He still finds the time for social action
Interfaith group’s new director proud of long history of civil disobedience
Alexander Levering Kern is a man of strong beliefs. Just look at his police record.
Last month, Kern was arrested outside the White House -- the second time he was taken into custody for protesting the war in Iraq.
Two decades ago, he was thrown in jail after a rally against apartheid in front of the South African Embassy in Washington.
"I believe the teachings of our faiths require that we speak out and put our bodies forward," the 36-year-old Quaker said recently, settling into his new position as executive director of the Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries. Based in Newton, it is one of the region's oldest interfaith organizations, with 67 congregations stretching from the heart of Boston to suburbs ringing the city. Among its members in Boston are Azusa Christian Community, Bethel AME Church, the Paulist Center, and Masjid al-Quran; its area members include churches and temples in Medfield, Needham, Newton, Sherborn, Sudbury, Waltham, and Wellesley.
Kern "has extraordinary enthusiasm and experience with social action," said Elsie Dorain, vice president of the ministries' board of directors and a member of the Wellesley Hills Congregational Church, one of the group's founding members. "He's just bubbling over with ideas about how we can be effective."
Just a few months into the job, Kern already is working to forge alliances with area Muslims and establishing a youth corps to fight for social justice.
Leaders of the ministries say Kern was brought in to raise the group's profile and make it a conscience for the region. This marks a shift in direction for the 40-year-old organization, which in the past focused primarily on promoting urban-suburban dialogue.
"It's much more trying to get people to do something together on issues," said the Rev. Anne Rousseau, a ministries board member and outreach minister at the Congregational Church of Needham.
"We're not just do-gooders," Dorain said. "We want to be brought to the table when there are social justice issues to address."
With dark brown hair and beard and a ready smile, Kern, who lives in Somerville with his wife and two small children, has a disarming friendliness to go along with his iron resolve.
In perpetual motion, he may be found volunteering at a soup kitchen, standing vigil against the war, or meeting with groups to enlist them for his organization; Tuesday night, he took part in a memorial service for students and faculty members killed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
This month, Kern and the ministries' president, Peter Barrer, began talks with M. Bilal Kaleem, executive director of the Boston chapter of the Muslim American Society.
Kaleem said joining forces with the ministries would enhance his group's efforts to reach out to the more than 7,000 Muslims who live in Greater Boston, many of them immigrants.
"Our organization focuses on getting the Muslim community involved in civic life and getting them engaged and politically empowered," he explained.
Kaleem said he expects initial wariness. "People always do a much closer examination before entering into a partnership with any Muslim organization," he said. "If I say 'Islam,' the first thing that probably comes to mind is 'terrorist.' That's unfortunate."
"Sometimes the most revolutionary thing we can do is to bring strangers together and make them friends," said Kern, who plans seminars on "what the region needs to know about our Muslim neighbors."
He also wants the ministries to help protect the civil liberties of Muslims and other groups facing government scrutiny.
Kern is not shy about taking a stand on a thorny debate over a proposed Roxbury mosque that has pitted the Islamic Society of Boston, another Muslim organization, against the David Project, a Jewish advocacy group.
The two sides should stop litigating and try "mediating and settling out of court," he said, adding that he believes most of the ministries' membership shares that view.
His father, Charles Kern II, twice left jobs over politics. In the early 1970s, his opposition to the Vietnam War made him a pariah in his Washington law firm. In 1994, he resigned from a post with the Senate Judiciary Committee because of the conservative Republican takeover of Congress.
Alexander Kern's mother, Helen Levering Kern, who goes by the pen name, Montague Kern, wrote an influential article in Rolling Stone magazine about possible complicity by US and Chilean intelligence services in the 1976 car-bomb murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington. Letelier was economics minister under Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende, who also was assassinated.
After the story appeared, her tires were slashed. Her son recalls how unnerving it was for his family. They heard weird clicks on the phone, leading them to suspect that their calls were bugged and that they might be under surveillance by the US government.
Kern said he was just 15 when he was arrested for protesting South Africa's apartheid policies. "It felt terrifying, it felt moving, it felt right," he said.
The experience prompted him to found the Student Coalition to Combat Apartheid, which became a nationwide group that pressed institutions to divest from companies doing business with South Africa.
As a student at Vassar, he joined protests against the local Ku Klux Klan and the college's offer of a lectureship to then-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Kern was among students who took over the school's administration building, prompting Moynihan to quit the post.
Kern transferred to Guilford College, a Quaker school in Greensboro, N.C., and majored in religion with a concentration on African-American studies. After graduation in 1994, he worked as a teacher and in other jobs mentoring young people. He traveled the globe as a delegate to the World Council of Churches.
After Kern received a master of divinity degree from Andover Newton Theological School, the school hired him in 2002 as director of its Faith Youth Institute. Kern said he launched a series of retreats that brought together urban and suburban young people.
It was peace advocacy that got Kern arrested last month. A part-time chaplain at Brandeis University, he joined a contingent from the school on a trip to Washington to protest the war in Iraq.
When he and 200 others tried to circle the White House, police cuffed them, loaded them on buses, and took them to National Park Police headquarters. He was freed after paying a $100 fine.
Kern leaves neither his faith nor his politics at work.
His wife, Rebecca, is a religious educator for the Friends Meeting at Cambridge, a Quaker gathering near Harvard Square.
Despite his and his wife's shared belief in peace, Kern said, he is beginning to feel concerned about their 4-year-old son, Elias, who has put his imagination to work fashioning everything within reach into a weapon.
"He's the best-armed kid in the neighborhood," Kern joked. "He's got a stick collection that's an arsenal."
Even Kern has an occasional lost cause -- at least for now.
Connie Paige can be reached atcpaige@globe.com. 
