The next president of the United States will have done the best campaigning job of replacing this sentence’s “or” with “and”: “Is health care for children a parental responsibility or a moral imperative for society?” Who would not agree that whatever the proportions, the health care of children must be a concern of both parents and society?

My first response to the question was political--the politics of the home (the Republican Party’s emphasis) and of the state (the Democratic Party’s emphasis). And my conclusion is that, this time around, no ideological Democrat or ideological Republican is electable to the Oval Office.

Now that I’ve taken care of POLITICS, we can move on to MORALITY.

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Let’s start with you. If you twist your arm slowly, soon it will begin to hurt, and the pain will keep increasing until it becomes SEVERE. If you enjoy the pain, you’re a masochist. If you so twist the arm of someone else, you’re a sadist. And if your job is to inflict such pain, you’re a torturer (the root meaning of the word torture is “twisting”).

Let’s apply this to our question: “Can the use of torture ever be justified?” Not in international law, which defines torture as “any act by which SEVERE pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as” (and here I expand the list) information, punishment, sadistic satisfaction, intimidation, coercion to acquiescence, political re-education, discrimination, humiliation, repression, & deprivation. So defined, torture can never be justified.

Implicitly, international law says that pain-infliction is permissible as long as the pain is not SEVERE. I agree here with international law, and reject the arguments of those who say that no inflicting of pain can be justified.

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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

No, I didn’t write that. I wanted you to read it as though it were something just written, so I left off the quotation marks. It’s from page 63 of "THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY," a 1952 classic by America’s premier public intellectual of the time, Reinhold Niebuhr.

“Christian realism” is the phrase Niebuhr’s name often brings to mind. He had a wry way of saying things, and I remember the irony I could see in the slightly upturned corner of his mouth when he said things like forgiveness sometimes doesn’t work and unforgiveness never works.

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Two men sprang to mind when I read “Happy Holidays? Why are many holiday family gatherings marked by tension and unhappiness?”

ANTONY FLEW—formerly Britain’s most prominent atheist—in late age concluded that the existence of purpose cannot be explained without assuming the existence of a purposeful Mind behind and within the universe. Late last year, with eleven other academicians, he urged the British government to teach ID (yes, “intelligent design”) in the public schools! But--given the “On Faith” description of “many holiday family gatherings”—we cannot believe that they are intelligently designed, can we?

Well, yes, if we hear from the other man who sprang to my mind. He wasn’t an archangel, but he used “the Archangel” as a way of referring playfully to a life-assumption that has educational and therapeutic value. (Though himself a devout Christian, he avoided using “God,” a turn-off word for many of his patients.) A Berlin psychotherapist and Jungian analyst who emigrated to the U.S. at the beginning of World War II, he was missing a shoulder—blown off when he was a German soldier in World War I.

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In the American year, Thanksgiving is the only day officially converging the Christian mind and the American mind—two minds, independent though inseparable, neither to be captive to the other.

Another convergence on this day: the universal human impulse to give thanks and the universal celebration of harvest as expressive of this impulse. And one more convergence: as a universal festival with historic and geographical particulars, Thanksgiving is implicitly an occasion to give thanks for all festival comminglings of universals and particulars.

Now to the “On Faith” question: “In a world torn by religious, ethnic and geopolitical conflict, what can we be thankful for this Thanksgiving?”

1. We can be thankful for the increasing global recognition that our humanity is common. In 1943 I read Wendell Willkie’s just-published “One World.” How prescient he was! For failure to join the human race, the cost to individuals and collectivities is increasingly steep, and the nudge to unity is increasingly strong. Much that in the past motivated division is losing persuasive power, and much that the strong considered weakness is gaining in respectability—though we still have far to go before, in Jesus’ words, “the meek inherit the earth.”

2. We can be thankful for the increasing rapproachement between those historic sibling rivals, faith and reason. As religion has become stronger, atheists have become louder; but some prominent ones among them have surrendered their atheism. In 2003 prominent British atheist Antony Flew signed the atheist “Humanist Manifesto III,” which teaches evolutionism (“unguided evolutionary change”); but subsequently he has come to believe in a cosmic guidedness, a universal purpose verifiable by science. We may be witnessing the slow emergence of a common mind in our common humanity.

3. On this Thanksgiving Day, we Americans can be thankful for the freedom of religion from government interference and the freedom of government from dominance by any particular religion. And individually, we Americans can give thanks for the freedom to make our own mix of meanings, our own list of things to be thankful for, and to chose who shall be the Recipient of our thanks.

But instead of extending this list, I want to sketch the two minds in this entry’s title.

THE AMERICAN MIND can be glimpsed through our formative political documents and our rituals, both formed over against historic and contemporary alternatives. Communism was the most threatening alternative to our way of life when in 1954 President Eisenhower and Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. In contrast to atheist regimes and secularist philosophies, America was founded and continues to see itself as “under God,” though wisely the Constitution forbids any religious test for any political office.

The ritual (official wordings) of Thanksgiving Day reveal the American mind as theocentric, centered on the biblical God, thankful to him for life, liberty, and hope. Though our population is the world’s most multi-ethnic, England is the mother country of our predominant religion and our predominant language. Our earliest thanksgiving ritual is in the 1619 English Virginia-colony charter stipulating the annual celebration of landing-day as a day to be “kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Two years later, English separatist Christians (who came to be called the Pilgrims) held a three-day thanksgiving of feasting, dancing, and merry-making with the Amerinds, whose farming skills had helped them survive their first winter. In the telling of the American Story, “Mayflower 1620” is the founding event, and the Mayflower Compact “in the name of God” is the earliest founding document. The other strand in the American mind is the Scottish-English Enlightenment, which added critical and structural reason to the biblical faith.

Both strands of the American mind are in our founding documents and in the presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving Day. Here, I’ll indicate only that “thanksgiving” was understood as a liturgical word, a word technical to worship. It was not “being thankful” in a global-vague sense. It was one dimension of prayer.

So our first president (in 1789) called for “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” And our now most honored president, Abraham Lincoln, proclaimed (in 1863) “a prayerful day of Thanksgiving” for “his [God’s] Providence.”

While in population America is overwhelming a Christian country, we are by wise design not a Christian nation: we believe that for their best flourishing, religion and politics need structural protection from each other. But protection does not mean total non-influence. Thanksgiving Day is fundamentally a religious holiday, and our presidents have used “church” language in giving it “state” recognition: no impenetrable “wall of separation between church and state.”

Finally, how does THE CHRISTIAN MIND differ from the American mind in answering this “On Faith” question, “what can we be thankful for?” I began a list of what the American mind is thankful for this Thanksgiving Day. The biblical mind’s answer is simpler: We should live lives of gratitude to God, thankful for everything—God’s dark gifts as well as his bright gifts.

When Job had nothing after having had everything, he said (Job 1:21) “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” First Thessalonians 5:16-18 has the same triumphant transcendence: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Life, the whole of it, is a gift of God by nature; and the new life in Christ is God’s gift of grace, which rejoices that God has come to the world not only in Jesus but as Jesus, who accepted the dark gift of crucifixion and received the bright gift of resurrection.

For the Christian mind, every day is thanksgiving day, and all acts of compassionate service to humanity and the good earth are return-gifts to the Giver of all.