Mark Silk
Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a Contributing Editor of the Religion News Service
All Stories by Mark Silk
Gerson, disarmed
By Mark Silk — July 4, 2008
Michael Gerson, who’s sort of an unreconstructed pre-9/11 compassionate conservative, likes the Obama faith-based plan. He elides the hiring issue with this probably willfully ignorant sentence: “Obama is characteristically opaque on the issue of hiring — seeming to promise that religious parent institutions can select employees based on their beliefs, while denying this right (depending […]
Religion in the News!
By Mark Silk — July 3, 2008
The latest issue of Religion in the News is now up on our website. Just click on the cover with Obama on it. Yes, it’s an Obamarama issue, and just as we had sympathetic pieces on those religiously distinctive presidential aspirants Huckabee and Romney, so two articles out of Chicago smile on the Illinois senator […]
Brody Hearts the Old Guard
By Mark Silk — July 3, 2008
The easily impressed Brody is impressed by the Denver conclave. Beliefnet’s Michele McGinty not so much. Update: Eric Zimmerman’s post from the floor of the National Right to Life Convention probably gives the best temperature reading for rank-and-file “Values” activists. Lukewarm. Very very lukewarm.
Burke Revisited
By Mark Silk — July 3, 2008
Last week I suggested that St. Louis archbishop Raymond Burke’s quick promotion to head the Vatican’s highest court might be a kick upstairs for a prelate whose determination to fight communion wars with politicians could be problematic for the Church this election season. Here’s John Allen’s considered take on the question. The bottom line: maybe.
Faith-Based Hiring
By Mark Silk — July 3, 2008
Steve Waldman pooh-poohs the real, on-the-ground significance of the hiring discrimination issue in the new Faith-Based Debate, but in my view he misses the crux of the matter. What the president has always loved about faith-based programming is its promise of transforming lives (and thereby society) by bringing suffering and troubled people to Christ. That’s […]
Ave Maria
By Mark Silk — July 3, 2008
Swinging through Mexico on his Latin American jaunt, John McCain is paying an early morning call on Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. The AP sees this as more or less a straight pander for Catholic–especially Hispanic Catholic–votes: “The Basilica de Guadalupe is Mexico’s holiest site for Roman Catholics, and Catholic and Hispanic voters […]
Ancien Regime
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
The old guard of the religious right hath assembled in Denver, even as the hated Obama was taking in the sights in Colorado Springs, and announced its support of the hitherto loathed John McCain. Have they changed their minds, and discovered hitherto unknown Virtue in the GOP Standard Bearer Presumptive. Not quite. “None of these […]
Up the Flagpole
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
It seems to me that Obama’s Zanesville and Colorado Springs speeches of the past two days have to be read together as constituting the core of his campaign’s general election appeal. It’s the Kennedy Inaugural message updated for a more faith-based, less government-centric age. Yesterday: “The fact is, the challenges we face today – from […]
CT Catholics
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
The latest Quinnipiac Poll shows Obama ahead of McCain 56-35. (In 2004, Kerry beat Bush 54-44 in the Nutmeg State.) Among Catholics, Obama leads 47-44. In 2004, Kerry lost the CT Catholic vote to Bush 47-53. In this year’s Democratic primary, Obama lost the CT Catholic vote to Clinton 39-59. What this suggests is that […]
Brody Hearts Obama
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
Yes, Brody’s pretty much in the tank for Obama, but it’s hard to argue with his judgment that when it comes to religion, the presumptive Democratic nominee always seems a step ahead of the presumptive Republican one. While McCain trudges up the mountain to get the official Graham seal of approval, Obama outflanks him on […]
AP
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
Not to beat a dead horse, but what may have happened to misdirect the AP on Obama’s faith-based proposal was that an unnamed senior campaign adviser told reporter Jennifer Loven: “Obama proposes allowing religious institutions to hire and fire based on religion only in the non-taxpayer-funded portions of their activities.” This is a backwards way […]
Hot off the press!
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2008
Copies of our new book arrived today, and if you order right away you can get it for 25 percent off. You can think of it as kind of the Cliff’s Notes version of the Greenberg Center’s Religion by Region project–cheap at three times the price–but more importantly, it offers a new way of understanding […]
The Obama Approach
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2008
Here’s the Obama faith-based proposal. On first blush, it looks like a pretty modest thing, mostly directed toward building capacity among grass-roots religious (and secular) organizations: training, partnering, evaluation. The only actual program initiative is a $500 million summer learning program for 1 million children–with the money to come, in the usual campaign promise way, […]
Son of Faith Based
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2008
In response to my little excursus on President Bush’s faith-based initiative, I’ve received an extended comment from Bob Wineburg, a professor at UNC-Greensboro who knows a whole lot more about the subject than I do. I’ve posted his comments after the jump below, and would only make a couple of remarks proleptically in response. First, […]
Credit where credit is due
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2008
Last Saturday, I offered up a short post that consisted mostly of a little diatribe by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi against the prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen. But because I stuck a photo of Osteen at the top, it was not hard to mistake the indented words for my own–and over at Beliefnet’s Chuch Basement […]
