Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #295: Todd H. Green - Presumed Guilty (Why We Shouldn't Ask Muslim

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Rick, thanks for having me. Glad to be with you.

Well, I am really excited to have you here today. I so enjoyed your lecture that you gave at the Islamic Day of Ohio at Wittenberg University just a few weeks ago. Hard to believe that time has passed so quickly, but I'm grateful that we had a chance to discuss your new book today. I really enjoyed it, and I think there's a lot in there for people to think about, especially people who maybe have not thought about this question before. Should we or should we not ask Muslims to condemn terrorism? So let's start with this question today. The subtitle of Presumed Guilty is Why We Shouldn't Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism. Who are the we that you are referring to there?

The we is not a fully inclusive we. It's particularly targeting those in the non-Muslim majority populations of the United States and Europe, and I even go so far in the book in the introduction as saying that it includes whites and white Christians, or people at least culturally speaking who might have a white Christian background, because I believe those are the portions of the non-Muslim majority in both sides of the Atlantic that have the most difficulty in terms of really having an honest, nuanced conversation about violence, and whether it's religion and violence or violence in the United States and its foreign policy or whatever, that those are the portions of the population that really struggle with having this kind of conversation and struggle with coming to terms not only with the complexities of, say, terrorism and the role that religion may or may not play in that, but also with some of the difficulties in their own history and even in their own presence, complicity in a violent world order. So I want everyone to read the book, no matter who they are, how they define themselves racially or whatever. But the "we" in particular, "we should stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism," is mostly whites and white Christians who occupy positions of power in the media or in the political establishment.

That's a great answer. And in your book, you present 3 reasons why we should stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism. And even that title alone seems to be controversial to a lot of people. And so I'd love for us to dig into it a little bit because there They really are 3 very helpful reasons when we look at them in the way that you provide them. So what I'd like to do is I would love to have you speak to each of them one at a time, if you don't mind. And we'll start with the first one. The first reason that you say that we shouldn't ask Muslims to condemn terrorism is that the question assumes that Islam is the cause of terrorism. I wonder if you could speak a bit to that reason.

Right. The idea here is that Muslims need to condemn terrorism because at its core it is driven by religion, by Islam, and therefore what connects 1.7 or 1.8 billion people to al-Qaeda or to ISIS or even to lone wolf terrorists who have a Muslim background is the religion, and therefore they have a particular obligation to condemn the terrorism even though they would have had nothing to do with the terrorists terrorism itself or wouldn't endorse it themselves, but the assumption is that they are presumed guilty of harboring some kind of latent terrorist tendencies until they speak out against it, and the reason is because they share the religion, presumably, of those who are perpetrators of these terrorist attacks or who participate in organizations, again, like al-Qaeda or ISIS. So what I basically get at in this portion of the book is expose readers and audiences to the scholarly debate about terrorism and what role religion, generally speaking, and/or Islam in particular, does and doesn't play in terrorism. And the question here that I think is helpful in terms of nuancing all this is not whether Islam plays a role in this. I don't debate that in terms of how it could be interpreted by some perpetrators. It's whether it's the cause or not.

Hmm.

And scholarly consensus, particularly from social scientists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, anthropologists, others who study terrorism and who have engaged with interviews of current or former terrorist members, fighters for ISIS and that sort of thing, the overwhelming consensus is that it's political factors and social factors that are the drivers of terrorism and not Islam itself. It doesn't mean Islam doesn't come to have a role in it, but it's usually as a justifier or something that justifies or sanctifies a cause. But that's very different than saying it's driving the cause. You don't really, Rick, have ISIS soldiers, you know, in the rank and file, some once upon a time pick up the Quran, read a couple verses, close it, and decide, you know what, I'm gonna go fight for ISIS now. I'm gonna commit a terrorist attack. That is not how terrorism works. It's not how religion works. And if the Quran itself was the driver behind terrorism, we have a bigger question to ask, which is Why aren't the overwhelming majority of Muslims doing the same? Why are so few terrorists with a Muslim background actually Muslim, right, as opposed to the overwhelming majority of Muslims? And it can't— the answer can't be Islam, otherwise the majority of Muslims would be doing the same thing and following suit. And there's absolutely no one who's making that argument, no one with any credibility at least. So political factors, responses to occupation, real or perceived military occupation, are big factors driving terrorism. The importance of a sense of a need for belonging, particularly for Muslims in Europe and the United States who on occasion might go join ISIS. There's these social factors, the need for belonging, a sense of purpose, a feeling of not belonging in Europe or not belonging in the United States and not really having a place a desire for glory, and oftentimes a connection to these terrorist organizations that comes about not because of ideology as such, but because of kinship networks and friendships. I think one scholar argued that 3 out of 4 people who join ISIS from abroad join because they already know someone who's a member or they're connected through family members, right? So these social factors are extremely important in getting at this first question, but it's not religion as such that is the cause.. And that's the big point to take away from this.

Sure, and I found that very interesting and enlightening when you were talking about that and then reading it again in the book. And I guess in my mind I can only liken it to sort of the Christian side of things, that, well, maybe Christianity is some factor in something like Westboro Baptist when they come and protest at funerals and tell everyone that God hates them, you know. Or if you have somebody like the KKK that you know, just marginally calls themselves Christian, but is not really driven by the faith. As you said, somebody wouldn't read the Bible and then necessarily jump to those conclusions. So I really appreciated the way that you brought that out in the book. I think it's a very important distinction that we're making in these conversations. The second reason that you give in the book of why we shouldn't ask Muslims to condemn terrorism, you say that the question ignores Muslims who do condemn terrorism. And we always hear, you know, news pundits and politicians on every side asking this, what seems to be a hypothetical question that they already assume the answer to. So what is your response to that, that, you know, that the question ignores Muslims who condemn terrorism? What's your response when you start hearing, well, why don't they condemn terrorism?

Yeah, this part of the book is— was the easiest to write, and— but yet frustrating to write, Rick, in part because the answer is not difficult to find. And it's hard not to have a major eye roll when some prominent journalist or politician asks with a serious face, they ask, "Why aren't Muslims condemning terrorism or speaking out more?" as if it's not easy to find out the truth, which is that they speak out all the time.

Yeah.

And it's not hard to find this information, but yeah, name a major Muslim organization here in the United States and they have made plenty of statements against terrorism. Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Society of North America, you go across the Atlantic, the French Council for the Muslim Faith or the Arab League, etc., etc., right? I mean, almost every major Muslim organization I can think of like that has done so. And one of the things I argue in the book is that in the Google age, right, it takes maybe 10 seconds to Google Muslims condemning terrorism and have a full page on Google, the Google search, right, full of hits to websites that give ample evidence of Muslims doing this. And I can't believe that many prominent journalists and politicians don't know how to do that. Hmm. In fact, the first hit that comes up when I do it is a website that was created last year by a Muslim college student here in the United States. It's called Muslims Condemn. It's a 712-page Google document. Full of thousands of condemnations. It's the first hit you get, right?

Wow.

So this idea, this presumption that Muslims aren't condemning terrorism, it's just not true. And let me make clear, that's not my opinion that it's not true. It is factually incorrect to say that Muslims aren't condemning terrorism. And when you perpetuate the notion that they are, then ask this kind of rhetorical question, "Why aren't Muslims condemning terrorism?" as if the answer is not so blatantly obvious. That says nothing about Muslims, and it says everything about those of us asking that ridiculous question. So that's one of the things I point out in the book, and then I also give examples of these condemnations, both in word, but I also talk about condemnations in deed, Muslims taking action, and stories of, you know, Muslims who participate in the United States military or in European militaries or law enforcement agencies or intelligence agencies. Muslims who engage in charitable activities to raise money to help victims of terrorism or their families. So there are all sorts of things that Muslims are saying and doing. And if the rest of us, Rick Lee James, don't know that, the problem doesn't lie with Muslims. It lies with the rest of us, and we need to get our act together.

Well, it's very interesting, too, that you mention that because my friends here, the Ahmeds, Samina and Sana Ahmed, who I'm sure you met when you were here at the Islamic Day in Ohio. When I was having a conversation with them about this, you know, from the 9/11 attacks, they were saying, "You know what? We were feeling the same thing everybody else was feeling that day. We were feeling that same sense of loss and the nervousness and not knowing what to do, but it was compounded for us because we felt like everyone was looking at us like we did it." You know, and I think that's a very interesting and, and necessary thing for us to take a look at, because here they are, American Muslims, and they're experiencing the same grief and the same sense of loss, and yet at the same time, so many people pointing fingers as if they were responsible for it in some ways. And so I appreciate how you bring that out in the book. I too did a Google search because I just wanted to see myself, and it is astonishing to find the number of Muslims that do condemn terrorist activities. And what I found so interesting about your lecture too is the sources that you gave. This isn't a right or a left issue because you were quoting CNN, you were quoting Fox News and different outlets that all seem to just make this assumption. And so it's an important thing for us to be able to confront that and just to confront the lie that they are not condemning it. So I really appreciate you bringing that out in your book. Well, there's a third reason that we get to why you say in the book that we shouldn't ask Muslims to condemn terrorism. You say that in doing so, we often divert attention away from our own violence in the West. And this was probably the most powerful part of the book and the part you probably spent the most on of any of the three reasons. And you, you ask questions like, why haven't white Christians engaged in the soul-searching that we are demanding of our Muslim brothers and sisters. So I'd love for you to speak to this point about the diverting attention away from our own Western violence that we often ignore.

Right, and you're absolutely right. This was the part of the book I spent the most attention, most time writing. I devote more attention to this topic. I actually think this is, of the 3 reasons, the most important reasons why quote-unquote "we" should stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism. I think it's a diversionary tactic. I think it's a very clear diversionary tactic. And at a certain point in this section, I quote the great author Toni Morrison, who famously said some decades ago that the very serious purpose of racism is distraction. And what she meant by that is that racism distracts people in the majority population, whites particularly, right? And it distracts African Americans. It forces them to be on the defensive to defend their contributions to to society, to defend their history, to defend their very personhood and humanity to a population that never seems convinced. They have to keep doing this over and over again. And I say Islamophobia in many ways functions in a very similar way, which is that it also functions as a distraction. So as long as we are talking about Muslims and violence and the presumed organic link that a lot of people try to make between the two, we don't have to focus our attention on our own history of violence and our own complicity today in a violent world order. And the way I frame this, Rick, in the book is that I say take a category of violence attributed to ISIS, right, that journalists and politicians attribute to ISIS that most of us can agree on. That could be this notion that ISIS is fighting holy wars, that they persecute religious minorities, they have reinstituted slavery, They engage in torture. They have engaged in attempted genocide, right? Trying to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, basically dirty bombs and nuclear weapons. All of which I could say, all that's true. ISIS has done those things or is trying to do those things. And obviously, you know, roundly should be condemned for it. But every single one of those categories of violence applies to the United States and to Europe. And to its white majority populations and its Christian populations, either in the past or in some cases very much in the present. So the idea that this is some unique form of violence that ISIS is engaged in and therefore it must be something that's unique to Muslims is just patently false. That suggests that we don't know our own history and that we're often diverted from paying attention to our own history and much less our own present. So I organize this by, in this part of the book, by chapters and, you know, take every single one of those categories I just mentioned and I illustrate how this has played out in our history from slavery to the persecution of religious minorities, past and present, to torture, which I have a particular interest in. You know, it's not just, we're not just talking about the Middle Ages and people hanging in the dungeons, right? We're talking about the mid-20th century onward torture and Nazis tortured, French and the British tortured in their empires. We're talking about torture in the Vietnam War and the Phoenix Program. We're talking about the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, where we train Latin American dictators and military leaders in the art of torture. We're talking about torture in the War on America and the War on Terror. So, you know, and I do this with other things, right, genocide and whatnot. You name a category of violence that ISIS has committed, or we categorize them that way, and I argue that applies very much to us as well, but we don't have to do the soul-searching. I'm not asked to do the kind of soul-searching that my Muslim neighbors would be asked in light of ISIS's atrocities, and that's my larger point in terms of the moral dimensions of this debate. I think a lot of what we do with Muslims and violence, or presumably Islam and violence, is to distract the attention of the rest of us so that we don't have to come to terms with with our own violence and the role it's played in the building of our nation even, and not to mention our foreign policies or national security initiatives. And until we do that kind of soul-searching, it is hypocritical, truly hypocritical, to ask Muslims to turn inward and to do soul-searching that we're not willing to do ourselves. And trust me, Muslims are put on the spot to do this all the time, and someone like me Rick Lee James is never put on the spot like that.

Sure. Well, and I was going to ask you, you know, we're at a time right now where this week, at the time of recording, it's, uh, it's October 26th today, and these pipe bombs have been, uh, being sent out to, um, different prominent Democratic politicians, people who are critical of President Trump. And it seems like they maybe have caught the person who was behind it just today. And I was thinking today, after reading your book and thinking that, you know, no one's ever asked me, you know, "Well, you're a white Christian," or whatever, "You need to condemn all this today because you must have had something to do with this." And I'm only judging that by pictures of the van that I saw, you know, that seemed to have some sort of, you know, almost a, you know, a white Christian guy vibe, you know, on the van of the person they caught. And it's very interesting that I too, I've never been asked, you know, I do condemn things like that, but I've never been asked myself. And so I was especially interested in the part of your book where it was an honor for me a couple years back, just before he passed away, to go hear James Cone speak on his book, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree." And you touch a little bit on some of the things that he spoke about in his lecture and in his book, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree," about just the lynchings that took place in our own history and the way that they were driven really by— and I wonder if you could just speak a little bit to that because I think many people are going to find that surprising because we don't have this in our history books. It's not taught in schools, and yet it's every bit as gruesome as anything we would hear about ISIS doing today.

Yeah, right. Could you repeat the question briefly?

Well, I just— I wondered if you could speak a little bit just about some of our history of lynching that you talk about in the book. And then there specifically was in the lecture you gave a picture that you showed that kind of showed who was there. But maybe just if people aren't familiar, I find all the time that people aren't familiar with our own history of this.

No, yeah, right. It's a great question. It's a difficult topic to think about, right? But from the late 19th century after the Civil War into the mid-20th century or so, there are about 4,000 people or so, give or take, were subject to lynchings, were killed in lynchings in the United States, right? A number that exceeds the people who died on 9/11. And yet we struggle to come to terms with that history, particularly the white population of the United States and white Christians, and to talk about the role that race has played in lynchings in its history, and also religion as well. And what violence gets remembered and what violence gets erased or forgotten so easily, right? And I frame in my— give a I talk to this, I frame it a lot in terms of 9/11, the motto of which is "Never Forget," right? And, you know, just a little over a decade after 9/11 happened, there was this massive 9/11 Memorial Museum in Lower Manhattan, an extraordinary place, right, where you can go and remember and relive that day. It took until 2018 for there to be a national memorial for lynchings that was built in Montgomery, Alabama. That certainly hasn't gotten the same kind of attention that the 9/11 memorial received. But it took a long time for that to be built. And again, why is that the case? And why is it difficult for us to talk about lynchings? And it's because it's easy to talk about 9/11 because we see ourselves as the victims. It's difficult to talk about lynchings because I think many of us recognize at a certain level that we or our ancestors were very much the perpetrators. And that Christianity was not on the margins, but it's very much part of the identity of many people who did the lynchings. The example I give in the book of a lynching that's significant in my own journey is one that took place in Waco, Texas. A man named Jesse Washington in 1916 was accused of murdering the wife of a farmer, and so he was arrested and put on trial. The jury deliberated 4 minutes, proclaimed him guilty. And as soon as that proclamation took place in the courtroom, a mob was there to drag him out of the courtroom, drag him out of the building, and onto the lawn outside of City Hall where he was stripped and beaten. And again, thinking of James Cone here, right, it's hard not to think about lynchings and the process that took place as very much running parallel to the crucifixion of Jesus. And so here is Washington being beaten and stripped of his clothing and dragged for public execution, very much like Jesus. And then he's strung up and again his toes are cut off, fingers are cut off, he's castrated, some of his body parts are circulated as souvenirs, photos are taken from the mayor's office with the mayor's permission and help in facilitating that.. And the lynching involved actually Washington's body being raised and lowered into fire below. He basically burned to death. What I do when I speak publicly on this is show a picture where you can't really make out Washington's body very well, and that's okay. I'm not trying to draw attention to that as much as to the crowd. There were 10,000 people who showed up to that lynching in a town, in a small city in 1916 that only had 30,000. People or so. 10,000 people. And so you see this massive crowd surrounding it, all white men, right? And if you know anything about Waco, Texas, either in 2018 or 100 years ago, you know that it is a very Christian part of the country. So all these people that, you know, these aren't secularists, they're not Jews, they're not Muslims, they're Christians. And they have somehow managed to reconcile this brutal act of violence that they are watching in or participating in, to reconcile that with their theological and moral convictions. So religion is worth raising. And I'm not saying Christianity caused the lynchings. I'm simply saying they made it work. They made it fit into their theological and moral scaffolding. And I tell the story for that reason. We need to talk about lynchings in that way. That's part of Christianity's history as well, or the history of Christians at least. In the United States, and let's be honest about it. I also raised the question because I lived in Waco, Texas for 4 years, from 1998 to 2002, served as a Presbyterian minister, and I never heard anyone talk about the story. And it wasn't because, Rick, it was a minor incident. Again, 10,000 people showed up to the lynching. That was big by the standards of many lynchings in terms of that size of a crowd. Not one plaque, not one memorial, not one bumper sticker in Waco, Texas with the "Never Forget" for Jesse Washington's lynching. Nothing, right? There's no public memory of this. We don't remember events like that. It takes courage of an organization like the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery to build a national memorial to lynchings. But we don't easily want to remember these sorts of things. We want to remember violence like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 when we were attacked and we perceive ourselves as victims. When we are the perpetrators, we really struggle to remember it. Or if we remember something, like say the dropping of the bombs in Japan at the end of World War II, where we were the perpetrators, we still craft that narrative and construct that narrative in a way that we are primarily being presented as victims ourselves and not as perpetrators. So this is the complexity of our own violence, right? This is the sort of stuff I really hone on in, in the book in terms of what we need to be talking about, what we need to be remembering, how we should go about trying to remember. Remember that. And the more we do that, Rick, the more honest we'll then be about the way we talk about Muslims and violence.

Yeah, well, and I agree with you. And, and one thing that you talked about a lot at the night that I heard you speak was one of the best ways that we can have these conversations is to actually begin to have relationships with people. And so part of the problem is we don't have relationships with people who are part of Islam. We don't have maybe even relationships with people who are outside of our own little bubbles. So we have a tendency to— if we're Christians, we stick with Christians oftentimes, or if we're not, we stick with people who aren't. And one of the best ways that— I loved how you talked about it— was that we could build relationships with people. And you're very passionate about this, and you explained that evening that part of your passion for this is because of the relationships that you have develop. When someone says Muslims, you're not just thinking in a broad group of people. You're thinking of actual names and actual people and actual relationships that you have, and they've influenced and helped you in this dialogue. So with that in mind, and I do believe that's very important, I too have friends who are of several different faiths, and some of them hear things like you're talking about and they still say, "Well, I am afraid." Even so, with all these reasons, and, and, and, and we'll set sort of different things in our mind that we still just can't quite get over. So I'd love to ask you a question, and I told you I was gonna ask you, that keeps coming to me through social media and different interactions with people, and it has to do with Israel. And I know that's a controversial subject on many different levels, and with many different faiths. But I'd love to ask you this because it's a relational question. Do you feel that most Muslims that you have interacted with, people that you know, do they have strong feelings for or against Israel as a nation? And, and why do you feel that they feel this way?

Well, I don't think there's one monolithic Muslim perspective on Israel in terms of, you know, what's what's going on in Israel and Palestine. I think there are lots of diverse opinions, and I also want to call attention to the question, right, which is— I definitely understand the background and some of the comments you've probably been getting on social media. They resonate with my own experiences and questions I get sometimes too.

Sure.

But the question itself of singling out Muslims to ask that question itself raises some interesting questions, right? That why single out Muslims as a population for what's going on in Israel-Palestine? Is cause it's a religious question. Is this religion driving this conflict? That itself is an assumption, right, that we don't want to just take for granted, but actually raise some critical questions about what drives the conflict over in Israel and Palestine to begin with, and whether this is at its core root about Islam, and therefore we need to single out Muslims to ask what they believe about this, or whether this is about something else. Suffice it to say, Palestinians themselves are not all Muslim. Groups, right? So, the Palestinian question, if you will, is not simply something that pertains to people who are Muslim, but it actually transcends religious boundaries. That said, I'm going to be cautious on speaking about what, you know, in terms of my own Muslim friends, what they all believe or don't believe. They believe very different things, have very different positions when it comes to Israel. I will say this: to the extent that you encounter criticisms of Israel among Muslim communities, for example, here in the United States, a common theme I often find is a frustration with Israelis, Israel policy, Israeli policy when it comes to Palestine and the United States and a real frustration about occupation. This is not unique to me. There are lots of human rights organizations, even the United Nations the United Nations itself has weighed in on this, that criticize Israel for significant violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, criticisms involving Israeli practices when it comes to the forced displacement of populations, unlawful killing, sometimes targeting civilians or responding with undue force to civilians who might be protesting, abuse of detention or torture in some cases. The restricted movement that exists in the Gaza Strip and the blockade. Gaza Strip's basically an open-air prison, and it has led to some horrific humanitarian conditions there. And this is all done in the name of security, assuming that all Palestinians are by nature or by default terrorist threats and doesn't treat them as human beings, you know, with full dignity. And deserving of full rights. And of course, there's the obvious problem with settlements and the spread of Israeli settlements that Israel continues to do, and the United States either turns the other way or in some cases actually supports this. And the violence that takes place from the Israeli state sometimes targeting Palestinian— Palestinians is violence from a military that is supported significantly by the United States. We are its greatest supporter in terms of weapons and tens of billions of dollars we give to Israel to do this. So we are part of this violence as well. It doesn't mean there aren't terrorist attacks that some Palestinians engage in sometimes. I roundly condemn those. I know many Muslims who roundly condemn those. But let's please not pretend that Israel is some sort of lamb, you know, surrounded by wolves. Israel is not innocent. And when it comes to their own human rights violations, some would argue they're even guilty of war crimes. And so we're going to have an honest conversation about violence in that part of the world. Let's really be honest and let's broaden our scope and recognize that, yeah, there is some horrific violence on both sides of this, but let's also remember that Israel is the occupying force. They are the ones in the positions of power. And until we have a significant change in the way that they engage with Palestinians and the human rights violations that they perpetuate and the violence that they perpetuate, we can't really have any kind of honest conversation about Muslim Muslims, or much less Palestinians, and their views of Israel. So this is a complex topic, but it's a very narrowly constructed topic, Rick Lee James, when we have this conversation in the United States. We can't actually have— and the political establishment, at least, and much of the media establishment— we can't actually have an honest conversation about Israel because the default orthodox position across the board, for the most part, is that we support Israel at all costs., and we turn a blind eye to their violations. In fact, we tend to support those by the way we support their military and the Israeli state, and Palestinians are on the raw end of that deal. So sure, let's ask these questions about the occasional terrorist attack and let's condemn those terrorist attacks, but let's also recognize why those terrorist attacks are being generated to begin with, and it's not because Israel's innocent. And if we can't have that conversation then we're engaged in self-deception, and we need more moral courage and more intellectual courage in the United States when it comes to how we talk about Israel.

Well, thank you for that answer. And if reading your book and our conversation— and I'm learning a lot— if it tells me anything, it tells me I have a lot more to learn, and I need to keep digging, and I need to keep having honest conversations, and conversations with people that I agree with and disagree with. Both, because I think that helps us to grow. And so I want to thank you for your time today. I want to thank you for your book. I'm looking forward to reading your other book as well. I haven't had a chance to dig into that one yet, but I found this one to be very well researched and very much worth the time. And so I want to recommend it to everyone listening to Voices in My Head. If you'd like to have just a little bit more understanding, the book is Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn't Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism. It's published by Fortress Press in 2018, and you can find it wherever books are online. We will have links to it in the show notes of this show at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. And I really appreciate you taking time to be here and to have this conversation. Todd Green, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week.

Thanks, Rick. I've enjoyed talking to you. Hymns, prayers, and invitations.

The latest album from Rick Rick Lee James has garnered praise from CCM Magazine, Worship Leader Magazine, UTR Media, and more. Written and arranged using hymnals and prayer books for inspiration, this collection of 10 modern hymn-like worship songs will inspire individuals and congregations to draw near to the heart of God. Highlights include Christ is Lord, inspired by St. Patrick's Breastplate Prayer. "Advent Hymn," and the communion hymn, "The Invitation." Worship leaders will be glad to know that all songs on the album are published through Lifeway Worship. Find hymns, prayers, and invitations on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music, CD Baby, and at rickleejames.com. Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/voicesinmyhead. @voicespodcast. And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website at rickleejames.com/bookings. And it would mean the world to me if you would write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction. May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.