experience, the first thing that you’re going to do is share it very publicly,” said Perett, 31, now a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame.

In other words, “If the Holy Spirit were working in your life,” you’d be talking about it— “You would be an extrovert,” he said. But what Perett really needed most was time to process what was happening to him spiritually.

Perett insists evangelical Christianity—with a bigger-is-often-better strain deeply embedded in its DNA—is stacked against introverts like himself. And so, like other introverts, he began to develop coping methods rather than a deeper theology.

Perett started to speak in code. He sprinkled phrases like “God was testing,” rather than “God was absent,” in his testimonials so that his peers would not realize he was actually trying to determine how—if at all—God was present in his life.

“It forces you to put on a spiritual show for everyone else,” he said.

Perett is far from the only Christian whose introverted personality has caused religious obstacles. Writer and pastor Adam McHugh has taken note and recently released a book called Introverts in the Church.

“In my mind at the time, ideal pastors were gregarious, able to move through crowds effortlessly, able to quickly turn strangers into friends,” he writes in the introduction of the book published by InterVarsity Press.

But as an introvert himself, McHugh found the social demands of his job overwhelming, which led him to take a closer look at his specific personality type.

McHugh discovered that although introverts previously had been thought to be in the minority, more recent studies reveal introverts actually make up roughly half of the population. That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re always understood.

By definition, an introvert is someone who is energized by solitude rather than social interaction. An introvert might also love long intimate conversations; they aren’t necessarily shy, but they may very well dislike small talk. In short, introverts like to go deep, and they often like to do it alone.

As writer Jonathan Rauch described introversion for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 2003, “introverts are people who find other people tiring.”

McHugh, for example, felt absolutely exhausted by all the retreats he was required to attend as an InterVarsity college minister in California. Canadian Jamie Arpin-Ricci says he has endured similar frustrations as a pastor.

Arpin-Ricci, a Mennonite pastor in Winnipeg, Manitoba, said most Christians expect a pastor to be available at all times, which gives introverts like him and McHugh little of the much-needed downtime.

Arpin-Ricci said it’s important not to fall into certain stereotypes—that introverts are antisocial, for example, or extroverts have plentiful but only shallow relationships. His church, the Little Flowers Community, is intentionally community-led, giving him the freedom to hand off certain responsibilities—especially when he feels a more extroverted personality may be better suited to the task.

Donna Katagi, director of spiritual formation at Cerritos (Calif.) Baptist Church, estimates her congregation is made up mostly of introverts who don’t fit neatly into the category of demonstrative Christians that many believe define a truly spiritual person.

Although Katagi says her church engages in typical activities like refreshments after worship, she also says she’s catered her spiritual formation program to meet the needs of her introverted congregation.

Outside of worship, Katagi says she’ll break up members into smaller rather than larger groups to better facilitate discussion.

For his part, McHugh says he has learned to incorporate solitude during the day, and says he remains confident that introverts can make good Christian leaders.

“I had to just figure out my own rhythm,” he said.

U.S. Catholics vexed at vatican. Nearly three-quarters of Catholics in the United States believe the Vatican tried to cover up clergy sex abuse, and a majority says Pope Benedict XVI has handled recent reports of past abuse poorly, according to a new poll, but less than 10 percent have considered leaving the Catholic Church over the issue. The Vatican has been besieged by criticism in recent months that top officials, including the future pope, mishandled cases of clergy sex abuse, allowing abusers to work in parishes with children, or stalling for years before defrocking serial molesters. More than half of U.S. Catholics—58 percent—say the Vatican did a “poor job,” of handing those reports, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. Less than one in three gave the Vatican good marks on the scandal, and 74 percent said the Vatican tried to cover up the problem in the past. The poll was based on telephone interviews with 412 Catholics conducted April 28-May 2. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Moral values in decline, most Americans insist. Three-quarters of Americans say the country’s moral values are worsening, blaming a decline in ethical standards, poor parenting, and dishonesty by government and business leaders, Gallup reports. The number of Americans who say the nation’s moral values are in decline grew by 5 percent since last year. Other reasons Americans mentioned were a rise in crime, a breakdown of the two-parent family and a moving away from religion or God. Only 14 percent of respondents believe the country’s moral values are getting better. The findings are based on May 3-6 telephone interviews with 1,029 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

New president tapped for Calvin Seminary. Church-planting expert Julius Med-enblik, 49, has been nominated to be the president of Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is pastor of New Life Christian Reformed Church in New Lenox, Ill., which has grown from four members to more than 700. He also leads the church-planting efforts for the Christian Reformed Church. Medenblik will succeed Cornelius Plantinga Jr. at the end of the 2010-11 school year if the Christian Reformed Church Synod in June approves his appointment. Medenblik currently is chairman of the seminary’s board of trustees.

Lesbian bishop consecrated. The Episcopal Church has consecrated its first lesbian bishop. Episcopal leaders portrayed the consecration of Mary Douglas Glasspool, 56, as a suffragan bishop in Los Angeles as an affirmation of its aim to be “inclusive” regardless of sexual orientation. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, last December called Glasspool’s election “regrettable” and warned it would affect the Episcopal Church’s role in the communion. But Williams did not comment after Glasspool’s consecration, and reaction from the rest of the Anglican Communion was relatively muted compared to the response after the first gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, was consecrated in 2003.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (RNS) — Is it a show about a modern-day shipwreck, featuring misfit castaways trying to survive increasingly bizarre circumstances on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean? Or is Lost really a show about faith, redemption, evil, predestination, love, suffering, free will and human understanding of the supernatural?

Either way, when Lost ends its six-season run on Sunday, May 23, what will remain is the debate — especially on thousands of blogs — about the religious themes sprinkled throughout the hit series.

Because of its complicated plot lines and character development, Lost virtually precludes drop-in viewing, giving it a smaller but dedicated fan base of between about 10 and 15 million viewers per episode, according to Nielson ratings.

So, while those 290 million Americans who don't watch "Lost" each week likely care very little about the show's religious symbolism, inferences or foreshadowing, Losties, as they're often called, eat the stuff up.

"By the end of first season, we began to see Lost cultivate a thematic debate about two ways to view the world," said Jeff Jensen, senior writer for Entertainment Weekly whose "Totally Lost" blog is a Losties must-read.

The options? "Either purely naturalistic terms that only science can explain," he said, or "a supernaturalistic view of the world in which we live in a fundamentally spiritual universe that deals with what theologians and philosophers call the ultimate concerns of man — who are we, who made us?"   

In purely rational terms, "Lost" is about a group of people who survive a plane crash on a tropical island, and the struggle to survive and escape. The characters include a woman on the lam for killing her father, an alcoholic surgeon, a torturer, a drug-addicted rock star and a con man, among other tough people to love.

"They are deeply broken people, but you fall in love with them," said Chris Seay, pastor of Ecclesia church in Houston and author of The Gospel According to Lost. "… We want these people to be redeemed and changed for the better."

In the first season, much of the action revolved around flashbacks o the various characters' lives and set a foundation for how their behavior on the island could be redemptive. During that first season, as the writers teased viewers with hints of who was good and who was evil, many bloggers embraced the theory that the island was purgatory.

Each of the characters in the plane crash had died, the theory went, but the series would follow their attempts to escape purgatory by coming to terms with their lives, thereby purifying their souls as a way to gain entrance to the afterlife. That theory was debunked by the show's creators.

"They said the island wasn't purgatory, but it had elements of purgatory," said Tony Rossi, a radio host and producer for The Christophers, a nonprofit Catholic organization, who writes about faith and culture on his blog, "The Intersection."

Rossi said there are some definite Catholic allusions in the series, including one in which a character (Charlie, the drug-addicted rock star) sacrifices his life for the woman he loves and her child while making a sign of the cross as he drowns.

In a more recent episode, Rossi said, a character named Benjamin Linus, who had been set up as the series villain, confesses his sins to another character who was standing in for God, before being accepted by the rest of the characters.

"That looks very much like the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation in which a priest, standing in for God during someone's confession, allows the person to be reconciled to the rest of the community," Rossi said.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, the online editor at Christianity Today and a Lost fan, said other theological ideas have been referenced by the show's writers. One, she said, is predestination, made famous by the 16th-century theologian John Calvin.

"Are these characters' paths laid out or do they get to choose their paths?" said Bailey. "That been a debate among theologians a long time."   

Jensen, who visited the set of the Lost finale, said the big-picture religious and philosophical themes are only likely to heighten as the series draws to an end. 

"It does seem that Lost believes that the world is fundamentally piritual, that we are not just stuff, we are not just animals," Jensen said. "But I think that it's also saying that no one explanation has ever gotten it right. And they're not about to declare who is correct."
 

ORLANDO, Fla.—Are people really responsible for all the things they do? Do they have what theologians call God-given “free will” to choose between right and wrong?

Those questions are at the heart of a four-year research project under way at Florida State University that aims to determine whether, and how, free will exists.

Funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the project will gather together scientists, philosophers and theologians around the question of what factors—free will, genetics, environment, God or something else—lead us to do all the things we do.

“Gathering evidence for it one way or another, it’s quite possible,” said Alfred Mele, a professor of philosophy at Florida State who will lead the project. “Scientists have been looking for evidence for and against free will since the early ’80s.”

The debate however, is much older. For instance: Do humans, through their own freely chosen actions and decisions, determine whether they will go to heaven or hell? Does an omniscient God already know how things will turn out in the end? Does God give humans the free choice to turn away?

In the early 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that found subjects’ brains registered the decision to flex their wrists roughly 300 milliseconds before the subjects themselves became aware of their decision to do it. Libet concluded “conscious free will never is involved in producing a decision, and you can see how there’s a quick road from there to ‘there actually is no free will,”’ Mele said.

The research led some to believe that brain processes traceable to genetic and environmental factors, and not free will, determine our decisions. Others think that while people might not be immediately aware of the decisions our brains make, they still possess the free will to veto these decisions.

But Mele, the author of two books and more than 170 articles on the concept of free will, doesn’t discount the more common definition of free will—one used by the courts in determining guilt and premeditation.

“There really is nothing more to it than sanely, rationally assessing reasons and then deciding on the basis of those reasons, as long as nobody is pushing you around or forcing you,” he said. “In that view of free will, it’s pretty obvious there is free will.”

The “Big Questions in Free Will” research project will devote $3.4 million for projects around the world to explore the concept of free will from scientific, philosophical and theological perspectives.

Scientists will look for evidence proving or disproving whether free will exists. Philosophers and theologians, meanwhile, will seek a better definition of the concept, helping scientists to know precisely what evidence they are looking for, Mele said.

Perhaps it is difficult to reconcile concepts such as fate and destiny with free will, but it is possible for an omniscient God to coexist with the idea of free will, said Kevin Timpe, an associate professor of philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.

“There is a difference between knowing what someone is going to do and causing them to do it,” said Timpe, author of Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives. “I know what my wife is going to order when I take her to certain restaurants just because I know her very well. But I also think my wife is freely choosing to order.”

What if researchers discover free will does not exist? Two studies portend a troubled future, Mele said. One found its subjects cheated more when they believed they were not responsible for their own decisions; another found subjects’ behavior growing more aggressive when their belief in free will was suspended.

Norman Geisler, the author of 70 books including several on free will, said the idea that free will does not exist is incompatible with the Bible and the doctrine of original sin, which refers to the sin inherited from Adam and Eve’s transgressions in the Garden of Eden. If Adam’s decision was not made freely, then that presumably makes God responsible for evil in the world.

“The Bible constantly affirms that man is free, that he can choose his destiny, that he’s morally responsible,” said Geisler, whose books include Chosen But Free. “To say that we are pre-determined is to blame God for our choices. Secondly if all our actions are pre-determined, then why doesn’t God save everyone? Because if he can save everyone apart from their free will and he if really loves everyone, then he would.”

POSSUM KINGDOM—When Dennis Trammell exhausted treatments available in the United States for his multiple sclerosis and began looking at other options, he excluded from consideration any possible regimens involving embryonic stem cells.

“I didn’t even explore that,” said Trammell, pastor of First Baptist Church at Possum Kingdom Lake, near Graford.

His health problems started in 1999 with decreased vision in one eye, diagnosed as a case of optic neuritis. When similar symptoms occurred in his other eye two years later, he was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS. He began a series of conventional treatments, including once-daily injections that helped manage the illness temporarily.

But in July 2008, his illness advanced to secondary progressive MS. Two months later, he went to Costa Rica for stem-cell treatments not available in the United States—but not before he checked on the source of the stem cells.

“I really questioned before agreeing to take part in the treatments what type of stem cells were used,” said Trammell, who serves on the Baptist General Convention of Texas Executive Board. While some countries allow experimental treatments using embryonic stem cells harvested from abortions, Costa Rica did not, he learned.

His treatment involved stem cells harvested from the umbilical cords of full-term births, administered by injection into his spinal cord to repair damage to the brain caused by MS. That was coupled with an intravenous infusion of his own stem cells, harvested through liposuction. The goal, he explained, was to “reset” his immune system.

Dennis Trammell

Results have been mixed, he reported. Initially, he experienced improvement in balance, but it proved short-lived. Use of his left arm has diminished in the last year, he noted. But a lasting benefit of the treatments has been a marked improvement in his energy level.

“I had gotten to the point where a nap was needed on a regular basis. But since the treatment, a daily nap is no longer needed,” he said.

Before he was diagnosed, Trammell already had determined certain boundaries existed in terms of medical treatment that he could not cross in good conscience. Other Christians sometimes fail to consider these kinds of issues until confronted with them in a doctor’s office or hospital waiting room.

“We’re still dealing with the age-old question: ‘Given what can be done, ought we?’ But the list of ‘can-do’ options in health care get longer each day; hence, also the ‘ought’ questions and the complexities of knowing right from wrong, good from bad,” said Tarris Rosell, professor at Central Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Rosemary Flanigan Chair in the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo.

While subjects like nanotechnology, reproductive cloning, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence capture the imagination of some bioethicists, those are not the issues most people face, said ethicist David Gushee.

“I sometimes wonder whether there isn’t a bit of a science fiction fetish here, in which for some it is just fun and interesting to ponder ethical issues from a future that hasn’t reached us yet. I would prefer to deal with the ethical issues that face us right now,” said Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.

“Very difficult health care decision-making remains a reality that everyone faces at one time or another, and not just at the end of life. My own family’s recent experiences in the health care system remind me that it has its own momentum and practices that are simply taken for granted from within the system,” he said. “As Christians, we do need to have a broader vision that asks questions rather than simply taking for granted the way things are.”

In recent weeks, Gushee’s wife, Jeanie, had an appendectomy, and his sister, Janette, had surgery to remove a brain tumor.

“All the talk of autonomy and informed consent bumps up against the realities of how little laypeople understand what doctors are saying and doing. Time pressures in situations of crisis, situations which also tend to limit our rational capacity as we are overwhelmed by fear and confusion and pain, also make it very difficult to exercise judgment either for ourselves or for someone else,” he said.

“Recently, I faced a situation where the doctor called me in the waiting room from my wife’s surgical suite during her appendectomy to ask me whether she should also take out the gall bladder. I had moments to decide, on the basis of very limited information, whether to authorize this irreversible surgery. I said no. But it was a tough call, and I had very little information, and of course, I had only met that doctor about 48 hours before.

“We need ways to slow down the decision-making process whenever possible, to empower patients and families with better information and more choices, to point us to websites and other sources of broader information.”

Tensions between sanctity-of-life issues and quality-of-life issues move from the realm of academic discussion or public policy debates when they affect people whom an individual Christian knows and loves, said ethicist Bill Tillman.

“Perhaps it is only when we find ourselves, a family member or someone else close to us involved in the bioethical realm that we even realize these tensions or where we might be with them,” said Tillman, who holds the T.B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon School of Theology.

Patients and family members today face tough questions their parents and grandparents never had to consider one or two generations ago, in part because of a greater emphasis on patient autonomy and patients’ rights, Rosell observed.

“Medical paternalism was the rule and practice for centuries or millennia, while the consensus now is against paternalism in favor of patient autonomy,” he said.

Perhaps “the pendulum may have swung too far” in the direction of patients being called upon to make some life-and-death decisions, Rosell suggested.

“It’s not necessarily a good thing when patients and/or their families demand specific medical interventions, especially when they are not medically indicated and won’t help but might harm,” he said, citing the example of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation being used on the frail elderly or people suffering from the failure of multiple organs. “So, just because I want it does not mean it would be good for me to get it.”

Ministers often find themselves in difficult situations when seeking to provide comfort and spiritual counsel to families or individuals facing difficult medical decisions.

“Likely, conversation about suffering, pain and ‘Where is God in all this?’ will arise,” Tillman observed. “Isn’t it interesting that it takes something we would call an intellectual, theological or physical crisis before we are willing to talk about these things?

“But these are matters to which a minister can be sensitive and perhaps build a relationship which had not been possible before.”

Tillman advises seminary students to set the proper example by considering end-of-life issues personally long before a crisis occurs.

“My advice to the students I have in classes at Logsdon is that they are never too young to put a will together, to have a statement of advanced directives prepared and to be advising their friends, family members and congregants to be doing the same thing,” he said.

“One benefit is they have to think through the matters surrounding their own mortality—all of us will die. Will we leave our life circumstances in such order that someone can pick up where we leave off? Can someone speak on our behalf if we arrive in a context where we cannot? As we recognize we will not be in this life forever—and frankly do not know the circumstances or the when of our death—quite probably those considerations will cause us to think more clearly and deliberately about how we live the moments we have.”

Beginning-of-life issues raise as many questions for some Christians as end-of-life dilemmas, Gushee added.

“Reproductive technologies also have brought us a host of unanticipated consequences, such as genetic screening to sift through extra embryos, ‘octomoms’ for those who feel compelled to implant all the conceived embryos, half a million frozen embryos and the ethical issues these raise, including a steady call for their exploitation in research, custody disputes over frozen embryos, and on it goes,” he said.

While the Religious Right has been most vocal about some of these issues, concern transcends political agendas, he added.

“I hear among my students at McAfee, who are not driven by a conservative political ideology, a kind of healthy sense of caution and sobriety about this endless fiddling with the procreative process,” Gushee said. “One may say it may be that the scientific and technological pride of the 1960s and 1970s is giving way to a more cautious appreciation of the dangers and limits of our interventions in nature.”

Caution and humility likewise should characterize the counsel Christians offer to families who are coping with end-of-life, quality-of-life and beginning-of-life issues, Tillman noted.

“Presence—caring presence—can be priceless,” he said. “I’d say stay away from interpretive generalities. Praying that God’s will be done—and not outlining to the patient and to God what that will is—is always appropriate.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Researchers say they’ve found the most religious place on Earth—between the southern border of the Sahara Desert and the tip of South Africa.

Religion is “very important” to more than three-quarters of the population in 17 of 19 sub-Saharan nations, according to a new survey.

In contrast, in the United States, the world’s most religious industrialized nation, 57 percent of people say religion is very important.

“On a continent-wide basis, sub-Saharan Africa comes out as the most religious place on Earth,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

According to the survey, 98 percent of respondents in Senegal say religion is very important, following by 93 percent in Mali. The lowest percentage was reported in Botswana, 69 percent, which still is a healthy majority.

“That begins to paint a picture of how religious sub-Saharan Africans are,” Lugo said.

The study is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project. More than 25,000 sub-Saharan Africans responded in face-to-face interviews in more than 60 languages.

While the study confirms that Africans are, indeed, morally conservative and religiously pious, researchers explored a variety of topics, including religious tolerance, polygamy, the role of women in society, and political and economic satisfaction.

Islam and Christianity dominate as the most popular religions in the region—a stark reversal from a century ago when Muslims and Christians were outnumbered by followers of traditional indigenous religions.

The study reports the number of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa grew faster than the number of Muslims, from 7 million in 1900 to 470 million in 2010. One in five of the world’s Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa.

While a majority of African Muslims are from the northern region of the continent, nearly 234 million live below the Sahara Desert.

Indigenous African beliefs have not disappeared, but they often are incorporated into Islam and Christianity, the report found. A number of sub-Saharan Africans believe in witchcraft, evil spirits, reincarnation and other elements of African spirituality. More than half of the people surveyed in Tanzania, Mali, Senegal and South Africa believe sacrifices to ancestors or spirits can protect them from harm.

According to the Pew survey, most sub-Saharan African Muslims are Sunni. Within Christianity, Catholicism dominates in Guinea Bissau, Rwanda and Cameroon, while Liberia, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Botswana are predominantly Protestant.

Pentecostalism is spreading rapidly and is deeply influential across the region, and also across Christian denominations.

“Casting out of the devil or evil spirits, high degree of apocalyptic expectations, the health-and-wealth `prosperity gospel’ is the new Christian phenomenon of the Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa,” Lugo said.

The 19 countries represented in the survey comprise 75 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. The countries are Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—President Obama has named 10 medical and legal experts—including a Franciscan friar—to a commission that will advise the White House on bioethical issues.

The appointees include Daniel Sulmasy, a friar and medical ethicist at the University of Chicago’s medical department and divinity school. Others include Lonnie Ali, wife of boxing legend Muhammad Ali and advocate for awareness of Parkinson’s disease, along with hospital executives and law professors.

When the president announced the commission in November, his executive order noted members “may examine issues linked to specific technologies, including but not limited to the creation of stem cells by novel means.” They also could look at broader issues such as “the intersection of science and human rights.”

At that time, Obama named University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann as the commission’s chair and Emory University President James W. Wagner as vice chair.