what you do for yourself will die with you and will end up at a yard sale and some woman driving the caprice classic will pay five bucks or to drive away and not will be the end of it. do what you do for others, what you serve, how you get out of your comfort zone and how you treat others in your family and business and gas in your politics, that does not have to be separated. they can be left in its entirety to everyone you know and it cannot be sold and it cannot be negotiated on. it can be left in 100% full trust of everybody you know and you look yourself in the mirror and make sure that you're doing because that's a legacy worth leaving in the beauty is your life gets us fulfilled if any life you fulfill as a result of the. ladies and gentlemen, that is what it to go someone of today's

preconceived notion that that is the challenge of against the grain. i thank you for having me. [applause] been back that was really terrific. that was fantastic. i know i was inspired. heritage in policy dictation that we hope will fix the nation has to be informed of the messages here today. quartz has very gracefully accepted to take questions from people in our audience. does anyone have any questions? ratepayer. >> as i walk over here i'm more mad the woman in the caprice classic is selling it for $10.

talk about having conversations about in the world doesn't want to talk about. your book talks about marriage and commitment. yesterday there was a march for marriage d.c. a dozen people came out from different days. i've been married in the last year and a half year. >> congratulations. >> what is your view on the debates about marriage rate now, the definition of marriage? how can people stand for it? you talk about having commonality of people who think differently. how do we do well well with our neighbors? >> i'm a little different in this regard. 2.0 quake. the first one is a lot of people don't get think you can be a leader without ever leaving the bedroom. you can be a leader to the kids down the hallway. you can get out of your comfort voted servingly your spouse.

you can get out of your comfort zone and servingly dear children. so when we talk about kerry to family and children, often times we forget that our number one goal, our number one job to serve in read and an inhibition, fears and goals are with the purse than you share a bed with and the kids down the hall. it's easy to pick up the people at capitol hill. but i don't think you have a right to pick off their lack of service and their lack of leadership when your house is in disarray and not in order as a result of your unwillingness, unwillingness to serve. so that is one. second of all, there's political faith based issues regarding marriage rate now and i'm certainly not in the to and i understand it.

you know what i choose the thing. i'm not sure how that is going to end up, but i do know this. if miley cyrus had swung around on a racquetball in a 15 and today mainland are. can everybody agree with that? can whip? can we at least have commonality i'm not? in 19 feet you she swung around on iraq up, it had been pornography. now it is mainstream art. if elvis presley did his today, it would be mundane. when he came out, parents are keeping kids away from him because he gyrated too much and it did seem. can we agree with that? it is a fact. here's the thing we as society is going to progress. it just does. about 100 years ago women could

go. about 50 years ago when mark luther king was killed in a disc, just trying to get equality for african-americans. society progresses. lots of it is great. some of it past our moral and ethical differences is also thought. but nonetheless, society will progress. it just does. so here is the deal. i fear that we are going to be the first generation to the this place worse for our kids and when i found an effect case we need to be taken out from behind the woodshed. here's how it really happens. if we fight inevitability, boulders roll downhill and society progresses and nothing stops that. what you can do is embrace inevitability and understand society is going to progress and

while you do it, make sure that a progresses at the tenets of character, integrity, honesty, commitment, dignity found in hardware, understanding of what it titled the to strip one's dignity, the understanding of what grace and forgiveness is. the understanding of building a proper foundation of the legacy and as long as we have and, society will roll downhill. society look to you to progress. let's do this. let's make sure songs that does progress of iraqi is there going to be miley cyrus is on wrecking and things 50 years from now that our ethical and moral medal but the things we talk about today 50 years from now look at the way they argue over that? that is going to happen.

let's just make sure because we know that's an inevitability that we take the long these commands and let's make sure that our society progresses with these 10 and that will be okay. when it comes to marriage, immigration, all the things you're talking about that are testing us right now on the social side we will work them out. we'll find our commonality. most importantly, we were not in handling the best ways we progress as long as we remember the core tenets that got us here in the first place. the 30,000-foot view is they speak and be open-minded, who says, for again. we just can't abandon the core principles that got us here in the first place. that is "against the grain." be my coach, you are a hard act

to follow up the masses. i was curious -- [inaudible] >> just wondering how the transition went whether the values he stood for are still part of the program. the night before i left it wasn't like i said okay, god, peace. the year leading up i told the athletic during the print to pull in all the coaches that this'll be my last year. if you saw the movie, the reason is obvious. but i didn't tell the kids. is that when i pointed so the kids because of not going to be about the last year. their senior year. so there is a transition put in place coming succession plan if you will and all the coaches were doing jobs and everything was great and when i left it rolled right over. and then it mistry should change about two months later and new administrators want to bring in their own staff and the things

changed after that unfortunately. but things were going well. there is money in the bank, is the way they wanted to, but he knew it evisceration, new coaching staff and so unfortunately it changed. >> i didn't have the benefit of the movie. >> that's okay. go get it. >> i don't know but i bet you like it. >> there were seven teen on the team. >> the movie is my sixth year. but it. but as they were six and a half years. it's a half years before the movie was shot. it explains it. the movie is the final year.

>> my question is about the first day, the first week when you had seven teams carry over players. i want to know what the first meeting of the seven he was like and what you said. >> is only 17 of you guys is really what i was. here's the deal. you are wearing suspension helmets and you want a you want to do with a three-point you want ogoni three-point stances and you're in high school. that's really what i was thinking. the truth is the guy that got me over there, the name is jim tipton was doing volunteer work over there and i coached football and played football and he asked the head coach at the time, do you want some help? i went over and bring fully intending to dig for two weeks during spring practice. that was it.

when i showed up and i'm not kidding you, i saw kids who could not keep a six or much of anything. i was like, this is going to be the biggest waste of two weeks of my life and about four days into it i was in love. these kids come us know pcd new chicago in remote, the three neighborhoods that surround the masses, $7885 annual median and come. of the children of families with children under 18 years old, 12.5% since the married couple. fewer than 50% have an operating vehicle. it'll just take your ballot pretends more likely to be incarcerated than a college by his 18th birthday. 60% of children under the age of six named the grandmother is head of household. it is as bad as it gets in his kids showed up to practice every day with a smile on their face and a willingness to work because anything to be part of

some positive, they were there and i fell in love with the resilience. i fell about the respectfulness. i will at the preconceived notion of what i was going to find them sinners to be all african-americans cool animation has been slapped because what i found was not what i expected. just kids. just wanted to have a level playing field an opportunity to be part of anything positive. and there may think of it to the dreaming and not two and half weeks turned into six and a half years. so what i found was a bunch of rag tickets he didn't know anything about football. what i also found was the beauty of the during human spirit just given a chance they could do amazing things that i wanted to be a part of it. >> given the events of the last week here in washington, you'll

know what i mean than a minute and the fact that your boat is so politically incorrect in its themes, i have a subtitle for the second print. >> what is that? >> go redskins. [laughter] yeah, and next. no comment. there's the first time i ever said that in the period no comment. any other questions at all? >> thank you very much. [applause] there are books out there for sale. i do want to say some mean. he did ask me to mention his wife. and i forgot. i apologize. i said what about your wife? for children 19, 18, 17 and 16.

that's all you need to say about her. thank you very much. [laughter] [applause] >> here's a look at books being published this week:

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months in preparation and there's been an incredible group of volunteers that made it all possible. thanks for coming and participating. remember that just after the session, that richard rodriguez will be signing copies of "darling" and any other books you might have brought. so just after we finished today he will be there to do that. my name is john phillip santos. it is an extremely honored to be

here with two writers i really regard as mentors. so it's an honor to be given an opportunity just to introduce them. theologian, international thinker, international scholar, his works include lifework cultures meet, the galilean journey, the god of incredible surprises, and about a dozen other ones which you probably know as well. virgil's work has always been an inspiration for many of us in terms of connecting our experiences here in san antonio to a broad theological, maybe even cosmological understanding of who we are as human beings. and the opportunity to have been there today to engage in this conversation with richard is an extraordinary privilege for all of us. and, indeed, to have richard rodriguez here as i was saying

to them before, having their in san antonio is a great honor, a truly long-awaited. he claims to visit here quite often but he's been a selective with who he has visited. [laughter] we can judge ourselves likely to have time with him today. richards work has been an extraordinary testimony to the complexity of american identity, from the beginning of his career as a writer with hunger only memories, brown, and now "darling: a spiritual autobiography." is connected and understanding coming out of a mexican-american experience but really engaged with a broad international global, historical, literary, philosophical and in this book maybe even theological reflection. he has challenged us always in his writing and it is work to expand the scope of our

imagination, expand the scope of our understanding. so it's a great honor to be able to introduce richard rodriguez. [applause] >> thank you very much. i was talking to you in new york after september 11 and he said to me, when i propose, wanted to write about religion in this very dangerous age. he said that if you write to stylish about religion, a pious will not read it. and if you write to piously about religious, the stylus won't read it. so i've written a book that is both highest and the stylist. god help me. [laughter] after september 11 i was struck by the fact that i know almost nothing, i knew almost nothing about islam except some cartoon version of islam.

gather for maybe a british movie, lawrence of arabia or wherever it came from. and my journey to the middle east was in some way just to satisfy my own hunger and knowledge. i did not who these people were, didn't know what their grievance was with americans. and so forth. i think what i learned from living and even worshiping with muslims is that as a christian i adore a desert god, and they reminded me that these religions of abraham, judaism, islam, christianity, our desert religions and god who reveals himself to abraham revealed himself to us, revealed himself in the landscape of such desolation that we almost, we do not dare to confront, witness

las vegas. this to be constructed on every sort of invasion of the deserts conclusions. one of the things i wanted to do in this book, i wanted to introduce the people who walked through my soul. so elvis presley is in this book. tina turner is in this book. saint teresa is in this book. the prophet mohammed is in this book. the famous british atheist who told us all that god is dead, having left england, where god is there much alive, the hindu god and the muslim god came to the united states to tell us god is dead, mother theresa, and the magazine, given in depth interviews with movie stars with no depth, wrote that mother teresa was ugly. anyway, we are both in an elevator in new york.

he smells a very expensive liquor when he walks into the elevator. we worked on a bbc project together some years earlier, but i never forgave him for us to treatment of mother teresa, not force criticism but for the distance towards this macedonian woman, how ugly she was, he said in the pages of "vanity fair" magazine. and there we are, picking up the paper because he pushed the button on the elevator and all his papers have come to the ground. what do we want to read to you about a book on which all of this is going on? i decided i wanted to read a few pages of this chapter, the central chapter -- chapter called darwin come in this book called "darling" about my friendship with a woman who is now dead on the day our divorce is finalized, she and i had lunch in malibu at a café in a restaurant music are too often. i called the garden of even come

that's not its real name but that is meant adjudicative but one of things that's interesting about our friendship is as a gay man almost all of our closest friendships have been with women and the madrid of them have been heterosexual women. that has been since my '20s and now i'm on the ease of my 70th birthday. that friendship between the gay men and heterosexual women is when the preoccupies me. i know there's somebody watching on c-span was drifting off and thinks okay, man, religion, this is a book about justifying homosexuality, but it's not. i'm not interested in justify myself to religious institutions who reject the. i'm more interested in women and women in religion. this book is dedicated to the irish order of nuns that educate me, the sisters of mercy, and it

concludes with mother teresa going to heaven. i've slipped out and told you the conclusion so you don't have to read it. [laughter] i don't think anybody except maybe this remarkable new pope, pope francis, is just what is riling now and have the one with women and their discomfort and their dissatisfaction at a point i said in a with a majority of american women are living without men, and a majority of children now are being raised without men because they've gone somewhere else. so my lunch with darling, the last three pages of this chapter which i'm very proud of but it's a real chapter and i'm afraid i might not be able to make it through the chapter. i write this chapter to "darling,, the name of a giver, the name of always give her, though she is dead and she's been dead for 12 years when i

write this. you were raised catholic. you said you didn't believe, much anyhow. how one believes you said that you admitted to downright needing christmas and music. twice you said you didn't know if you ascend to the notion of god. notion? existence, and. you said you believed in history. ministry. you said religion. any religion you know about was a cult of patriarchy. men in the bible were better fathers and husbands you notice. a friend who sat with you the night, one of the worst nights during near the end recounted to me a troubled youth seemed. what a bad person i've been. you said to the friend. to the shadows, to the statues.

weight, are those statues? turning her face away, what a poor mother. what a poor daughter. no, no. , the friend richard. come on. you were a very good mother. your children love you. your children are wonderful. they adored, everyone adores you. in the morning your friends send you opened your eyes but no one could enter them. you spoke as if from a trance, how wonderful god is, you said. how beautiful it is. i mean, who doesn't love the breath, the throw, the hand, the ring, the laughter, who doesn't love the economy of her ways,% and abandonment to joy, the way she can arrange the bed, she,

blanket, pillow. the way she can do everything better than when she entered. i know plenty of men who could arrange a room but i'm not talking about taste. i'm talking about partly it is the patience for folding material, the patience of square corners, but partly it is the carelessness of allowable thrift of opening a window and closing a curtain and letting the curtain blow as it will. during world war ii the u.s. military in its attempt to make men more uniform studied the art of the hospital, the convent, the feminine. men were trained to make up the cost inefficient, spotless, feminine ways, selfless and other words. literally selfless, as a grave is selfless. one bed must be exactly like the next. unsuspecting officers made up a metrical fetish of a made bed, a punishment of what should promise ease.

darling, you could wrap a package to save your soul. i watched as you take together some wrinkled flowered saved remnants for mother's day, then you died on a wide plaid ribbon, the result was not perfection. it was pretty. same with your flower arrangements. plunking a fistful of cut flowers in two of the house, in the face, flowers, one would be steady for years to achieve the carelessness of your impulse. and unkempt, prettiness follows you wherever you went. and i don't understand it at all how you can buy. i don't even understand what it was. who doesn't love her stockings? you were dead so you missed the plump televangelist jerry falwell confiding to the god job televangelist pat robertson that the islamist attack on america on september 11 was the result not of religious extremism but

of divine displeasure with immoral and decadent united states of america. i really believe that the agonies and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are trying to make their alternate lifestyle the aclu, i point a finger in your face and say, you helped make this happen. he means us, darling. you and me, and the bar of the garden of eden, passing those long past afternoons. i cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils, women in red chanel. women and red flannel night gowns, women in their mayors, women sang tiny bunny, women saying, we will see. women saying if you let one hand on a child, i swear to god i will kill you.

women in curlers. women in high heels. younger sisters, older sisters, women and girls, without women, without you, darling. [applause] >> i'm fascinated by your reference to islam. and i was fascinated in studying spanish history, how much we owe to islam. how much we forget that islam was the humanizing domination of spain for 800 years. who has held meetings with joy today that we don't think about that come from islam.

chess comes from islam. our numbering system that i always ask my finance students, how would you finance today's roman numerals? can you add? it's incredible. we owe it to the muslims. we owe so many things to do. there was a human to an aspect of islam that was so beautiful. that's very much a part of who we are today in the latino community, because islam was basic to the spanish character. unfortunately, we have erased it from our conscious. but i'll be interested, richard, just how you see the country of islam. i think islam is a very much a part of us. >> i do, too. traveling among strangers in cairo, my first experience of arabic in that kind of crowd was

how much i was shooting in spanish but at the same feeling in africa summit go to, when i said in an effort in comedy and how much spanish is in swahili? he said that some spanish, that's everybody. the same was true when i was hearing in arabic was not spanish what i carry on my lips in spanish is a remnant of arabic. it is on our tongue. so there i was in cairo remembering my mother in sacramento, california, standing at the door as i was about to leave for school, sacred heart school, and saying, let's hope it's not going to rein. the sale will be on the pennies this weekend and i can buy you shoes within. it was on my mother's lips the name of allah. i didn't hear it. i doubt i new issue speaking. right now in this dangerous world, indonesia there are many, many muslims who do not like the

christians habitually using the name of allah when they pray the godfather. it is not a crime in kuala lumpur when they're not otherwise investigating the disappearance in of an airliner to a rest christians who use the name of allah. in fact, there was recently a catholic priest who was arrested for such a crime. that is where we have gotten. but when i think of the inherent fashion inheritance, i think that there is something of, you know, the catholic civilization comes to spain and chases in 1492, chases off the mower and that you. the senior catholics, to the new world. there is both a constriction of the world and also the expansion of the world. but nothing is over in history. we carry it and now it's like a madness.

now i look at a name like alvarez, good hispanic name like alvarez and all you have to do is put a little-between it and suddenly you are transported. so there we are in 2014. where none of our difference, the fact that arab is in us and on our lips. >> i think, really, what was housing that spain was the place of these three cultures, three religions, judaism, christianity, islam. for a tug years they were mixed in various ways. you say we speak arabic. many names and san antonio are jewish. other names. the whole border was colonized by crypto. >> which also to say, you know within the language already is

this ferocity. one that says, sunni and shia are murdering each other, muslims were saying to me a few years ago when i remarked on it that islam is about as old as christians was when christians come when catholics and protestants begin to murder each other. this habit within religion, not really between religions, this destructiveness. this is i think what haunts me about these religions, about religion maybe in general. that is how the ip of my god, the prayer of my god, becomes the possessive. my god used against you. and it's that habit. on september 11, 2001, those pilots on the boeing 757s were praying as the planes crashed

into the world trade center. listen to what you said. that the world could end in some horrible way in the future in prayer. there is always within us, within this claim to this intimacy with god, this fierceness about him and his otherness and his difference. that is the sobering truth, and while i think some people might say, you know, this book has little bit too flaccid on always wanting to see his connection to the other. i think that it's important for us at this point in the history to in every possible recognize our relationship with each other. even when it means that we send in common. >> i think, richard, that that's precisely the point of what i see in the revival of a real

return to the new testament christianity. it values the other do it does not see the other as an enemy but as a potential friend. his holy father has called us, pope francis, he calls the sacred ground of the other, not the opposite. and how do we bring about this new synthesis, a core word in pope francis, a new people who encounter each other, how do we work to bring a new synthesis? >> one other thing she did do in thinking about these civilizations, is you come back to the earth. religion is always criticize for something other than world. as i began to think about these desert religions, just how central the ecology of the desert is to their understandings. we live in a time in the secular west when we're using every excuse to avoid place. so we have this technology and we can walk down the street with

in order not to even know where we are. ower i was watching one day, i was caught in an airport watching oprah winfrey and bono, and they're talking about making the earth greener, before they got into private plans an agenda the place to talk about making the earth green. and i thought, have a look at the earth lately? the earth is brown, most of it, and even a place where the earth is green and the spring and summer, it turns brown in its fulfillment. there's a chapter in the death of the american newspaper in "darling," and some critics have wondered why it's there. why it's is because we no longer live in peoria. we no longer live anywhere. all we have to talk about with each other is national politics and whether we are progressives or conservatives. we've lost a sense of place of the 4-h club, of the little league game down the street, of the fire across town last week. and so what happens in that

chapter, i write an obituary for the mac newspaper but i might also an obituary for obituaries. a number of friends of mine, i would say fight -- five of six best friends i've had who died recently that one individual in the paper. when you're buried, and here's the second revolution, they were all cremated. cremation has replaced burial. for many, many americans come and no one will remark on it but undertakers will say people will say he made, some will come pick it up next week. the wife will say, honey, our closet is filled with these boxes. there are dead people in the basis of our house next to the christmas tree ornaments because we don't have anyplac any placet them. a friend of mine who'd been a catholic priest, had left the priesthood toward the end of his life. he reconciled this order on his deathbed but before he died he asked two women friends of his

to take his ashes and disperse them someplace to i don't know why they took them. and seashore, under a redwood tree, whether they buried it, whatever. it was once a custom in the world for the living to visit the cities of the dead, cemeteries. well, my friend was taken somewhere, but about two weeks after his death one of his students called me and said, i'm so sorry that i was not able to attend the funeral. but i would like to pay my respects at the cemetery where he is buried. and i said, well, i would like to their respects where he is buried. i have no idea what he is. he's gone. and that disconnection from death, i think, is what is most troubling about the otherness of our civilization. so here we are, talk about the connection we have in the new

testament. the ecology connects us, to. the last chapter of this book is not the mountaintop, martin luther king, jr., i've been to the mountaintop, before he dies. the mountaintop which was the location where man that god. the valley floor, a desert plain where the jews wandered for 40 years. we are people of the cave. mohammed has his elimination of the cave. jesus is born in a cave and he is buried in a cave. moses is put in a cave by god, when he walks past so that he will not be blinded. want the things about these religions is a trust the dark. in desert cultures, the noonday

sun is blinded. it is when the light to sense into twilight that reflection begins, that rest begins, that insight begins. and it seems to me that one of the things we need to remember as we think about our connection to each other is that we share this landscape. we share the earth. at the end of her life, mother teresa was haunted by her disconnection to cut. god. she didn't give any connection to god. she wasn't an atheist. she felt god removed himself. 40 years of she thought that. and she described her life in continuously as being in darkness. the great atheist mox or. he doesn't understand the people who believe go through seasons of disbelief, unbelief, darkness. she talked about living in a tunnel. the night that she dies in calcutta, the great around the concept collapses. the content goes black. there are two emergency

generators at the convent and the nuns bring out one of the generators and a plucker respirator to the generator. that goes dark. they bring out the other generator. that goes dark. she dies in the dark. it seems to me that one of the things we don't acknowledged as we live our lives in this particular time in our history, the fastest-growing ecology in our world in this globally warming world is the desert. the of the most radical global phenomenon in our environment is the rising sea. so we're going to live in a civilization were children and grandchildren of rising water and dryness, expanding dryness. understand? and that i think is in some way our connection to a landscape that when jesus leaves the

relative greenness of the jordan, of nazareth, he goes into the desert, puts on the desert security of the desert, he takes the emptiness on, and in some way, plato mocks that he mocks people in the cave as confusing the reflections on the wall with reality. we are people of the cave, those of us who believe the we believe in the darkness. >> i agree with you but i believe i still believe in the tension between the three images that you mentioned. we live in the tension of the cave where the primal events of the new testament takes place in the cave. the enunciation. mary lives in the home. the birth of jesus in a cave, the resurrection comes from a cave. lazarus come when jesus called lazarus to come for the comedy comes from the cave. so the cave is going down to the

depths of humanity, the depths of the earth but it's going down to the pit bottom of humanity. but then he goes through the desert experience. you mention in your book, the desert is a place of nothingness, absolute nothing. it's a place of vision. you've experienced that sense of absolute nothingness, but then you have vision. your vision and that's really important. you have to let go because you're walking in the desert, you take off every precept, nothing that you need absolutely as value anymore. of jewelry, clothing, everything. it's the mechanisms of the desert. today we climb the mountain and the mountain is a place of vision. it's a place that you can see with clarity. it seems to me like in christianity we live the combination of three andhe