I am delighted to introduce The Immanent Frame and its diverse lineup of contributors to the readers of the Tikkun Daily Blog. As a collective blog publishing interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere, we serve as a forum for ongoing exchanges among leading scholars across the social sciences and humanities, and feature original essays about controversial issues, major new books, and world events. As managing editor of The Immanent Frame, I will be posting regularly in this space, and on behalf of our entire editorial team and our many contributors, I sincerely hope you will follow and participate in our conversations, both here and at The Immanent Frame.

Most recently, contributors to The Immanent Frame have been engaged in an extended discussion about President Barack Obama, civic virtues, and the common good, called “These things are old.” Drawing on Obama’s complex and powerful political rhetoric – including the Inaugural Address from which this series title was drawn – our contributors have sought to trace his values back to the historical and philosophical traditions from which they are drawn.

Contributors have placed this political moment in different historical contexts—Jennifer Herdt traces Obama’s virtues back to the ancient Greeks, while Martin E. Marty finds their roots in the American Founding Fathers. Thomas L. Dumm and Robyn S. Schroeder analyze Obama’s novel invocation of American exceptionalism and Wade Clark Roof, David Morgan, and George Shulman situate Obama in debates about civil religion. A number of pieces explore Obama’s philosophical influences: Ronald F. Thiemann portrays him as the latest in a long line of “public theologians,” Gary Dorrien and Hent de Vries track his pragmatism back to Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Schmalzbauer suggests he has been inspired by a diverse group, from conservative intellectual Russell Kirk to Stan Lee’s Spiderman. Several plumb Obama’s rhetoric for calls to action: Todd Gitlin honors the American lineage of opposition to conquest, while Lawrie Balfour reminds us of Americans’ collective experience of strife and unfinished overcoming, and Jon A. Shields considers the role of religion in sustaining the courage and solidarity required to enact a “spirit of service.” While Vijay Prashad worries the “common good” that binds the citizenry together has been broken and hope alone cannot repair it, Bill Ayers argues we must now turn to movements on the ground to push Obama toward lasting change. Contributors to this series have been careful to explore the ruptures alongside the continuities in Obama’s elaboration and transformation of these diverse traditions. Most express hope alongside caution about the real changes that might accompany his rhetoric.

We hope you will join us as we continue this timely and wide-ranging exploration. For those of you who are new to this conversation, check out the following introduction to this discussion series by our editor-at-large, David Kyuman Kim.

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“These things are old”: A new discussion series at The Immanent Frame

by David Kyuman Kim

[This essay was originally posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at The Immanent Frame.]

In his Inaugural Address, President Barack Obama called upon Americans to “reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” Analysts of various political stripes have noted that Obama’s speech sought to distill for the American people, and the world, a new set of civic virtues—rooted in an ethic of the common good—posed as guides to Americans in their daily lives as citizens. Some observers have gone further and proclaimed the dawn of a new American civil religion.

Consider these words from the President’s Inaugural Address:

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

These are heady aspirations, and perhaps the kind of message a nation in crisis and in transition needs to hear. It would appear that this is a moment that is paradoxically imbued with a sense of clarity and ambiguity. And so it is that we at The Immanent Frame have chosen to honor and interrogate this moment—generated by the event of Obama’s presidency (and its corollaries “the Obama generation” and “the Obama era”)—by launching a new series: “These things are old.”

In a manner of speaking, Obama appears as both a question and an answer. As president, he poses an open invitation as well as a concrete proposal. He strongly makes the call to engage in the renewal and revival of a conversation about the common good. Yet while Obama used the civic space of the inauguration to dispatch the call to engage these values, he also offered a sanctification of “American” values and virtues as well as a particular historical narrative of American time and space. [...]

Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.