Part 2 of Hillary's Park Ridge photoblogging: The First United Methodist Church

Part one of Hillary's Park Ridge photoblog is here. All the pictures for this series were taken last Monday afternoon.

Hillary Clinton was once, according to the late Barbara Olson in her indispensable book about Hillary, Hell to Pay, a teenage supporter of Barry Goldwater and his 1964 presidential run.

HRC has changed since then.

How did it happen? Barbara dug into Hillary's Park Ridge, IL past and focused on the First United Methodist Church on Touhy Avenue, near the Rodham home at 235 Wisner Street.

Donald G. Jones was the youth minister there, according to Olson, when Hillary Rodham was a high school student.

Olson writes:

(Jones) conveyed his deep commitment to the theology of Paul Tillich, who redefined Christianity in terms of the German idealistic tradition and existentialism. Jones believed, as Tillich wrote, that the major flaw of contemporary Christianity was its deep roots in middle-class culture.

The Reverend Jones jolted his students with a bracing mixture of counterculture and high culture, the poems of e.e. cummings, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and a discussion of Picasso's Guernica.

In 1965, Hillary wrote a letter to the Reverend Jones, expressing glee over liberal Republican John Lindsay's election as mayor of New York City.

As Olson writes, at that time Hillary "was still a Republican but 'leaning left.' She added 'See how liberal I'm becoming.'"

The transformation was far from complete.

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