I was raised Roman Catholic in a working-class suburb on the near South Side of St. Louis. I am grateful for much of what the Church gave me, particularly the nuns who taught the Catholic school where I went with my brother and three sisters. Their gifts of a solid education, reverence for God and God’s creation, a sense of belonging to a community, and a deep commitment to social justice have shaped my life to this day. I no longer consider myself a Roman Catholic, but after a self-taught, experiential investigation into most of the world’s religious traditions, I returned to school in my thirties to study theology, and eventually earned a Ph.D. at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. I am currently a member of the Anglican Church and teach Comparative Religious Ethics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I have the benefit of having been in Manhattan on 9/11 and living outside the country for much of the time afterward. It gives me, I think, a unique perspective to understand how the U.S. looks from both inside and outside.
I am very interested in how people of different faiths can find common ground, work together, and work through the conflicts that might arise from their different points of view. I actually study this quite in depth. This is what initially attracted me about Obama’s message, the idea that we are better than our politics suggest. I respected his strong stand against the invasion of Iraq, and the fact that his priorities seem to be consistently on the side of the common people, particularly those who were being told they weren’t important or powerful enough to change things.
Faith gives a power of commitment and the strength of hope to people to engage in what can be very difficult struggles. Most religions teach people to look beyond themselves and their own families’ wellbeing and consider their neighbors. Buddhists talk about compassion for all sentient beings. Jews have the rich tradition of “repairing the world”, and the prophets measure faithfulness to God in a society by the wellbeing of those on the bottom. Islam has a similar tradition, and for Christians, I think the heart of the gospel is when Jesus points out that those who have clothed the naked, fed the hungry, tended the sick and visited prisoners, have been caring for him (Matthew 25). Many Christians confine this to personal acts of charity, but that ignores the ways in which the collective ways we do things harm people and create the situations that make people suffer. Health care is one example. By making adequate insurance something unaffordable, we are not only failing to care for the sick, we are making many more people vulnerable to poverty. I think if we really believe in a government of, by, and for the people, we have to look at it as our collective will, not as an enemy against us. What government can and should do should be the answer to this question: what can we do more effectively together than we can do individually?
Health care is just one of the moral issues I think are at stake in this election. I think our treatment of the environment is also a moral issue when we consider the consequences of global warming on other countries as well as our own, and the world we are leaving our children. Christians are also called to make peace–”Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God”–and this seems to get lost in the glorification of war in much of American culture. Christian theology has seen war as at best a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless. We have used war as an excuse to violate our constitution. This makes no sense. What are we defending, if not the rights and rule of law guaranteed in the constitution? Those were put there, not for when it is easy or convenient, but when it is hard. So war is a moral issue. Imprisonment without due process is a moral issue. Torture is a moral issue. Education is a moral issue.
Our lofty religious ideals mean nothing if they are not lived out in the mundane world. Putting this into policy involves a lot of give and take. I don’t agree with Barack on everything. But overall, I have confidence in his ability to bring people together and respect for his insight and understanding.
I think our choice is very stark this year, the starkest of my lifetime. In January, Barack’s victory in Iowa lifted me out of a despair I had sunk into so deep I didn’t even realize it. I had been mourning my native land, that it had built walls instead of bridges, that instead of the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King, its people were divided by race, economic interests, and religion and its politics corrupted by special interests and those who were willing to tell any lie and invoke fear for power, that its education system had failed to be what Jefferson intended, a cultivation of an informed citizenry, that its future as a place where humanity could flourish in justice and freedom had all but been lost. I thought the Dream had died. Then I heard: “They said this day would never come…but…you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. … In the face of impossible odds people who love this country can change it.” And I believed–in him, and us, in the future–again. Our time for change has come.
