Word: chautauquas
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...anniversary of Sept. 11 passed, several new enterprises inaugurated similar efforts. In Portland, Ore., a group called the Abraham Initiative began a two-year, citywide interfaith program. The venerable, Protestant-founded Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York is starting an open-ended Abraham Program involving lectures and trifaith panels. A participant in several such efforts is Feiler. At the end of Abraham, its author announces that understanding how each faith, and seemingly each generation, concocts its own Abraham has liberated him to create his own, whom he whimsically calls "Abraham No. 241." This Abraham, he says, "is perceptive enough...
...decades, marches on Washington degenerated, it seemed, into merely coercive shows of force, of political plumage display. Sometimes, of course - especially in the vast antiwar outpourings of the late '60s - they possessed anarchic energy. And they sometimes accomplished their purposes. But the art form (happening, circus, pep rally, Chautauqua, media spectacle, political threat) has devolved into special-interest pleading. In addition, there is the risk that good causes may be contaminated or embarrassed, as by appalling jokes during the recent gay and lesbian march on Washington, cracks that made Minister Farrakhan's interminable parsing of the mystical meanings...
While parts of Chautauqua are serene, Jamestown is a small, beaten-down city where for years drugs and homelessness have made their mark. Authorities say Williams moved to the community in 1995 to see family and allegedly to sell narcotics. A self-proclaimed member of the Bloods street gang and widely disliked by his Brooklyn neighbors, Williams has eight arrests and three convictions behind him. In Jamestown he seems to have used his urban of-the-street credibility to impress the disaffected girls he picked up in local parks. Chautauqua investigators believe in some cases Williams may have bartered drugs...
That so many did not say no is what horrifies parents and health educators in Chautauqua, who say safe-sex information is widely distributed in the area. As clinics were flooded with young people seeking HIV tests in recent days and an AIDS-education seminar drew hundreds, many, like Sue Genco, a Jamestown mother of three, came to see the Williams case as "our wake-up call...
...Williams' future, Chautauqua prosecutors plan to charge him with first-degree assault in the cases of those who contracted HIV from him. But that may do little to heal the trauma he has inflicted on circles of Jamestown youth. The hope offered by new AIDS treatments still hasn't entered their thinking. "There's nothing to do now," says Danielle Rapp, 18, "but watch your friends...