Friday, May 18, 2012
Bradley, "The Audacity of Faith"
My friend and colleague, Gerry Bradley, has an essay up, over at Public Discourse, about the understanding of faith and religion that was expressed by President Obama during his speech, a few years ago, at Notre Dame. A bit:
. . . The commencement address was full of musings about religious faith, and its tone and substance were remarkably faith-friendly. The president spoke winsomely of his own faith journey, and credited “the church folks” with whom he worked in Chicago as a community organizer with showing him the way to religious faith. Throughout his speech, Obama showed how the Christian tradition supplies him with a vocabulary for describing and understanding realities that he previously glimpsed without the eyes of faith.
The faith of which he spoke was not, however, the faith of our fathers. Therein lies the novelty of Obama’s initiative. He would protect the state from the church, not by privatizing faith, but by redefining it. In a bold and unprecedented challenge to the churches, Obama told believers, not what they believe, but what it means for them to believe it. . . .
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/05/bradley-the-audacity-of-faith.html
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Another timely essay that approaches the topic that Prof. Bradley addresses of John Winthrop's version of a "city shinning on a hill" is Patrick Deneen's essay "Cities of Man on a Hill."
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/664825
"While a long-standing belief in American Exceptionalism can hardly be disputed, further probing of the idea—both conceptually and historically—suggests that “American exceptionalism” can be distinguished as at least three different types. Further, even some main forms of criticism of American exceptionalism can be seen to derive from a similar set of commitments to the transformational power of politics. The more fundamental similarity between both the various types of exceptionalism as well as the critical response by a version of contemporary “cosmopolitanism” comes particularly into view from the vantage of Augustine’s critique of the idea of any national exceptionalism."