Bell aims to restore true meaning of ‘evangelical’

Q. What does it mean to you to be an evangelical?

A. I take issue with the word to a certain degree, so I make a distinction between a capital E and a small e. I was in the Caribbean in 2004, watching the election returns with a group of friends, and when Fox News, in a state of delirious joy, announced that evangelicals had helped sway the election, I realized this word has really been hijacked. I find the word troubling, because it has come in America to mean politically to the right, almost, at times, anti-intellectual. For many, the word has nothing to do with a spiritual context.

Q. OK, how would you describe what it is that you believe?

A. I embrace the term evangelical, if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That’s a beautiful sort of thing.

Q. Do you preach, or perform?

A. I came up through your standard go-to-seminary path, served as an apprentice pastor, did weddings and funerals and hospital visits, but I always veered toward creating things. I was always setting stuff on fire, building things, bringing in piles of dirt. And I started to realize that there’s a dimension to the sermon in which it’s a kind of performance art. Over the years, I’ve realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I’m in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.

Q. I’m struck by the fact that I don’t hear a lot of explicitly religious language, or mentions of Jesus, from you.

A. I think we have enough religious people who are going around trying to convert people. My guard is up when somebody is trying to convert me to their thing. Are you talking to me because you actually are interested in this subject, because you care about me as a human, or am I one more possible conversion that will make you feel good about your religiosity? I don’t have any embarrassment about my religion, and it’s not that I’m too cool, but I would hope that the Jesus message would come through, hopefully through a full humanity.

Interim senator has family link to late cardinal

The connection ties Kirk to one of the odder stories now unfolding in town, as the Archdiocese of Boston seeks to disinter the cardinal’s remains and remove them from land that the church sold to Boston College to raise money to pay off victims of clergy sexual abuse. The saga of the cardinal’s tomb, which has been playing out for five years now, recently moved to Suffolk Probate and Family Court, where Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley and the trustees of Boston College are suing 30 of O’Connell’s living relatives, including Kirk, for the right to relocate the remains.

I last spoke with Kirk about his famous great-uncle about a year and a half ago. Kirk was born in 1938 and the cardinal died in 1944, so they didn’t spend a lot of time together and the memories have faded. But Kirk told me he remembered, as a young boy, visiting Cardinal O’Connell at his grand residence in Brighton (also now the property of BC), and that his most distinct memory was of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance for his great-uncle. At the time of our interview last year, Kirk was opposed to relocating the cardinal’s remains, saying, “I think I speak for the majority of the cardinal’s next of kin in saying that we would like him to remain at his chosen resting place.’’

Kirk didn’t return my call about the disinterment case, but I spoke Thursday morning with his younger brother, Edward W. Kirk, who told me that Cardinal O’Connell presided at the 1934 marriage of the Kirk boys’ parents, Josephine O’Connell and Paul G. Kirk, at a chapel at the cardinal’s residence in Brighton. The elder Kirk went on to become a longtime Superior Court judge and then a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, and “was a great admirer of the cardinal,’’ Ed Kirk told me. To mark that admiration, the elder Kirk placed two plaques on the flagpole of the Kirk family’s summer house on Wequaquet Lake on Cape Cod, one bearing the name of the cardinal, and the other that of the Rev. Jeremiah F. Minihan, an O’Connell aide and Kirk friend who went on to become an auxiliary bishop in Boston. When the Kirk family sold the Centerville house, Paul G. Kirk Jr. removed the plaques for safekeeping, and the O’Connell tributes are now mounted on a flagpole in the yard of the interim senator’s own house on Mystic Lake in Marstons Mills.