1.3 Key Terms and Symbols
You may already have some questions about the meaning of some of the terms and symbols I’m using, so let me briefly clarify the most important of them here, realizing that a more complete understanding will come only as you go further into the site. (Note: these are just some of the items you’ll find in Section 9. Glossary, which is still under construction.)
1. I’m using the word “faith” in a very broad sense, referring not only to religious faiths (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism and even cults) but also to “spiritual but not religious” faiths and secular faiths (e.g., secular humanism and communist atheism). This means the scope of this website, as seen in its title, “Centrist Faith and Politics,” is quite intentionally much broader than the more familiar “Religion and Politics.”
2. Some of the images I’m using to point to the main concern of this website (right) could also lead to a misunderstanding of its total scope. They do accurately represent the predominant focus as being the mutual influence on each other of the three great Western monotheistic religious faiths (Christianity, Judaism and Islam), on the one hand, and American politics, on the other. However, this website also includes non-religious and secular faiths, on the one hand, and politics more generally, on the other. |
3. What I mean by the key word “centrist,” is also different from how it is often used. As you’ve may have noticed, I am using it in a familiar sense as a negative contrast to “extremist.” However, what I mean is not a “moderate, wishy-washy middle” arrived at by compromising purer extremes, but rather something close to what David Brooks (one of our most important center-right commentators) says we are missing today: a “principled center.”
(If you’re curious about what this could be, that’s good! For this website, it’s a key to the healing of our excessive polarization that the best of the many principled forms of centrist faith and politics can provide for us.) (See Page 2.2 for a more detailed explanation of my understanding.) |
4. My use of “center-left” and “center-right” follows today’s common parlance (for example, the debate over whether the majority of Americans are one or the other politically). While I do recognize the problems and complexities with labels and typologies, employing some labels consistently is necessary for making useful distinctions. I find these common conventions the most serviceable: the labels “left/right” = “liberal/conservative”(neither of which I identify with evil by definition, as is far too common today), expanded to a basic spectrum of
“(far-left) (solid-left) (center-left)--(center)--(center-right) (solid-right) (far-right).”
With the risk of oversimplification, I will sometimes place other terms used to identify faith and political groups (e.g., “progressives,” “neo-cons,” “evangelicals,” “fundamentalists”) on this basic spectrum for ease of comparison.
“(far-left) (solid-left) (center-left)--(center)--(center-right) (solid-right) (far-right).”
With the risk of oversimplification, I will sometimes place other terms used to identify faith and political groups (e.g., “progressives,” “neo-cons,” “evangelicals,” “fundamentalists”) on this basic spectrum for ease of comparison.
5. That we are living in a “postmodern” age is related to the common historical distinction between premodern, modern and postmodern ages. In many of the resources referred to on this website "postmodern" points to a huge cultural paradigm shift in the West that is crucially important for the healing of our faith and politics (see Page 1.2 for more information)
6. There is “method in my madness” in the use of colors. Red is used to designate something I evaluate negatively. Blue (my favorite color) is used to designate something I evaluate positively. Green is used for emphasis as is the underlining and bolding of text. Purple is used when I have a different stance from one of the sources I'm reviewing.
7. Sometimes you will see the phrase "faith & politics" and sometimes "faith and politics." The latter is simply pointing to the fields of faith and politics as they exist separately. I use the former to point to their mutual interrelationship and effects on each other, which is the principle interest of this website.
8. I primarily employ health metaphors to describe better and worse forms of faith and politics. As you will see later, there are theological reasons for this related to my being a Wesleyan Christian and also the influence of the biblical Hebrew phrase tikkun olam “to heal the world.” But it’s also because they are organic metaphors that capture the always incomplete, yet evolving, finite human condition better than many alternatives. In this sense, various kinds of faith and politics can be more or less healthy, but not absolutely so. Thus, health metaphors are ideal for our postmodern pluralist age.
Click this button to go to the next section, which provides my viewpoint on our present crisis in faith & politics and its historical context; deals with crucial misperceptions of centrism, and argues for its importance for overcoming the crisis; and confronts the growing doubts that there can be any healthy interrelationships between religion and politics.
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