Civic Involvement Quotes

From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear. Ronan finished with, “For the love of … Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.” Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ’73.

While they waited, Ronan decided to finally take up the task of teaching Adam how to drive a stick shift. For several minutes, it seemed to be going well, as the BMW had an easy clutch, Ronan was brief and to the point with his instruction, and Adam was a quick study with no ego to get in the way. From a safe vantage point beside the building, Gansey and Noah huddled and watched as Adam began to make ever quicker circles around the parking lot. Every so often their hoots were audible through the open windows of the BMW. Then—it had to happen eventually—Adam stalled the car. It was a pretty magnificent beast, as far as stalls went, with lots of noise and death spasms on the part of the car. From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear. Ronan finished with, “For the love of . . . Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.” Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ’73.” There was a flash of fangs from the passenger seat, but before Ronan truly had time to strike, they both heard Gansey call warmly, “Jane! I thought you’d never show up. Ronan is tutoring Adam in the ways of manual transmissions.” Blue, her hair pulled every which way by the wind, stuck her head in the driver’s side window. The scent of wildflowers accompanied her presence. As Adam catalogued the scent in the mental file of things that made Blue attractive, she said brightly, “Looks like it’s going well. Is that what that smell is?” Without replying, Ronan climbed out of the car and slammed the door. Noah appeared beside Blue. He looked joyful and adoring, like a Labrador retriever. Noah had decided almost immediately that he would do anything for Blue, a fact that would’ve needled Adam if it had been anyone other than Noah. Blue permitted Noah to pet the crazy tufts of her hair, something Adam would have also liked to do, but felt would mean something far different coming from him.

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful differences of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.

It happened in all walks of life: business, real estate, health care, the school yard, you name it. Any where that bad things happened, people would not get involved in order to save their own skin. It wasn't that people weren't civic-minded. It was just that the price for intervention would be punishment, not praise.

A final irony has to do with the idea of political responsibility. Christians are urged to vote and become involved in politics as an expression of their civic duty and public responsibility. This is a credible argument and good advice up to a point. Yet in our day, given the size of the state and the expectations that people place on it to solve so many problems, politics can also be a way of saying, in effect, that the problems should be solved by others besides myself and by institutions other than the church. It is, after all, much easier to vote for a politician who champions child welfare than to adopt a baby born in poverty, to vote for a referendum that would expand health care benefits for seniors than to care for an elderly and infirmed parent, and to rally for racial harmony than to get to know someone of a different race than yours. True responsibility invariably costs. Political participation, then, can and often does amount to an avoidance of responsibility.

The decisions we make regarding vocation, child rearing, education, civic and church involvement, and other areas of life create changes that affect our marriage relationships. The manner in which couples process these changes will determine the quality of their marriages.

empirically well established. Sociological studies show that faith is strongly correlated with social bonding. Religious commitments encourage civic involvement and build social capital.

Another sign of those with an “elder brother” spirit is joyless, fear-based compliance. The older son boasts of his obedience to his father, but lets his underlying motivation and attitude slip out when he says, “All these years I’ve been slaving for you.” To be sure, being faithful to any commitment involves a certain amount of dutifulness. Often we don’t feel like doing what we ought to do, but we do it anyway, for the sake of integrity. But the elder brother shows that his obedience to his father is nothing but duty all the way down. There is no joy or love, no reward in just seeing his father pleased. In the same way, elder brothers are fastidious in their compliance to ethical norms, and in fulfillment of all traditional family, community, and civic responsibilities. But it is a slavish, joyless drudgery. The word “slave” has strong overtones of being forced or pushed rather than drawn or attracted. A slave works out of fear—fear of consequences imposed by force. This gets to the root of what drives an elder brother. Ultimately, elder brothers live good lives out of fear, not out of joy and love.

Why have two figures of such remarkable interest been so scanted by the annalists and historians, so overlooked by philosophers, poets, and priests? I think it may be that they were, to put it bluntly, too disreputable. They were too stubbornly independent to give allegiance to a single city and thus become subject matter for a civic epic. They were too often involved with demons and sorcerers to appeal to the staid philosopher and too shifty to please the sober historian. In short, they were rogues, and rogues have no place in the lists of kings and demigods and heroes. It may be that no poet shall ever write of them, alas!

School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals, but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student’s doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).

Then — it had to happen eventually — Adam stalled the car. It was a pretty magnificent beast, as far as stalls went, with lots of noise and death spasms on the part of the car. From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear. Ronan finished with, “For the love of … Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.” Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ’73.

Los Angeles, in short, is a place of great material and creative wealth, and boundless personal freedom—but also of a certain spiritual and civic poverty. Though there are many wonderful people here, on the whole it’s an anxious, self-involved place, where roots and tradition are largely forgotten, where neighbors don’t know each other and don’t particularly want to. It’s not that L.A. people are bad, but that there’s something about the way life is structured in this sunny paradise that leaves people feeling atomized and powerless to do anything about our common condition. I know it. I feel it myself, and had been feeling it for a long time before I realized how homesick I was. And I want better for my children.

Parenting pressures have resculpted our priorities so dramatically that we simply forget. In 1975 couples spent, on average, 12.4 hours alone together per week. By 2000 they spent only nine. What happens, as this number shrinks, is that our expectations shrink with it. Couple-time becomes stolen time, snatched in the interstices or piggybacked onto other pursuits. Homework is the new family dinner. I was struck by Laura Anne’s language as she described this new reality. She said the evening ritual of guiding her sons through their assignments was her “gift of service.” No doubt it is. But this particular form of service is directed inside the home, rather than toward the community and for the commonweal, and those kinds of volunteer efforts and public involvements have also steadily declined over the last few decades, at least in terms of the number of hours of sweat equity we put into them. Our gifts of service are now more likely to be for the sake of our kids. And so our world becomes smaller, and the internal pressure we feel to parent well, whatever that may mean, only increases: how one raises a child, as Jerome Kagan notes, is now one of the few remaining ways in public life that we can prove our moral worth. In other cultures and in other eras, this could be done by caring for one’s elders, participating in social movements, providing civic leadership, and volunteering. Now, in the United States, child-rearing has largely taken their place. Parenting books have become, literally, our bibles. It’s understandable why parents go to such elaborate lengths on behalf of their children. But here’s something to think about: while Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods makes it clear that middle-class children enjoy far greater success in the world, what the book can’t say is whether concerted cultivation causes that success or whether middle-class children would do just as well if they were simply left to their own devices. For all we know, the answer may be the latter.

What is most dystopian about all of the digital houses designed for customized consumption is the implication that the entire landscape could be covered with new houses lacking any social or economic neighborhood context. Designers minimize the need for family or neighborhood interaction if they plan for digital surveillance as a route to ordering mass-produced commodities as well as handling work and civic life. If many external activities, such as paid work, exercise, shopping, seeking entertainment, and voting, are able to be done in-house through the various electronic communications systems, reasons for going outside decrease. The residents become isolated, although the house continues to function as a container for mass-produced goods and electronic media. In a landscape bristling with tens of thousands of digital houses and cell towers, where the ground is laced with hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, neighborhoods may not exist. Car journeys involving traffic problems may disappear, although the roads will be clogged with delivery vans.

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity. It is extraordinarily naive for a Christian to rule out categorically the possibility of any conflict between their national identity and their baptismal identity. But it’s precisely this kind of naiveté that is on display every time a church flies an American flag above the so-called Christian flag. Or perhaps it’s a bit of unintended truth-telling. Flags are powerful symbols that have the capacity to evoke strong emotions—think of the passion connected with protests involving flag burning. In the world of symbol, flags are among the most revered signs. So when a church flies the American flag above the Christian flag, what is the message being communicated? How can it be anything other than that all allegiances—including allegiance to Christ—must be subordinate to a supreme national allegiance? This is what Caiaphas admitted when he confessed to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”[8] When the American flag is placed in supremacy over all other flags—including a flag intended to represent Christian faith—aren’t we saying our faith is subordinate to our patriotism? Is there any other interpretation? And if you’re inclined to argue that I’m making too much out of the mere arrangement of flags on a church lawn, try reversing them and see what happens! For the “America First” Christian it would create too much cognitive dissonance to actually admit that their loyalty to Christ is penultimate, trumped by their primary allegiance to America, but there are plenty of moments when the truth seeps out.

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

During the ceremony celebrating the unveiling of Chicago’s huge outdoor Picasso sculpture in the plaza across from City Hall, I happened to be standing next to a personal-injury lawyer with whom I was acquainted. As the inaugural speech droned on, I noticed a look of intense concentration on his face, and that his lips were moving. Asked what he was thinking, he answered that he was trying to estimate the amount of money the city was going to have to pay to settle suits involving children who got hurt climbing the sculpture. Was this lawyer lucky, because he could transform everything he saw into a professional problem his skills could master, and thus live in constant flow? Or was he depriving himself of an opportunity to grow by paying attention only to what he was already familiar with, and ignoring the aesthetic, civic, and social dimensions of the event? Perhaps both interpretations are accurate. In the long run, however, looking at the world exclusively from the little window that one’s self affords is always limiting. Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

The Republic of Foo, our high-investment, intangible economy of the future, has significantly overhauled its land-use rules, particularly in major cities, making it easier to build housing and workplaces; at the same time, it invests significantly in the kind of infrastructure needed to make cities livable and convivial, in particular, effective transport and civic and cultural amenities, from museums to nightlife. In some cases, this involves rejecting big development plans that destroy existing places. It has faced political costs in making this change, especially from vested interests opposed to new development or gentrification, but the increased economic benefits of vibrant urban centers have provided enough incentive to tip the balance of power in favor of development. The cities of the Kingdom of Bar have chosen one of two unfortunate paths: in some cases, they have privileged continuity over dynamism in its towns—creating places like Oxford in the UK, which are beautiful and full of convivial public spaces, but where it is very hard to build anything, meaning few people can take advantage of the economic potential the place creates. Other cities resemble Houston, Texas, in the 1990s—a low-regulation paradise where an absence of planning laws keeps home and office prices low, but where the lack of walkable centers and convivial places makes it harder for intangibles to multiply. (To Houston’s credit, it has changed for the better in the last twenty years.) The worst of Bar’s cities fail in both regards, underinvesting in urban amenities and making it hard to build. In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased.

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him. Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience. It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestions of they could operate. Such loosely affiliated small groups within a larger organization deepen a sense of belonging, help more people learn from diverse others and stay open to growing through that shared learning and collaboration. That's one way that members of Rick Warren's large Saddleback Church have maintained a close-knit feeling yet continue to grow in fresh ways. imilarly the innovative outdoor gear company Gore-Tex has nimbly grown by using their version of self-organized groups of 150 or less within the larger corporation. In fact, they give grants to those who further their learning about that philosophy when adapted to outdoor adventure, traveling in compact groups of "close friends who had mutual respect and trust for one another.

Of course, not everyone agreed with Professor Glaude’s assessment. Joel C. Gregory, a white professor of preaching at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and coauthor of What We Love about the Black Church,8 took issue with Glaude’s pronouncement of the Black Church’s death. Gregory, a self-described veteran of preaching in “more than two hundred African-American congregations, conferences, and conventions in more than twenty states each year,” found himself at a loss for an explanation of Glaude’s statements. Gregory offered six signs of vitality in the African-American church, including: thriving preaching, vitality in worship, continuing concern for social justice, active community service, high regard for education, and efforts at empowerment. Gregory contends that these signs of life can be found in African-American congregations in every historically black denomination and in varying regions across the country. He writes: Where is the obituary? I do not know any organization in America today that has the vitality of the black church. Lodges are dying, civic clubs are filled with octogenarians, volunteer organizations are languishing, and even the academy has to prove the worth of a degree. The government is divided, the schoolroom has become a war zone, mainline denominations are staggering, and evangelical megachurch juggernauts show signs of lagging. Above all this entropy stands one institution that is more vital than ever: the praising, preaching, and empowering black church.9 The back-and-forth between those pronouncing death and those highlighting life reveals the difficulty of defining “the Black Church.” In fact, we must admit that speaking of “the Black Church” remains a quixotic quest. “The Black Church” really exists as multiple black churches across denominational, theological, and regional lines. To some extent, we can define the Black Church by referring to the historically black denominations—National Baptist, Progressive Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal (AME), African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), Church of God in Christ (COGIC), and so on. But increasingly we must recognize that one part of “the Black Church” exists as predominantly black congregations belonging to majority white denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention or even African-American members of predominantly white churches. Still, other quarters of “the Black Church” belong to nondenominational affinity groups like the many congregations involved in Word of Faith and “prosperity gospel” networks sponsored by leaders like Creflo A. Dollar Jr. and T. D. Jakes. Clearly “the Black Church” is not one thing. Black churches come in as many flavors as any other ethnic communion. Indeed, many African-Americans have experiences with many parts of the varied Black Church world.

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.

What is the gospel, and how do we bring it to bear on the hearts of people today? What is this culture like, and how can we both connect to it and challenge it in our communication? Where are we located — city, suburb, town, rural area — and how does this affect our ministry? To what degree and how should Christians be involved in civic life and cultural production? How do the various ministries in a church — word and deed, community and instruction — relate to one another? How innovative will our church be and how traditional? How will our church relate to other churches in our city and region? How will we make our case to the culture about the truth of Christianity?

As the environmental writer and analyst David Roberts has observed, “the ingredients of resilience” are “overlapping social and civic circles, filled with people who, by virtue of living in close proximity and sharing common spaces, know and take care of each other. The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project—it’s a survival strategy.”58

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.

In their authoritative 1995 work, Voice and Equality, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady demonstrated that political activity varied by class. Their study found that 86 percent of high-income people reported having voted, but only 52 percent of low-income people said they voted. And 73 percent of high-income people were involved with a political organization, compared to 29 percent of low-income people. A 2012 sequel by the same authors showed a widening of these patterns, as institutions of working-class participation such as trade unions continued to decline, while the influence of the wealthy concentrated. The affluent go to meetings, are active members of groups concerned with public issues, and develop “civic skills” far more than the poor do—and that disparity has been widening. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting of an ordinary working fellow standing up to speak his mind at a town meeting, meant to depict one of FDR’s Four Freedoms, belongs to another era. And yet, in the Trump rebellion, regular working people who had little regard for civic norms abruptly recovered their voices in a fashion characteristic of mass society—disaffected people sharing not always rational rage with an irrational leader. They even formed new, Tocqueville-style associations, the Tea Parties. Voice and Equality concluded that lower-income people participate at lower rates for three reasons: “they can’t” (because they lack the time or money); “they don’t want to” (because they don’t believe that politics will make a positive difference in their lives); and “nobody asked them” (the political system has few avenues of recruitment for lower-income people). In a survey of why so many people avoided politics, one key reason was that politics felt irrelevant. This view, of course, was also correlated by social class. Nobody in large corporations believes that politics is irrelevant. Trust in government—and in all major institutions—has been falling for half a century. When the American National Election Study first asked the question in 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” That sense of trust peaked in 1964, at 78 percent, and has been steadily dropping ever since. By 2015, it was down to just 19 percent. The

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.

In articulating their theory of growth machines, Logan and Molotch contrast the exchange value of land (its economic worth) with its use value (value as living space) to illustrate the conflicting interests of developer-led growth coalitions focused on exchange value and the interests of city residents on use value. In North America, according to the two authors, exchange regularly trumps use. This fact underlies the development of a growth machine. Growth machines develop in the following manner: place entrepreneurs see the potential for profit from the development and intensification of their property holdings, namely, through the increase in rent. These "rentiers" develop a close relationship with other local business interests. In particular, businesses that rely on the growth of a city to increase their profitability, such as newspapers, are likely to support the interests of developers. Developers and their allies, through constant interaction with government, through ample campaign contributions, and through their ability to organize and mobilize, can co-opt local politicians, effectively coercing their involvement in the growth coalition. They supply politicians with the funds necessary to run effective election campaigns. Politicians, in turn, along with local media and other members of the growth coalition, help to perpetuate a link between civic pride and a city's economic and physical growth. This link undermines interest in the use value of land (specifically the use and maintenance of existing areas) as the city focuses increasingly on growth. Molotch argues in a later article that this coalition of growth interests reflected the most common political coalition in American cities, while acknowledging its limited applicability elsewhere. He argues that Americans' acceptance of developers' actions " as the baseline of urban process, rather than as disruptions," is evidence that Americans take developers' "presence for granted"....Numerous authors, in adopting growth machine theory, also added anti-growth citizen coalitions to the mix. Current analyses adopting the theory now invariably include the neighborhood-association-led anti-growth coalition as the foil of the developer-led growth coalition.

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.

While African Americans had long played important roles in civic life, while the docks had seen the progress of the Negro Longshoreman’s Union, and while all kinds of people mingled in the city streets, much of Galveston’s social and political life had long involved rigid racial segregation.

Home Economics & Civics What ever happened to the two courses that were cornerstone programs of public education? For one, convenience foods made learning how to cook seem irrelevant. Home Economics was also gender driven and seemed to stratify women, even though most well paid chefs are men. Also, being considered a dead-end high school program, in a world that promotes continuing education, it has waned in popularity. With both partners in a marriage working, out of necessity or choice, career-minded couples would rather go to a restaurant or simply micro-burn a frozen pre-prepared food packet. Almost anybody that enjoys the preparation of food can make a career of it by going to a specialty school such as the Culinary Institute of America along the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York. Also, many colleges now have programs that are directed to those that are interested in cooking as a career. However, what about those that are looking to other career paths but still have a need to effectively run a household? Who among us is still concerned with this mundane but necessary avocation that so many of us are involved with? Public Schools should be aware that the basic requirements to being successful in life include how to balance and budget a checking and a savings account. We should all be able to prepare a wholesome, nutritious and delicious meal, make a bed and clean up behind one’s self, not to mention taking care of children that may become a part of the family structure. Now, note that this has absolutely nothing to do with politics and is something that members of all parties can use. Civics is different and is deeply involved in politics and how our government works. However, it doesn’t pick sides…. What it does do is teach young people the basics of our democracy. Teaching how our Country developed out of the fires of a revolution, fought out of necessity because of the imposing tyranny of the British Crown is central. How our “Founding Fathers” formed this union with checks and balances, allowing us to live free, is imperative. Unfortunately not enough young people are sufficiently aware of the sacrifices made, so that we can all live free. During the 1930’s, most people understood and believed it was important that we live in and preserve our democracy. People then understood what Patrick Henry meant when in 1776 he proclaimed “Give me liberty or give me death.” During the 1940’s, we fought a great war against Fascist dictatorships. A total of sixty million people were killed during that war, which amounted to 3% of everyone on the planet. If someone tells us that there is not enough money in the budget, or that Civic courses are not necessary or important, they are effectively undermining our Democracy. Having been born during the great Depression of the 1930’s, and having lived and lost family during World War II, I understand the importance of having Civics taught in our schools. Our country and our way of life are all too valuable to be squandered because of ignorance. Over 90 million eligible voters didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election. This means that 40% of our fellow citizens failed to exercise their right to vote! Perhaps they didn’t understand their duty or how vital their vote is. Perhaps it’s time to reinvigorate what it means to be a patriotic citizen. It’s definitely time to reinstitute some of the basic courses that teach our children how our American way of life works. Or do we have to relive history again?

Experts need to remember, always, that they are the servants and not the masters of a democratic society and a republican government. If citizens, however, are to be the masters, they must equip themselves not just with education, but with the kind of civic virtue that keeps them involved in the running of their own country. Laypeople cannot do without experts, and they must accept this reality without rancor. Experts, likewise, must accept that their advice, which might seem obvious and right to them, will not always be taken in a democracy that may not value the same things they do. Otherwise, when democracy is understood as an unending demand for unearned respect for unfounded opinions, anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy and republican government itself.

Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the Talmud and Christians the Bible—and, in Muslim countries, it uses the Quran explicitly as the basis for legal codes. Just before we elected our forty-fourth non-Muslim president in a row, people on the right began fantasizing that American Muslims were scheming to supplant U.S. jurisprudence with Islamic jurisprudence. The definitive text is a 2010 book called Shariah: The Threat to America. Its nineteen authors included respectable hard-right conservatives and national security wonks. We’re “infiltrated and deeply influenced,” the book says, “by an enemy within that is openly determined to replace the U.S. Constitution with shariah.” The movement took off, and in short order the specter of sharia became a right-wing catchphrase encompassing suspicion of almost any Islamic involvement in the U.S. civic sphere. The word gave Islamophobia a patina of legitimacy. It was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabs but rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny. It was also a shiny new exotic term, a word nobody in America but a few intellectuals knew.

In 2004, researchers Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published Character Strengths and Virtues, a manual with twenty-four such categories, divided into six groups: wisdom and knowledge—cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge; courage—emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; humanity—interpersonal strengths that involve tending to and befriending others; justice—civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; temperance—strengths that protect against excess; and transcendence—strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning. 9

Like his father, Andrew became actively involved in the civic affairs of his community. At the time, farm bureaus were forming throughout the country—cooperative organizations devoted to promoting the practical and economic interests of local farmers.10 When a national farm bureau was founded in 1919, Kehoe “volunteered to head [its] drive for membership.” Two years later, in April 1921, he was elected to the board of directors of its Bath Township unit. He did not retain that position for long. Just seven months later, he abruptly quit the organization.11 From that point on, he directed his energies toward an issue that had come to dominate the politics of his adopted hometown, one that would eventually obsess him to the point of madness.

It's not possible to read critically if one treats reading as if it were a similar operation to buying in bulk. What's the point of boasting of having read twenty books-twenty books! Really reading involves a kind of relationship with the text, which offers itself to me and to which I give myself and through the fundamental comprehension of which I undergo the process of becoming a subject. While reading, I'm not just a captive of the mind of the text as if it were simply a product of its author. This is a vitiated form of reading that has nothing to do with thinking or teaching correctly.

Well, I mean, I knew he had an interest in the constabulary. Like some lords have an interest in the symphony, or in civic matters. It seemed odd, but not ungentlemanly. I mean, it’s not as if he was involved in the theater.

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.

Involvement in the life of the community was a vital part of every citizen's daily life; preparing the next generation for such a civic life was the schools' primary mission.

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

In all countries ethnic diversity reduces trust. In Peruvian credit-sharing cooperatives, members default more often on loans when there is ethnic diversity among co-op members. Likewise, in Kenyan school districts, fundraising is easier in tribally homogenous areas. Dutch researchers found that immigrants to Holland were more likely to develop schizophrenia if they lived in mixed neighborhoods with Dutch people than if they lived in purely immigrant areas. Surinamese and Turks had twice the chance of getting schizophrenia if they had to deal with Dutch neighbors; for Moroccans, the likelihood quadrupled. Dora Costa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn of Tufts University analyzed 15 recent studies of the impact of diversity on social cohesion. They found that every study had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement.” James Poterba of MIT has found that public spending on education falls as the percentage of elderly people without children rises. He notes, however, that the effect “is particularly large when the elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups.” This unwillingness of taxpayers to fund public projects if the beneficiaries are from a different group is so consistent it has its own name—“the Florida effect”—from the fact that old, white Floridians are reluctant to pay taxes or vote for bond issues to support schools attended by blacks and Hispanics. Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia are the most racially homogeneous states, and spend the highest proportion of gross state product on public education. Most people believe charity begins with their own people. A study of begging in Moscow, for example, found that Russians are more likely to give money to fellow Russians than to Central Asians or others who do not look like them. Researchers in Australia have found that immigrants from countries racially and culturally similar to Australia—Britain, the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa—fit in and become involved in volunteer work at the same level as native-born Australians. Immigrants from non white countries volunteer at just over half that rate. At the same time, the more racially diverse the neighborhood in which immigrants live, the less likely native Australians themselves are to do volunteer work. Sydney has the most diversity of any Australian city—and also the lowest level of volunteerism. People want their efforts to benefit people like themselves. It has long been theorized that welfare programs are more generous in Europe because European countries have traditionally been more homogeneous than the United States, and that people are less resistant to paying for welfare if the beneficiaries are of the same race. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have used statistical regression techniques to conclude that about half the difference in welfare levels is explained by greater American diversity, and the other half by weaker leftist political parties. Americans are not stingy—they give more to charity than Europeans do—but they prefer to give to specific groups. Many Jews and blacks give largely or even exclusively to ethnic charities. There are no specifically white charities, but much church giving is essentially ethnic. Church congregations are usually homogeneous, which means that offerings for aid within the congregation stay within the ethnic group.