Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. We are delighted to have with us today someone who spends his time mining the experience of the past in order to make sense of the present. Thomas Cahill, as many of you know, is a best-selling author of a popular book series called The Hinges of History that began auspiciously with How the Irish Saved Civilization, a book that actually captured the imagination of a great many people across this country, including me, followed by The Gift of the Jews, Why the Greeks Matter, and most recently Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Signs and Arts from the Cults of Catholic Europe. Tom Cahill is beloved for his ability to crystalize pivotal moments and ideas of the past and make them relevant and really gripping for today. We look forward to hearing what he has to say this morning. Tom, thanks for being with us.

Mr. Cahill: I’m very happy to be here. The Cathedral is so beautiful that I forgot for a few minutes that I’m supposed to talk.

Dean Lloyd: Well, you can come back and stare any time; we’re going to work you right now. Hinges Of History, I’d love to have you say a little bit at the beginning of how that coalesced as a project for you and how, in fact, you decided to begin with the Irish saving civilization.

Mr. Cahill: In the summer of 1970, my wife and I went to Ireland for a year to write a book together called The Literary Guide To Ireland, which is now long out of print. We decided at the end of that project that we would rather be married to one another than to write books together. So that was our last book together.

You know in 1970 it was still possible in the west of Ireland to come upon people and communities who seemed to be living in a prehistoric world, who may have been formally Christian but were really practitioners of an ancient nature religion. I mean I remember attending a fair in the west of Ireland that was really a remnant of a prehistoric fertility festival. And while you were there, you could feel that you were in ancient Greece in the eighth century B.C. or something like that.

I doubt that you could have those experiences today, because part of the holding on of that kind social ambience was connected to the poverty of the west of Ireland. There were other parts of Europe where—you know, you find in Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek and a Greek passion, you find it in Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli and you find it also of course in John Millington Synge’s plays. And the question I began to ask myself was—I felt very alien in some of these places—the question I began to ask myself was, how did the west become the west? How did we become people that we are in the Western world? What is it that we do share in common and don’t share with the people living in the cyclical places?

And out of that came what I thought of as six volumes of a series, to start with the Gifts of the Jews, because the Jews are really the beginning of Western civilization, even though they are not the west when they begin. There is no west before the Jews. They really initiate everything. So often, our collegiate 101 courses, we think that everything begins with the Greeks, but the Greeks were stilling diapers when the Jews had written the better part of the Hebrew Bible. So it really is the Jews.

The Jews give us our value system. It is the Greeks who give us our filing system. The Greeks are responsible for our terms for the way we argue, for our language. The departments in a university are basically Greek words, you know, ecology, philosophy, those terms come to us in the Greek. So our terminology is Greek, but our value system is Jewish, or Judeo-Christian if you like.

And I wanted to get at this in a way that would enable the common reader to reconnect with his or her roots, and then I realized as I spent about ten years putting together files of my own and reading more deeply that I wasn’t insane, that I really actually was seeing something that was there, but that I needed a book to start a series, something simpler and something less profound than the Gifts of the Jews, so that’s the reason for How the Irish Saved Civilization.

I knew it was the simplest story I had to tell and that it really did give the reader a new way of looking at history, the beginning of this way that I wanted to present. I’m sorry, I talk far too long.

Dean Lloyd: That’s okay. In that book a couple of things seem to be happening that you’re analyzing that will come up consistently, and one very powerful one you describe is how fragile civilization is. It focuses on the Dark Ages quite a bit: how difficult it is to maintain the vision and mission of civilized society. Then you draw attention to a particularly strong figure, who seems to be able to do something critical to sustain the civilization project. And one of the things I loved about that book was the sense that saving remnants, that small communities—in this case Irish monastic communities—could be the very vessels that keep this civilization project going. So that was part of, I think, the excitement and the thrill of the story: that individual people and small groups can have world-significant impact.

Mr. Cahill: Well, I think that’s true, and I think we… very often the people who are at the exciting center of events, in whatever time they happen to be at the exciting center, are not always the people who see the most deeply into what’s going on.

Very often it’s the people at the margins who have a much more critical view of the society that they are linked with, and actually can make assessments that people at the center of events—the politicians, the generals—fail to make. And that is as true today as it was in the 5th century A.D.

So often the people that we really care about, the people who gave us something wonderful, are not Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or any of those startling figures who go through history on horseback. There are people like Patrick of Ireland, you know, who had actually been a part of the Roman Empire, grew up in the Roman province of Britain, at sixteen was snatched by Irish slave traders and brought to Ireland where he remained for six years, from sixteen to 22, which are really the years in which a personality is finally forged, and then at midlife he returned to Ireland with the Gospel.

And he returned to people that really nobody from his original situation would want to willingly to have anything to do with. I mean, they were nuts. The Irish were just…they were wild, wild people, and they were about as uncivilized as you could get.

So what did this man think he was doing? Well, he didn’t think he was saving Western civilization. He thought he was bringing the Gospel. But at the same time, he taught the Irish to read and write, which they got a great kick out of. They thought it was terrific to know, to have an alphabet, and they started playing with alphabets, and that’s how you get all those wonderful little…the Irish manuscript tradition; books like the Book of Kells really come out the playfulness of the early Irish scribes.

But in the course of their playfulness they saved the library of the Western world, which we have largely because of that. So acts of generosity have untold consequences, and really Patrick’s act was an act of immense generosity: to return to his captors willingly. And acts of war and devastation have just the kind of effect we expect them to have, negative effect on civilization, a negative effect on whoever is there. And they are just destructive in their way as the acts of generosity are creative.

Dean Lloyd: You make me think as you talk, of even our last, 20th, century, I remember a book with the odd title The Ignorant Greatness of Ordinary People that talks about the defining leaders of the 20th century were all people like St. Patrick, people from the margins, whether you talk about Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela, John Paul II, these are all people who didn’t come out of Oxford and Cambridge, they didn’t come out of the elite, they were grounded in a faith and people and a place that gave the place to stand and a perspective from which to engage the larger currents of the time. You go on to talk about Francis of Assisi later. It is these odd characters on the edge who surprisingly become the defining characters in a lot of the stories you tell.

Mr. Cahill: You know, Francis of Assisi wore the same potato sack throughout most of his life. You probably knew he was coming because you could have smelled him long before he reached the room. But this is a great figure. In each of the books…this is something I’ve only mentioned a couple of times, but…and I’m not going to tell you as much about it as you might want to know, but I tried to find somebody that I know, somebody in my own world, who seems like the figure that I’m writing about.

And my model for Patrick is Desmond Tutu, which I’m sure would surprise him if he knew this, but we became friends when I was in charge of religious publishing at Doubleday, and he did several books for us, and so it wasn’t just…he wasn’t just Desmond Tutu as a distant figure, but as somebody up close. He is truly a humane person whose blood boils at injustice. He just can’t keep his mouth shut, you know.

And that’s exactly what Patrick was like. Patrick is this little guy, you know, Desmond is five-foot-four, but if you see him on television, you might think he was nine feet tall. And I think Patrick was the same kind of scrappy little man. There’s no evidence for how tall he was, but I think of him as a little guy, you know, with a great heart.

Dean Lloyd: Speaking of blood boiling with a concern for justice, I understand you’ve interrupted your work on the Hinges of History series to write a book relating of all things to a contemporary situation, and in particular to the death penalty. Would you tell us something about that?

Mr. Cahill: I’ve just finished a book that the publisher is rushing to publication. Rushing in publishing means at least six months. They rush in a walk. It will come out and March and it’s called A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green. And Dominique Green is somebody that I met several years ago. He had been eleven years on death row. He was…in Texas…he was convicted in a trial that took a couple of days and was a perfect model of injustice, and he never got a decent hearing after that. And he was finally executed just after he had reached his thirtieth birthday, after spending years in solitary confinement, which is what Texas now insists be the situation for its death row prisoners, which is an additional form of torture.

I think he was a great man, and the first time I met him, I was on a tour for the book on the Greeks, which is actually called Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, and I had lunch with a friend of mine in Chicago, a retired judge, who had just taken up Dominique’s case in its final appeals. And she asked me where I was going next, and it so happened that my tour ended in Houston, and about a week before Christmas.

And book tours may sound glamorous to anybody who’s never been on one, but it really… all it is is waiting at airports for delayed planes hoping that your luggage hasn’t gone to the Philippines. And that’s basically what you do, and then you talk to people for an hour or so a night. The rest of the time you’re just moving on the next place. And I can’t tell you how much I wanted to go home and decorate my Christmas tree.

And she said, you’re going to be in Houston; then you can visit Dominique. And I thought, oh…I won’t tell you what I thought, because we’re in the Cathedral here. And so I stayed the extra day and went out to see him, this back-of-beyond place, because none of these prisons are anywhere near urban centers, and of course it is only the poor who are incarcerated, and only their poor relatives who have to go visit them, having taken the whole day on a bus to get there and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, Dominique Green was so different from anyone I expected to meet.

He was smart as whip, he was funny, he didn’t want to talk about himself. He wanted to talk about me, you know, and he was really interested in the outside world, what I did, how I did it. He was very interested in writing and he was a good writer, very good writer. He had… he was a dedicated reader. He had read just about everything he could put his hands on. And just before I met him, he had read Desmond Tutu’s book No Future Without Forgiveness, which was about the archbishop’s experience of being in charge of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the revolution in South Africa.

Dominique…you would think that people in solitary confinement cannot communicate with one another, but human beings are infinitely resourceful. And I won’t tell you how they communicate with one another, but they do. He, after he finished the book, sent it up and down death row. And by that time in 2003, a week before Christmas, virtually everyone on death row had decided to forgive the people that had hurt them, and to ask for forgiveness from the people that they had hurt. That was what was happening on death row in Houston that year.

I find it very hard to talk about, but to me this is an extremely important book. In writing the book, I realized that my whole project of the Hinges of History is an investigation into the difference between civilization and barbarism: How are we civilized and how are we not. So that I consider A Saint on Death Row to be another, in effect, another book in the series. Even though it’s not about the middle ages or ancient Greece or anything like that, it still is an investigation between civilization and barbarism.

Dean Lloyd: Why has it taken so long for civilization to move away from the death penalty, from killing people to punish them?

Mr. Cahill: I think within civilization—as within each human being, if we are honest with ourselves—there is a penchant for cruelty. I think we all have it. You know, it was Reinhold Niebuhr who said there is only one doctrine of Christianity that’s provable by experience, and that is the doctrine of original sin.

I think Niebuhr was correct, and that we all have—just as we have a penchant for good and generosity, we have a penchant for evil, and the real evil of evil is cruelty. It is human cruelty toward… one human being’s cruelty toward another or toward many others. And I think it goes all the way back to our prehistoric past. And I think that basically the death penalty is our form of human sacrifice.

Dean Lloyd: One of the striking comments you make in your writing about this is, in many ways Europe has led the way in moving away from capital punishment. And you trace it perhaps to a revolution that began with the killings of the 16th and 17th century with the reformation and murdering back and forth, and then with the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars—that something seems to have shifted in the psyche in Europe such that—and I didn’t know this until I was reading one of your essays—that a country cannot join the European Union now without prohibiting capital punishment.

Mr. Cahill: Right. We know the Europeans very well. They are our brothers and sisters, our cousins, whatever you like, you know, we know them all too well. That’s where most of us came from, at least ancestrally. At the end of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, people like Voltaire began to say, do we really have to keep doing this? Do Catholics have to kill Protestants, and do Protestants have to kill Catholics? Is this absolutely necessary? Isn’t there some other way we could manage?

And that’s the beginning of the Enlightenment and it’s the beginning of what became the basis for the United States, the first country that was based on the Enlightenment, the first country to grow out of the Enlightenment. Europe still wasn’t finished with its intermeshing hatreds and the First and Second World Wars—which is, I think, really one, if you look: the further we get away from it, the more it looks like one great war.

They had to keep killing. They now aren’t doing it on the basis of religion, but on the basis of nationality, and finally at the end of all of that, the Europeans came to realize that they could not do it again. And so it’s not really possible to imagine Germany going to war against France now. So you really do have…there is such a thing as human progress. It can fall apart, it can—we can end up backtracking, but there is such a thing as human progress.

And one of the things that they came to realize was that they had to extirpate this vein of cruelty that went through European civilization, as through all civilizations in different ways. And one of the ways that they have gone about doing it is to outlaw the death penalty throughout the European Union. You cannot join the European Union if you have the death penalty. You know why? Because it indicates that you are barbaric. They don’t want you.

Dean Lloyd: Let’s go back to the series of wonderful stories you tell. And I want to land on your book on the Jews, The Gift of the Jews, where you says some lively and provocative things.

Mr. Cahill: By the way, Sam, it’s The Gifts of the Jews, more than one.

Dean Lloyd: Gifts, thank you. You say the Jews invented the west. Then you go on to say we can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. Now that’s impressive. Could you tell us about that?

Mr. Cahill: If you look through, my…part of my methodology is not to read other historians but to read literature, because in literature you find the heart and soul of the people of the past. You don’t just find battles and dates, you find what it felt like to be them. If you want to find out what warfare was like in 8th-century B.C. Greece, read the Iliad; don’t read a book of history. And that’s true of everything. When you read the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians usually call the Old Testament, you see, and read it against the literatures of other people, like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, you see that the Jews came up with things that nobody had ever thought of before.

And in that context all the other cultures look the same. Of course they’re different from one another. The Assyrians were not the Egyptians. But what they all had in common was that they were all cyclical. They all saw time as cyclical. They looked up at the sky and they saw the zodiac passing and they said, that’s what the heavens—that’s the message of the heavens, and they’re telling us about what’s going on here on earth.

So that they also believed that they could predict the future. They believed they could predict the future based on the past because the zodiac keeps returning. Like summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, birth, copulation, death, birth…everything happens over and over again. And there’s a constant pattern.

The Jews were the first people to break that and to say, and it really happens in the story of Abraham and Genesis when God tells Abraham to go out into the unknown. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him. He has no idea. And at that moment, time becomes real, which it never was before. It had always been a wheel.

Now, for the first time, the future becomes real, and the only thing that’s real about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet. That’s its reality. It’s a completely new way of thinking. And Abraham becomes a person with a personal destiny. He is not simply another sheaf of wheat that is cut down as we are all cut down. He is not simply part of the eternal wheel of birth, copulation, and death. He is Abraham the individual.

So you get two enormous new things. Real time and real individuality. You cannot find either of those things in the literatures of the surrounding peoples. These are the great insights of the Jews. And the third one, which we’re still not… we’re very good at time and individuality, right? The third great insight is social justice. And we’re still not very good at that, but… that is the third insight, because if Abraham is an individual, I am an individual, and you are an individual, and you are an individual, and we all have rights, and that’s the part that we’re still learning.

Dean Lloyd: I want to go for questions from the audience, but as we prepare for that, put one more question to you. Your book addressing the birth and emergence of the Christian story, called Desire of the Everlasting Hills, puts before us a question at the beginning. After all these two thousand years, the coming of the one proclaimed to be the son of God, what difference did he ultimately make? You lay that out the beginning, you circle back to it at the end. What kind of response do you make now, about two thousand years later, about the difference that Jesus actually made?

Mr. Cahill: Well, I want you to read the book, so I don’t what to give away the ending.

Dean Lloyd: Give us a hint.

Mr. Cahill: The hint is really in what I said earlier. That we do progress. There is progression, I think. Jesus is the central figure of western experience, and there is really no serious candidate to displace him. Whether you think he was God’s son in a Christian theological sense, it doesn’t really matter. He is still the great yardstick by which all human moral activity is judge.

When, toward the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus presents this scene of the last judgment, and the judge himself, separating the sheep and the goats, he says to those who are going to be with God, I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you gave me a home, I was in prison and you came to see me. And they all say, well, what are you talking about? We didn’t see you. And then he says, insofar as you did this for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it for me. So that at this point, Jesus becomes the principle of Jewish justice in the universe. And that Jewish justice is threaded into the universe like a genetic code. And once it’s spoken aloud, as it is in Matthew’s Gospel, we cannot get rid of it. Try as we might, we cannot get rid of it. We’re stuck with it. And I brought out my own copy, and I’m just going to quote the very end of that passage which I think is downright scary. I need my glasses to even see my own writing at this point. Soon I’ll probably have to hire someone to read for me. He says—this is Matthew commenting on Jesus’ description of the scene of the last judgment: Jesus had now finished all he wanted to say.

Dean Lloyd: Questions?

Question: Last week our presiding bishop indicated that eighty percent of Episcopal priests in the south had owned slaves. Today we have a…the previous week the humane society president talked about animal cruelty. We’ve got epidemics of child and domestic abuse. How is it, on a personal level, that humans can be cruel to people that they have close relationships or animals that they have close relationships with? You’ve address that; why do you think it is that we as humans can on a personal level do that when the people we’re being cruel to aren’t enemies per se?

Mr. Cahill: Yeah, well, I think that we do things like this all the time and why do we do it? I would just go back to Reinhold Niebuhr and, you know, it’s—the best explanation is original sin. You know, there’s something wrong inside of us, and each of us has to find a way of righting that wrong.

Question: Good morning. As you’ve talked about these books that you’re writing, what impact has this had your own faith?

Mr. Cahill: Somebody in every audience asks this question, which I myself—I know I’m talking about religion very much, because it is threaded through civilization. I find it embarrassing to talk about my own beliefs. But I would just say that, if anything, it has given me the understanding that faith has a very different contour when you go from one society to another to another. The faith that any of us hold could be Judaism, it could be Christianity, it could be Islam, it could be lots of different things, but those are sort of the three majors.

When you look back a Jewish history, Christian history, Islamic history, you see that there have been… This faith has taken so many different forms at different times, and what one authority condemns, another embraces. And I would say, if anything, it has made me more catholic with a small “c” than ever, and more certain that there are as many ways to the truth as there are points on a compass. There is no such thing as one way.

Dean Lloyd: You have an image in one of your books describing the handing on of the Gospel through the ages as something like handing on soup stock.

Mr. Cahill: Did I say that?

Dean Lloyd: You did. So it’s as if it’s not the same soup all the time, but the soup morphs and changes, and it gets handed on. There’s just enough of the original there to engender a new Jesus moment, movement something like that. Mr. Cahill: Right.

Dean Lloyd: Is that… Do you think that is a viable image for how this thing gets passed on?

Mr. Cahill: I think so. I think it’s better than a mechanical image, you know, or an electronic image or something like that.

Dean Lloyd: It’s messier than that.

Mr. Cahill: Is messier and it has to do with nourishment.

Dean Lloyd: And different things get thrown in at different times.

Mr. Cahill: Yeah, and you know… I mean, well, if you spend some time in a place like France, you come to realize how important stock is. It really is holy. And it’s not always the same, and yet the tradition of the stock is meaningful.

Question: One could come away from this conversation thinking that you believe that these special individuals that stand at the hinges of history are all people of faith. And my question is, doesn’t that seem unlikely to you?

Mr. Cahill: Yeah, and I don’t feel that that’s the case. I mean, you know, you could call the people in the book on the Greeks people of faith, but their faith is in Zeus. So it’s a very different world. And when I get to the last book in the series, the last book will be largely about the secular contribution. It will go from the Enlightenment to the establishment of the democracies, and it will be… faith will be there mixed up with a lot of other things.

Question: So who would be some examples of those individuals more recently than 1000 A.D.—since 1000 A.D.—people not of faith who stand at the hinges of history?

Mr. Cahill: Well, I think the founding fathers, who I’m not saying didn’t have faith, but that wasn’t front and center for them. They would certainly be… you know… this not of faith… At least, in the western tradition, it’s hard to find anybody who is not a believer until fairly well into the 19th century. You know, they just didn’t exist. So since my theme is not the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s really a little bit outside my expertise.

Question: Good morning. My…that gentleman’s question lead into mine a bit. It’s about Abraham Lincoln. We are of course coming up on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, and there will be an explosion of publications, some of very high quality I suspect. Lincoln, and especially as we get in this election year as well, and we’re looking for greatness and a large number of Americans are disappointed so far… What Lincoln had, it seems he had obviously some elements of what a president should have—he had intelligence, ambition, no doubt about that, he had a facility with words which is perhaps unparalleled in American history. But the other thing he did have, it seems to me in looking at his life, is he had a humility before God which he could actually articulate, and did, and just beautifully, of course, six weeks before he died, in his second inaugural address. That’s another discussion, but I wonder almost if that, this may be a question without a clear answer, academic answer, is that… It seems it’s essential for greatness. We look back upon Lincoln as a great president; I think very few people will quarrel with that. He had this capacity for growth. He would be an example of a man who didn’t have a strong faith but developed a strong faith even if it was not overtly a Christian faith by any means, very ecumenical kind of faith. But at the end, he realized the magic ingredient he had perhaps that made him great, was that he realized in the final analysis that he was not in control or as he said, I am not in control of events, events have controlled me.

Mr. Cahill: Do you have a question?

Question: I do. The question is, I guess, my question is whether or not you think such a thing is possible in our political arena, in our national arena any longer? That’s my question.

Mr. Cahill: I think for any number of reasons Lincoln could no longer be elected. For one, he was too ugly. I think that’s the horrible truth. I mean, each age yields its own limitations. Not that I think Lincoln really was ugly, but I think that he wouldn’t have made it on television. And it’s, you know, Plato said that the person that we want in charge of the republic is the person that we pull out of his house who doesn’t want that job. And of course that would always be the best person that you could find. We are very unlikely to find anyone like that in our current situation too. We, you know, by and large our politicians are among… have the largest egos in our society. Whether they’re good or bad, you can just see the ego coming when they enter the room. It’s also why so many of them are so boring, because egotism is never interesting except to the egotist. So I would say that it’s very unlikely that we would elect somebody as good as Lincoln.

Question: You have spoken of influential individuals at various inflection points in history, and you have also spoken of this inherent cruelty as a basic element of the human temperament. And now, in light of your apparent skepticism of politicians as well, I wonder how you square all of this a faith, if any, in the democratic process?

Mr. Cahill: Well, I agree with Churchill that democracy is the worst of all possible organizations of society except for all the others. When you look possible choices, we are stuck with democracy, it seems to me. The Episcopal Church in the United States has in many ways become a democracy. It runs by very democratic rules. Does it always give us very best people? No. But it does prevent… what it does do is insist that the congregation be responsible for its choices. So you know, just as we are responsible finally for the people that we elect. We can’t get out from under that, whereas of course, if it were hereditary or something like that, we wouldn’t be responsible. To go back once again to Reinhold Niebuhr, who I think is the great American theologian, he characterized himself as someone of pessimistic optimism, and that’s how I would characterize myself.

Dean Lloyd: May be I could follow up with that and just ask you for your own take on living through a moment of quite some crisis at the moment, with the economy, facing a general election very soon, and there’s a lot of anxiety about the future, both short-term and long-term. Are you hopeful about the world prospect and the American prospect given how fragile the civilization you described is? And if so, why?

Mr. Cahill: Well, I really do believe we don’t know what’s going to happen next. That Jewish insight is real. We can see some of the seeds of the future being planted in the present if we know what the seeds are and where they are being planted but of course none of us know all of that.

There are so many things that in retrospect look like accidents. The assassinations of the 1960s deprived us, for instance, of some of the best people that we had to lead us. There was no way that… Once they were gone, there was no way of just somebody else popping up and taking over what they might have been able to accomplish. And those are accidents of history.

Sometimes the accidents can be in our favor and sometimes they can be against us. The current economic crisis could turn out to be a gift if we approach it with some sense of responsibility. I don’t mean to get into all that, it’s probably to big a topic. A civilization that is on the verge of becoming a civilization of shoppers is now given a chance to pull back and ask themselves if that is what they really want to be. Or is progress only material? Is it possible that we could create a society of progress that was spiritual rather than material?

Dean Lloyd: Final question.

Question: Yes, I was intrigued when you talked about people on the margins And, as I know you say, you’re not really talking about the 20th century per se. But, for instance, a lot of our Constitution was also influenced by the Iroquois nation. It would probably be on the margins of the U.S.; and I’m thinking about women, as a woman. So if you could just have a few comments about the margins and what they contribute to civilization.

Mr. Cahill: Well, in each of the books I look as much for the margins as I possibly can. Anyone who has read books will notice that particularly there are many women in the books, much more than there would be I think in most histories. And I can’t say the Iroquois are in any of my book as yet, but they may very well make it into the last one. Thank you very much.

Dean Lloyd: This has been a great conversation. I hope you will be with us next when we have Eboo Patel with us, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, and a very important fresh new Muslim voice on the scene. It will be very important to listen to him talk about an interfaith youth movement.

We hope you will stay for our service that begins at 11:15. Meanwhile there is coffee available in the west end of the Cathedral and just to your left, and Tom Cahill will be there to sign his books for a few minutes. Join me in thanking Tom Cahill for his time with us today.