Law prof discusses religion

Penn Law Professor Howard Lesnick has never known quite what to make of organized religion. To answer his own questions -- and to help others come to terms with how religion fits into their own lives -- the 38-year Law School veteran wrote a book about his religious coming-of-age. "My goal is to ask you to try on the spectacles with which I view the world and see how they fit you," Lesnick wrote in the book, Listening for God: Religion and Moral Discernment, published earlier this year by Fordham University Press. Lesnick discussed his book in front of about a dozen people yesterday as part of the Forum for Penn Authors, which holds bimonthly presentations by University professors who have recently published books. Lesnick's book deals with using religious language, metaphors and images as aids to understanding moral truth. "My interest in religion comes out of my and my wife's own life," Lesnick said when asked what inspired him to write Listening for God. "My wife and I had pursued a love-hate relationship with our own religions of origin." Lesnick was born Jewish; his wife, Catholic. Listening for God began as an academic approach to examining the place of religion in law and public policy. But it quickly shifted focus, Lesnick told the audience, when he became more interested in how religion impacted people's everyday lives. Lesnick said he felt the book was an attempt to answer his own questions about morality, which he published because he thought his "ambivalent" feelings toward religion were common. "No matter what you think about religion, it's necessarily true that unless you think you have revelations, you're always believing something [that] somebody else said," Lesnick said. He explained that the book is the story of how his personal realizations about morality developed, and he expressed the hope that it would be helpful to others struggling with the same faith issues. College senior Andrew Melbourne said he enjoyed the speech. "I was especially interested in what he had to say about the differentiations between religious material for spiritual purposes and for guidance in living," said Melbourne, who is in the Perspectives in Humanities program, part of the University's college house initiative. College sophomore Ursula Ahrens, who took Lesnick's undergraduate seminar about integrity last fall, said Lesnick is "very careful in giving answers and thinking about these ideas so that it's a conversation -- open, not didactic." "Finding faith is something that's done with the aid of other people, but ultimately it's personal," she added. Lesnick joined Penn's law faculty in 1960. He received his law degree and a master's degree in American History from Columbia University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. The Forum was sponsored by the Perspectives in Humanities program and King's Court/English House.