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Showing posts from August, 2010

On Turning Back to God

Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the National Mall in our nation’s capitol has come and gone. Presumably both the litter and the loiterers have been removed. Now the event lives on only in the memory of those who experienced it or saw it on television, and in the articles and columns and blogs finding their way onto the Internet. This blog isn’t one of them, but it does grow out of a prominent theme at Beck’s rally: God and America! More specifically, the theme is God’s role in American society. Beck is not the first, but he is the most recent, to call Americans to turn back to God and thereby emerge from a season of darkness. Any summons to return to God, especially as the antidote to misdirection and error, begs the question of God’s role in our social and political order. Moreover, a call for America to return to God, or the assertion that even now America is turning back to God, raises the question of whether this applies to the nation as such, as a corporate entit

Our Social/Political Pathology

The seasons of political elections come and go, each characterized not only by a set of particular issues but a peculiar tone to the public discussions and debates. Invariably the constellation of issues and challenges facing the country and its political leadership is anchored in but a handful of extra-ordinary issues, those that seem to evoke heightened interest and inspire civic participation, but may or may not actually point our way forward as a nation. Ballots are cast, swearings-in occur, and we get on with our lives, whether we are pleased or disgruntled at the outcome. It is what it is—and we hope to see another day. Wars and wages, rights and responsibilities, freedom and fairness, equality and ecology, safety and security: these are the provinces within which we have crystallized the issues of political elections in seasons past. With confrontation and pugnacity, we achieve a measurable degree of social and political resolution, and move on. Now, however, it all se

Home-Grown Threat to Religious Freedom

Before September 11, 2001, most Americans didn’t know what to think of Muslims, if they thought about them at all. Seemingly isolated terrorist acts occurred in various parts of the world, linked to Muslims who were militant and violent in their activism against Western cultural and political institutions and symbols. The U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed in 1998 and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. But for the most part, Americans were woefully ignorant of the religion of Islam. Then came 9/11. But Americans still don’t know what to think of Muslims. They have opted to remain woefully ignorant of Islam, but to this ignorance have now been added stereotypes and caricatures of the most malicious kind. The September 11 attacks by members of al-Qaeda are unspeakably horrific and will remain so in our nation’s history. Those who lost their lives during the events of that day and those who have served—some at the price of their own lives—in the struggle of the United States to