“There are a lot of people who’ve said things I don’t agree with. But if I want to say what I believe, I’ve got to let you say what you believe, even if I violently disagree with it and even if I find it despicable.” NYC Michael Bloomberg on Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan, last week on The Daily Show 
Find the beginnings of a We the Wiki page on this debate HERE. Log in and add your information to the post.
Add comment August 29th, 2010
Before all of our events, we plaster the town with posters so people know what we’re up to. That includes grocery stores, public bulletin boards, churches and your living room if you’re willing. We get all sorts of responses to the plastering, from warm welcomes to recitations of no-poster policies.
A couple of years ago we took a poster for Faith & The Founding Fathers to a large conservative church in town. I thought that was a safe topic and – as always – we want to invite as wide a diversity of opinion as we can to the table. Staff there said, as churches and some businesses usually do, that they have to get the OK of the pastor. A couple days later I got a call that it wasn’t approved and that I could come by to pick up my poster. I thought it was particularly kind and respectful of them to bother to call me back to get my poster (and wasn’t likely easy).
I was also quite discouraged. If a nonpartisan discussion on faith and the founding fathers wasn’t acceptable content for their bulletin board, it seemed like nothing The Village Square offers would be and my efforts to include their congregation in our discussions would be effectively over. To me, this was a sure sign of what Bill Bishop (one of our dinner speakers this year) calls “The Big Sort”. After all, how would we ever learn from each other if we never actually sat in the same room?
Tuesday night, on election day, I drove by the same church. It was a polling station and outside of it there were the normal hodgepodge of sign-waivers for every flavor of candidate, some likely highly objectionable to the same pastor I suspect.
So on this particular day this church had swung their doors wide open for that messy sport of democracy. On this one day, church and state – seeming to strain so often – cooperated to bring us the election. The church paid the electricity, provided the space, and likely cleaned the floors afterward. Inside the church, an endless stream of people who might not agree with the prevailing opinions of the pastor and congregation were invited in to express their own opinion.
This isn’t a small thing.
I still won’t go back with posters anytime soon, but I’ve revised my sentiment when I pass the church. Village Square posters might not hang there, but we’re forever connected through this exceptional country we share.
Again, not a small thing.
Add comment August 25th, 2010
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Cleaning out the blog draft queue and found a great story from a couple weeks ago that I failed to get posted. But it’s timeless, so we’ll run with it…
Add comment April 7th, 2010
For this occasion, I will pass it off to the Founders. Please feel free to add your favorite quotes to the mix.
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” — George Washington
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” –Patrick Henry
“A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” –John Adams
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” –Thomas Jefferson
Add comment July 4th, 2009
On this day sixty-five years ago, young Americans were fighting and dying on the shores of Normandy France. The soldiers made their way onto the beach that June 6th in Higgins boats, unique high-walled boats that carried 25 men, sort of a “floating boxcar.”
Conservative author Peggy Noonan wrote about D-Day, and about the Higgins boats in the introduction of her book “Patriotic Grace: What it is and why we need it now.” Noonan tells of one soldier, his fate intricately woven with the fate of the other men in his Higgins Boat, heading in high seas to a conclusion unknown… “it took [his] five little boats four hours to cover the nine miles to the beach:”
They were the worst hours of our lives. It was pitch black, cold, and the rain was coming down in sheets, drenching us. The boats were being tossed in the waves, making all of us violently sick.
Noonan reflects in the remainder of Patriotic Grace on the difficult circumstances we find ourselves in as a people today, and of the rise of the partisan hate-filled din. Says Noonan “we fight as if we’ll never need each other,” yet our very fate may depend on one another.
And so I came to think this: What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace-a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported. I’ve come to think that this really is our Normandy Beach… the little, key area in which we have to prevail if the whole enterprise is to succeed. The challenge we must rise to… We are an armada. All sorts of Americans, wonderful people, all ages, faiths and colors, with different skills, fabulous skills, from a million different places, but all here with you, going forward.
Like it or not, we are in each others’ Higgins boats. Our fate, almost certainly shared.
Given that circumstance, perhaps we might use today to consider how we will best keep faith with those young Americans who left their lives that day on Omaha Beach.
Photo credit: Chuck Holon
Add comment June 6th, 2009
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” –Matthew 25:40
The Reverend Allison DeFoor, speaking at our January dinner “Faith in the Public Square” spoke softly, but carried a big stick. It wasn’t until after I got home and listened to the tape of the dinner that I realized how profound what he said was. Whether you’re a person of faith or no faith, whether you apply them to the Prison Ministries which he had dedicated his life to or to any other group of “the least of these,” it’s hard to argue with the truth of his words (emphasis added):
So it was a pretty big reorientation for my life and if you look at Matthew 25, it might be for yours as well. To the extent that there are divisions in our culture about these issues it’s because we’re not paying attention to the orders in Matthew 25 which come directly out of the Jewish tradition. If we would [take care of the prisoners, take care of the poor, take care of the sick] we might find that many of these divisions would disappear because the divisions, really – at the end of the day – aren’t anything compared to what we’re being told to do. Towards that end, I’ll tell you that at Wakulla Prison we have 1,000 volunteers coming in to a faith and character based institution, I have personally gone to the ACLU and dialoged with them… using volunteers and no state money passes constitutional muster. I’ll tell you that we’re sitting on an 8% recidivism rate, when the recidivism rate is 33% post-release in the general population. So if you would like to come and put away your divisions in the public square and devote the public square to actually doing things as opposed to talking, we’d love to have you. We could use another thousand volunteers.
Add comment May 31st, 2009
In the busy hubbub of modern life, today too often becomes about sleeping in, shopping, getting the lawn mowed. But forgetting the real meaning of Memorial Day is nearly impossible in my neighborhood because of a neighbor.
We’ll call her Jane.
Jane’s lawn is a memorial to the sacrifice made by our fellow Americans, people like you and me, until they put everything in their life on hold to do what their country asked. And in case you didn’t notice the front-yard-turned-monument spread out right before you when you drive past Jane’s house, her sign downright insists that we STOP.
So, stop I will… to honor the memory of our neighbors killed in service to our country since this American experiment began. Those killed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in WWII and WWI and those killed more quietly away from the headlines in smaller conflicts that have exacted the same big price.
To my father-in-law who died in Vietnam, and to my mother-in-law who had to raise four children without him, I remember.
In the name of my family members who served and are serving: My grandfather who left a thriving pediatric practice to join the Army in WWII, my father who spent his career in service to the Navy (first as a pilot, later as a civilian), my brother and sister-in-law and cousin who still serve today… I remember.
The Village Square has always been about finding what we agree on in the midst of so much disagreement, and this is it.
Today, as our country remembers, President Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. I’m a D.C. native who’s had many an opportunity in my life to take in the breathtaking awe of Arlington. You simply can’t leave there unaffected.
For every rich and beloved life lost in the sea of crosses on the hills of Arlington, we remember.
Sure, it’s a different scale, but if you really pause to take it in, you won’t be quite the same when you leave Jane’s lawn either.
3 comments May 25th, 2009
I will never meet Monsignor William Kerr in person and I am sure my life is the less for it. Kerr died yesterday at age 68. Of late, though, I’ve spent a bit of my time learning about him and I wanted you to know what I found out.
In my job, I scour this hometown of ours for the right people to have transcendent conversation across divides. I ask lots of my “neighbors” who might be just right. I look for unique spirits in a world so much less likely to celebrate what unites us than fight about what divides us.
For our summer program “A Rabbi, A Priest and An Imam” Monsignor Kerr never really had any competition.
Kerr’s professional reputation, to a person I spoke with, was stellar. And everyone stopped to say a kind personal word about him. One source shared that “people just love that man.” The Democrat’s obit mentioned a stealth hospital visit by Nando, Kerr’s German shepherd, arranged by those who most know and love Kerr in his final days.
Not a bad epitaph as vivid evidence of the measure of this man’s humanity.
“Monsignor Kerr traveled all over the globe, touching lives everywhere as he worked to build a more peaceful world,” FSU President T.K. Wetherell said in a statement… “Florida State has lost a good friend, and the world has lost a true visionary. We are extremely saddened by this loss.”
We’ll have to find a way to move on without Bill Kerr in July, as will so many other people who I know really needed him to be there. The world needed a couple more decades of Monsignor Kerr in it, but now we’ll all have to find another way. Perhaps we’re left to multiply Bill Kerr ourselves, to rise just a little higher to his call.
Today I mourn for what we all lost yesterday. Tomorrow I’ll try to pick back up my own little tiny piece of the work to be done. I’ll do it remembering Bill Kerr. And I think maybe I’ll try to live my life well enough that someone will do their best to sneak my dog in at the end.
I’ll call it my Bill Kerr yardstick.
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Add comment May 14th, 2009
From the LeRoy Collins Institute recently updated report “Tough Choices: Shaping Florida’s Future:”
Providing high-quality education for those students remaining in the schools remains a daunting task. Florida spends, on average, $8,437 per student, compared to a national average of $9.993. In its 2009 special session, the Florida legislature balanced its budget in part by cutting $140 per student. The high costs associated with the 2002 constitutional amendment limiting class size still loom (although there have been recent efforts by public school officials and others encouraging the legislature to relax the requirements). Florida continues to place large financial burdens on local governments to provide school funding. We reported last year that the local share of school funding in the 2004-2005 school year was greater than for any other southern state, save Virginia, and this remains true. In fact, the local share of public school funding continues to increase with no signs of slowing.
Please watch Dr. Carol Weissert, Director of the LeRoy Collins Institute, speaking on this topic at the Florida TaxWatch and Village Square Take-out Tuesday forum HERE. (Dr. Weissert’s presentation begins two-thirds through.)
Add comment March 13th, 2009
On the reopening of trading on Wall Street after 9/11:
“They lifted the New York Stock Exchange covered with ash-the monitors on the floor literally thick with ash, the trading floor badly damaged-and one week later, seven days, they were lined up ready to roar and ringing the bell. That day, for the first and only time in my Iife, I bought a stock-five thousand dollars worth, of J&J-and as I bought it on the Internet, I called my son over to watch me hit “Enter” so he would understand for the rest of his life that when America is in trouble you invest in it, you put what you’ve got right there.”
–Peggy Noonan in Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now
Add comment February 25th, 2009
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