Catholic Imagination and Contemporary Culture

Barbara Elliott's Presentation on Catholic Imagination and Contemporary Culture to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Enjoy.

Beautiful Brilliance: Barbara Elliott on Mike Church

The ever elegant and thoughtful Barbara Elliott (yes, OUR Barbara) was on the Mike Church show today.  Congrats to Barbara for sharing her always inspiring insights on the nature of American character and community, and congrats to Mike Church for having such good taste in his choice of guests.

Click here for the interview with Barbara Elliott on the Mike Church (King Dude) radio show.

Barbara, we love you!

Faith-based Initiatives in Action

by James E. Person, Jr.

Street Saints: Renewing America’s Cities
by Barbara J. Elliott (Templeton Foundation Press, 2004), 320 pages

Some of the world’s greatest people are largely unknown, for they accomplish positive, life-changing deeds in quiet, unannounced ways. Their work is unreported and largely unknown outside their immediate circle of influence. A great number of such people lack political connections and every characteristic of celebrity, and their only claim to recognition springs from one small source: they desire to help others in practical, uplifting ways, often in obedience to God. They are the men and women who work in faith-based initiatives in America’s cities, and their lives affirm the belief articulated by St. James, that faith without works is dead.

In Street Saints: Renewing America’s Cities, Barbara J. Elliott tells the stories of these Christian servants in a straightforward, warts-and-all manner, revealing their life stories, struggles, and triumphs. An authority on civic renewal, Elliott has interviewed hundreds of activists (predominantly Christian) working amid conditions of squalor and hopelessness who are seeking to fashion a sense of order, faith, and community-mindedness that has been long forgotten in many inner-city neighborhoods.

Renewing America’s Soul: Part IV of Faith and Civil Society

By Barbara J. Elliott                              

         When did the conversation of conservatives in America shift predominantly to the realm of politics, to the exclusion of virtually everything else?  What was once a rich philosophy of ideas imbedded in imaginative literature, philosophy, history and theology has thinned out to a one-note samba played on a political tin drum. Both political parties have reduced their vision to the material realm, where the only disagreement is over whether the government should be vast and bankrupt now or large and bankrupt soon. The assumption is that the government must provide all significant solutions. Is politics really the main engine that drives history? 

        

Seeking Secular Salvation

        

Deep beneath this shift toward the political realm was a philosophical drift that began in an undercurrent early in the 13^th century.  Eric Voegelin, one of the most astute critics of modernity, argued that the modern age has been characterized by the emergence of politics as a secular means of salvation.  He traces the unraveling of order back to Joachim of Flora, a medieval mystic who depicted man’s history in three ascending ages, which would bring about the final age of perfection.  According to Voegelin, Fiore “and his successors replaced faith in God with faith in man’s ability to build heaven on earth.  The new earthly faith depended upon the fallacious notion that history itself has a purpose:  the achievement of human perfection.  Salvation was to be sought in this world, through the pursuit of temporal achievements aimed at making material the transcendent world of God.” [1]  Hobbes and Rousseau took the next steps, claiming that the political order could provide the means to rescue man from his fallen state and remake his image.

Faith, Civil Society and the American Founding

by Barbara J. Elliott

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he marveled at the faith that motivated civic life.  He wrote, “For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other.” [1] He was dazzled by the array of voluntary associations– civic, philanthropic, political, neighborly, moral, educational – and the vibrant good will they harnessed.  This kind of engagement was unique to America in this era, quite unlike the European culture.  In old Europe, it was much more likely that the nobility or the church hierarchy would take on a project, but seldom would individuals simply band together. But in the years since the first colonials stepped ashore, these European immigrants had been helping one another settle in and thrive. It had become a way of life.

         In the famous passage that illustrates the voluntary vibrancy of America, Tocqueville wrote:

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations.  There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile…immensely large and very minute.  Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes.  Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way.  Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. [2]

  The variety of such associations was truly staggering. In The Tragedy of American Compassion, Marvin Olasky gives us a snapshot of the kinds of groups Tocqueville would have seen on his visit here. 

Faith and the American Founding

By Barbara J. Elliott

An increasingly heated debate is taking place in America to redefine the role of faith in the public square.  Faith has been a part of the American experience since the earliest days of the founding.  As the nation now considers the relationship of the sacred and the secular, it may be helpful to reconsider our roots.  This debate does not take place in a vacuum.  In fact we have several hundred years of American experience since the earliest settlers came here.  The role of faith in the founding of America is worth revisiting, as is the truth about the relationship between church and state.

The American founders believed that freedom must be linked to faith, or freedom would fail. They were convinced that a free nation can function well only if its citizens live by the fruits of faith, although they did not want the government to impose one church on the nation. They believed that individual men and women can live in liberty only if they are governed from within. They believed that faith fosters good character, and that without virtue and self-restraint, there would be conflict and chaos. The American founders were certain that religion is indispensable for freedom. The relationship of church and state is this:  the state depends on the fruits of faith for its survival. Without virtue, freedom cannot be sustained. And faith is necessary to foster virtue.

         George Washington said so plainly in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports…let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. …reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”[1] That is exactly the same conclusion John Adams reached, and he drove the point home saying, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [2]

 

Conclusive Christian Convictions

The signers of the Declaration were predominantly devout Christians, despite the contemporary spin on history that would tell us otherwise.  Professor M.E. Bradford researched their lives thoroughly, including their correspondence, wills, and writings, and found conclusive evidence that the signers, with very few exceptions, were firmly committed in traditional practice of Christianity. [3]  Bradford found that the references by the founders to “Jesus Christ as Redeemer and Son of God” are “commonplace in their private papers, correspondence, and public remarks.”[4]  Their faith was evident not only in their words, but in their lives. For example:

Remembering Ronald Reagan

by Barbara J. Elliott
 

The first time I saw Ronald Reagan in person, I was in a close-up on national television, crying.  It was the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976, and I was the youngest delegate from Gerald Ford’s home state, pledged to the candidate who had just lost to him.  I would have slit my arm to pledge my loyalty in a big bloody RR, if anyone had asked.  I was completely clothed in white that night, and as my hero Reagan was defeated I Iost my political innocence. The best man doesn’t always win.

It took the nation four more years to discover its devotion to Reagan, but it finally did. I was privileged to be one of many people from the conservative movement to be appointed by President Reagan to serve in his Administration.  I left my job at The Heritage Foundation to accept a position in the White House Office of Public Liaison, where I was tasked with putting on briefings on the new administration’s economic policy for leaders of the business community.  

One thing you learn quickly in the Washington world is that power has a clear ratio to the length of one’s title. Short title = big job. President, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury-- these are all short titles and jobs that pack a punch.  But Deputy Special Assistant to the President in the Office of Public Liaison of the White House -- now that’s a position so far down the totem pole that I really had no business setting foot in the Indian Treaty Room.  But I did in fact find myself there holding briefings with all manner of distinguished people.  The really important people got to hear the President.  The moderately important people got to hear the Vice President and a member or two of the cabinet in the briefings I put together for them. The rest got, well… me.  Another thing I learned is that Washington runs on the backs of eager twenty-somethings who work insane hours to make up for the lack of experience we should have had for the responsibility we bore. It was a privilege to serve, for which I have been grateful ever since.

Ronald Reagan was clear about his sunny vision for America.  He had a contagious confidence in the capacity of ordinary Americans to accomplish extraordinary things, if given the freedom to come up with their own solutions.  Years on the speaking trail for GE had given him the opportunity to experience the ingenuity and energy of Americans across the country. He believed in the great capacity of this country’s wind-swept plains and fertile fields to grow good grain and great souls. 

Remembering Reagan's Compassion

The Hauenstein Center--September 17, 2010

By Barbara J. Elliott

For the past 15 years, I have been involved with philanthropy in America – as a philanthropic advisor to donors, as a social entrepreneur, a nonprofit leader, and advisor to leaders of faith-based organizations that serve the homeless, prisoners, recovering addicts, and at-risk children.  I also collaborated with the efforts of the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based Initiative.

In a previous phase of my life, I had the honor of being appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve in The White House in the Office of Public Liaison, where I was responsible for the White House briefings on the economic program for the business community.  From that vantage point, I got a bird’s eye view of the Administration’s efforts to revitalize the America’s public and private sectors. I was in the thick of it, putting on briefings day in and day out, with cabinet secretaries and their deputies as spokesmen, as well as key White House staff.  In the first year everybody wanted to meet with the President--- and everybody had an agenda, as we discovered.   

Ronald Reagan came to the presidency with a body of knowledge and convictions honed during his years as a spokesman for General Electric, where he gave hundreds of talks on all manner of subjects, long before he entered the political arena.  He had a deep and abiding faith in the prudence and wisdom of people at the grass roots level to manage their own lives well, if left free from government intrusion.  We know a lot of his thoughts from the handwritten commentaries he wrote in preparation for his radio broadcasts in the 1970s, published in the book:  Reagan In His Own Hand. For his critics who claimed he was a “great communicator” because Peggy Noonan and others put great words in his mouth, this book is a rebuke. These are vintage Reagan talks--- all written in his longhand—and they tell us a lot about the contours of the heart and mind of Ronald Reagan long before he became president. 

Review of Arthur C. Brooks' "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism America’s Charity Divide – Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why it Matters"

By Barbara J. Elliott

 

We live in two Americas: “America the Selfish” and “America the Charitable,” according to Arthur Brooks. If one maps these two Americas, their boundaries align closely to the political blue and red states: the red states give more. The bright line that delineates the charitable from the selfish is their convictions, both political and religious. And research shows that conservative people of faith put their money where a secular liberal’s mouth is.

Brooks is a professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and a consummate cruncher of numbers. When he received his first results, he did not believe them—or did not want to. So he ran them again. He had assumed that the people who are most vociferous about socioeconomic inequality would give the most to alleviate it. He was shocked to find that is not the case. Brooks came up with some eye-opening conclusions:

·      Despite their reputation as “caring,” political liberals give less of their income to charitable causes than conservatives.

·      People who mistrust big government give more of their money and time as volunteers to take care of the poor themselves.

·      Government spending displaces private dollars to charities, weakening their ability to garner private support.

·      People who are religious give more across the board, not only to religious causes but to non-religious charities as well.

·      Charity isn’t just a rich man’s activity: The working poor give a greater proportion of their income than the middle or upper classes.

·      Americans give far more money and volunteer much more frequently than Europeans.

·      Charitable giving fosters not only personal happiness, but economic growth and prosperity.

Who gives in America? About three out of four families give charitable gifts each year. The average amount is $1,800, or 3.5 percent of their income. Brooks finds that the most generous donors have four key traits: religious faith, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism. Where these converge, dollars flow freely toward charitable causes.

What Must Leaders Know to Wield the “Five Swords of Imagination”?

By Barbara J. Elliott

Kudos to Gleaves Whitney for the insightful and well-crafted article on Dr. Kirk’s book The Sword of Imagination. This piece and the book on which it is based are a tonic for anyone concerned about redeeming the time. Contemporary myopia limits vision to merely the political as the only serious realm capable of improving the miserable state of humankind. But the Sage of Mecosta knew better.

Russell Kirk told us that those who would do battle with the errors of their time should be equipped with not just one but five “swords of imagination.” As Gleaves Whitney summarizes, leaders need the historical imagination to understand what humankind has been. They need the political imagination to know what humankind can do in community. They need the moral imagination to discern what the human person ought to be. They need the poetic imagination to perceive how human beings can best use their creative energies. And they need the prophetic imagination to divine what human beings will be, given the choices they make.

Russell Kirk’s rich historical imagination allowed him to break free of the prevailing interpretation of America’s patrimony and give us the brilliant overview of the deeper rootedness which runs through the history of five cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. Dr. Kirk helped us see that we have inherited the ordering of the soul from the ancient Hebrews, the ordering of the mind from the ancient Greeks, the ordering of the polity rooted in virtue from ancient Rome, the hope of redemption from Christian Jerusalem, common law and contracts from London. Together, the incremental growth of these truths over 3,000 years produced the tree of ordered liberty --a sapling of which was planted in the American colonies and took shape in our Constitution in Philadelphia.

The Power of Beauty

By Barbara J. Elliott

T.S. Eliot’s quote on beauty gladdened my soul.

The past several days I have had the opportunity to pull back from my otherwise consuming activities serving at-risk inner city teenagers, recovering drug addicts, prisoners transitioning into employment, nonprofit management and the inexorable necessities of fund raising, to focus on something altogether different: Beauty. In particular, the intersection of faith, art, and culture where the True, the Good and the Beautiful take form. The Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image, attracts poets, painters, and playwrights, writers of fiction and filmmakers, illustrators, collage-makers and musicians from across the continent for a week in Santa Fe to deepen their craft or learn a new one. Many – but not all – are people of faith, wrestling with the calling that accompanies their gifts, struggling to give shape to the collision of the immanent and the transcendent, the irruption of spirit into the material realm, and the journey of the human soul from doubt to belief.

What value can art have in a world so distressed by war, ideological clashes, poverty, economic implosion, moral disintegration, unemployment, and all the other ills that afflict us? John Paul II addressed the value of work – all work – in his encyclical Laborem Exercens:

“When a man works he not only alters things and society, he develops himself as well. He learns much, he cultivates his resources, he goes outside himself and beyond himself. Rightly understood, this kind of growth is of greater than any external riches which can be garnered…. Hence the norm of human activity is this: that in accord with the divine plan and will, it should harmonize with the genuine good of the human race, and allow people as individuals and as members of a society to pursue their total vocation and fulfill it.” (Laborem Exercens, 23)

It is refreshing, and a little surprising for someone who has been so long entrenched in the dissolute realm of poverty and broken down neighborhoods and systems, to discover a gathering of serious souls involved in the hard work of creating beauty. By that I don’t mean the saccharine realm of prettiness, but the difficult kind of beauty incarnate in the suffering Christ and the scandal of the cross.

Art has the twin functions of reflecting a culture and shaping it. The problem that contemporary artists face is a difficult one: how to express meaning to a world which has become culturally over-stimulated by the spectacular, hyper-sexualized, dumbed-down by inanity, and increasingly antagonistic to manifestations of Christianity. Some of the artists who are here this week struggle to believe that the vocation as an artist – especially a Christian artist – has any meaning or value at all. They are at the edge of redefining and creating anew with moral imagination a vision of the True, the Good and the Beautiful that has been all but exterminated in Western culture.

Redeeming the Time

By Barbara J. Elliott

One advantage I have in this conversation is that the Elliott household continues the discussion in more hours and words than we can capture on this scroll. We wrestled with some ideas today I would like to share with the rest of you.

One is a hope for us in this discussion to remember, reclaim and formulate anew the truths that comprise a body of thought worthy of living by, which we can pass on to our children and students, while taking up the sword of imagination to do battle with the present culture. Part of the weakness of conservatism has been a tendency to only look backward, often with nostalgia, which can only result in a kind of melancholy acceptance that most good things have been lost and the best we can do is hunker down and survive.

Another weakness of the current conservative movement is its uber-politicization. What we need is a revitalization of the life of the mind and spirit, because it is here that the deep wellspring can nourish us as individuals and as a movement. I am certain that we are pilgrims with an eternal destination, and that the political circumstances of that journey are secondary or tertiary in importance in the grand scheme of things. The culture we create has a profound effect on our lives and those that follow us. But as T. S. Eliot reminds us in “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture,” cultural disintegration is the most devastating and the most difficult to repair. It takes a long time to grow the grass to feed the sheep, which will provide the wool to make the yarn, to finally produce a coat.

I am reminded of a presentation given years ago at the Center for Constructive Alternatives by a Member of the British Parliament, Rhodes Boyson, on “How Ideas Become Political Reality.” His model is so good that we used it in the early days of The Heritage Foundation to move ideas through the steps quickly and effectively. It runs something like this:

The Difference Between Fellow Travelers and Friends

by Barbara J. Elliott

As someone who had libertarianism poured into my morning milk as a child, I am in some ways still “in recovery.” However, I have lived a long time the American conservative movement, as it grew from obscurity into an intellectual movement, then into a national political triumph, and then as it squandered much of the intellectual capital in the political realm, at the same time as most of the conservative institutions have focused their energy primarily on politics. The breadth and depth of conservative thought has been simplified from a symphony to a one-note samba.

We need to have the differentiation of thought to recognize that there are different realms within which we live: the personal realm with family and friends; our community of faith; our professional realm; the economic realm; the local civic realm; and the political. At home and with our closest friends we want convictions to be at least harmonious with our own. We seek out a community of faith where we share one creed. In the economic realm, we encounter people of all kinds of convictions, but we can still do business with them, or choose not to. In the professional realm, we prefer people of similar convictions, but don’t always have that opportunity. At the local civic level there is a diversity of beliefs and motivations, but as long as the interaction remains civil, it is acceptable. In the political realm, in a two-party system, of necessity we may have fellow travelers as political allies who do not share our cultural views or religious convictions, and whom we would not necessarily choose as friends, but who are necessary to form a coalition for victory. Or we can remain pristine and pure, and relinquish political control to people who will use the concentration of power to limit our freedoms, take more of our earnings, and pervert the law for us and for future generations.

This leads to some very uneasy coalitions. For the conservative movement of the 1950s until 1990, communism was the glue that held the coalition together, as various strands joined forces to oppose the threat all agreed must be met, just as politicians of different stripes rallied together in two world wars. Do libertarians and conservative start from totally different points of reasoning? Absolutely. Do they share an understanding of the human person? No. Do they value culture and community in the same way? No. There are differences with neo-cons and paleo-cons and crunchy-cons, and all the other cons, too. But alone, none of these factions has enough sway to dominate elections. Such is life. And it may even be a good thing--at least the Founders thought so.

I had a conversation with an old FEE style libertarian over lunch not long ago. What is the highest goal of human life? For him, the answer is freedom. And I had the impertinence to ask him: Freedom for what? How can the answer not take virtue or transcendence into account? At that, he threw down his napkin and announced lunch was over. I was stunned. But as I was driving home reflecting, I realized (or remembered) it’s a closed system, which is why libertarian thought is so appealing to minds in search of airtight solutions. And it does not allow dissent.

The rich soil of faith, family and friends is where community is formed, where relationships flourish, where roots go down that nourish us. It is sometimes unpredictable, even messy, and the order that emerges is organic. This is where the little platoon lives and breathes, where stories are told and legacies are passed down. This is where truth emerges as we dig in the soil. This is where those of us who are rooted in Christ seek to walk out our faith in tangible deeds of sacrifice, loyalty and love, in relationship with people whose names we know. And the eternal language of love is written in the hearts of those whose lives we touch.

The political realm should protect our ability to do these things. In fact, political order in a republic depends on the virtues that are formed there. We need the political fellow travelers who may not share the same rootedness, but who agree that the political realm should protect these freedoms. We won’t agree on everything, not even on the highest goal of human life. But libertarians are necessary allies in a political coalition that may just barely muster enough votes to rebuke the present administration. The problem is not libertarians vs conservatives. The problem is the political operatives snatching huge hunks of what was the private sphere, spending the nation into oblivion, and trying to plant democracy in unready soil. And unfortunately, they are in both parties.