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Showing posts from November, 2008

Belief and Change

As one who has been interested in the nature of “belief” from theological and social-scientific perspectives, I was quite taken with one of the slogans of the Obama presidential campaign: Change We Can Believe In . There can be no serious doubt that many people who were caught up in the campaign in support of Obama were also energized by the prospect of change. He declared, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.” Apparently, enough voters chose to “believe” in change as expressed by his vision for America and our recent politics that he is now our President-elect—and many have considerable energy built up and pent up. But apparently, a vast array of these supporters also believe in their own ability to bring change, just as President-elect Obama declared. Now, what to do? It is not likely that the change envisioned by Candidate Obama can be achieved without the help—and continued activity—of

A Call to Civic and Religious Duty

Some years ago, back when the war and the soldiers were young, mortgages and cell phones cheap, executive bonuses and political corruption out of sight, and most Americans cruising along on the waves of a strong economy, an ethics and legal scholar at Saint Mary’s College of California wrote a book entitled Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America (SUNY Press, 2003). In this book, Barbara A. McGraw argues that this country’s “sacred ground” is freedom of conscience, and she makes her case not only by an analysis of our founding documents, but an examination of the social and political mind of the intellectual architect of our system of government, the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. As she sees it, this freedom, first elaborated at length by Locke in the context of social contract and natural law theory, is the ground on which all the enumerated freedoms in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are planted: U