Canada

In terms of Faith and Values politicking, it's been a rough week for the Democrats. Yesterday, while Sarah Palin was (again) reminding folks of Barack Obama's views on bitter Americans clinging to religion and guns, Joseph Biden found himself enmeshed in the one religiously themed debate he must steadfastly avoid. The issue in question: What else? Abortion.

On Meet the Press this past Sunday Senator Biden reiterated that, as a Catholic, he is personally opposed to abortion. He went on to add,...

World leaders are heading for Japan for the annual ritual known as the Group of Eight meeting. Last week a different group of leaders met, also in Japan, also to take stock of the leading issues that face the world.

They were religious leaders, and their gathering took place in two Japanese cities with spiritual roots, Osaka and Kyoto. The meeting is part of a tradition, now three years old, of a religious summit on the eve of the grand G8 summit.

Religious leaders don’t make policy,...

The global food crisis came like a tsunami, with amazing speed and stealth. Development institutions everywhere are scrambling to face the urgent problems and questions that come in its wake.

There's the immediate problem: How to find funds to buy enough food to meet steep increases in demand to feed hungry people here and now.

The landmark "Breakthrough" summit at the National Cathedral had a clear goal; to bring together faith, development, and women's organizations in order to create a powerful new force for reducing poverty by improving the lives of women and girls around the world.

The event, held April 13-14, had two distinct parts. The first was a grand and moving show that drew in the crowd in both a spiritual and sensory way. In the morning a forum in the Cathedral nave featured Thoraya Obaid, who heads...

Admit it, Secular America. If Mike Huckabee had said something like this on the campaign trail you’d be locking and loading faster than you could hum John Lennon’s lyric “Imagine all the people, Living life in peace”:

And during the course of that sermon, I was introduced to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed and that if I placed my trust in Christ, He could set me on the path to eternal life.

And you’d probably be thinking again...

Charles  Taylor writes on the Immanent Frame: Robert Bellah’s latest post poses clearly the issues that we’ve been agonizing over in Canada, and in a different way now in Quebec. Lots of people want to shy away from a political identity which is primarily defined in ethnic terms. On the contrary when asked what are the crucial uniting ideas of our society, they come up with some variant of universal “values,” defined in terms of modern charters of rights (all...

Robert Bellah writes on the Immanent Frame: In his response to my concern about whether “post-Durkheimian” is a viable category, Charles Taylor goes part way in answering my query, but, in my view, not far enough. When he writes “I don’t think it’s possible to have a successful, modern democratic society without some strong sense of what unites us as citizens,” he is conceding my basic Durkheimian point, that a society without common values is not a viable...

Charles Taylor writes on the Immanent Frame: Having escaped for a few seconds from the Commission, I had a chance to read many of the very interesting posts to the blog. With many I agree, others not. But there are two points where I obviously failed to communicate what I wanted to say (possibly because that is incoherent, though I hope not).

Elizabeth Hurd headed off a series of entries with “The slipstream of disenchantment and the place of fullness”. “Fullness” is a...