A Unique Voice — Keeping Faith in Troubled Times 

By Jackie Savage
Epiphany Chapel & Church House, Odenton MD

On June 3, 2018 the public is invited to an outdoor concert and dedication of a WWI Centennial Monument with keynote speaker, Diane Rehm.

The event includes WWI music by The Maryland Military Band and an opportunity to discover online information about family members who served in WWI. Diane Rehm, whose own father was deployed through Camp Meade to the trenches of WWI, will address the crowd—“Keeping Faith in Troubled Times.”

The Diane Rehm Show was distributed nationally and internationally by National Public Radio until her retirement in December, 2016. She now hosts a weekly podcast, On My Mind (NPR). Rehm has been the recipient of the Peabody Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award. Her father, Wadie S. Aed, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mersin, Turkey, enlisted and served in France with the United States Army, Camp Meade Detachment 147th Infantry 37th Division at the age of twenty-two.

In 1918 the Chapel was a home-away-from-home for soldiers and included “reinforcements to the Chaplains of the colored regiments.” Second-floor rooms provided overnight accommodations. The Chapel is a National Register Historic Site featuring a Chaplains’ Peace Garden with bronze plaques naming 2,929 WWI chaplains among them 24 rabbis and 108 African Americans. The museum is staged as in 1918 with bunk beds, original posters, victrola, trench art, uniforms, and items of everyday life and culture during WWI.

The Centennial Memorial Gardens is a half-acre open-space chapel created with granite boulders from a Maryland quarry and featuring dozens of iron poppies forged by blacksmiths from Belgium. Epiphany Chapel & Church House, this 100-year old relic, remains a unique voice in troubled times.

Diane Rehm