You could call America the love child of faith and power. Never happily married, church and state for centuries flexed their muscles, fought their wars, until the Founding Fathers made peace: the Creator endowed inalienable rights, the constitution would guard them. And America grew rich and mighty, welcoming people of all faiths, favoring none, and hosting a 240-year workshop on the role of God in public life.
That genealogy felt especially relevant during Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States. Having called out the world’s superpower more than once for the sins of hubris and materialism, Francis presented himself as pastor more than righteous prophet. He got so busy taking selfies with school children on his first morning in Washington that he was 20 minutes late to the White House. There, the easy smile that lit his broad features among the children dissolved into a look of distant contemplation‹as if to say that the Almighty does not make political endorsements. When the Pope closed his remarks with the words, “God bless America,” it was a prayer, not a boast.
He came as a shepherd and was everywhere tending his flock, with the human touch that has enthralled even skeptics with little use for the larger church. He knows the art of an image: when he touched down in Washington, he left the tarmac in a small black Fiat, dwarfed among the ominous SUVs of the President’s motorcade. But the Pope is not Mother Teresa. He is tough, still sturdy at 78, intensely focused on making the most of his allotted time. He is also a shrewd politician; his early
shuffling of the cutthroat ranks of the Curia are proof enough of that; he has kept the old guard of the Vatican guessing and off balance while quietly installing a vanguard of his own.
So it was especially timely that he should have landed on these shores just as America was working through a few of its regular eruptions of confusion and conflict on the borderlands of faith and politics. There is Kim Davis in Kentucky refusing to issue marriage certificates to same sex couples; here is Ben Carson rejecting the idea of a Muslim president; John Boehner is trying to forestall a government shutdown over funding of Planned Parenthood.
He is the first pope to do a Google Hangout and the first to amass over 20 million Twitter followers. The age of authority is giving way to the age of persuaion, which is why this first official declaration was a call to a new era of evangelization. The former nightclub bouncer and slum priest treats every encounter, whether with saint or sinner, as an invitation to mercy. You're gay? you're divorced? You had an abortion? Come home. "The heart of the Pope expands to include everyone," The U.SU. church is shifting demographically, politically and spiritually, and no one knows that better than a Pope who is hard at work transforming this church in all those same ways.
Mahatma Gandhi said that those who believe that religion and politics aren’t connected don’t understand either. They’ve forever been connected in this country; in that sense, the Pope was right at home as he balanced his spiritually driven, politically explosive agenda about the poor and global climate change alongside the leaders of the country, and the world. It was a bracing demonstration of the strengths and limits of moral leadership in the modern age.
The War on Delicious:
Americans love to talk about their freedoms. Most of the time they mean the familiar ones-speech and press and assembly, as well as the other high-minded things our forefathers made sure to include in the national contract. But there are other freedoms too-the freedoms too-the freedom to have an appetite for anything at all and then set out to satisfy it.
That's the freedom of rock and roll and super bowls a..and for many of us it's also the everyday freedom, when we sit down at the table, to eat whatever we please
Whatever the world has been doing about ISIS, it's not working
when he talks about the importance of service to others, in this way he is especially attuned to America;s current spiritual pulse.
Teddy Roosevelt calle the presidency a bully pulpit because he grasped the value of using arguments rather than armies to advance an agenda. At a time when so much of American leadership feels flabby and phony, when trust in institutions-congress, the presidency, the media, the church, police and business-is near all time lows, a visit by this attractive and enigmatic man reminds us of certain timeless truths. Humility is a powerful muscle; timing is a precious gift; and a genuine desire for progress is more winning, in the long run, than the cunning art of obstruction.
Merkel's hands-on approach carries a constant danger of getting lost in the weeds, as many said she did during the euro crisis. But she also has a record of scanning the globe from a high altitude, focusing intently on dangers not yet apparent to others. At that Munich security conference, almost every questioner wanted to know why she favored economic sanctions
Even when she was awkward and shy, you could feel her energy, you could feel her power, from the beginning..
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