{"id":15435,"date":"2015-07-16T18:02:20","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T22:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15435"},"modified":"2015-07-16T18:02:20","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T22:02:20","slug":"respond-call-civic-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15435","title":{"rendered":"how to respond to a leader’s call for civic renewal"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama spoke at length, consistently, and passionately about\u00a0renewing citizenship in the US. I\u00a0collected many of the key quotes here<\/a>. There was a depth to these comments because Obama had worked for a\u00a0faith-based organizing network, had studied\u00a0Asset Based Community Development, had served on Robert Putnam’s Saguaro Seminar, and was married to the leader of a youth engagement nonprofit. He knew what he was talking about. And although he sought to lead the\u00a0Democratic Party,\u00a0he explicitly included Republicans and Independents in his call for civic renewal. However, the press ignored his citizenship theme, both during the campaign and later on (examples here<\/a>).\u00a0Policy wonks\u00a0and Democratic Party elites also ignored it. I served on both the Education and Urban Policy committees of the campaign, and neither group generated strong policy proposals for enhancing civic engagement. Thus\u00a0the administration–of which I am a defender, when it comes to mainstream matters of domestic and foreign policy–has done little to support enhanced citizenship in the US. A president cannot accomplish much alone, and if even his allies<\/em> don’t hear his call for something as abstract as civic renewal, nothing will happen.<\/p>\n

This summer, Pope Francis has made an impassioned call<\/a> to the peoples of the world to organize from the bottom up to combat environmental crises. Like Obama’s call in 2008, this one is rooted in experience and theory–in the Pope’s case, extending\u00a0back to his sainted namesake in the 13th century, but also including sophisticated modern theology. The Pope is the leader of Catholicism, yet\u00a0he has explicitly included non-Catholics and non-believers in his call for global organizing. But again, the theme of civic agency has been lost on the punditocracy. The Pope’s speech<\/a> at the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements was all about popular organizing, and\u00a0yet\u00a0the New York Times<\/em> largely\u00a0ignored that theme, summarizing his visit in these words: “Pope Francis met Thursday with President Evo Morales of Bolivia and apologized for the church’s ‘sins’ during Latin America’s colonial era. …\u00a0But if Francis again called for change, he also offered no detailed prescription.”<\/p>\n

Leaders alone cannot create\u00a0social movements, but their words can be\u00a0useful resources.\u00a0Barack Obama gave us an opportunity in 2008; I do not think we (or he) took adequate advantage of it. The Pope is giving us another chance. How–concretely and practically–should we respond this time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama spoke at length, consistently, and passionately about\u00a0renewing citizenship in the US. I\u00a0collected many of the key quotes here. There was a depth to these comments because Obama had worked for a\u00a0faith-based organizing network, had studied\u00a0Asset Based Community Development, had served on Robert Putnam’s Saguaro Seminar, and was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-democratic-reform-overseas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15460,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15435\/revisions\/15460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}