The Contribution of Faith and Ethics to an Understanding of Humanness in the Public Square

David Pfrimmer

An analysis of the effect of the globalisation of the economy on various aspects of society, and in terms of the crisis of meaning in the North and the crisis of Misery in the South. The role of the church in the future, and some potential responses that it may make both to challenge current economic trends and to re-humanise our world.

David Pfrimmer is the director of the Office of Public Policy for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada

Introduction

I want to thank the organisers for the opportunity to address the theme of this symposium, "What Constitutes Humanness?" I know that the symposium has addressed this question from various perspectives and disciplines. I would like to speak to a particular aspect of the question; namely, the contribution of Christian faith and ethics to an understanding of humanness in the public square.

I am not much for watching television but a commercial ¹ has been running recently, that is quite captivating. You may have seen it. It begins with panoramic shots of the mountains of Canada; gigantic children walk among miniature houses. It continues with scenic pictures of various sites across the country and elegant music. A melodic voice in the background says, "Welcome to the global village." There are more pictures of scenery, and the voice continues, "There will be one billion tourists in our global village." Eventually, the series of shots from around the world ends; then the punch line of the commercial, "A great place for hotel!" Perhaps you have seen it?

In thinking about the theme for this event, it struck me that this commercial is a revealing metaphor of what it means to be human in the global village, in the minds of many of the academic, political an economic mandarins of power and influence in our society. The very people shaping our world today. People are seen as really just ‘tourists,’ passing through, having no permanence. People who are rootless, not anchored in any community, unaware of the local culture, certainly not more than superficially involved with each other, and primarily valued for the money they will spend without an expectation of any other contribution to the community. This is not what the advertisers intended and, indeed, it may seem rather harsh. Nevertheless, we live in a harsh world and in turbulent times. It may be that we are tourists in this world, but for most of us the world is a cheap hotel with no amenities. In fact, for a growing number of these third millennium tourists, it means no hotel at all.

The current human dilemma

If we stay with this image of tourists for a moment, we discover something about the problem we face in the global village of the third millennium. Currently, there are those who are calling for a renewed commitment to a new and implicitly more glorious vision for the 21^st Century based upon our illusions of greatness of the past century and an overestimation of our accomplishments. While having a vision is important, it may not be the most pressing problem for the human family today. Ours may not be a problem of vision, of looking a long way down the road, as it is a problem of identity. We are like tourists in a foreign land. We have to ask ourselves, do we know who we are? Where we are? Do we have a calling to some vocation here in the human story, in human history?

A few years ago, when I was in El Salvador, Dean Brackley (a Jesuit who took over from the six Jesuits and two women were killed at the University of Central America) put the problem very succinctly. In describing the difference between what was happening in El Salvador and what was happening in North America, he said, the campesino, the poor peasant in the mountain and in the countryside, knows every day exactly who he or she is, …but in North American society there is a constant state of low grade confusion about who you are. We face an identity crisis in the new global village of the third millennium! We don’t know from where we have come, usually. We don’t know where we are headed. We often don’t know who we are, or what we are called to do! This collective identity crisis may be the core problem in describing what it means to be human at the end of the second millennium.

Various theologians, such as Carl Braaten and others, have described this current identity crisis as a twin crisis–a Crisis of Misery and a Crisis of Meaning. The Crisis of Misery is that which faces countless billions in the poor nations of the South and the poor within the richer nations of the North. It is the crisis of poverty, hunger, unemployment, homelessness, and social exclusion. The Crisis of Meaning faces primarily the modestly affluent in the countries of the North, and to some extent groups in the South confronting the question of purpose for their lives and their children’s future. Many of you are aware of the ruthlessness and barbarity of the poverty of the Nations of the South. Sadly, many are not so aware of the ruthlessness and barbarity of social exclusion in the countries of the North. As an example, I think of the last election in Ontario. What astounded me was that there was no sense of moral outrage that 1 in 5 children grows up poor in this country. That, in fact, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, and that Ontario, as well as other Provinces in Canada, is responding with punitive programmes for the poor. In the face of these realities many people are apathetic, rather than indignant. However, it is not my purpose here to recite a litany of these destructive and dehumanising realities. Yet we need to remember that they are destructive and that they are dehumanising. It is, however, important to observe–at least for me–that these two crises, the crisis of meaning and the crisis of misery, are related to one another in a very important way. They are related by our collective failure as societies, both in the South and in the North, to address and provide effective answers to foundational questions with regard to our social life together. By effective answers, I mean ones that people can believe in; and secondly, that give people a sense of security for their community, for their families, for those who they love and care about–answers that affirm human value.

There are four foundational questions here: the political question, the economic question, the social question, and the environmental question. These questions are foundational to defining our common life. Providing believable and effective answers to these foundational questions is in essence to provide important clues to our understanding of our collective humanness. The current answers to these questions contain fundamental inconsistencies, ambiguities, and moral paradoxes that are, in some cases, not even identified by those dominating the leadership of all our institutions, let alone being resolved in the public mind.

This is not new to societies. The ethical rules which govern our collective life encounter new realities as we move through time, and need to change to retain their social validity. Resolving the paradoxes of life is, essentially, the ethical task of bringing the ultimate values we hold, those values that determine how we see the world, to particular social realities and problems. In short, seeing these social realities and problems from the perspective of faith, and in particular the foundational beliefs of our faith.

One of the best examples of this kind of resolution is seen in the film, Fiddler on the Roof. At the beginning of the film Tevye has some rules as to how his daughters should marry. And in each case, as each of the daughters finds a mate, thereby encountering a new reality, old Tevye has to come to grips with rewriting the ethical and moral script to which he relates, as each of his daughters marry. I think, this is the fundamental challenge for the next millennium in a nutshell: to find a place for the ethical, providing a place for ethics and moral deliberation, in the public square. Some–possibly many of you–would see this as the process by which we assign value to the human in our modern communities.

Before speaking to each of these questions, it is important for me to note that resolving the ethical paradoxes which shape us collectively is not an individual exercise. Fundamentally, people are made to live in communities. Western societies live with the illusion of the self-made person or what some have suggested is the rugged individualist mentality. For Christians, and for many others, the sacredness of individuals created in the image of God is incumbent upon people living in communities. Resolving these fundamental paradoxes requires a community-based human-centred ethic. We cannot resolve these questions alone.

Let us look at these questions, why they have been distorted and why we must support the reclamation of a community-based, human-centred ethic for our time.

We all know that today the dominant answer offered for all social, political and environmental questions is economic! Economic competition; the laws of supply and demand; the invisible hand of the market will order our collective life; if we leave it to the market, it will sort out what our priorities should be. It is true the economy is changing–we are at the end of an industrial economy moving to an information based or knowledge based economy, and technology has been dramatically changing the way markets work. Globalisation has become an all too familiar term to all of us. There is a reality to these observations but it is important to note one important change here. In the early 1980s, when globalisation first entered our vocabulary, it was primarily a description of how the world was changing, or what was happening out there. Since then, particularly in the 1990s, globalisation has become a normative ideology used to assert how the world should be, and, in some minds, must be. It is used to justify certain economic changes as inevitable. We hear this ideology echoed in speeches from our leaders when they say "we have to remain competitive, we have no choice," or "we need to maintain investor confidence, we have no choice." But as we see the increasing disparities it creates, many people are beginning to realise that it is failing to answer the foundational economic question–How can we ensure that the needs of the many are met before providing for the endless wants of the few? In short, we are failing to provide the basic human necessities–food, shelter, clothing, nurture, and care–for too many people. Many today are falling short of a threshold of basic human dignity. Today in Ontario, for example, poverty is increasing even though the economy is growing! This is something we have never seen in this century before, since poverty usually increases only when there is a recession, and not during periods of economic growth. It reminds me of that wonderful line from John Ralston Saul, "If economists were doctors they would all be sued for malpractice!"

This is no longer just a question of economics. Global economics has become a new economic theology, which imposes answers on the basic meaning questions of people and communities. Indeed, James Laxer, ironically a political scientist at the University of Toronto and not a theologian, has described globalisation as a False God. ² I would argue that there is a certain inherent idolatry in the overwhelming prevalence of this economic worldview today. It claims to define that which is of ultimate importance to communities (thereby humanness) by asserting that people are fundamentally acquisitive self-interested consumers driven by the principle of competition, working only for a pay cheque, saved by technological innovation, and motivated by the pursuit of owning toward the ultimate salvation of material prosperity. Economics has moved beyond its technical function into the realm of ultimate meaning. To paraphrase noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith, it has lost its nobler purpose of serving the well being of people and communities. ³ Simply stated, the bottom line now defines humanity.

What is important to note today is that how we have chosen to address the economic question, also dramatically foreclosed on the possibilities and choices of how we answer the political, social and ecological questions of society. Tragically, this is not news to many of us!

In addressing the political question, most of us are increasingly troubled by our political leaders who seemed to be held intellectually hostage by the false god of globalisation. We see numerous examples, including Prime Minister Cretien’s Team Canada trade missions, and Premier Harris’ noteworthy mantra (echoed by other Premiers for their respective provinces) that Ontario is Open for Business. Meanwhile, at the grassroots level there is a growing civil cynicism. For example, whether elected and business leaders believe it or not, many average people believe that government deficits have been reduced on the back of the poor and middle class. For those middle income people fearful of their own economic futures, this has been translated into an unfocused anger against all those in public office, and the relentless call for less government and more tax reductions. For those on the margins–the poor, the unemployed, those with disabilities, the young, the old–it has meant a growing sense of insecurity, fear and a sense of abandonment by the rest of society.

Peter C. Newman has observed the change that has taken place in Canada in The Canadian Revolution. Canadians, whose founding maxim was "peace, order and good government" and who possessed a general deference to authority, have taken on a mood of defiance toward those who are in positions of leadership within all institutions. ⁴ Reginald Bibby, a sociologist of religion, also points to this reality by observing that confidence in the federal government has fallen from 30% (1985) to 13% (1990) and 25% (1995). Similar drops in confidence were reported in terms of the provincial governments also–33% (1985) to 30% (1990) to 22% (1995). ⁵

Not coincidentally, this loss of political confidence has been manifested internationally as well. Notice that while the Cold War ended in 1989, today only 10% of the global human family participates in democratic elections in any formal way, according to the United Nations. In many countries the political infrastructure to support democratic participation (i.e., a multiparty system, independent judicial processes, a vibrant and active civil society, etc.) are non-existent or dysfunctional. More critical is the fact that gross and systematic violations in human rights by repressive military governments still remain far too common. In the face of these abuses, Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental monitoring organisation, made the point that "the major powers showed a marked tendency to ignore human rights when they proved inconvenient to economic or strategic interests." ⁶ As an example, we currently hear all the news about this humanitarian war in Kosovo, and what it means. The reality is that there are at least another dozen hot spots in the world engaged in similar "ethnic cleansings" which have never made the front page of our newspapers. We need to ask why?

Indeed, the rising nationalism that is at the root of these atrocities, is itself an indication that people no longer have confidence that former political institutions and/or nation states or that their leaders will safeguard the well being of the individuals, families and communities that people love. We see in the crisis in the former Yugoslavia/Balkans or in Rawanda horrific examples of the crisis of confidence in the extreme.

In the short term, political defiance can also be see in the volatility of the electorate, and the longer-term consequences may include a greatly reduced confidence in conventional political institutions and a subsequent reduction in the participation of citizens in making choices through those institutions. In the United States participation rates in elections have dropped considerably (as low as 20-30% in some congressional races). People will look for alternatives as they become more aware of globalisation’s very anti-democratic imprint on our political institutions–evidenced most recently in the secret negotiations concerning the Multi-lateral Agreement on Investment. Political leaders are functioning like the CEOs of large corporations. This tendency to executive governance can only serve to further weaken public participation in formal political structures. People will look for and will find alternatives to the formal processes that are available, or not available to them. I think of the Days of Action in Ontario, where there were massive rallies and demonstration in various locales, as but one example of an alternative approach.

Human communities need a process for making collective decisions not only for functional reasons, but also because participation leads to a sense of belonging. Michael Ignatieff, in his assessment of nationalism, makes this important point,

All forms of nationalism vest political sovereignty in ‘the people’ – indeed the word ‘nation’ is often a synonym for ‘the people’ – but not all nationalist movements create democratic regimes, because not all nationalisms include all of the people in their definition of who constitutes a nation. ⁷

Political participation is essential not just for the process of establishing collective priorities and taking action to implement these priorities, but is foundational for a sense of belonging, fostering human and community security and thereby human well being and the sense of what is truly human. The question we must face is how we can insure a process of public decision making by an informed citizenry based upon a set of enduring values?

As in the case of the political question globalisation’s answer to the social question is increasingly recognised as unacceptable. You may have noticed–as I have–more comments like those of Koffi Annan (the United Nations General Secretary) at the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland recently, where he called on business leaders, "to embrace, support and enact a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards and environmental practices." Annan continues,

… Globalisation is a fact of life. But I believe we have underestimated its fragility. The problem is this. The spread of markets outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them, let alone guide the course they take. History teaches us that such an imbalance between the economic, social, and political realms can never be sustained for very long. ⁸

Poverty, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, militarism, racism, illiteracy, the dismantling of access to health care and education, and the privatisation of the public or social sphere in general are all leading to increasing forms of social exclusion. Yet it is these social dimensions of our collective life which matter the most to people. When you ask people of what they feel proud, what is important in their life, it is often these intangible social aspects of their life where they, in fact, make a contribution. It is often here where they feel valued, it is here where they feel affirmed and shaped as people in terms their character and what they are about. Globalisation in its dehumanising effects and its disruptive aspects is failing to address the foundational social question: How can we assure that the lives of people are valued, relationships are nurtured and assured, and that people can make a contribution to the common good?

I do not need to say much about how the illogic of globalisation is failing to understand and address the "eco-logic" necessary to insure the future of the planet for generations to come. Whether it be the recently released Report of the Pembina Institute on the impact of the oil industry on communities; the growing public anger in Alberta at the oil industry; the leaked reports that Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment will not enforce all of Ontario’s environmental laws, in order to allow business to remain competitive; or the recent accusation leveled against the Federal Government for not exhibiting or exercising due diligence in the disposal of toxic carcinogenic chemicals, the evidence seems clear that sustaining God’s good Creation is not in practice a priority. Globalisation is failing to address the foundational ecological question, which is absolutely vital in maintaining the human and the human community: How will we together protect the earth community in the present in order to sustain creation for generations to come?

The need for a community-based human-centred ethic

Much more could be said about each of these basic foundational questions. My point is that these turbulent currents are creating both the crisis of Misery and the Crisis of Meaning for people both in the North and the South. Our collective failure to articulate and embrace an ethic that values human beings and builds communities necessary for well being at international, national, regional, and local levels is a principal challenge facing the human family. In responding to the false god of globalisation we must not merely address the symptoms, but also the fundamental values necessary for our common life, which have been corrupted, and the social foundations upon which our societies, our economies and our politics are built, which have been corroded dramatically in recent times. Human well being, which we might say is essential to humanness, requires more than ever a community-based human-centred ethic.

Thus the challenge on the threshold of the third millennium is an ethical one. It involves our vision of the future and, yes, it involves what we do; however, I would also suggest that it crucially involves who we are. How do we as assumed tourists in the global village, address this identity crisis? Where do we fit? What are the values that inform and reflect who we are?

The changing place of religion

We need to turn for a moment to the changing place of religion in our society. Globalisation is often described as one of the hallmarks of a modern or post-modern society. As modern (and post-modern) society moves toward a more highly differentiated structure, the place of religious faith and institutional religion is changing. While the Enlightenment view of secularisation has tried to portray religion as unnecessary– or at best, modestly useful in providing some common basis for society (civil religion), something to be out-grown as a society develops–religion has not disappeared and it has remained vital in many places of the world. And indeed it sees itself as having an emerging role. As José Casanova, a sociologist, argues,

… we are witnessing the deprivatisation of religion in the modern world… [whereby] religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privatised role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularisation have reserved for them. ⁹

This has resulted in religions’ entering the public arena, not merely to defend their traditional roles–the pastoral care of souls–but also to help shape the issues and questions facing societies.

The move toward a more differentiated social reality (where people have compartmentalised their lives, and where there is no overarching framework, nothing that unifies the various aspects of their lives) has caused those within Christianity to engage in an interesting re-examination of its contribution in terms of the public arena. Against suggestions that the churches should withdraw to remain isolated within their own autonomous sphere, their own compartment, with no relationship to the public arena, writers like William Stringfellow point to the essentially public nature of faith,

Christians must enter the common life of the world fully and unequivocally in order to know the Word of God, in order to witness to the Word of God in the world, in order to worship God at all. ¹⁰

Faith is always public in the sense that there is an evangelical calling to engage the world. Faith is vital to how Christians see, understand and derive meaning from the world. For it is in the public areas of the common life where Christians also encounter God. Paul Tillich, a Lutheran theologian, articulated this crucial relationship between theology and culture. Tillich emphasised the idea of a "theonomous culture" by which humans can find honest fulfilment rooted in God, who is present in the culture. That is, culture is a means by which the finite is the bearer of the infinite: faith and life are inseparable.

Leslie Newbegin takes this point even further in arguing that the message of the Gospel is not just a personal truth but a public truth. Newbegin makes the observation that, while the early church could have enjoyed the Imperial protection of Rome, it refused. "The Church could not accept relegation to the private sphere of a purely inward and personal religion." ¹¹ Newbegin continues by stating that the Gospel does have something to contribute to the public discussion.

Max Stackhouse, a Presbyterian theologian at Princeton, points out that the church has had a public theology in every age for addressing public issues. Public theology, in Stackhouse’s view,

… entails the conviction that it is possible to speak about the most important questions, such as God, in public discourse–in ways that can interact with other sciences and make sense among people. It is called ‘public theology’ for two reasons … First … It is something that we believe is comprehensible and indispensable for all … Second, such a theology will give guidance to the structures and policies of public life. ¹²

For Stackhouse, what is required is the development of a renewed public theology to address the realities of modern life.

The religious question facing the Canadian churches, the communities of faith, is: what is the public truth or public theology that we have to proclaim and offer a globalised world? It remains to be seen whether or not the Canadian institutional church is up to asking the question or articulating just such a public theology.

The ideology of globalisation holds the churches hostage as well as society. Polls indicated that a large majority of Canadians (80-85%) self-identify themselves as Christian, yet with few exceptions the values of most Christian communities are indistinguishable from the values of the wider Canadian culture. Indeed, we find that the values of many Christians in various vocations are not distinguishable from those who profess no faith at all.

Much could be said about the effectiveness of the various programmes for social ministry and various efforts by the churches to influence various public programmes or policies. This is not my point for the moment. I do believe that it is our public theology or the public ethic of our community that confers on each of us a certain identity. And it is this identity conferring function that is important in defining who we are and what our humanness is all about. Princeton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow makes just this point, for the current moment,

The identity-conferring function of the church looms all the more important now at the end of the twentieth century because so many of these functions have eroded. ¹³

Wuthnow points to three ways the church can serve to confer a sense of identity. First, by virtue of its being a community of memory, that is, a community that keeps the history alive, not in terms of events, but in terms of the story and the narrative in which each of our individual stories participate and are kept alive. For example, we were talking this morning about Estonia. In one sense there is a narrative that is a part of the Estonian community to which it is important for all Estonians to relate and which is also needed to provoke Estonians in terms of what happens as the story moves on and in terms of future chapters with regard to their relationships to the wider world. I think this was the case for Latvians and Danes and the Germans as they moved to this country as well. Similarly, through the broader story, the community of memory, the church confers a sense of identity.

Secondly, the church confers identity as a denomination, and thirdly as a supportive community. Much will depend on the degree to which the church offers people stories (of compassion) to live by. This community-based human-centred ethic, which the church offers society, is what will shape society’s identity and that of its members in the future. For the affluent society it will help address the crisis of meaning. For materially poorer society it will be a means of deliverance from the suffering of misery.

Our role in the ethical challenge as people of earth

I want to outline four possible roles for a new identity that might inform what we must do in the public square to address this foundational ethical challenge. We must be moral custodians, a community of new ideas, solidarity partners, and community builders. These roles might help provide snapshots of who we–as the church and as social activists–might be at different social moments in the turbulent struggle toward a different future.

By moral custodians I mean we need to collectively–this is not an individual exercise–hold each other accountable to the assertion of some fundamental values of what justice requires or demands. The debate today is not about whether or not justice will be present, but rather what form of justice will prevail. Cornell West has said, "Churches may be the last places left in our culture that can engage in public conversation with non-market values." As societies, we need to be informed by a fuller understanding of what justice requires. Much of what passes for justice today is a pale imitation of what God intends justice to be in its fuller, more complete sense. As moral custodians we need to create spaces for moral formation and reflection, as well as for ethical deliberations about these very important questions. As an aside, this is why I believe it is important on a sunny Sunday morning for people to gather at events like this symposium to begin to think in a more complex way about some of these social and foundational issues. We have a space where we can discuss, identify and have our beings shaped by wider notions of justice. For Christians, this should be happening within churches and requires the development of a critical faith–a faith that forces us to look at the world differently. People can have faith, they can believe in God, but a critical faith gives us a different lens through which to see things, through which to interpret and value things. This also means that we need other places for discussion and reflection as well. For example, during the Civil Rights Movement the men of the Black community in the United States often found that crucible for forming and preserving values in the Barber shops of the ghettos.

By a community of new ideas I mean that we should not be apologetic about our role of developing and providing new perspectives. We need to be reminded that the churches have always had many good ideas. We were right to oppose Apartheid, sanctions worked and brought about a different kind of society in that part of the world. We were right in criticising our own governments for ignoring gross and systematic human rights violations in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and other countries. We were right to oppose Sunday shopping, not because it was in fact going to compete with people attending church (that wasn’t the issue), but because society needs a pause, a break from the relentless cycle of the market. And more recently, we were right in calling a halt to the expansion of government sponsored gambling because it victimises and cannibalises the very citizens whose well being the government is supposed to safeguard. Last weekend, in an article in the Toronto Star, Carol Goar pointed out that she originally thought that the Jubilee Initiative for the cancellation of the debt of the fifty poorest countries of the world seemed naïve and utopian, but after looking at the detailed analysis provided by the churches, she was convinced that it was a good idea, an idea that made sense and could work. As a community of new ideas, we need to be a strategic interruption of the relentless cycle of acquisitiveness, an interruption that undermines the fallacious myth that we are merely consumers motivated by self-interested gain.

Often those who are socially excluded are also the forgotten ones. The challenges seem so big and complex. This leads to a sense of alienation and powerlessness. As solidarity partners, ours is the task of accompaniment; walking with those who are the voiceless, those who are the victims, those who are forgotten, while walking with each other gaining strength and hope.

Recently, I was at a conference in Ottawa, where the church regularly issues public statements about poverty and a number of other issues. A couple of people from the churches were lamenting the fact that we were not getting a response–nobody seemed to care, and the politicians just seemed to be going on in the same old way. A low-income person from the national anti-poverty organisation asked, "who are you trying to speak to?" She continued, "I just came from our conference in St. John, New Brunswick, where 450 people gave the churches a standing ovation, because when everyone else in society says, ‘the poor don’t count,’ ‘they’re just lazy,’ ‘they just want to collect welfare,’ they just want cigarettes and beer’, and ‘they don’t do anything’, the churches in their public statements say ‘you are valuable as a human being and a member of our community.’" We need to also be solidarity partners.

Globalisation has a profoundly dehumanising effect on people. Looking for ways to strengthen the bonds of community between people is important. Loneliness may be one of the most severe diseases of the current age. We cannot be who we are all by ourselves. As community builders, we need to recover this reality for many of our institutions, and we need to create new humanising centres that give people some sense of the human and community security they so desperately need. This begins with such basic things as providing food, shelter, and clothing, for which some of the immediate plans for food-banks and hostels are a first step. This is a first step, not because we are giving because we are charitable, but because it is a first step in a humanising process, which leads and pushes us toward a call and a working for a greater justice–a much broader and far-reaching process of humanisation.

Conclusion

I am sorely tempted to say much more. Let me close with just two brief comments. I think we must be modest in understanding of who we are. History is full of examples of those who have thought more of themselves than they should. Humility is a necessary virtue. We need to cultivate all the necessary virtues for this new identity–for what it means to be humans in community. In addition, we also need to realise that the principalities and powers of this world will not welcome what we have to say. They will never be totally overcome in the dehumanising and destructive forces that they bring about. We must also realise that we too, living in our society, are in part captive to and a part of those powers and principalities, as of their destructiveness.

Finally, it might be easy to look with fear and dread at the conflicts that might arise during these times. To be sure the principalities and powers of this age will not welcome our approach. Nevertheless, I believe it was Fredrick Buechner who has said, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of love." Perhaps reclaiming a community-based human-centred ethic for our public life and expressing it concretely, in terms of a tenacious love is our greatest contribution and challenge as a people committed to a different future, and is a profound recognition of the sacredness of our humanness.

1. Ad campaign for Canadian Pacific International airing in the Spring and Summer of 1999. return to text 

2. James Laxer, False God, How the Globalisation Myth has Impoverished Canada, (Toronto; Lester Publishing, 1993).return to text 

3. Galbraith made these statements at the Couchiching Conference in 1995. return to text 

4. Peter C. Newman, The Canadian Revolution 1985-1995: From Deference to Defiance (Toronto; Viking Press, 1995). return to text 

5. Reginald W. Bibby, The Bibby Report – Social Trends Canadian Style (Toronto; Stoddart Publishing, 1995), p. 110. return to text 

6. Human Rights Watch World Report 1998, p. xiii.return to text 

7. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto; Viking Press, 1993), p. 3. return to text 

8. This is from a speech given by the UN Secretary General at the Global Economic Forum in March 1999. return to text 

9. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 5. return to text 

10. W. Stringfellow, A Private and Public Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.; William Eerdmans Publishing Co.), p. 81.return to text 

11. Leslie Newbegin, What is to be done? The Political Frontier, lecture in the Princeton Series, March 22, 1984. return to text 

12. M.L. Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy: Christian Stewardship in Modern Society (Grand Rapids, Mich.; William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1987), p. xi. return to text 

13. R. Wuthnow, Christianity in the Twenty-first Century: Reflections of the Challenges Ahead (New York; Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 249. return to text 

Draft 99/12/11
David Pfrimmer: The Contribution of Faith and Ethics to an Understanding of Humanness in the Public Square
Humanness II (1999)
Presented: May 28, 1999 - May 30, 1999 in Montréal, Québec

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