♪ ♪ ♪ coming up, betty rollin reports on doctors performing bloodless surgery on jehovah's witnesses whose religion forbids blood transfusions. many say that is good medicine. also judy valenti looks at the spiritual journey of christian wiman, a poet, teacher, husband, and father who has incurable cancer. >> i have cursed mightily and have been furious, have cursed god just like any old testament prophet. and the jewish holiday of shavuot, celebrating the harvest and the torah, and proclaiming -- >> that you should be really, really, really happy.

>> announcer: major funding for "religion and ethics newsweekly" is provided by the lillian endoumt, a private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interest in religion, community development and education. additional funding also provided by mutual of america, designing customized, individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. welcome. i'm bob abernethy. it's good to have you with us. this weekend, pope francis is continuing the push for peace he began during his recent visit to the middle east, as he hosts palestinian authority president mahmoud abbas and israeli president shimon peres for a special vatican prayer meeting. francis says he believes prayer is a key element in the peace process. earlier in the week, he renewed calls for peace in syria and criticized what he called a

"globalization of indifference" which has numbed people to the ongoing violence and humanitarian devastation caused by that conflict. meanwhile, francis raised eyebrows with some comments about families. he blamed a "culture of well-being and comfort" for convincing some married people not to have children. he lamented that some people think it's easier "to have a puppy or two cats" rather than children. instead, francis said, "fruitfulness" should be a pillar of christian marriage. prayers and remembrances were held around the world this week to mark the 70th anniversary of d-day in world war ii. on june 6, 1944, allied forces invaded the french coast of normandy, an event that ultimately led to the defeat of nazi germany. thousands of allied troops died in what was the largest seaborne invasion in history.

international pressure is mounting on the u.s. government to intervene in the case of meriam ibrahim, a sudanese christian woman who was sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her faith. ibrahim was also sentenced to 100 lashes for her marriage to a christian man, a u.s. citizen. the sudanese court considers their marriage to be invalid under islamic law. last week ibrahim gave birth in prison to a daughter. the couple also has a toddler son, who is in prison with his mother. another sign of declining attendance at many churches, protestant and catholic. the catholic archdiocese of philadelphia last week announced it is closing and merging 16 of its 235 parishes. weekly church attendance in the archdiocese has dropped by more than a quarter over the last decade.

president obama unveiled a new plan this week to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 30% over the next 15 years. several religious groups, including the religious action center of reform judaism, welcomed the new carbon pollution standards. they called them an important step toward curbing climate change and protecting public health. existing power plants are the largest single source of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions. one of the great dilemmas for some religious people can occur when doctrine seems to prevent care -- for instance, when a jehovah's witness refuses surgery because his or her beliefs prohibit blood transfusions. but there may be a way through that problem. betty rollin reports on a surgeon and a hospital operating without the need for transfusions. the technique is called bloodless surgery, and doctors

performing it say it is simply good medicine. >> reporter: the kingdom hall of jehovah's witnesses in cumming, georgia, justine and gary laclair are among the congregants. and they are among the 1.2 million jehovah's witnesses in the united states. the organization of jehovah's witnesses was begun in the late 19th century by a small group of bible students in pennsylvania. >> we believe from the bible that god has a name and it is jehovah, and that his son, jesus christ is separate. his kingdom has been established in heaven and instead of everybody going to heaven when they die there will actually be a resurrection here on the earth and all of our loved ones will come back and we'll enjoy perfect life forever right here on earth. where a lot of religions may teach things such as hell fire,

immortality of the soul, and trinity, jehovah's witnesses don't believe those teachings. we take the bible very literally and believe the bible for what it is. we look for the truth in the bible. >> reporter: one of the "truths" witnesses believe in has to do with blood. >> in genesis and again leviticus, there's very specific scriptures that state that the blood is sacred and that life is in the blood and that belongs to god. so we want to respect that and be obedient to that. so that means jehovah's witnesses do not accept blood transfusions. >> reporter: they believe to do so would be a sin, a sin serious enough that many church members would rather die than receive blood transfusions. this issue has been very much on the laclairs' minds because the 43-year-old justine was about to have surgery. she had a tumor in her skull which had to be removed. for this type of surgery most

hospitals might have required a blood transfusion, which was unacceptable to justine and to her husband gary as well. >> it's her decision obviously, but it makes it a lot easier if she had support and that's really my responsibility and i'm taking it seriously. >> reporter: the laclairs found a solution to their problem in englewood, new jersey. nearly 20 years ago the englewood hospital began a bloodless surgery program. the policy grew out of the need of jehovah's witnesses, and now it has become the hospital's preferred method of surgery for all patients. >> do you see this thing here? >> yes. >> that's not supposed to be here. this is a tumor of some kind. >> reporter: dr. steinberger, who performed justine's surgery, has become a firm believer in englewood's avoidance of blood transfusions. for him it's just good medicine. >> the science seemed very real. the literature seemed to support it and once we started doing the

operations, the results were great. the risks of giving blood in many cases outweigh the benefits of giving blood. there are risks of infections, there are risks of lowering the immune response of the patient, there are risks of giving the wrong kind of blood, errors can occur and if there's any way to avoid getting a blood transfusion, one is better off in general if they can avoid it. >> reporter: in any sense, do you feel the jehovah's witnesses have done medicine a service? >> definitely. they definitely have done medicine a service. >> reporter: the key to successful bloodless surgery is preparation. sherri ozawa directs the hospital's bloodless surgery program. >> many, many patients, estimates are as many 40 or 50% of patients come to surgery anemic. they don't have enough blood cells. very simply, dealing with that

ahead of time, helping to build those patients' blood up eliminates even the question of transfusion for many patients. we could perform even serious surgeries and even life threatening situations bloodlessly with much greater success than other people would have expected, even than we expected initially. >> reporter: and, there is the cost of blood. >> it's immensely expensive and if it's done for no good reason that is billions of dollars of waste in the healthcare system. it costs about $1,100 to give one unit of blood. not to buy it, to transfuse one unit of blood. >> reporter: when englewood's program began in 1994 there were fewer than ten hospitals offering programs for surgery without blood transfusions. today there are about 150 and many more are in development. there is more to successful bloodless surgery than preparation. at englewood they practice precision surgery with minimal

blood loss, and if a patient loses blood and has agreed before hand, the surgeon uses a technology that recycles the patient's own blood. still there is a resistance among surgeons to bloodless surgery. both dr. steinberger and sherri ozawa simply blame tradition and habit. >> the resistance is primarily behaviorally based. physicians get about between three to six hours of training in transfusion science in medical school. they don't know a whole lot about it. so most of bloodless medicine or transfusion-free surgery really is education for clinicians in how to handle these situations without blood. >> reporter: lately doctors from other countries have taken an interest in bloodless surgery, particularly in africa. >> they are learning the techniques that we have learned from taking care of this specific population to use in their countries where either the blood supply is unsafe or unavailable. >> reporter: justine's surgery was successfully performed. she went home to georgia two

days later. >> everything went very well, no problems. she's waking up from anesthesia. there was hardly any blood loss. depending on how she feels tomorrow e can leave when she feels ready to go. >> you did a wonderful thing. >> well, let's see how she does. >> reporter: for "religion and ethics newsweekly," i'm betty rollin in englewood, new jersey. we have a judy valente profile today of poet christian wiman, the former editor of "poetry" magazine, this year teaching at the yale divinity school and yale's institute of sacred music. wiman said poetry and all the arts are essential to experiencing what he calls "glimmerings" of the presence of god. meanwhile, he lives with the implications of his incurable cancer.

♪ ♪ >> reporter: poet christian wiman is in a place where he says his spirit is at home -- the chapel at the yale divinity school. >> there's so much genuine joy and intensity in those services. you think of young people as being ironic and dejected and you know, dispassionate or dissolute maybe. and here are a bunch of people in their twenties that are filled with joy, they're singing out, it is truly inspiring. >> reporter: wiman is here to offer a message to aspiring ministers and church musicians, that poetry is not only a means of reaching out to god, but one of the ways through which god reaches out to us. >> this is true in a profound sense, in the way that art radically expands or extends our notion of god. we've all had the experience of coming across a work of art that suddenly blows your mind and

makes you think of everything differently, think of the world differently, think of god differently. it's actually an absolutely essential element of any authentic and unified religious experience, i think. >> reporter: wiman's arrival at yale's institute of sacred music as a senior lecturer in religion and literature comes at the end of a long personal pilgrimage. one that included years of spiritual unrest and wandering, and led ultimately to an encounter with what he calls "the god of job, the god of annihilation." it is a journey that began here, amid the arid plains and long horizons of west texas. >> i was raised in an atmosphere that was really completely saturated with religion. it was southern baptist, fundamentalist baptist. the bible was inerrant, as we said. and i never really met a person who wasn't a believer until i left that place. >> reporter: wiman left texas to

travel the world, aspiring to be a poet. he also left behind his baptist upbringing but not what he calls an insistent, "clandestine" religious yearning. >> reporter: i wouldn't have called myself a christian for years and years, but clearly it was a passion. it wasn't exactly dormant. he would go on to publish two collections of poetry and win a major award for younger poets. at age 36, he was named editor of the prestigious "poetry" magazine in chicago, just after the magazine was awarded a $150 million bequest by pharmaceutical heiress ruth lilly. he fell in love and married. >> falling in love with my wife, meeting my wife really shook my world up in ways i couldn't have predicted. i had not been able to write for a long time and i began to write after that. she and i began to say prayers after we got together and we also began to talk about going to church. we didn't actually make it in

the door, but we talked about it. >> reporter: then, at the age of 39, just one year into his marriage, wiman was diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer. >> i have cursed mightily and i have been furious and have cursed god just like any old testament prophet. it didn't ever destroy me, it didn't ever make me bitter toward the people that i love. but gosh, it's been hard. i would say the illness made me need to formalize faith, need to find some form for it. it wasn't necessarily that i felt like i needed to be surrounded by people who were going to help us. i think that's part of it. it was more simply a sense of solidarity and suffering and a sense of solidarity and worship. i have a hard time conceiving of a god who is completely removed from suffering. once i understand the notion of

christ participating in suffering, then it makes more sense to me. >> reporter: while wiman found comfort in worshiping with others, he found the ways churches talk about god, faith, suffering and death to be woefully inadequate. christian wiman says people today are seeking a new language for speaking about god. it is a language that goes beyond words, concepts or even doctrine, that taps into a genuine experience of the divine, what he calls "glimmers of god." >> if you ask me, do i get glimpses of god, yes, i get these glimmerings of intuitions, stronger than that really, where the existence of god seems to me absolute. we all go through our lives and then suddenly we'll have a moment when we think, i have faith right now in something. i find that i've had these moments in my life when i have been overcome by what i only know to call god.

think of the atoms inside the stone. think of the man who sits alone trying to will himself into the stillness where god goes belonging. in my experience, the artists that i know, even though they wouldn't call themselves christians, some would, but they are the ones who are fighting to remake some kind of language to connect us with the ineffable, with the divine. if we think that metaphor is how we talk of god, and that seems to me very hard to dispute that there's any other way of talking to god, talking about god, other than metaphorically, then it would follow that the place where metaphor is most powerfully used, most compressed, most concise, most explosive in poetry would be where we would go to find religious enlightenment.

>> reporter: he cites as an example a poem that he teaches in his class by the polish poet anna kamienska. >> lord let me suffer much and then die let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind, not even fear make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before let the grass stay green so that frogs can hide in it so that someone can bury his face in it and sob out his love make the day rise brightly as if there were no more pain and let my poem stand clear as a windowpane bumped by a bumblebee's head it's a hard poem to pray, "lord, let me suffer, let me die, lord, let nothing be changed after my death." >> reporter: wiman is now 46, and the father of twin daughters.

his doctors tell him his cancer is "under control." but his prognosis is highly uncertain. he has endured painful marrow transplants and in the course of many long hospitalizations, confronted death. >> i find that i don't fear death, now for myself. it's just a great tragedy to think of my family. i also believe that death is here to teach us something and that we are meant not to fill up the content of the afterlife, and that we have to mostly be silent about it. >> reporter: a poem he often reads in public came to him after a three-year dry spell in his poetry writing. he wrote it in one of the darkest periods of his illness. it is a psalm-like portrayal of a god who appears in stone, atom, shadow and all creation, or as the poet says, "in every riven thing." >> god goes belonging to every riven thing.

he's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. a part of what man knows, apart from what man knows, god goes belonging to every riven thing he's made. >> reporter: for "religion and ethics newsweekly," i'm judy valente at yale university's institute of sacred music. on our calendar this week -- sunday is pentecost, when christians celebrate god's gift of the holy spirit to the church. according to the new testament, the holy spirit came to jesus' followers in the form of tongues of fire. pentecost is also known as the birthday of the church.

and last week jews celebrated the festival of shavuot, honoring god's gift of the torah to moses. we visited the sixth and i historic synagogue in washington, d.c. and talked with rabbi shira stutman. >> the shavuot holiday is actually one of the more important holidays in the jewish tradition, and it basically has two reasons for being. the original reason comes outof the israelite people being an agricultural people a few thousand years ago in the land that we now call israel. the israelites would bring the bikkurim, the first fruits, the first offerings, of their harvest up to the temple as an offering to god, as a way of saying thank you and in hopes of a good harvest. after the temple was destroyed in about 70 ce, the rabbis needed to enlarge the understanding of shavuot because we no longer had a temple to which people could bring their offerings. so they brought forward this understanding of shavuot as

being the anniversary of revelation -- the anniversary of the moment that god gave the torah, our bible or a part of the hebrew bible, to the israelite people on mount sinai, basically turning them from this rag-tag group of slaves who had just weeks ago come out of egypt into a people complete with its own set of texts and ways of being in the world. shavuot, actually, probably more than any other holiday on the jewish calendar, is very difficult for american jews in the 21st century to wrap their hands around, and one of the reasons is because there are not a lot of the same home-based rituals that we have, for instance, with the passover seder or lighting the hanukkah menorah. you are seeing more and more people trying to engage jewish people and jewish families in the shavuot holiday in unusual ways, and that is what sixth and i is doing tonight -- people

using traditional jewish texts to have contemporary conversations. what -- how does my life have meaning? what are the ten-jewish commandments of sports? how do we take this tradition that has been going on for thousands of years and make it relevant to us today? it is traditional to read the book of ruth, because it is a book about the barley harvest. it's also about what happens in a society where there are haves and have-nots, and how we can act as people who have more, or people who have less, and engage each other to make sure that there's more equity and social justice in the world. some of the other traditions you're going to see here tonight are the making of cheesecake and challah, because on shavuot the understanding is that we're supposed to eat dairy foods, because on the day that the israelites received the torah they also ate dairy foods. there are not a lot of laws that are specific to shavuot. but one of the laws that's specific to shavuot is the

vehayita ach sameach that you should be really, really, really happy, and on the shavuot holiday it is a time of rejoicing, rejoicing in the harvest, rejoicing in this gift of torah that god has given us, and rejoicing in the ability to learn from torah in each and every generation. >> that's what you're seeing us do here tonight -- stay up all night and study jewish text. finally, the gallup poll has reported its annual findings on what behaviors americans find morally acceptable, or not. divorce is tolerated by 69% of us. sex between unmarried adults by 66% and gay and lesbian relations, 58% birth control is accepted by 90%. extra marital affairs, just 7%. that's our program for now.

i'm bob abernethy. you can follow us on twitter and facebook and watch anytime on the pbs app for iphones and ipads. and visit our website, where there is always much more, and where you can also listen to or watch each program. join us at pbs.org. as we leave you, more music from the yale divinity school chapel. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ >> announcer: major funding for "religion and ethics newsweekly" is provided by the lily endowment, an indianapolis-based private family foundation dedicated to its founder's interest in religion, community development and education. additional funding also provided by mutual of america, designing customized, individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. er

>> rose: welcome to the program. i'm charlie rose. the program is "charlie rose: the week." just ahead, an exit interview with the president's press secretary. world leaders remember d-day. and broadaway a audra mcdonald celebrates the life of billy holiday. >> rose: we have those stories and more on what happened and what might happen.