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Obama Teaches a Faith Big Enough for Questions
What did you think of President Obama's commencement speech Sunday at Notre Dame? How will the Notre Dame controversy change the abortion debate in America?
Stealing a page from the Republican play book, President Obama asked us all to "starve the beast" of totalitarian religion without asking us to take all the muscle out of our faith or the conclusions to which it leads us. In doing so, he charted a new course in our national debate about a whole variety of deeply divisive issues in which religion is often central to fueling the divisions.
Precisely because we are not all going to agree any time soon, if ever, on a whole range of divisive issues like abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment, we need a shared ethic of engagement for the body politic of our nation. That is what the President offered in his remarks at Notre Dame. The fact that he did so on religious terms, the terms so often used to polarize the debate around these issues, is truly inspiring.
President Obama did something far more important than address the issue of abortion in his remarks at Notre Dame: he transformed a narrow debate driven by fear and anger into a call for thinking bigger about the problems we face, and he invited us all to look more deeply both into ourselves and the traditions we love for better responses to those problems. That is the work of all great religious and intellectual traditions regardless of the conclusions which they reach on any given issue, and in this case, it took the President to remind us of that fact.
In a world increasingly populated by individuals who hold to either faith or doubt, but rarely both, President Obama invited his entire audience to re-think what we mean by words so often used to divide us, words like faithful and religious. By speaking about the sanctity not only of religious faith and answers, but also of the sanctity of religious questions and doubt, the President worked past the typically destructive dichotomies which keep us yelling at each other rather than learning from each other.
The President's words at Notre Dame were nothing less than a critically needed full-out response to the use of any ideology claiming to possess the complete truth about how best to respond to any of the big issues we face as human beings in the 21st century. Speaking with eloquence, wisdom and grace, Obama went even further, implicitly challenging what many people consider to be the very essence of what it means to be Catholic, or for that matter, to being deeply committed to the truth of any religious tradition i.e. being right, to the exclusion of all others. But because he did all that with profound respect for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, it worked.
By
Brad Hirschfield
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May 18, 2009; 6:49 PM ET
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Posted by: marymack77 | May 26, 2009 9:07 PM
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Were fair minded words used by Southern senators when discussing slavery? Should those who opposed slavery given up the fight because charming well spoken southern gentleman talked of how their slaves were well treated and only a tiny minority were ill treated? After all slavery was underpinning the culture of the southern states and we should enter into dialogue if a cultural divide separates us? Like slavery abortion is intrinsically evil and must be opposed. Like slavery it treats one section of the human family as if they were disposable possessions. For those who see this clearly Don't be disheartened slavery was once legal and it was eventually made illegal. Once people come to their senses and realise the brutal reality of abortion they will begin to insist that politicians work to change this traversty of human justice for no man or woman has the right to deliberately kill an innocent vulnerable child sheltering in its mother's womb.Those who say they are against abortion but won't stop another person from the right to have one are no different to those who demand abortions because by your support for pro abortion groups you are enabling them to hold sway You cannot serve two masters. Abortion is an evil act that destroys the highest most loved part of God's creation the human person whom even the angels must bow to so beloved of God is humanity.Like slavery it cannot be justified.