President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday serves as a reminder of the hazards of relying on easy or settled conclusions about the complicated relationships between religion and politics in the US. Darn it, things were a heck of a lot simpler under his predecessor: George W. Bush was the standard bearer for an aggressive and corporately financed fundamentalist Christian right bent on restoring a Christian America, even establishing a "theocracy", and rolling back the frontiers of secularism. We Europeans knew where we stood. In a single sweeping repudiation, we could set our faces simultaneously against his crass religion, his heartless economics and his militaristic adventurism (along with his stupid grin). Of course, we then rejoiced to see the White House occupied by a recognisable European-style social liberal, economic interventionist and articulate global statesman. We thought we knew where we stood with him. But then, for goodness sake, we find the president cosying up to the religious right all over again, flattering them year after year by showing up at their annual prayer jamboree, allegedly organised by a shady fundamentalist outfit, and, worse still, talking in gushing terms about his faith in "Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour". When we examine the actual content of Obama's speech we are plunged into yet deeper anxiety. This year it was unusually personal, a disturbing fact reported without comment by the Guardian: "My Christian faith, has been a sustaining force for me, All the more so, when Michelle and I hear our faith questioned from time to time, we are reminded that ultimately what matters is not what other people say about us but whether we're being true to our conscience and true to our God. 'Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.'" "My conscience before God"? Wasn't that what Tony Blair appealed to when justifying his decision (and we now know for sure it was essentially his decision alone) to invade Iraq? Now we discover that Obama's faith is also more than a mere source of personal succour. It informs his political decision-making. He makes clear his belief that "our values, our love and our charity must find expression not just in our families, not just in our places of work and our places of worship, but also in our government and in our politics". In case you missed that, the president of the US is implying that he thinks his Christian faith can legitimately shape the way he governs the nation. It gets worse. Obama reveals that the director of his Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnership's office, Joshua DuBois, "starts my morning off with meditations from scripture". Just imagine what would happen if Obama actually decided government policy as if "one day the world will be turned right side up and everything will return as it should be".  Suppose he was even driven to the crazy conclusion that, "until that day, we're called to work on behalf of a God that chose justice and mercy and compassion to the most vulnerable". Might that actually lead him to seek to use the law to guarantee healthcare for every individual citizen, coercing even secular healthcare providers and insurance companies to fall in line with his irrational biblical utopianism? Or to increase social welfare spending by raising taxes on the corporations on whose profits the economic growth of the whole country depends? What could be a more blatant example of "imposing religion" on a secular society? I wish there were some relief by the end of the speech. It was bad enough when Blair hinted that he turned to God in prayer to guide his major decisions. But Obama seems to claim a direct channel to the Almighty and to see himself as God's representative on earth. "When I wake in the morning, I wait on the Lord, and I ask Him to give me the strength to do right by our country and its people. And when I go to bed at night I wait on the Lord, and I ask Him to forgive me my sins, and look after my family and the American people, and make me an instrument of His will." It's just too much. Can't America come to its senses again and put someone in the White House we secular Europeans can make sense of?

Whatever we make of the substance of Judge Andrew Rutherford's ruling in the Cornish private hotel case, his citation of a striking and controversial opinion by Lord Justice Laws, delivered in another religious freedom case in 2010, is worth pausing over. The owners of the Chymorvah hotel were found to have discriminated against a gay couple by refusing them a double-bedded room. They had appealed to their right to manifest their religious belief by running their hotel according to Christian moral standards. Given the drift of recent legal judgments in cases where equality rights are thought to clash with religious freedom rights, it is no surprise that the gay couple won their case. But quite apart from the merits of the case, judges should be warned off any future reliance on the ill-considered opinions about law and religion ventured last year by Lord Justice Laws. Laws rightly asserted that no law can justify itself purely on the basis of the authority of any religion or belief system: "The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other." A sound basis for this view is Locke's terse principle, in his Letter on Toleration, that "neither the right nor the art of ruling does necessarily carry with it the certain knowledge of other things; and least of all the true religion". But Laws seemed to ground the principle instead on two problematic and potentially discriminatory claims. One is that the state can only justify a law on the grounds that it can be seen rationally and objectively to advance the general good (I paraphrase). The question is, seen by whom? What counts as rational, objective and publicly beneficial is not at all self-evident but deeply contested, determined in the cut and thrust of democratic debate and certainly not by the subjective views of individual judges. Religiously inspired political views, such as those driving the US civil rights movement of the 1960s or the Burmese Buddhists today, have as much right to enter that contest as any others. In this sense law can quite legitimately be influenced by religion. Laws' other claim is that religious belief is, for all except the holder, "incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence", and that the truth of it "lies only in the heart of the believer". But many non-Christians, for example, recognise that at least some of the claims of Christianity, historical ones, no doubt, or claims about universal moral values, are capable of successful communication to and critical assessment by others. Laws' assertion is also inconsistent with his own Anglican tradition, in which authority has never been seen as based on the subjective opinions of the individual but rather on the claims of "scripture, tradition and reason" acting in concert. By relying on a dated epistemology, itself the product of the very kind of secularist "belief system" he claims has no place in the justification of law, Laws has obscured the proper relationship between religion and law. Judges would be well advised to give his opinions on law and religion a wide berth. Instead they should rely on Locke's more limited and better-established principle of the limits of what the state can know. That principle won't in itself resolve any future equality rights cases, but it will mean that controversial rulings on the scope of religious freedom will not be discredited by resting on an erroneous view of religious belief.

A note from C2C's editorial board chair: Canada's Journal of Ideas, C2C Journal, asked two of Canada's leading thinkers to consider the question of whether capitalism needs an outside morality to survive. So we asked Michael Walker, the founder of the Fraser Institute and now head of the Free Market Foundation, and Peter Stockland, president of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal and a longtime journalist, including as editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald and editor of Reader's Digest, to debate this question: "Be it resolved that markets cannot function without a basis in shared religious belief." Peter Stockland goes first; check back soon for Michael Walker's column. -Mark Milke, editorial board chair, C2C Journal.ca, Canada's Journal of Ideas Read the debate here.

In 1987, as the Reagan revitalization drew to an end, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind. It has taken nearly a quarter century for books to emerge that trace the promise of re-opening the Western soul. For conservatives, it need not matter that the author of those works, Terry Eagleton, is an Irish Catholic Marxist any more than it mattered that Bloom was a Jewish liberal elitist. What matters first is that conservatives take Eagleton's eloquent savaging of morally flaccid capitalism and its attendant spiritual vacuity seriously. What matters more is that we heed with deep attentiveness the hope implied in Eagleton's call for a renewed understanding of the West's foundation in the bond between faith and reason. What matters most is his conviction that this recovery must take place not just for the reassertion of faith but also for the rescue of reason. "(I)t is only if reason can draw upon energies and resources deeper, more tenacious and less fragile than itself that it is capable of prevailing, a truth which liberal rationalism for the most part disastrously overlooks," Eagleton writes in his 2009 book Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Arguing effectively that there is a dimension of human life more tenacious and less fragile than reason is a bold move for anyone at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. For the argument to come from the pen of a leading Anglo-American scholar and cultural theorist (Eagleton holds professorships at the University of Ireland, Lancaster University and at Notre Dame; he has also been a distinguished speaker at Yale and Columbia) signals a significant cultural shift in the wind. It is a shift that that has the potential to finally lead to removal of the intellectual no exit sign that has stood steadfastly since Bloom raised it over American (read: Western) thinking more than two decades ago. Contrary to the way it was initially understood, and vigorously embraced by misapprehending conservatives, The Closing of the American Mind was not a work of prophecy. It was, in fact a lamentation for the irredeemably lost. In counterpoint to the ersatz mood of moodiness that he identified and deplored in American culture, Bloom was a genuine pessimist about the causes of the Closing. His conviction was that the American mind was not only closed to the Good, but was closed for good. The quick notes version of the book summarized it as a plaint roused by the political correctness fad just then sweeping U.S. university campuses, and a tweaking of the academic twits promoting or acquiescing to it. In fact, it was a substantive, and withering, critique of the way nihilistic 19th and 20th century philosophy had been openly welcomed ashore by unwitting American intellectuals after the Second World War. Surviving Nazis had to at least flee at great risk to South American countries, change their names, check the accent and watch out for that twitchy right hand whenever someone in military boots clicked his heels. Against that, thinkers parroting Nietzsche and especially Heidegger, who was not only a Nazi but had attached his world historical intellectual pedigree to its evil, were given first-class passage and a comfortable chair in the salon when they arrived in North America. The result, Bloom wrote, was a "particularly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending." Sadly, what was really ending in Bloom's mind was America's founding constitutional openness to common co-existence that required old habits to be subordinated to an understanding of natural rights and the acceptance of a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. What was being rushed in to fill the void, he saw, was official Openness based on Nietzschean values language misconstrued to mean cultural relativism and the essential equivalence of all thought no matter how bad or how antithetical to the Good. In the context of the era's raging culture war, Bloom's authentic American despair burst like twin hand grenades colliding in mid-air. The liberal left rained abuse on both the book and its author while the conservative right ran giddily around bayonetting its own. Indeed, perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the conservative embrace of the decidedly anti-conservative classics professor from the University of Chicago was the extent to which The Closing of the American Mind corresponded, in its timing at least, to the end of any pretence of conservative coherence. The staying power of electoral grasping and the weird alchemy of political nominalism led, over the ensuing years, to people being identified as conservatives who couldn't stand to be in the same ideological room together. As the writer Tom Wolfe famously said, the only thing shared by fragmented paleocons, theocons, neocons, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians and so on was their common refusal to go along with the running gag of postmodern North American thought. As a lifelong Marxist, of course, Terry Eagleton has no personal interest in unifying conservatives. As a Catholic, however, he is intensely invested in asserting the existence of Truth. And as a gifted cultural critic, he is devoted to digging deep into what that Truth might be, and how it can be lived not only spiritually but also politically and culturally. For conservatives, his line of thought is the re-opening that Bloom convinced us was probably permanently closed. It is the opportunity to re-examine the soul of Western conservatism, albeit through a very different lens than we may be accustomed to using. Eagleton forces us to confront, first and foremost, the truth that economic liberalism and agnostic capitalism may be necessary means to unbridled affluence, but they are not even close to sufficient grounds to healthy societies or individual lives well lived. However we might have been able to muddle along for decades denying that truth, he argues, our denial simply cannot be sustained in the face of the muscular metaphysics of resurgent Islam. "Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. This makes it look particularly flaccid and out of shape when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff," he writes in Reason, Faith and Revolution. "Liberalism of the economic kind rides roughshod over peoples and communities, triggering in the process just the kind of violent backlash that liberalism of the social and cultural kind is least capable of handling." Nor is the backlash a creature only of Islamist terrorists. Rather, it is the response of fundamentalism in all its forms, e.g., that 15-minutes of fame Florida yahoo who threatened to burn copies of the Koran in the name of Christianity. "The ideologues of the religious right, aware in their own way that the market is ousting metaphysics, then seek to put those values back in place, which is one of several senses in which postmodern relativism breeds a red-neck fundamentalism. Those who believe very little rub shoulders with those ready to believe almost anything." The upshot, he warns, is an undermining of the metaphysical values on which political authority depends and a reduction of politics to mere culture or, worse, multiculturalism, that throw back to the inchoate state in which the only obligation to civic life is the wearing of a traditional hat or the display of grandmother's dance steps on particular days of the calendar. Paradoxically, these are the conditions in which a surfeit of belief flourishes, but it is a shallow form of faith that constitutes not a seeking after Truth but comprises the twin evils of excessive rationalism and religious fanaticism. "A surfeit of belief is what agnostic, late capitalism itself has helped to spawn, because when reason becomes too dominative, calculative and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith to flourish. As a result, faith lapses into a kind of irrationalism theologians call fideism, turning its back on reason altogether. From there, it is an easy enough step to fanaticism." The resulting crude caricature of faith is precisely what anti-theists such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and journalistic gadfly Christopher Hitchens have seized on in their jeremiads against religion, belief and God. Conflating the two into a single entity that he dubs Ditchkins, Eagleton dismantles their claims like a wise priest dealing with a smart-aleck teen drunk on a cursory reading of the catechism. Yet he stresses that Ditchkins is merely a symptom of the deep malaise wrought by postmodernity's false assertion of the end of grand narratives and globalism's premature proclamation of the end of history, both of which required fervent belief in the impossibility of reasoned faith continuing to undergird human life. Western civilization in the throes of later modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzchean spirit, it appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy melange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism and philosophical skepticism. All of this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence. Affluence bred from the spinning apart of faith and reason militates against the creation of loving fidelity and peaceable community (both of which lie at the core of conservative thought) and leaves us with a politics whose sole end is the bedding down of culture with power. What we end up with, Eagleton argues, is the current mutually antagonistic clash of culture and civilization or, put simply, the universal and plural against the local and customary (or, as some might translate these terms, the Germans and the French). "One of the most pressing problems of our age is that civilization can neither dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it. The more pragmatic and materialistic civilization becomes, the more culture is summoned to fulfill the emotional and psychological needs (civilization) cannot handle. The more, therefore, the two fall into mutual antagonism." Reasoned religious faith is the one human endeavor with the power to bridge this chasm. Art cannot do it because it can only render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired without ever being able to offer full redemption. The Romantic humanism and Enlightenment rationalism of Marxism might once have held promise but, Eagleton ruefully admits, it has suffered in our time such a staggering political rebuff that its best impulses must be sought elsewhere. Eagleton warns us against being seduced by the Ditchkins cartoon of religious faith as an automatic condition for sectarian violence. "The fundamental moral values of the average Muslim dentist who migrates to Britain are much the same as those of an English-born plumber. Neither will typically maintain that lying and cheating are the soundest policy or that children are at their finest when regularly beaten to a pulp. As far as religious morality goes, it is hard to slide a cigarette paper between Allah and Jehovah. This is, indeed, what Ditchkins finds so repugnant about it." Against such revulsion, he notes, is the enormous amount of good that could come from seriously listening to the moral congruence in, say, devout Muslim critiques of Western materialism, hedonism and individualism. "A common culture in a more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes the same thing, but in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a common way of life." Therein lies the Good that Bloom held almost a quarter century ago had been closed to us for good. In large measure, this was because he believed in the soul and in reason but, like contemporary anti-theists, had no need for the hypothesis of God, much less for the power of reasoned faith to restore us. Eagleton's elevation of the tragic humanism at the core of all reasoned faith, the process of self-dispossession and radical remaking that faith promises, at least opens the door once more. It is a message conservatives of all kinds would do well to take to heart and mind.

Those who theorize that striking down laws surrounding prostitution will make Canada a safer place to sell sex overlook a crucial countervailing truth. While there is no doubt the so-called sex trade is fraught with physical perils, the first and unavoidable harm for prostitutes is prostitution. Normalize it as some will by calling it the world's oldest profession, prostitution remains an inherently de-humanizing activity. Prostitution is, effectively, rental slavery in that its very nature reduces human beings purely to the dollar value of their genitals or their ability to rent themselves out for sexual gratification. Laws crafted to discourage prostitution should not be dismissed because they are deemed the detritus of sexual prudery. They go the root of how we view our society and should be determined and upheld based on a democratic discussion of how we wish to protect Canadians' basic human dignity. Unfortunately, the greater harm of prostitution is the essential point Ontario Justice Susan Himel disregarded when she struck down Canadian laws against keeping a common bawdy house, living off the avails of prostitution (pimping) or communicating for the purposes of prostitution. Justice Himel accepted the claims of three women charged under those sections of the law that the first two provisions violated their charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person. The women had argued that violence against prostitutes would decrease in indoor settings such as brothels or when they can retain "managers" or security personnel. She also agreed with their challenge to the communicating provision on the basis of charter guarantees of free expression, finding that allowing communication for the purpose of prostitution enhances safety by letting prostitutes screen customers. The Ontario Court of Appeal has given the federal government until next April to counter Himel's ruling. The time given Ottawa to organize its arguments is also an opportunity for Canadians to remind ourselves of what prostitution actually entails, and to reassert Parliament's prerogative to legislate on wider social harms that outstrip overly narrow definitions of individual freedom. There is no question arguments exist from a libertarian perspective in favour of permitting prostitution. The libertarian impulse creates an antipathy toward any "morality" laws including those dealing with illicit drugs, pornography and prostitution. Perhaps most Canadians wish Canada to become like Amsterdam with its window prostitutes and Nevada with its brothels. If so, it should be for that majority to convince parliamentarians that our society should be that permissive. What all Canadians must remember is that those foundations are the reason Parliament has always chosen to combat prostitution indirectly by making most acts associated with it criminal offences, though the act itself has never been illegal. While prostitution may not be a criminal offence, the provisions impugned in this case are clearly intended to severely restrict its practice. In complex social matters involving community values, deference to Parliament's social objectives is essential. In our system, the legislative branch is better able to react to the needs of Canadians and weigh the benefits and harms of current social practices and their impact on society. These provisions are designed to limit prostitution and therefore can be expected to interfere with the business of prostitution, even to the point of making it practically impossible. In her ruling, Himel defined the legislative objectives too narrowly to such concerns as limiting nuisances in the street. Such legal narrowness makes it much easier to undermine the provisions based on the countervailing "harm" to prostitutes who engage in a "legal" business. While the courts have previously held that preventing "dirt for dirt's sake" is not a legitimate objective that would justify violating the charter, the wider social objective of limiting or eliminating prostitution is legitimate. The harm caused by prostitution is considered by many Canadians (and by Parliament) to go beyond minor issues of nuisance, and is much greater than simply the legislation of morality. This is a view previously held by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1990 Prostitution Reference. "The fact that the sale of sex for money is not a criminal act under Canadian law does not mean that Parliament must refrain from using the criminal law to express society's disapprobation of street solicitation," wrote then Chief Justice Brian Dickson. None of us lives in splendid isolation. The moral disapprobation of prostitution is connected with our society's deep beliefs pertaining to dehumanizing acts associated with the rental of bodies for sexual gratification. Focusing on the barriers to safely practising prostitution caused by prohibiting brothels, pimping and soliciting fails to weigh such "harm" against the broader legislative aims and societal benefits of limiting prostitution. A significant resulting problem is that the government's objectives and the harm it seeks to avoid are measured by different standards than the "harm" caused to prostitutes. In demanding substantial social science "proof" from the government of the harm avoided, Himel requires Parliament to prove the negative. Parliament is thus precluded from relying on its legitimate broad objective based on human dignity and is instead required to prove the benefits of the provisions in narrow and mundane "avoidance of nuisance" terms. How can Parliament prove that its laws preserve human dignity by discouraging prostitution? Parliament will need to make arguments from a social values perspective and looking at negative impacts of prostitution more generally. Before dismissing the government's expert evidence of social harms of prostitution, Justice Himel ought to have borne in mind the Supreme Court of Canada's admonition that context, deference and a flexible and realistic standard of proof are essential aspects of the constitutional analysis. There are limits on social science evidence and when it comes to issues like these, Parliament needs some leeway to determine what should be a legitimate mode of living. It cannot constitutionally justify such laws without reference to the wider social structures under which Canadians choose to live. The issues involved in this case go far beyond what regulations on an economic transaction are justifiable from a "safety" perspective. Ideas concerning the value of humans and limits on how they treat their bodies remain relevant and important to the dialogue, but that dialogue is a democratic one effectively undertaken in legislatures, which are designed to formulate perspectives on controversial social practices.

Any Canadian who remains confused about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may find clarity in the words of Canada's only Nobel Prize winner for literature. Saul Bellow, Chicago raised but born in what he called the "paradise" of Lachine, Que., was unequivocal about those who treacherously undermine the very Western nation states that uphold freedom of speech as an inalienable right. As a just-released collection of Bellow's letters makes plain, he was ready to take on heavyweights like William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway if it kept the poet Ezra Pound locked up in the 1950s. Pound was committed to an insane asylum after the Second World War for his broadcasts from Rome that poured anti-Semitism and pro-Axis propaganda over the airwaves. A decade after the war, leading writers sought his release on the grounds that while he might have been a menace in the 1940s, he was still one of the 20th century's great poets. "In France, Pound would have been shot," Bellow snorted in a 1956 letter to Faulkner. "Free him because he is a poet? A fine mess!" Bellow's evident glee at twitchy French trigger fingers making short work of traitors might comfort U of C political scientist Tom Flanagan who, ridiculously, is under police investigation for joking that he thought the founder of WikiLeaks should be assassinated. (Among the abundant absurdities of the WikiLeaks drama is the way its majestic justifications of free expression trumping western security quickly slipped into the farce of an intellectual such as Flanagan being subjected to police scrutiny for daring to express a jocular thought. That way madness lies.) Whatever fate befalls Assange, however, the real take-away in Bellow's letter about Pound is his objection to letting vocation excuse vexation. Nothing about being a poet, he argues, justifies a get out of the booby bin free card for someone complicit in the undermining of democratic governments busily trying to stop mass murder. The very assertion that someone's status life should spare them the consequences of their active life, Bellow points out, is itself a form of complicity in their deeds. It's an appropriate reminder in the face of the WikiLeaks fiasco in which cultural icons stand complicit in abetting Assange simply because he purports to be a journalist and a crusader for free expression. From the Dead Tree Media that first published the stolen WikiLeaks documents to Amazon, which gave technical support to the website, to the pay sites that allowed Assange to fundraise to make his skulduggery financially worthwhile, no one seemed to care about what would actually be done. All appear to have been overawed by iterations of the identity he claimed for himself. Such awe let them (and many others) overlook Assange's willingness to fulfil his self-styled vocation of exposing the purported lies and deceit at the heart of western foreign policy in the following ways. 1) By engaging in massive and indiscriminate theft. 2) By vile violation of professional as well as personal privacy and property. 3) By the elevation of himself to arbiter of ends justifying any means. No one anywhere seems to have bothered to ask a variation of Bellow's rhetorical question about freeing Pound just because he was a poet, e.g.: " Profit from the theft of stolen property just because it comes from a journalist?" Failure to ask something so plain spoken represents more than a lapse of good taste, protocol or even ethics. It evokes a moral crisis that far outstrips the passing antics of a schmendrick such as Julian Assange. It is a moral crisis mired in the conviction that what we call right and wrong is purely a function of whether it is ascribed to foe or friend. And it is at the heart of the horror of history forgotten. As Bellow pointed out to the literary luminaries of his day, it leads us, again and again, into evil's confidence trick of seductive personal image and facility with language masking the most odious outcomes. "What staggers me," Bellow wrote to Faulkner, "is that you and Mr. Steinbeck, who have dealt for so many years in words, should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound's plain and brutal statements about the "kikes" leading the "goy" to slaughter. Is this -- from (Pound's) Pisan Cantos -- the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder. . . . "The whole world conspires to ignore what has happened, the giant wars, the colossal hatreds, the unimaginable murders, the destruction of the very image of man. Is this what we come out for, too?" There was clearly no doubt in the mind of Canada's only Nobel Prize laureate for literature (where else could he have been born but in the "paradise" of Lachine, Que.?) that the only answer was no. We can all share his moral clarity if we choose.

Ray Pennings writes on the role and end of labour unions in the international economy, in the latest issue of the Review for Faith & International Affairs. See the same issue for, "Evangelicals, Pope Benedict and the Financial Crisis" by Senior Fellow, Paul Williams. Journal online, text for subscribers only.

Dear Centre supporter, Paradox might be defined as an organization dedicated to renewal finding reason to celebrate stability. Yet as that master of the paradox, G.K. Chesterton once said, a dead thing can go with the stream; only a living thing can stand against it. This past year was one in which new life, and the resulting stability to stand against certain currents of mainstream culture, was brought to the Centre for Cultural Renewal through our strategic partnership with Cardus. As a result of that partnership, the Centre's own period of uncertainty and drift is over. Renewed as the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal we are able to resume the work for which we have been celebrated since 1993. We can return with fresh energy and focus to the vital task of explaining culture to religion and religion to culture. We can again take strong stands from a stable base to speak for freedom of faith and the need for the voices of the faithful in the public square. Indeed, resumption of that re-energized work is already well underway. During 2010, we re-established regular publication of our signature legal analysis, LexView, with a reconstituted editorial board comprising some of Canada's best lawyers and scholars. Constitutional lawyer Kevin Boonstra, our lead LexView writer, has tackled such controversies as euthanasia, the denial of full religious freedom to minorities such as the Hutterite Brethren, infringement on the rights of charities such as Christian Horizons to deal with same sex issues in their workplaces, and the errors in the recent Ontario court decision striking down Canada's prostitution laws. Beyond LexView, writings from the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Victoria Times-Colonist and in the European scholarly journal Atlantide, as well as in translation on the Italian website ilsussidiario.net. And we're only getting started—perhaps re-started—raising our voice to articulate the concerns of those who have so faithfully supported us for so long. Yet the Centre has always been about more than speaking out. It has always been an active participant in the cultural and political life of this country. Our partnership with Cardus gave added impetus to that participation, most notably in the record-setting audience that turned out to hear rising academic star John von Heyking deliver this year's Hill Lecture at the Rideau Club in Ottawa. Additionally, we were active at the God and the Global Economy conference hosted by Vancouver's Regent College; co-sponsored highly successful breakfast events in Calgary with prominent politicians Danielle Smith and Ted Morton; and, internationally, lectured at the prestigious Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, Europe's largest cultural fair. Finally, the 2010 partnership with Cardus, and our revitalization as the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal, has given us all the new and exciting tools of social networking to let us effectively communicate with you, our supporters. Our old static, out-dated website is gone. Our web presence is now fully integrated with the fresh, vital Cardus site that provides a regular infusion of thought-provoking topical information and commentary unavailable anywhere else. On a more technical but no less important level, our support database has been thoroughly overhauled to serve our supporters better. The Cardus and Centre staff have combined to make our interactions with our supporters more efficient, timely, and inclusive of the latest technologies.Such is the reward and the richness that stability brings, especially when the stabilizing results from partnership with such a dynamic, future-oriented organization as Cardus. The great baseball paradoxialist, Yogi Berra, is alleged to have said that to change you gotta change. The paradox is the strength that true renewal demands. Therein lies the future for the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal. Please continue to support us at the highest possible level your generosity permits, so that together we can look to a future of renewed life, renewed culture, renewed faith in the Canada we love.Peter Stockland Director, Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal pstockland@cardus.ca To make a gift to support the Centre's work, please do so online. Cardus and the Centre for Cultural Renewal are registered charities in Canada and designated exempt organizations in the US.

When Canada's university leaders meet privately in Vancouver on Thursday to talk academic freedom, headline-grabbing incidents at schools such as Carleton, York and Waterloo will doubtless drive much discussion. Abortion, Israel and aboriginal rights, not to mention arrests of yahoos locking themselves by their necks to fences, have a way of monopolizing the highest-minded conversation. In reality, however, such events are town and gown conflicts -- university spaces hijacked by external partisans. They have little to do with true academic freedom. As the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada engages in its Dialogue on Academic Freedom next week, it would do well to deal with a more egregious threat to scholarly liberty. The AUCC should take sharp note of the assault being waged from with academe itself on the independence, and even existence, of Canada's faith-based universities. Since 2006, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has been targeting small, private, accredited, and invariably Christian, universities. Its method is to emit vague accusations that codes of conduct of such institutions somehow violate CAUT's definition of academic freedom. It then appoints its own "commissioners" to "investigate" whether the schools are guilty as charged. Last year, it used these tactics against Trinity Western University in the Fraser Valley. More recently, it has turned it sights on a Mennonite school in Manitoba, a Baptist academy in the Maritimes and similar Christian schools across Canada. What's risible about CAUT's singling out of these Christian schools is that, by its own admission, it has absolutely no legislative or administrative authority to conduct such investigations. CAUT has been around since 1951, primarily as a labour advisory body for academic staff. It also plays the role of equal opportunity foghorn on campus free-speech issues. Demonstrating classic mission creep, though, it has appointed itself Canada's guardian of academic freedom and launched its campaign to root out attempts by universities to "ensure an ideologically or religiously homogeneous staff." The meaning of academic freedom is what CAUT says it means. A CAUT document has a footnote to give authority to what it calls the "conventional understanding of academic freedom" -- and then cites itself as the authority. CAUT's campaign impugns the legal rights of faith-based institutions to require employees to conduct themselves in ways consistent with their affiliation to the organization's religious mission. Settled human rights law and religious freedom rulings from the Supreme Court of Canada entitle such organizations -- non-academic and academic alike -- to do just that. As Don Hutchinson, senior counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said recently about the case of Heintz versus Christian Horizons: "Christian institutions ... have particular rights that permit them to engage in selective hiring, requiring their employees to agree with their mission, beliefs, and behaviours -- provided the institution adequately explains ... why they are essential to the performance of the individual's work . . . ." Such rights are not, Hutchinson stressed, special exemptions or loopholes or simply sneaky ways to impose "Christian morality" within the academy. They are legal rights, straight up. Sending unauthorized "commissioners" to snoop into entirely legal conduct is not just impudent. It offends the very fundamentals of freedom. Nor does it matter that CAUT is limited to posting the results of its snooping on its website shame list. "An allegation that a university has 'violated the commitment to academic freedom' is an extremely serious matter [that can] easily damage the reputation of a university and place a cloud over the scholarship of its faculty," Jonathan Raymond, president of Trinity Western University, wrote in response to CAUT's bid to damage his school's good name last year. It can also cost huge amounts of money if legal action is required. Every dollar spent fighting allegations is one that isn't spent for scholarship. Every such engagement, even at the more limited level of meeting the demands of self-appointed CAUT "commissioners" for all manner of documents, hearings, explanations, justifications etc., diverts time and energy from the proper pursuits of academic life. In small private institutions, time and energy are always precious commodities and increasing pressure on them can lead to the worst effect of all. It can sow seeds of self-doubt -- even self-censorship -- among Christian scholars who, by ancient tradition and current law, are entitled to organize themselves into academic institutions that permit them to freely express their faith. One legal scholar I spoke to last week put it best: "In some ways, it's easier to be a Jewish academic than a Christian academic. We've done a good job of identifying anti-Semitism and protecting ourselves from it. Christians are just learning what it means to be a minority, and they're still awkward at defending themselves." Canada's academic leaders could strike a blow for freedom by lending them a supportive hand.