An odd tragedy

There were a couple of odd things about an event that happened over the weekend. A Presbyterian Center colleague whom I don't know - but he works with several Center journalists we do know - died at age 42 - apparently of complications from meningitis - including pneumonia. Although he grew up in Louisville and has family in Louisville, he was found dead over the weekend next to his laptop at his home. We remember Vincent's Sunday school teacher, Paula, who became blind and deaf from meningitis, before she died, in Tallahassee.

There are Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, Unitarians, and even atheists working at the Center, but not too many non-Christians. I started checking on this when I thought of including non-Christians in a cultural proficiency program I helped put together two years ago (I ended up only including Christians of different denominations). In addition to there being one woman I think is Hindu, Evan Silverstein was the only Jewish person working at the Center. This was a far cry from my grad school days, when the New School was culturally secular Jewish and we had the September Jewish holy days off from school.

I went to the chapel service this afternoon for Evan. Interestingly, all of the scriptures were from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). I don't know if Evan was a secular or religious Jewish person. Plenty of Presbyterians are somewhat universalistic in their thinking (all the world's religions can be equally good ways of finding ultimate truth) (or don't believe in Hell) but others are not and certainly plenty of Baptists are not universalists. So I had to look around at the 60 or so people who were there and wonder who believed that Evan was going to Hell. It's this sort of thinking (perfectly logical from an orthodox Christian perspective) that helped make my Mother - at age 16 - start to wonder about the evangelical Protestant theology she grew up with - when her boss when she was in her last year at Columbus, OH's East High School, a Jewish man who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust (standing on one foot for hours on the last train out of some European country - maybe Poland), died suddenly, and she found it hard to believe that he was going to Hell.

-- Perry