Oh, you came back. I was hoping you would.
Last time, I told you about Virchand Gandhi --- a young Jain scholar who crossed an ocean to stand in a hall full of strangers and speak his truth without apology. I watched him. I was so proud.
And now I want to tell you about someone you might not have heard of. Not a visitor from distant shores. Not an outsider making his way in. This man helped build the room.
His name was Jenkin Lloyd Jones. And if Virchand Gandhi showed us what courage looks like walking through a door, Jenkin Lloyd Jones showed us what it looks like to make sure that door exists at all --- and that it opens wide enough for everyone.
Come sit with me. This one matters.
Chicago. September, 1893.
I was there, though no one saw me. I rarely miss moments like this.
The Art Institute stood at the edge of Lake Michigan like a promise someone had actually kept. Inside, the air was thick with something I can only describe as --- possibility. Thousands of people pressed into those halls, fanning themselves with their programs, whispering to strangers, craning their necks to see the platform where, one after another, voices unlike any they had ever heard were filling the room.
I watched a woman in the third row close her eyes during a Sanskrit prayer. She didn't understand a single word. But something in her went quiet anyway. Something recognized something.
And at the back of the hall stood a Welsh-born Unitarian minister from Chicago. Compact, serious, with the kind of stillness that belongs to people who are genuinely paying attention. He had fought for two years to make this moment happen --- argued in committee rooms, pushed back against the voices that wanted a smaller table, a safer gathering, something more... manageable.
Now he was standing in what he had built. And the faces on that platform --- Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto --- were teaching him something he hadn't expected to learn.
He had come as an architect. He was leaving as a student.
That is the thing about building a door wide enough for everyone. Eventually, you have to walk through it yourself.
His name was Jenkin Lloyd Jones. And I have been waiting a long time to tell you his story.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones was born in Wales in 1843, the son of a farming family with deep roots in Unitarian faith. When he was still a child, his family made the long crossing to America and settled in Wisconsin. He grew up with soil under his fingernails and chapel hymns in his memory --- two things that never entirely left him.
When the Civil War came, he went. Not as a soldier, but as a chaplain. I watched him move through those terrible fields --- tending the wounded, sitting with the dying, holding the hands of boys who had grown up in churches that would have called each other heretics. He noticed that. A Baptist boy and a Catholic boy bleeding into the same ground. It stayed with him.
After the war he found his calling in ministry, and eventually Chicago found him. He built All Souls Church into something that barely fit the word "church" anymore --- it was a community hall, a lecture space, a gathering place for anyone asking serious questions about how to live. He started a journal called Unity --- and he meant that word with everything he had.
He moved in remarkable circles. Jane Addams was nearby --- you might remember her from episode fifty-one, part of our series on the great transformation of the nineteenth century --- building Hull House just miles away, insisting that service to the poor was a spiritual practice. Jones believed the same thing. For him, religion that didn't roll up its sleeves wasn't religion at all.
And then came the Parliament.
He didn't just attend it. He helped dream it into existence, fighting in planning committees for a table that was genuinely open --- not a showcase for Christian generosity, but an honest gathering of the world's spiritual wisdom. He pushed. He insisted. He made himself inconvenient in all the right ways.
Because Jenkin Lloyd Jones understood something that not everyone on that committee was willing to admit. The world was already plural. It had always been plural. The only question was whether Americans were finally ready to look at it honestly.
In 1893, for seventeen extraordinary days, they were.
Here is something people forget about Jenkin Lloyd Jones.
He was not standing on safe ground when he opened those doors.
Unitarians in 1893 America were not exactly welcome at the orthodox table. Too questioning. Too reluctant to recite the creeds. Too willing to sit with doubt instead of drowning it in certainty. I watched the way some of the more conservative clergy looked at Jones during those planning meetings --- the slight pause before they shook his hand, the careful distance in their voices. He was useful to them. He was organized, tireless, visionary. But he was not entirely one of them.
He knew what it felt like to have your faith treated as insufficient. To be told, in so many words, that your searching didn't count as belief.
That knowledge lived in him. And I think it is the secret at the heart of everything he built.
Because when you have felt the cold draft of someone else's contempt for your tradition --- when you have stood on the outside of a door that should have been open --- something shifts in you. You start to understand, in your bones rather than just your mind, that the question of whose faith deserves respect is never really about theology. It is about power. It is about who gets to decide which searches are sacred and which are merely strange.
Jones had decided. Every search was sacred.
But here is what I find most remarkable. He didn't stop at tolerance --- that thin, cool virtue that says I will endure your presence. He went further. He believed that the Hindu scholar and the Buddhist monk and the Jain philosopher standing on that Parliament platform carried genuine light. Not a lesser light. Not a light that needed Christian correction before it could be trusted. Real light. Light that he --- a Welsh Unitarian minister from Wisconsin --- did not already possess and could not find anywhere else.
That is a different thing entirely.
To defend someone's right to speak is one kind of courage. To believe that what they say might change you --- that takes something more. It takes the willingness to be a student. To let understanding come before judgment. To know that you cannot truly respect what you have never honestly tried to know.
The Parliament was built on that conviction. And for seventeen days in Chicago, it held.
I watched people leave those sessions different from how they had entered. Quieter. More careful. As if they had touched something they hadn't expected to find real.
That is what genuine encounter does. It doesn't demand agreement. It demands attention. And attention, paid honestly across the distance of difference, is one of the oldest spiritual practices I know.
There is a principle so simple it sounds almost obvious until you test it against reality.
Religious freedom is indivisible.
You cannot protect it selectively. You cannot say --- this tradition deserves shelter and that one does not --- without introducing a crack in the foundation that will, given enough time and pressure, bring the whole structure down. History has shown me this more times than I care to count. I have watched it happen in beautiful places, in civilized societies, in nations that were absolutely certain they had gotten the balance right.
They hadn't.
What Jenkin Lloyd Jones understood --- and what the Parliament of Religions embodied, however imperfectly --- was that the American experiment in religious freedom only works if it means what it says. All. Every tradition. Every search. Every community gathered around its own understanding of the sacred.
Not because every belief is equally true. That is a different argument and not the one Jones was making. But because the mechanism of protection --- the principle that no government, no majority, no cultural consensus gets to decide which faiths are legitimate --- that mechanism either covers everyone or it covers no one. The moment you carve out exceptions, you have handed someone the power to keep carving.
And here is the part I find quietly extraordinary. By insisting that Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Muslims belonged at that table, Jones was also protecting Unitarians. And Quakers. And every small, questioning, inconvenient tradition that didn't fit neatly into the orthodox consensus. He was protecting people who would not be born for another generation, communities that didn't yet exist, faiths that hadn't yet found their American footing.
He probably knew that. I think that is exactly why he pushed so hard in those committee rooms.
The Parliament didn't solve anything. Religious intolerance didn't pack its bags and leave Chicago in September of 1893. But something was planted. A demonstration that encounter was possible. That you could sit in a room with someone whose cosmology was entirely unlike your own and find --- not agreement, but recognition. The recognition that they were searching. That the search itself was real. That it deserved the same air and light you claimed for your own.
Jones spent the rest of his life tending that idea. He worked toward a permanent Congress of Religions that would keep the Parliament's conversation alive. He kept editing Unity, kept building All Souls into a place where questions were more welcome than certainties. He didn't get everything he wanted. The permanent congress never quite took root the way he hoped.
But the seed he helped plant in 1893 did not die. It traveled. It found soil in unexpected places.
I watched it go.
I want to ask you something.
When was the last time you thought about someone else's religious freedom?
Not your own. Not the tradition you grew up in, or left, or are still figuring out. Someone else's. The mosque three neighborhoods over. The temple you drive past on the way to work. The family down the street whose holy days you couldn't name if you tried.
If you are honest, probably not recently. And that is not a criticism --- it is just the nature of freedom we have never had to fight for. It becomes invisible. It starts to feel like weather. Like something that was always there and will always be there, requiring nothing from us.
But I have watched this story play out more times than I can bear to count. And I need to tell you something.
It is never just weather.
The pattern is always the same. It begins with one community --- usually small, usually foreign-seeming, usually easy to dismiss. Their practices are strange. Their language is unfamiliar. Their holy days fall on the wrong days of the calendar. And someone, somewhere, decides that their freedom is a little less essential than everyone else's. A little more negotiable. A special case. An exception that doesn't really count as an exception because surely everyone can see that this particular tradition is different.
And then the exception gets used again. On someone else. And again. On someone else after that.
I have watched this happen in places that were absolutely certain it could never happen there. Beautiful places. Educated places. Places with constitutions and charters and long traditions of tolerance that turned out, under pressure, to be thinner than anyone wanted to admit.
Here is what I have never once seen. I have never seen a society that learned to treat one community's religious freedom as disposable and then stopped there. The appetite doesn't work that way. The tool, once forged, keeps finding new hands.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones understood this not as a political argument but as a spiritual one. You cannot claim the sacred nature of your own search while dismissing someone else's as superstition. The moment you do, you have said something about what searching is worth. And that verdict will eventually circle back to you.
The sequence he lived by matters now as much as it did in 1893. Curiosity first. Then understanding. Then respect. And only from that respect --- genuine, not performed --- can you defend another's freedom as if it were your own.
Because it is your own.
We live now in the most religiously diverse moment in human history. That diversity is not a problem to be managed. It is an invitation. But invitations can be declined. Doors that took years to open can be shut in an afternoon.
I have seen that too.
The choice, as it has always been, is ours.
I don't want to tell you what to think about all of this.
That has never been my way.
But I do want to leave you with a question. Just one. And I want you to sit with it honestly, without rushing toward a comfortable answer.
Is there a tradition you find difficult to understand? Not one you disagree with in the polite, abstract way we disagree with things that don't really touch us. I mean one that genuinely puzzles you. Or unsettles you. Or that you have quietly decided, without ever quite saying so out loud, is a little less serious than your own searching.
You don't have to defend it. You don't have to agree with it. You don't even have to like it.
But what would it look like to approach it with honest curiosity? To read something written from inside it, by someone who loves it. To sit with a question about it that you don't already know the answer to.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones didn't agree with everything he heard in that Chicago hall. I watched his face during some of those sessions. He was working things out in real time, the way honest people do.
But he listened. Fully. Without deciding in advance what he was going to find.
That listening changed him. And through him, it changed something in the world.
I think it can still do that.
Before I let you go, I want to whisper something in your ear.
There was a woman who was supposed to be in that hall.
Her name was Sarah Farmer. She had been planning for it --- had actually traveled to Chicago the year before with her father Moses to see the World's Fair and scout the ground. She had met the organizers. She had felt the vision of it taking shape. She was ready.
And then her father got sick. Pneumonia. He died in Chicago that spring, before the Parliament even opened its doors. Sarah took him home to Maine and buried him, and the September sessions she had waited for came and went without her.
I watched her during those weeks. The grief was real. So was something else --- a quiet fire that the loss had not extinguished. If anything it had made it burn more steadily.
She never stopped believing in what the Parliament represented. She gathered its echoes --- the people who had been there, the ideas that were still moving through the air afterward. And then she asked a question that I find completely wonderful.
What if this conversation didn't have to end?
What if there was a place --- an actual place, with gardens and gathering halls and summer light on a Maine river --- where people of every tradition could keep talking to each other, year after year, for as long as it took?
She couldn't attend the Parliament. So she built something better. A place where the Parliament never ended.
It was called Greenacre. And the story of how it came to be --- and who eventually found their way there --- is one I have been saving for you.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.