I’m not sure what the “new direction” here is, whether it is the attachment of faith to policy issues in general or to the specific issues of poverty, health care, immigration and war. In either case, I don’t think that any of this changes very much -- not that the issues themselves or a faith-based approach to them are not important.

I just don’t think that most people would expect the Democrats not to support these issues, even in the absence of any kind of commitment to faith. In other words, to many ears at least, all these front-runners will seem to be saying is that they are committed to being more faithful Democrats, i.e., more faithful to the positions that have defined the Democratic agenda so far.

Continue »

It would be easy to turn this question into a straw-man and read into it a presumed contradiction between doing good and being saved. On such a construction, the answer would be that there simply is no such conflict: Doing good deeds IS the way to salvation.

As the Qur’an says: “Do you not see the one who rejects religion? S/he is the one who rebuffs the orphan and does not encourage feeding the poor. Woe unto those who busy themselves in prayer but who are heedless of its meaning. Those who feign religion in order to be seen amongst men, but who will not share so much as a kitchen utensil.”

Perhaps a deeper reading of this question would ask about the actual value or utility of good deeds.

Continue »

My understanding of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has always been that “knowledge” -- in his case scientific knowledge – constitutes more of a horseshoe that we tend to treat as a fully closed circle.

In the space between the two extremes of the horseshoe, there are always “counterfactuals” that our theory can’t quite explain. Ultimately, when the number of counterfactuals grows to the point that the theory’s explanatory power falls below the level of effort it takes to sustain the theory itself, it is exchanged for another theory, and thus we get a scientific revolution. Ultimately, however, this too will be a horseshoe that we treat as a circle. And thus the cycle continues.

Continue »