Civic Engagement Quotes

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself.

The most important political office is that of private citizen.

...rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids' participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement.

Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off depression, lets go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves.

have come to recognise Abdullah Öcalan not only as a political leader who has been able to engage in self-criticism and change his positions radically, but also as a political philosopher and inspiring civic rights figure.

If we don’t respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making.

In many cases our perspective has been so thoroughly shaped - or even discipled - by worldly ideologies that we mistake our flawed ideological positions for Christian positions.

If you are ever really down on yourself, the best thing you can do is help someone else, and become outwardly focused.

Christianity is not just about going to church. It's a way of seeing and understanding the world around us that should affect everything we do. In other words, Christianity is both a lifestyle and a worldview.

Why were rebellion and maturity continually represented as incompatible? [...] Because if rebellion is the dominion of the young, it is presented as something you should grow out of. Because a mature rebel is harder to dismiss. Because framing adulthood as synonymous with passive conformity excuses adults from an engaged notion of civic ethics, hooks them into compensatory consumption, and provides the young with a reason not to listen.

All incivility is, at its root, preceded by dehumanization. Incivility is toxic because it stems from a lapse in the recognition of human dignity: recognition of the dignity of others or recognition of one's own dignity.

In our quest to become minimalists, we want to reduce the amount of things in our homes that require our care and attention. Fortunately, we have ample opportunity to do so—simply by shifting some of our pleasures and activities into the public realm. In fact, such action produces a pretty wonderful side effect. For when we hang out in parks, museums, movie houses, and coffee shops—instead of trying to create similar experiences in our own homes—we become significantly more socially active and civically engaged. By breaking down the walls of stuff around us, we’re able to get out into the world and enjoy fresher, more direct, and more rewarding experiences.

Love for others should compel us to advocate for justice on their behalf just as we would do for ourselves. When we're confronted with a societal problem we must consider the best solution out of love, compassion, and justice.

Democracy is not something we have by divine right. It is a hard-won privilege granted to us by those who came before us and fought for it. These were people who knew the tyranny and injustice of oppressive masters who would deny ordinary people a voice and basic human rights, such as freedom of expression and association. But we forget that democracy requires an active, informed, and engaged citizenry that seeks the well-being of all, not just their gang, in order to thrive.

People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures—not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.

In politics, civility shows itself in respect for disagreement and in granting others the right to express it. Civility shows itself when we acknowledge the best in our political opponents' line of thinking and the best in our political opponents themselves. Civility is mercy and forgiveness. It is a form of public grace.

Civic flattery - or a political culture that allows people to appear to engage in civic discourse without ever having their opinions, or even their claims of fact, seriously challenged - is ultimately more damaging to democracy than civic enmity. When we incorporate civic flattery into our personal relationships, we get shallow, insincere friendships. When we use it as the basis for political alliances, we get echo chambers. And when a skilled political manipulator flatters a large portion of the population in an attempt to acquire and consolidate power, we get perhaps the most dangerous test that a democratic society can ever face: the emergence of a demagogue.

For six years, I’d assumed this was an inevitable transformation, an inherent part of parenthood. It seemed to be what most parents (but especially women) did, moving their children to the absolute center of their lives and pushing everything else—marriage, friendship, civic engagement, creative work—out to the distant edges where maybe, possibly, it could be revisited in fifteen or twenty years. Or at least, I thought it was parenthood we were moving to the center, but what if that was only part of it? What if the thing taking up so much space was not the fact of parenthood itself, the actual relationship with our children, but the feeling surrounding that relationship, the fearful feeling that we could never quite do enough?

George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As

In reality, Kabila was no more than a petty tyrant propelled to prominence by accident. Secretive and paranoid, he had no political programme, no strategic vision and no experience of running a government. He refused to engage with established opposition groups or with civic organisations and banned political parties. Lacking a political organisation of his own, he surrounded himself with friends and family members and relied heavily for support and protection on Rwanda and Banyamulenge. Two key ministries were awarded to cousins; the new chief of staff of the army, James Kabarebe, was a Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up in Uganda; the deputy chief of staff and commander of land forces was his 26-year-old son, Joseph; the national police chief was a brother-in-law. Whereas Mobutu had packed his administration with supporters from his home province of Équateur, Kabila handed out key positions in government, the armed forces, security services and public companies to fellow Swahili-speaking Katangese, notably members of the Lubakat group of northern Katanga, his father’s tribe.

The colorblind ideology that says “I don’t see race” should not be embraced by Christians. When we choose to look past race, we also choose to avert our eyes from the many ways that even well-meaning people and institutions engage in practices that reproduce and reinforce negative outcomes such as segregation, disadvantages for minorities in the job market, and the portrayal of whiteness as superior in public communications and entertainment. The simple fact is that if we can’t see and discuss the issue of race, we cannot solve the problems that racism causes.

participation in the political process or lack thereof—and the principles we employ—greatly affect our neighbors. Politics can be a matter of freedom or imprisonment, free speech or censorship, housing or homelessness, life or death. Politics is an essential aspect of modern life. It is how we govern ourselves, and it plays a major role in how we organize ourselves as a society. Political actions have started wars and defined certain people as property, but they’ve also fed the hungry and provided care for the sick. Christians must be faithful and thoughtful in how we choose to wield our influence and political power.

Always remember... We are engaged in a battle for the continuation of our capitalist, free-market economic model; our way of life; and our liberty. The enemy is anticapitalist, believes in big government, embraces collectivist ideologies, and has, over the past century, infiltrated every level of our government and most of the banking industry. They don’t care about patriotism, although they may sport the red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes on their bumper stickers. They don’t care about personal responsibility or civic duty. They don’t share your sense of honor. All they care about is power and control over your money and every aspect of your life.

Alwasy remember.... We are engaged in a battle for the continuation of our capitalist, free-market economic model; our way of life; and our liberty. The enemy is anticapitalist, believes in big government, embraces collectivist ideologies, and has, over the past century, infiltrated every level of our government and most of the banking industry. They don’t care about patriotism, although they may sport the red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes on their bumper stickers. They don’t care about personal responsibility or civic duty. They don’t share your sense of honor. All they care about is power and control over your money and every aspect of your life.

Peter Block is an author and consultant who writes about community development and civic engagement. He is a master at coming up with questions that lift you out of your ruts and invite fresh reevaluations. Here are some of his: “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?…What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?…What forgiveness are you withholding?…How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?…What is the gift you currently hold in exile?” Mónica Guzmán, the journalist I quoted in the last chapter, asks people, “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who felt a responsibility to run for the school board? A few years ago, I met some guys who run a program for gang members in Chicago. These young men have endured a lot of violence and trauma and are often triggered to overreact. One of the program directors’ common questions is “Why is that a problem for you?” In other words they are asking, “What event in your past produced that strong reaction just now?” We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life: “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?

For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.

Civic charity is easy to talk about but tremendously difficult to practice - mainly because a lot of people don't reciprocate. Some people will be rude and obnoxious and will laugh at us when we try to engage with them charitably. They will see our generosity as a sign of weakness and take advantage of our good nature to abuse us further. We will forgive them the requisite seventy times seven times, and they will keep on offending us. Charity always works this way, both the civic kind and the 'love-other-people-like-God-loves-you' kind. We need not think, however, that we are shirking our duties or abandoning our causes when we decline to angrily denounce those on the other side or to treat them like subhuman imbeciles. Charitable engagement does not always change people's hearts and minds, but the number of times it has done so is not zero - which gives charity a better track record than anger, contempt, and derision. Ultimately, though, mature and thoughtful people do not allow the way other people treat them to determine how they treat other people; when we do this, we surrender an enormous amount of power to people who do not wish us well.

Selecting officials on the basis of their mastery of literature and philosophy had several advantages. It ensured that most Chinese bureaucrats were smart—the examinations had the effect of screening for IQ as well as the ability to memorize. Another advantage of the examination system was its emphasis on merit over family background, engaging the loyalties of the lower classes by making it possible for a man of humble birth to pass the jin shi and become a mandarin. Still a third advantage was that the examination system co-opted the intellectual classes, who in other societies were often critics of the established order. Intellectuals in traditional China had a ready avenue to power. Above all, the examination system ensured that throughout the country, voluntarily, each generation of the most talented people in China steeped themselves in the core cultural values of the empire. From a pragmatic standpoint, this was a good thing for preserving cultural continuity. But it was also a good thing because those core cultural values constituted such a remarkable legacy in themselves, amalgamating properties that in the West would be divided into religion and civic culture.

Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by Divine wisdom. Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it. In like manner God pours forth the gifts of His goodness first and most plentifully on the substances which are nearest to Him, as Dionysius declares (On the Celestial Hierarchy, VII). But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us. Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.

In his sermons, as in the book he published in 2005, The Myth of a Christian Nation, Boyd challenged the idea that America had been, or ever could be, a “Christian nation.” Taking his text from the Gospels, he reminded evangelicals that Christ’s kingdom was “not of this world,” and worldly kingdoms were the domain of fallen man. Evangelicals, he wrote, speak of “taking America back to God,” but the Constitution said nothing about a Christian nation, and America never remotely looked like the domain of God, certainly not in the days of slavery or of Jim Crow, and not today. A nation may have noble ideals and be committed to just principles, but of necessity it wields the “power over” of the sword, as opposed to the “power under” of the cross—which is that of Jesus’ self-sacrificial love. To identify the Kingdom of God with that of any version of the kingdom of the world is, he wrote, to engage in idolatry. The myth of a Christian nation, he continued, has led to the misconception that the American civil religion is real Christianity. Evangelicals, he wrote, spend our time striving to keep prayer in the public schools, “In God we trust” on our coins, and the Ten Commandments in public places. Might it not be, he asked, that the effort to defend prayer before civic functions reinforces the notion that prayer is a perfunctory social activity? And what if we spent all that energy serving each other with Christ-like love? We could, he wrote, feed the hungry, house the homeless, bridge the “ungodly racial gap,” and side with others whose rights are routinely trampled.

It had had a fragrant element, reminding him of a regular childhood experience, a memory that reverberated like the chimes of a prayer bell inside his head. For a few moments, he pictured the old Orthodox church that had dominated his remote Russian village. The bearded priest was swinging the elaborate incense-burner, suspended from gold-plated chains. It had been the same odour. Hadn’t it? He blinked, shook his head. He couldn’t make sense of that. He decided, with an odd lack of enthusiasm, that he’d imagined it. The effects of the war played tricks of the mind, of the senses. Looking over his shoulder, he counted all seven of his men as they emerged from the remnants of the four-storey civic office building. A few muddied documents were scattered on the ground, stamped with the official Nazi Party eagle, its head turned to the left, and an emblem he failed to recognize, but which looked to him like a decorative wheel, with a geometrical design of squares at its centre. Even a blackened flag had survived the bomb damage. Hanging beneath a crumbling windowsill, the swastika flapped against the bullet-ridden façade, the movement both panicky and defiant, Pavel thought. His men were conscripts. A few still wore their padded khaki jackets and mustard-yellow blouses. Most, their green field tunics and forage caps. All the clothing was lice-ridden and smeared with soft ash. Months of exposure to frozen winds had darkened their skins and narrowed their eyes. They’d been engaged in hazardous reconnaissance missions. They’d slept rough and had existed on a diet of raw husks and dried horsemeat. Haggard and weary now, he reckoned they’d aged well beyond their years.

Our political system today does not engage the best minds in our country to help us get the answers and deploy the resources we need to move into the future. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence in the same way that markets have unleashed our collective productivity. “We the people” must reclaim and revitalize the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated—but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities—especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power—has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. The freedoms embodied in our First Amendment represented the hard-won wisdom of the eighteenth century: that individuals must be able to fully participate in challenging, questioning, and thereby breathing human values constantly into the prevailing ideologies of their time and sharing with others the wisdom of their own experience.

A church that truly understands the implications of the biblical gospel, letting the “word of Christ dwell in [it] richly” (Col 3:16), will look like an unusual hybrid of various church forms and stereotypes. Because of the inside-out, substitutionary atonement aspect, the church will place great emphasis on personal conversion, experiential grace renewal, evangelism, outreach, and church planting. This makes it look like an evangelical-charismatic church. Because of the upside-down, kingdom/incarnation aspect, the church will place great emphasis on deep community, cell groups or house churches, radical giving and sharing of resources, spiritual disciplines, racial reconciliation, and living with the poor. This makes it look like an Anabaptist “peace” church. Because of the forward-back, kingdom/restoration aspect, the church will place great emphasis on seeking the welfare of the city, neighborhood and civic involvement, cultural engagement, and training people to work in “secular” vocations out of a Christian worldview. This makes it look like a mainline church or, perhaps, a Kuyperian Reformed church. Very few churches, denominations, or movements integrate all of these ministries and emphases. Yet I believe that a comprehensive view of the biblical gospel — one that grasps the gospel’s inside-out, upside-down, and forward-back aspects — will champion and cultivate them all. This is what we mean by a Center Church.

As the state spreads it tentacles into every corner of life in the name of regulation, rationalization or economic development, people who wanted their way of life to continue would have no choice but to engage the political system, no matter how much they had wanted to mind their own business. The Catch-22 was that an attempt at such engagement could be deemed as the government as political interference deserving of a tough response. Thus, civic groups had to find ways to protect their interests without being seen as challenging the government's dominance; to act politically while seeming apolitical.

when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence.

Tea Party Patriots, Inc., as an organization, believes in Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets. Tea Party Patriots, Inc. is a non-partisan grassroots organization of individuals united by our core values, which derive from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, and the Bill of Rights as explained in The Federalist Papers. We recognize and support the strength of a grassroots organization powered by activism and civic responsibility at a local level. We hold that the United States is a republic conceived by its architects as a nation whose people were granted “unalienable rights” by our Creator. Chief among these are the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Tea Party Patriots stand with our Founders, as heirs to the Republic, to claim our rights and duties which preserve their legacy and our own. We hold, as did the Founders, that there exists an inherent benefit to our country when private property and prosperity are secured by natural law and the rights of the individual. As an organization we do not take stances on social issues. We urge members to engage fully on the social issues they consider important and aligned with their beliefs.

We make sense of the variability in civic imaginations by observing that they cluster around three strong sets of discourses: concern with inequality, prioritizing solidarity, and collective thinking to solve social problems.First, some civic imaginations cluster around the need to fight unequal distributions of power in society. Individuals and organizations with this imagination see themselves acting at the local level to contribute to a much broader struggle against systemic social inequalities, and prioritize the opinions, voices, and actions of those most affected by injustice. A second type of civic imagination clusters around the idea of promoting community solidarity, making claims for people to come together, to develop a sense of community and collective culture, and to strengthen neighborhoods and local spaces. A third type clusters around the belief that by simply coming together and communicating, people can generate creative solutions to social problems. We argue that listening for others’ civic imaginations is a way to gain clarity about the inspirations of engaged citizens and civic groups, their actions and their pitfalls. It is a means of understanding political culture, of examining civic life, of studying democracy in action2

The alienation of Americans from the democratic process has also eroded knowledge of the most basic facts about our constitutional architecture of checks and balances. When the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a broad survey on our Constitution, released in September 2006, they found that more than a third of the respondents believed the executive branch has the final say on all issues and can overrule the legislative and judicial branches. Barely half—53 percent—believed that the president was required to follow a Supreme Court decision with which he disagreed. Similarly, only 55 percent of those questioned believed that the Supreme Court had the power to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Another study found that the majority of respondents did not know that Congress—rather than the president—has the power to declare war. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted a study in 2005 of what our nation’s college students knew about the Constitution, American government, and American history that provoked the American Political Science Association Task Force on Civic Education to pronounce that it is “axiomatic that current levels of political knowledge, political engagement, and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of democratic politics in the United States.” The study found that less than half of college students “recognized that the line ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ is from the Declaration of Independence.” They also found that “an overwhelming majority, 72.8 percent, could not correctly identify the source of the idea of ‘a wall of separation’ between church and state.” When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation conducted a survey of high school students to determine their feelings toward the First Amendment, they found that “after the text of the First Amendment was read to students, more than a third of them (35 percent) thought that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees. Nearly a quarter (21 percent) did not know enough about the First Amendment to even give an opinion. Of those who did express an opinion, an even higher percentage (44 percent) agreed that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” The survey revealed that “nearly three-fourths” of high school students “either don’t know how they feel about [the First Amendment] or they take it for granted.

This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, "Occupy Wall Street," and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate unlike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power.

Such processes also take them beyond their own immediate family and friends and engage them in conversations with agency and civic leaders. These experiences show them that their ideas have merit and that they possess the capacity to voice their concerns in ways that are capable of gaining the ear of decision-makers. Alienation is commonly associated with the experience of political disenfranchisement.

shifts is participatory learning. Participatory learning includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment on one another's projects, and plan, design, implement, advance, or simply discuss their practices, goals, and ideas together. This method of learning has been promoted both by HASTAC and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Participatory learning begins from the premise that new technologies are changing how people of all ages learn, play, socialize, exercise judgment, and engage in civic life. Learning environments-peers, family, and social institutions (such as schools, community centers, libraries, museums, even the playground, and so on)-are changing as well. The concept of participatory learning

Civically engaged, business oriented, technology obsessed, and socially skilled, Franklin was "our founding Yuppie," declares the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Franklin "would have felt right at home in the information revolution," Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of the statesman. "We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan of a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas." The essence of Franklin's appeal is that he was brilliant but practical, interested in everything, but especially in how things work.

Raised in privilege, Robert Moses was always cushioned from real life; from the age of nine, he slept in a custom-made bed and was served dinner prepared by the family’s cook on fine china. As Parks Commissioner, he swindled Long Island farmers and homeowners out of their land to build his parkways—essentially cattle chutes that skirted the properties of the rich, allowing those well-off enough to own a car to get to beaches disfigured by vast parking lots. He cut the city off from its waterfront with expressways built to the river’s edge, and the parks he built were covered with concrete rather than grass, leaving the city grayer, not greener, than it had been before. The ambient racism of the time hardly excuses his shocking contempt for minorities: of the 255 new playgrounds he built in the 1930s, only one was in Harlem. (Physically separated from the city by wrought-iron monkeys.) In the decade after the Second World War, he caused 320,000 people to be evicted from their homes; his cheap, sterile projects became vertical ghettos that fomented civic decay for decades. If some of his more insane schemes had been realized—a highway through the sixth floor of the Empire State Building, the Lower Manhattan Expressway through today’s SoHo, the Battery Bridge whose approaches would have eliminated Castle Clinton and Battery Park—New York as we know it would be nearly uninhabitable. There is a name for what Robert Moses was engaged in: class warfare, waged not with armored vehicles and napalm, but with bulldozers and concrete.

Important causes and people in need lose precious political capital when their advocates are loud but don't clearly understand the process.

The goal is not to have all Christians share the same exact politics but to have all Christians think Christianly about politics.

America's current political system separates love from truth, compassion from conviction, and social justice from moral order as if they're somehow at odds with one another. People who support social justice issues generally don't support traditional views of morality and vice versa. But there's no clear reason why those two stances should be separate. It's just presented to us as the only way, and we accept it.

Christians must be critical thinkers and question the assumptions and conclusions presented to us. We shouldn't simply accept the issues as they've been framed by political parties, ideological tribes, or the media - because these sources usually aren't analyzing the issues from the standard of the gospel.

As Christians, part of our purpose is to direct people toward the love of Christ, which acknowledges the dignity of all people, and toward his truth, which allows for human flourishing.

Indeed, we should be careful to ensure that we do not invoke moral order only in regard to issues that don't affect us directly. Christians should be sure that they first apply any standard to themselves and those ideas most personal to them before thinking about how that standard affects others (Matthew 7:5).

At certain times and on certain issues Christian principles compel us to defy both political conservatism and political progressivism. When it comes to political ideology, to be conservative or progressive at all times and on every issue is not only to be intellectually lazy and easily manipulated, but also it's unfaithful.

Our purpose in civic engagement is not to make our own names great but to make known the greatness of the One who sends us. Our great desire is to be agents of the will of God in the earth, distribution centers for the love of God toward his creation.

In one sense, just about everyone contributes something to the direction of the culture, starting in the home and then extending outward to civic involvement and engagement with other people. We are culture-making cultures.

Pastor Tim Keller once said that “love without truth is sentimentality (overly emotional and lacking substance) and truth without love is harshness.”1 We can know the Bible front to back and be adept in our understanding of systematic theology, but if we don’t love our neighbors, we’re not being Christlike. If we use doctrine to correct people but don’t show them love and compassion, not only will we be ineffective but more importantly we’ll fail to follow Christ’s example. The apostle Paul says, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians

Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.

Christians should say, "I support social justice, morality, and family values. I don't affirm ungodly behavior, nor do I hate the individual; I affirm the human dignity of all people. I love and care for the poor, and I believe in personal responsibility." In other words, proper framing allows us to embrace the love and truth of the gospel. Christians can reject false choices without walking away from civic engagement altogether.

As Christians, we have to be careful about how we label people. When we portray others in a demeaning light, we sin against them and reveal our own lack of wisdom (Proverbs 11:12). Discrediting a group might help us win an argument, but if it belittles our neighbor, it's wrong.

We must confront racism with humility and grace, with a posture of self-examination, not self-defense, remembering that God demands something of all of us (Exodus 20), even if we've been the victim. As Christians we ought to have a much clearer view of our own depravity and need for mercy. That awareness of sin in our lives and in our own cultures must drive us to a posture of humility, first toward God and then by extension to our fellow humans (Ephesians 5:21). Furthermore, being aware of the profound mercy and forgiveness of God, we should find grace to confront our personal and cultural issues knowing that we serve a God of love who intends to cleanse us from sin rather than to destroy us because of it (1 John 1:9).

For Professor John Inazu, humility does not reflect a lack of conviction, but rather reflects "the limits of translation, and the difficulty of proving our deeply held values to one another... Humility also recognizes that our human faculties are inherently limited - our ability to think, reason and reflect is less than perfect, a limitation that leaves open the possibility that we are wrong.

When in conflict we should demonstrate that our public witness is more important than winning a political battle.

As a result of this creeping public fatalism, we now have depressingly low levels of civic participation, knowledge, engagement, and awareness. Political life has been subcontracted out to a band of professionals—money people, message people, outreach people. The rest of us are made to feel like amateurs, as in suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. And this pervasive power illiteracy becomes, in a vicious cycle, both a cause and a consequence of the concentration of opportunity, wealth, and clout in society.

To love others as we love ourselves is to give them the care and consideration that we’d provide for ourselves and our loved ones. If we were negatively impacted by injustice, we would advocate for ourselves; according to Scripture, we should also advocate and stand up for others (Isaiah 1:17).

Because sustaining civic feeling is so difficult, democracies are subject to entropy. When the bond of citizenship is badly cast or has been allowed to weaken, there is a natural tendency for subpolitical attachments to become paramount in people's minds. We see this in every failed American effort to export democracy abroad. And we are also seeing it in Eastern Europe today, a particularly tragic development. Within a few years after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, democratic institutions were established there. But not a sense of shared citizenship, which is the work of generations. Democracies without democrats do not last. They decay, into oligarchy, theocracy, ethnic nationalism, tribalism, authoritarian one-party rule, or some combination of these.

Showing kindness means being able to unconditionally accept people for who they are without approving of their choices, even if we believe those choices are outside of God’s will according to our understanding of God’s Word.

People are paying attention to how Christians operate in political life. They want to know if faith makes a difference in how to think about politics, in how to carry out those duties of citizenship

As Christians, our primary objective is to profess the gospel of Jesus Christ to all nations (Matthew 28:16-20). No other task should be allowed to interfere with or obscure that purpose. If the Great Commission becomes secondary, or if Christianity is understood primarily as a means of accomplishing social or political goals, then we’ve handed to Caesar what belongs to God (Matthew 22:21).

To avoid or dismiss political engagement is to forgo an important opportunity to help our neighbors and to promote the righteousness and justice that are the foundation of God’s throne (Psalm 89:14).

In Micah 6:8, we find what has been called the Great Requirement: He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Just as the Great Commandment requires us to actively love our neighbors, the Great Requirement commands us to further the cause of justice.

Consequently, we swing between disorder and overly harsh rules, roles, and systems that trample on humanity’s God-given rights.

The notion that religion is bound to disappear has become increasingly untenable. There are far too many spiritually serious, well-educated, economically sophisticated, civically engaged religious people in the world. There is no doubt that the nature and role of religion has changed, but these founding myths of social science have run their course. Rather than assuming that spiritual beliefs are irrational and religious participation is regressive, researchers are now asking whether and under what conditions different sorts of beliefs and spiritual practices have what kinds of effects.

Educators who teach low-income and nonwhite students can take steps to combat these gaps in political attitudes and civic engagement. First, we can go beyond the typical list of famous activists of color and introduce students to “ordinary” role models, people who share their racial, ethnic, cultural, and/or class-related characteristics, live and/or work locally, may be relatively unknown, and are effectively engaged in civic or political action. We can teach students that the ordinary, everyday acts taken by these people make significant differences to their communities. Finally, we can help students identify and practice the key skills deployed by these “ordinary” role models as a means of becoming efficacious, engaged civic and political actors themselves.

Frederick Douglass, the Christian abolitionist, orator, and writer, understood this quite well. In a lecture in Rochester, New York, he said, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”17 That quote may seem trite until you understand the context in which Douglass said it. He was explaining that he would partner with the American Anti-Slavery Society to abolish slavery, but he would not partner in their effort to abolish the American government as a whole. They believed the US Constitution was a slaveholding document and that they needed to abolish the Union itself for the sake of emancipation. Douglass disagreed. He understood the flaws in the US Constitution and the blind spots of the founders, but he believed the Constitution opened the door and provided the apparatus to abolish slavery. He said, “To dissolve the Union, as a means to abolish slavery, is about as wise as it would be to burn up this city in order to get the thieves out of it.”18 No one could credibly claim that Douglass didn’t understand the issue or wasn’t taking it seriously enough. He had himself been a slave, was separated from his family, and was physically beaten in this demonic institution of slavery, yet Douglass refused to surrender his critical thinking just to appease his partners. This took an incredible amount of fortitude and vision. Remember Douglass the next time your political partners demand that you go along to get along. This man of faith understood that the means of achieving emancipation were not to be overlooked—and history proved him right. Efforts go wrong when people who know better become yes men or women. We hurt the cause most when we fail to be its moral anchor and moral compass.

The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.

Race is not an easy topic to engage, but an unwillingness to confront the issue of racism is one of the greatest roadblocks to reconciliation.

Some Christians are more willing to defend their ideological tribe than the Christian faith. It’s imperative that Christians are deliberate about avoiding partisan and ideological indoctrination. We also compromise our faith when we look to political tribes for validation simply because we want to belong. Our partisan and ideological affiliations should never become religious in nature.

In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: Keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence.

The standard story of cultural conflict in America has conservative Christians defending established forms of social authority, while Progressives see themselves as challenging established norms and institutions, a self-assessment that the media accept at face value. The reality is the opposite. The counter-culturalism of the Faithful gives them an independent spirit. The committed core of Christians in America increasingly lives on the peripheries of cultural and institutional power. The Engaged Progressives, in command of civic institutions, are the establishmentarians. A

Cheered on by the growing crowd, Gabrielli joined forces with Mario. My teacher said, “In antiquity, pederasty was seen as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values by the older man to the younger, as well as a form of sexual expression. It gained representation in history from the Archaic period onwards in Ancient Greece.” Both men had created an imaginary platform, as if speaking in a forum at an ancient amphitheater. “According to Plato, in ancient Greece, pederasty was a relationship and a bond, be it sexual or chaste, between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. “Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

There can be no liberal politics without a sense of we—of what we are as citizens and what we owe each other. If liberals hope ever to recapture America’s imagination and become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to beat the Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe Sixpack. They must offer a vision of our common destiny based on one thing that all Americans, of every background, actually share. And that is citizenship. We must relearn how to speak to citizens as citizens and to frame our appeals—including ones to benefit particular groups—in terms of principles that everyone can affirm. Ours must become a civic liberalism.* This does not mean a return to the New Deal. Future liberals cannot be like the liberals of yore; too much has changed. But it will require that the spell of identity politics that has held two generations in its thrall be broken so that we can focus on what we share as citizens. I hope to convince my fellow liberals that their current way of looking at the country, speaking to it, teaching the young, and engaging in practical politics has been misguided and counterproductive. Their abdication must end and a new approach must be embraced.   It is a bittersweet truth that there has never been a better opportunity in half a century for liberals to start winning the country back. Republicans since Trump’s election are in disarray and intellectually bankrupt. Most Americans now recognize that Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” has turned into rust belt towns with long-shuttered shops, abandoned factories invaded by local grasses, cities where the water is undrinkable and guns are everywhere, and homes across the country where families are scraping by with part-time minimum-wage jobs and no health insurance. It is an America where Democrats, independents, and many Republican voters feel themselves abandoned by their country. They want America to be America again. But there is no again in politics, just the future. And there is no reason why the American future should not be a liberal one. Our message can and should be simple: we are a republic, not a campsite. Citizens are not roadkill. They are not collateral damage. They are not the tail of the distribution. A citizen, simply by virtue of being a citizen, is one of us. We have stood together to defend the country against foreign adversaries in the past. Now we must stand together at home to make sure that none of us faces the risk of being left behind. We’re all Americans and we owe that to each other. That’s what liberalism means.

Asking democratic citizens to leave their moral and religious convictions behind when they enter the public realm may seem a way of ensuring toleration and mutual respect. In practice, however, the opposite can be true. Deciding important public questions while pretending to a neutrality that cannot be achieved is a recipe for backlash and resentment. A politics emptied of substantive moral engagement makes for an impoverished civic life. It is also an open invitation to narrow, intolerant moralisms. Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.

Fight for the Future (fightforthefuture.org) is dedicated to protecting and expanding the Internet’s transformative power in our lives by creating civic campaigns that are engaging for millions of people.

High-quality national surveys of high school seniors confirm that kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes.

America is marred by low societal cohesion, political fragmentation, loss of public trust in government, weakened national institutions, and reduced civic engagement. It is

Much is made about the right to vote and the importance of election days. However, if we reduce civic engagement to a singular vote every two or four years, we are part of the problem. Yes, get out and vote. But don’t just cast a vote. Embody your faith. Serve your neighbors. Advocate for the last and the least. Share the gospel. Work for the common good. Pursue justice. Seek the peace of your city.

Boomers: so many of whom walked away from the church and retain only a disfigured Sunday school memory of the Christian faith. Gen Xers: the first generation “raised without religion: according to Vancouver author Douglas Copeland, and yet many of us in this generation retain some structural memory of Christendom through school and society. Millennials: raised with more secular/civic religion beliefs like environmentalism and respect for ancient cultures (Indigenous, etc.)—all good of course, but tricky to witness to with no Christian memory. Generation Z/iGen: even further along the secularity path, now open to hearing about Christianity without the baggage that their boomer grandparents often attach to the faith.

First, reframe the purpose of taxes to help build social consensus for the kind of higher-tax, higher-returns public sector that has been a proven success in many Scandinavian countries. And remember, the verbal framing expert George Lakoff advises to choose your words wisely: don’t oppose tax relief—talk about tax justice. Likewise, the notion of public spending is often used by those who oppose it to evoke a never-ending outlay. Public investment, on the other hand, focuses on the public goods—such as high-quality schools and effective public transport—that underpin collective well-being.57 Second, end the extraordinary injustice of tax loopholes, offshore havens, profit shifting and special exemptions that allow many of the world’s richest people and largest corporations—from Amazon to Zara—to pay negligible tax in the countries in which they live and do business. At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens worldwide, representing an annual loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue, a sum that could end extreme income poverty twice over.58 At the same time, transnational corporations shift around $660 billion of their profits each year to near-zero tax jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda and Luxembourg.59 The Global Alliance for Tax Justice is among those focused on tackling this, campaigning worldwide for greater corporate transparency and accountability, fair international tax rules, and progressive national tax systems.60 Third, shifting both personal and corporate taxation away from taxing income streams and towards taxing accumulated wealth—such as real estate and financial assets—will diminish the role played by a growing GDP in ensuring sufficient tax revenue. Of course progressive tax reforms such as these can quickly encounter pushback from the corporate lobby, along with claims of state incompetence and corruption. This only reinforces the importance of strong civic engagement in promoting and defending political democracies that can hold the state to account.

Yogic civic engagement invites a joyful paradox. Civic engagement invites us to get involved and to act within the world without getting too attached to being of the world. Civic engagement is connecting, acting and caring beyond the sphere of our own lives, into a wider circle of influence and impact.

When figures identified as thought leaders suggest the real value of higher education rests in its ability to teach new skills to the rising generation (as well as current job seekers who’ve been left behind, outsourced, or downsized), they cast knowledge and knowledge creation in purely instrumental terms, rendering the work of higher education almost completely transactional in nature. Sure, there are platitudes about “deep learning” and “meaningful connections” thrown into the mix, but that instrumental logic remains the dominant trope. This creates a real problem for those of us engaged in articulating and defending the larger value— the intrinsic public good— of higher education. Challenged by the abstract nature of arguments about social contracts and civic connections, we shift to a language we think will be taken more seriously by administrators, politicians, and cost-conscious parents: the language of marketable skills for the “new economy” and of terms like “nimble” and “agile” and “multiple competencies.” But in doing this, we cede the terrain of the debate; we’ve implicitly declared higher education’s real value is transactional and market oriented when we use that language. We’ve sacrificed our larger vision in favor of short-term relevance. While it might be an eminently understandable move, it’s certainly a dangerous one.

Social trust is highly correlated with peaceful collective decision making and civic engagement. In its absence, the authority of shared values and mutual obligations slips away. The void that remains is a loud signal of societal vulnerability. Confusion, uncertainty, and distrust enable power to fill the social void. Indeed, they welcome it.

Till civic intervention becomes the norm, political intervention will achieve nothing.

Trust is the building block of effective governance, and especially of good governance within democracies. When people do not trust their government, they will not listen to, support or even engage with it. In democracies, this means that people will not vote. And when people in Muscle Shoals, Leeds and Gangwon are so disconnected from their governments in Washington, Westminster and Seoul that they don’t vote, the government will not provide for them effectively – because officials are not mind-readers; they cannot serve a population from which they have grown distant. So, when people don’t trust their government and thus opt out of civic participation, the result is a ‘mistrust loop’ in which a distrustful public is disengaged, resulting in a government even more disconnected from the public. This, in turn, leads only to the further deterioration of trust, which prompts people to look for solutions in new places and people – including in populists with authoritarian tendencies.

Having a free press doesn’t mean anyone cares.

Political leaders often talk as if their side is for all that is good and true, and the other side is for death and destruction. But civic decisions become too easy when we as Christians pretend politics is simply a battle between angels and demons. The implication is that we don’t have to parse the details of their proposals or weigh the alternatives, we just need to know what position the “right side” is taking. This makes for a simple and powerful narrative, but in a broken world, neither side is completely good. There weren’t any perfect groups of people in the Bible (Romans 3:23), and there is only one perfect human, Jesus Christ (Isaiah 53:9). That fact still stands today. That isn’t to say that both sides of any given issue are equal or that one side can’t be clearly wrong, but a quick look at the record of any party or tribe will dispel all misconceptions about their infallibility. Indeed, sometimes political opponents are plainly misguided or even ill intended, and we as Christians would be remiss not to correct them. However, we must be able to disagree and work against those with opposing beliefs without dehumanizing them. When we label other groups evil, stupid, or irredeemable—or deny their pain—we strip them of their human dignity and make ourselves and others less likely to show them concern and compassion.

here in North Carolina, Republicans launched a specific attack on civics education because they don’t want an educated and engaged and informed population, because those are the kinds of people that hold people accountable. Right? (Interview with Truthout)

Part of the appeal of markets is that they don't pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don't ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is, "How much?" Markets don't wag fingers. They don't discriminate between admirable preferences and base ones. Each party to a deal decides for himself or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics that afflicts many societies today.

Because personal development provides the foundation for leadership development, an individual’s personal development and leadership capacities could be enhanced by participation in structured programs. Effective programs use a balance of experiential, cognitive and reflective learning processes to engage the whole person by integrating physical, emotional, social, mental and spiritual aspects and focus on learning processes rather than task completion, content knowledge or skills.

The kingdom of God is not advanced or defended through the sword of political power but through the Word of God and the faithful testimony of believers. As an act of love of neighbor, it is right to want biblical values to be reflected in public life. But we should not expect the state to defend the church or its doctrines. We should not expect it to afford us special privileges. Indeed, if we read the book of Revelation seriously, we should expect the state to persecute us. If we try to create Christendom then we deny the cross. The irony is that those who continue to cling most tenaciously to the remnants of Christendom are often from within evangelicalism when Christendom is so self-evidently an unevangelical model. Evangelicals are defined by their commitment to the centrality of the gospel. For them the sufficiency of God’s Word is central. But for some reason, when we engage in the political and social realm, many of us look to the state to defend Christianity. The Word is no longer sufficient to defend the name of Christ or the cause of his kingdom. We evoke the notion of a Christian society or Christian heritage when evangelicals of all people should know that people and communities are Christian only through faith in Christ. No amount of legislation can create a Christian society. The sad reality of this is that our political engagement becomes focused on self-centeredness. Kenneth Myers says: “Surely we ought to be more preoccupied with serving our neighbours than with ruling them. The involvement of Christians in cultural and civic life ought to be motivated by love of neighbour, not by self-interest—not even by the corporate self-interest of the evangelical movement.”20

We are living through a shift from education as a place down the street to learning as bundle of personal digital services that are engaging, customized, mobile and flexible. For most young people, there will be a place called school, but learning will not be limited to what is offered there. Young and old will increasingly learn based on interest and need, when and how they want, for free or inexpensively; they will have learning partners that queue opportunities in productive modalities; they will utilize their learning for the common good through civic engagement; they will demonstrate and signal learning with certificates, artifacts and references. Vibrant cities will lead with learning.

Efforts to establish local cohesion and community investment are thwarted in neighborhoods with high turnover rates. In this way, eviction can unravel the fabric of a community, helping to ensure that neighbors remain strangers and that their collective capacity to combat crime and promote civic engagement remains untapped.19