The Rumi Forum presented “Left at the Altar: The roller-coaster relationship between the Catholics and the Democratic Party” with Michael Sean Winters, Writer
In his discussion Michael Sean Winters focused on the past, present and future of the relationship between the Catholic voters and the Democratic Party in the United States and answered questions such as:
How is the line between church and state, and religion and society, shifting today? How is that shift consonant with historical trends or divergent? Why is Catholicism different from other Christian faiths in the public square? And, finally, what does the tidal wave of Latino immigrants mean for both American Christianity and American politics?
Michael Sean Winters writes the daily political blog for America and is the political columnist for The Catholic World. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, City Paper, and I Tempi. In 2002, during the clergy sexual abuse scandal, he served as an expert commentator for ABC News and was interviewed on-air by Peter Jennings for an ABC News special. In late 2003, he went to work as an assistant speech writer on the presidential campaign of General Wesley K. Clark (ret.) in Little Rock, Arkansas. Commenting upon Left at the Altar, New Yorker editor Hendrick Hertzberg wrote: “The opening decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by a stormy encounter—sometimes a confluence, sometimes a collision—between religion and politics. Michael Sean Winters, who is as at home in the library of a theological seminary as he is in the boiler room of a political campaign, is well positioned to navigate the storm. Few observers are as steeped as he is in the theory and practice of politics in both the Roman Catholic Church and the United States of America, and few are as passionately engaged in seeking a redemptive and humane common ground.”
Moderator :
Jerome D. Maryon, Esq. is conducting a nationwide series of lectures and panels on the threefold legal-historical-moral topic of (I) the moral imperatives in the history of the Rule of Law, the Common Law, and the U.S. Constitution, (II) the new and unprecedented challenges to those imperatives that are presented by Guantánamo, “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and the legal black holes created by extraordinary renditions, and (III) given those challenges, the question of whether the American electorate will vote for a return to an historically grounded, multilateral foreign policy, one that relies less on unilateral power and more on shared values. That nationwide outreach is based on his conviction that there are universal values and that these values are best discovered and developed in dialogue. That conviction also guides his research, from a project planned for Boston College, Harvard, MIT, etc., on the comparative law of drugs, covering some 70 nations and 7 universal faiths. The appropriation of universal values is reflected in his judicial draft opinions: to date, not one has been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Jerome’s awareness of universal values arose in an extensive academic formation: a perfect Poli Sci 4.0, a First Honours Diploma in Pontifical Studies, French and American law school, and a first-place tie for the Strategy Diploma of the U.S. Naval War College. Jerome draws on that formation in his teaching and outside lectures, in his community leadership (v., e.g., the CSPC Committee and the ICPL, Inc.), and in his overall emphasis on America’s need to restore common reason to public policy debate.