Transcripts For CSPAN Washington This Week 20131228 : vimars

CSPAN Washington This Week December 28, 2013

Look at u. S. saudi arabia it relations. Then a review talks about the federal budget and government shut down. He says what he thinks the matter what it is. I think you have to be political in a certain way. If you have to be honest and say the same thing. You have to cater to people sometimes i think and know what they want and need to be able to influence and to vote for them. It is not being does on it. Know your going to help them with the. Season to, next week Lady Bird Johnson to roselyn cotter rosalyn carter. Next, a discussion on faith and the white house with current and former directors of the white house faithbased offices. Use met in dallas at as him southernmessages methodist university. Thank you for that kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, we at smu and the center for president ial history is honored to have you here with us this evening. I hope i can speak for all of us when i say it is an honor to have our five guests and panelists with us today. These five people have served our country well. They have led the charge in finding fair, constitutional, efficient, and effective ways for our National Government to assist and partner with faith based and neighborhood organizations in our midst which are doing great social good. In short, they have invested personally in making our country a better place to live in. We have the opportunity to hear from all of them are on the same stage. For years, president osha and his advisers believed that small faithbased and Community Organizations had been at an unfair disadvantage, competing on an unlevel Playing Field when it came to qualifying for and accessing and receiving federal funding. Although they were serving American Communities in many ways, they did not have the resources, information, or connections to pursue federal funding that larger, more prominent organizations have. In some instances, faithbased organizations were finding themselves at a disadvantage in applying for funding specifically because they were faithbased. The White House Office of faith is an committee conditions was established. Each of our panelists has a server is serving as the director of this very office. I encourage you to take a good look at your programs. You will see that they are all eminently incredibly qualified, experienced and hardworking people but for now, please allow me to briefly introduce all of our distinguished guests. Our first guest, john dulio served as the first chairman. He is currently a professor of politics, religion, and Civil Society and professor of Political Science at the university of pennsylvania and is involved in multiple organizations aiding our nations communities in his hometown of philadelphia. After he left office, president bush appointed our second guest, jim twqohy as the new director. He served for four years and is now in his third year a atve mari a university. Our third guests served at the office of faithbased and Community Initiatives from 2006 2008. Since 2008, he has served as the distinguished senior fellow at Baylor University and is president of the Sagamore Institute and International Public policy research firm. When president obama came into office in 2009, he oversaw a revamping of this White House Office including renaming it the office of faithbased and neighborhood partnerships. He appointed as its new director our fourth guest, joshua dubois. He left his office after serving from 20092013 to author a new book and become a weekly columnist for the daily east and start values partnerships aimed at helping companies and nonprofits partner with the Faithbased Community. Finally, i would like to introduce our fifth guest, melissa rogers, the current executive director of the White House Office of faithbased and neighborhood partnerships. Before assuming her white house post in march of this year, she served in senior positions at the center for religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University divinity school, the brookings institution, the pew forum on religion of public life, and as general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for religious liberty. I encourage you to take a look at each of their bios on your program. These are truly remarkable people. We have the opportunity tonight to hear from all five of these experts and civil servants. Allow me to explain how we will proceed. I have asked each of our panelists to share 1015 minutes about their experiences, successes and difficulties, their views on the role of the white house in matters of faith in the Public Square. After each is had an opportunity to speak, i will lead a discussion amongst our panelists about some of the most important issues they have raised. Finally, at the end, we will open up the floor for you to ask questions of our guests. It takes very little faith to believe that i have spoken enough for now. Panelists, we are eager to hear about your experiences and thoughts on the role of the white house in matters of faith and the Public Square. Audience, please join me in welcoming our first analyst, the first rector of the now office of faith based and neighborhood partnerships. [applause] thank you very much, brian. It is an extraordinary pleasure to be here. I want to thank brian and the other leaders of the center for bringing us altogether. It is a real personal trait to be here with my friends and colleagues, jim, jay, joshua, and melissa, melissa not only being the first woman but the first person whose name does not begin with j. [laughter] each of my colleagues here served with incredible distinction. I say that this is not the thing you kind of say when you are all together and you have to be nice, i mean it from the heart. Jim succeeded a crazy fat man from philadelphia [laughter] and then succeeded in institutionalizing the office under far from easy circumstances and was able to forge faithbased and Community Initiatives plenty. Jay sustain that office and work creatively to grow the effort even as the sense drained from the second term hourglass. If you dont believe it, just wait for the book coming out in january. It tells the story. Joshua transitioned the office under a new president of a Different Party and engaged the widest spectrum of leaders of all faiths and no faith and established centers in every Cabinet Agency and other federal units as well. I am a book salesman, as you can tell. I am selling their books and i am on commission, by the way. [laughter] last but not least, melissa, whose history with the office predates her own directorship, having served from her perch at brookings as a key confidant and friend to both the first bush and the first obama fa so calledith czars and she has begun to develop exciting new faithbased partnerships and initiatives. God bless each of them and god bless resident george w. Bush and god bless president opera obama. Barack obama. I have been teaching at Ivy League Universities for more than 30 years. I qualify as having the key value of an Ivy League Professor which means i can speak for five minutes or two hours on any subject with no essential change in content. [laughter] before you hear from my betters on this panel, let me inflict 10 or 12 minutes or so of my thoughts about our topic for this evening, fate, the white house, and the Public Square and i will offer four sets of points. The first point i would make is that today, faithbased is not only a term associated with a White House Office that is soon to be 14 years old and a faith based, more importantly, is a permanent part of the Public Discourse about religion, policy, and civic life. In the half dozen or so years that are seeded the establishment of the office, small but intellectually and ideologically and religiously diverse cadre of policy wonks and opinion leaders came together. What happened was that we trumpeted a fact, a fact that was hiding pretty much in plain view. Namely, the fact that americas urban churches come the synagogues, and mosques and other houses of worship and, most of all, the small street level ministries concentrated in the nations poorest places. All of these functions as Sacred Places that serve civic purposes. Food pantries, daycare, drug and alcohol prevention or treatment, homeless shelters, afterschool and summer education, Youth Violence reduction, welfare to work placement and job training, health care, prisoner reentry, and literally scores upon scores more. In many cities from coast to coast, these faithbased organizations were not just add ons but accounted for much or most of given types of social Service Delivery either on their own or in partnerships with other groups or with public agencies. The vast majority of these Sacred Places serve people of all faiths and no faith, most did not discriminate on religious grounds in mobilizing workers or volunteers and their primary beneficiaries, at least in most urban areas, were children, youth, and young adults who were not themselves members. But also, in some not so innocent cases, out of outright hostility to religious people and places. President clinton and the first lady clinton were the first major fence, white house fans come of faith based, the First Federal faithbased center was established during the second clinton term out of the office out of the department of housing and urban development under secretary andy cuomo. , it was in the 2000 president ial election that faith based Went National to stay. Vice president doran governor bush had their respective favorite locutions on the subject. Their respective messages on faith based were much the same. I still think the best single sentence in this regard was the one that governor bush first delivered in his july, 1999 duty of hope speech, the speech that launched his president ial campaign. Government cannot be replaced by charities but it should welcome them as partners, not resent them as rivals. A new White House Office, while respecting all federal church, state doctrines and limits would build on the federal socalled charitable choice laws that had been and active in the late 1990s and would welcome religious leaders into the white house, into the Public Square, into the Public Discourse and debate and dialogue and it would promote faith based and Community Initiatives and partnerships to expand mentoring for the children of prisoners and achieve many, many other civic goals. Not everybody was thrilled with this approach. Orthodox secularists, mainly among Democratic Party elites, and orthodox sectarians, mainly among Republican Party e lee, did not like the bipartisan centrist level the Playing Field approach. Still, each candidate persisted in embracing and in articulating this vision. Thereafter, so did governors and mayors in each party. Although it has received relatively little attention, the White House Office has its younger siblings in dozens of state governments all around the country. Second, today, the imperial evidence on the existence of faithbased organizations and programs is both deeper and wider than it was back in 2001 when the office was established. For instance, a forthcoming study by my university of pennsylvania colleague is being conducted in concert with orders for sacred laces come of the nations leading national nonsectarian organization that tends to the Historic Preservation of older religious robberies involved in Community Activities and purposes, it will indicate that the civic replacement value of the average older urban congregation is what it would cost tax ayers were these Sacred Places to top supplying social services and serving civic offices as they do. This replacement value is, if anything, several times what was estimated to be when the first generation of studies were completed. Faithbased organizations and programs have, what he called, i halo effect is respected Economic Development that goes even far beyond social Service Delivery. Stay tuned for those interesting academic findings. I know you cannot wait. [laughter] third, in the courts of Public Opinion and the courts of law, the core ideas and sentiments behind the White House Office that began in 2001 are at least as widely embraced today than before. For all the church state controversy that has turned this into a toxin, nearly 3 4 of all americans including republicans and democrats believe in the civic value of Sacred Places and believe that most to a very good and Cost Effective job at supplying Vital Social Services and support a level Playing Field for all religious nonprofits when it comes to government grants. It is certainly true that in the past dozen years or so, we have witnessed a rise in the fraction of americans that claim no religious affiliation. The survey researchers have turned this none. when i heard that 15 of americans were nuns, i got excited, look out. Even many of the socalled nones see themselves as religious or spiritual and consider religion important in their only daily lives. Moreover, churches are second only to the military in public trust and confidence, way at a Public Schools, newspapers, labor unions, big businesses and congress. Over the last dozen years or so, virtually all of the major constitutional and other legal challenges to faithbased have resulted in rulings that either favor faithbased efforts or that challenge those that would treat faith motivated citizens as secondclass citizens. Alas, our nations social and civic capital is in excitedly bound with its spiritual capital. That is a fact. It is a fact warmly embraced by most americans without regard to party, religion, demographic description, or social economic status. That said, the lives of future White House Office directors will be no less interesting or surrounded by political conflicts and crosscurrents that our respective tenures were. My final points to me, the soon to be 14year old White House Office, in addition to all the actual substantive ongoing good works should serve now and in the future as a symbolic reminder that, deep is the divisions may go on churchstate issues, whether in general or in particular issues like religious hiring rights, what unites us is always more important than what divides us. As my jesuit friend liked to preach, and essential unity and nonessential diversity in all things charity. Who among us does not want to find ways for diverse faith based organizations to partner with each other, with secular nonprofits and with federal, state, or local agencies to improve and expand the health and Human Services that go to americas elderly shutins, to the evergrowing numbers of Senior Citizens that many regions and cities live alone or other elderly relatives or friends . Who does not want the same faithbased and neighborhood partnerships to improve and expand in relation to the u. S. Department of agricultures food and nutrition programs . To curb this bikes in child heard hunger when the reduced price meals the kids get during the school months are no longer a readily available. A bipartisan, centrist, problem solving, community anchored vision was behind the original case for faithbased. I do not mean to say that by harkening back to that vision, all of our disagreements will melt away nor do i mean to say that by rallying together to meet specific challenges like the two i just mentioned, we will have nothing about which to fuss, fight, or sue each other over. I do mean to say that the focus exclusively on the disagreements while forgetting the past, present, or potential Common Grounds, to dispute without regards to what resulting the disputes might yield in the way of a common good is the road to civic tradition. Perdition. The white house has persisted in part because people of diverse faiths and no faith focused fatefully and together on the civic challenges that faith based and neighborhood partnerships could help to meet. Doing so with genuine compassion, looking for compassion and truth in action, and caring especially about the least of the last and the loss of our society. Speaking to a group of boston innercity clergy in 2005, senator Hillary Rodham clinton put it this way who is more likely to go out on a street and save a poor at risk child and someone from the community, someone who believes in the divinity of every person, who sees god at work in the lives of even the most hopeless and left behind our children . That is why we need not to have a false division or deb

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