Mike Hickerson from the Emerging Scholars Network interviews Comment Associate Editor, Alissa Wilkinson, on her life, vocation and all the incredible ways she balances them.Read ESN's interview with Alissa here.

Author Marci McDonald's latest book, The Armageddon Factor, mocked for its sky-shouting alarm about a purported Christian putsch in Canadian federal politics, has been dismissed by its harsher critics as delusional rubbish being pushed through the public square. And yet, Ms. McDonald's face-off with public faith deserves a second look, at least for what it says about the suspicion and hostility many Canadians harbour toward mixing religious and political belief. The Armageddon Factor may be, as its detractors argue, anti-theist fear-mongering. Yet the book's publisher is clearly betting it will sell to the growing number of Canadians who see faith not merely as a private good, but as a public bad. It's hardly a reckless wager. Whether the discussion involves Muslims, Sikhs, Jews or Christians, it has become common to express uneasiness with any public expression of truth claims that might be considered exclusive to a given faith group. Such public claims are increasingly viewed as divisive or mortal sin of the 21st century intolerant. Common expression need not translate into majority belief. However, 9/11 made us all profoundly aware of private belief's public consequences. Since Canadians are committed to equality and pluralism, the thinking goes, of necessity we need great care in dealing with all religion in public. Even granting the virtue in prudence, it's critical to see such neo-squeamishness about public faith as itself undesirable for several reasons. First, it's flatly ahistorical and utterly ignores Canada's founding nature. Second, it risks befouling the very 'civic oxygen' that religious faith provides in superabundance to Canada's social ecology. While it is now standard fare to hear Canadian secular nationalists imitate their American counterparts by parroting phrases about separation of church and state, Christian faith and practice were essential elements in the construction of Canada. Confederation involved the creation of a national polity within which two separate societies, French Catholic and English Protestant, could unite. In the constitutional protection for religious education, in the social gospel movement of the early 20th century, or in the relationship of the Duplessis government to the Catholic Church, we find the broad trajectory of forces that bound otherwise disparate Canadians together. Yet our shift to the 'secular pluralism' of the past 40 years has been possible primarily because of the social contributions of those who practice religious faith. There is, demonstrably, a civic oxygen on which Canadian social ecology relies, and it is generated by the nation's churches, synagogues and mosques. If Canada's institutions of faith ceased to participate in our country's public life, it would be the civic equivalent of the clearing of the rain forest. The social ecological implications would be far more significant than many comprehend. Statistics Canada data on charitable giving demonstrates this. For example, parsing StatsCan numbers, the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy calculates that the 32 per cent of Canadians who are religiously active contribute 65 per cent of direct charitable donations. Even in the secular sector, they provide 42 per cent of the $2.1-billion raised annually by direct giving. Such statistics do not begin to factor in the importance of the institutional church in contributing to public and social infrastructural space. Institutional religion provides significant social cohesion to cities suffering fragmentation, isolation and disintegration. Can we, reasonably and in a democratic society, demand the members of such institutions simply perform good works, give freely and then shut up? If public, political language can only exclude God, we are not just preventing believers from speaking about their faith. We are denying them the right to speak for themselves. That is why the paradigm presented by The Armageddon Factor cannot be taken. It is not just injurious. It is not just false. It is unsustainable. Historical, sociological, legal and philosophical evidence all prove that that the secularizing experiment of the past 40 years has been a failure. We cannot go on attempting to shape a public square in which God is neither met nor encountered.

In late January, Jonathan Wellum said it was time for central banks to start to raise interest rates. About half a year later, the Bank of Canada pulled the trigger. Should this be just the first in a series of rapid rates hikes? How should investors view the move? Jonathan Wellum, CEO, Rocklinc Investment Partners Inc., explains.Watch Jonathan Wellum online here (8 min).

Senior Fellow Stanley Carlson-Thies on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly (PBS), talking about whether federally funded faith-based groups should be able to hire on the basis of religion.Watch a preview here.

Critics keep demanding that the President drastically change the faith-based initiative that now spans three administrations. President Obama, they say, is not following candidate Obama's promise to make the initiative constitutional. The critics charge that the President, by not rewriting the initiative's regulations, is allowing federal money illicitly to support religion. Yet, giving in to the critics, demands would destroy, not improve, the initiative. It would wreck valuable government partnerships with faith-based organizations serving the needy. The President asked his new Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to say how to strengthen the constitutional foundations of the initiative. The Council's membership, and its working groups, were diverse religiously and ideologically. The Reform of the Office Taskforce, on which I served, spent months deliberating about the regulations, and the Council itself debated additional hours. And the result? In its March recommendations the Council proposed keeping, with a few adjustments, the rules developed over the past fifteen years. It turns out that, with a new administration in charge and after years of experience, a broad consensus has emerged. Government grants can't pay for religion but neither can government forbid voluntary religious activities. No religion may be imposed on beneficiaries and no secularism may be imposed on faith-based organizations. But there is no such consensus on the critics, charge that the President is allowing an unconstitutional and immoral practice to continue by not fulfilling his campaign promise to forbid religious hiring in every service a faith group operates with federal funds. President Bush, they say, initiated government funding of religious job discrimination; President Obama must end it immediately. Yet religious hiring by the government's religious partners long pre-dates the Bush administration. Nearly half a century ago, in crafting our nation's basic civil rights rules for employment, Congress specifically chose not to stop religious organizations from taking account of religion when deciding on staff. Since then, Congress has forbidden religious hiring in some specific federal programs but usually has chosen not to override this freedom, and sometimes has specifically confirmed it. The universal ban that candidate Obama rashly promised would thus be not only unprecedented but also vastly disruptive. Many faith-based organizations have told the administration, in private or public, that such a change would force them to end their collaboration with government. Far more than a loss of government funds for these groups, this would mean for the government a loss of trusted partners and for countless individuals, families, and communities the loss of a valued source of help. The critics are not dissuaded. Religious hiring by government partners is immoral and must be stopped. Somehow government money in a faith group's bank account magically converts the congressionally blessed hiring freedom into unjustifiable bias. Instead, the religious hiring freedom is centrist policy. It authorizes no invidious discrimination. Rather, it acknowledges that government should stay out of this religious decisionmaking. And it accepts that, for religious organizations, religion is such a defining factor that it can be appropriately considered in deciding about employee qualifications. But there is no general authorization to discriminate; ethnic, racial, gender, and age bias are forbidden. But do what the critics demand and all of a sudden a carefully balanced employment law will be undone. Faith groups will have to either concede that government knows better than they do how important religion is to their operations, or they will have to abandon their service partnerships with government. The President is right to stay in the center, no matter how loud his critics become.

Bipartisanship is not a word that comes easily to the lips of British political leaders. Parliamentary systems of government like Britain's, when combined with a first-past-the-post electoral system, generate a binary political mindset and an adversarial practice. But the inconclusive May 6 parliamentary election gave neither of the two main parties an overall majority, producing a hung parliament.This outcome forced party leaders to confront the necessity for cross-party cooperation. Within hours of the close of polling the leaders of the two main parties were falling over themselves to offer olive branches to the third party, the Liberal Democrats, whose support they would need in order to govern. Following several days of high drama and backroom horse-trading, Prime Minister Gordon Brown resigned and the Conservatives offered a full coalition to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats accepted that offer and enter government for the first peacetime coalition in 70 years. Many had expressed the hope that, whatever the exact composition of the new government, the election result would herald a new era of cross-party cooperation. Such cooperation is, in fact, already pervasive throughout the system. It is standard fare in local government. The three Celtic legislatures, the Scottish parliament, and the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies, are elected by versions of proportional representation, so it is well-entrenched regionally as well. British members of the European parliament (MEPs) have been exposed to coalition-style politics for a generation. Cross-party cooperation is even routine in the national parliament, albeit below the radar. Legislation is often supported by more than one party, and parliamentary committees often proceed by consensus. So those who argue that cross-party cooperation is alien to our system are just plain wrong. If a new dawn of bipartisanship is rising, it will be an evolution out of current practice not a radical break with the past. That said, the territory of national coalitions is unfamiliar and unsettling to our party elites and a media which thrives on pantomime confrontation. One of the most important factors determining whether this process continues will be whether electoral reform, a key Liberal Democrat demand, actually takes place. A big obstacle to a more representative parliament, and to a more deliberative political culture, is the first-past-the-post system. As in the USA, this effectively disenfranchises millions of voters whose party choices get no or vastly reduced representation in the national legislature, and massively over-rewards those who support the two largest parties. This time the Liberal Democrats won 23% of votes cast but secured only 9% of seats, while Labour won only 29% of votes but garnered 40% of seats. Equally, the Conservatives won 17% of the vote in Scotland but only 1 out of 59 seats in the region. This system systematically distorts voters, choices, marginalizes smaller parties, and restricts entry to new ones. It thwarts the capacity of parliament to fulfill its crucial function of representing the full diversity of the nation's political convictions and interests. Members of the political class routinely warn that a more proportional voting system will mean unstable and ineffective government. They misrepresent continental European governments elected by proportional systems as precarious, hamstrung, and vulnerable to sectional minority demands. They cling to the dream of a single party, theirs, winning a monopoly of governmental power, even on a minority of votes. (Tony Blair got a clear parliamentary majority in 2005 on a mere 35% of the votes.) Waking up from this dream and embracing a politics which allows fair compromises to emerge out of dialogue between diverse communities of political conviction, will be a prerequisite for UK politicians to register for Bipartisanship 201.

Institutions and organizations are out, networks and relationships are in. Or so goes conventional postmodern wisdom on how to transform society, at least among those who still hold out any hope that societal transformation is still possible at all and who resist the despair implied in a consistent logic of deconstruction. Yet I want to propose that a credible twenty-first-century Christian voice on the theme of economy and hope needs to affirm loving institutions as key building blocks in any constructive response to our current economic and political malaise.1 To complicate this thesis, I also propose that Christians needs to reckon with the fact that all institutions are in some sense faith-based and that Christians should be unapologetic both about working to shape existing institutions from within according to their own vision of hope or, where necessary, founding their own institutions. The current narrative favored by many Christian progressives isn't very congenial toward these proposals. Institutions, so the story goes, are the classic instruments of social control generated by modernity. Shaped according to the imperatives of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic efficiency, they serve the interests of oppressive global capital, entrenching economic inequality, stifling human creativity, and suppressing dissent. They march toward their hegemonic goals regardless of the welfare of the people they purportedly exist to serve those whom they promised to liberate from the supposed bondage, ignorance, and squalor of pre-industrial society. But many critics now observe that modernity and its leading institutional bridgeheads are beginning to teeter. They point to deep fault lines appearing on the smooth surface of institutional bureaucracies and to new social formations emerging in the wings. To many people, the cumulative and interconnected failures of modernity, economic, political, environmental, and spiritual, seem to herald the decline of institutions and the arrival of new models of social interaction rooted in open, dynamic relational networks. These networks, it is said, are flexible enough to adapt to ever-changing contexts and spacious enough to allow human beings to continually redefine their identities and projects and to realize greater freedom and authenticity. It is also claimed by, for example, heralds of the emergent church movement or by neo-Anabaptists that the appearance of a network model of social change provides new openings for Christians to bear public witness. Breaking free from the constraints of mainstream institutions, Christians can join the subaltern flux on the margins of society, generate their own relational networks, and inject messages of hope (justice, peace, community, etc.) in the interstices of the current system. They can speak truth to power from a position of institutional powerlessness. The language of bringing institutions under the Lordship of Christ seems to such postmodern Christians like the controlling language of a dying Christendom. That is, to say the least, an abridgement of a much more complex story (actually a set of stories), but I hope it's not a complete caricature. And let me add at the outset that I actually share much of the critical analysis it implies toward the modernist characteristics of some of the institutions that have come to dominate the modern West, notably many transnational corporations, larger professional organizations, universities, and governmental bureaucracies, what even Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (hardly postmodern progressives) dubbed thirty years ago the megastructures of society.2 Because this piece is intended as a polemic, and in order to get something on the radar screens of Christian postmoderns, let me get my central beef off my chest right away: many Christians who have been understandably, and often rightly, drawn to postmodern ways of thinking (there may be one or two among the readership of TOJ and I'd welcome their responses) need to learn to love institutions again, and they won't get very far in transforming society unless they do. And such Christians also need to see that existing institutions, especially the larger ones, are already 'faith-based.' Contrary to the ruling secularist mindset, institutions like corporations, universities, government bureaucracies, and professional bodies are not devoid of faith-based influences; they merely deny their presence. The key questions, then, are: which faith (or faiths) drive these institutions? And how can a biblically inspired faith make any impact on them in a secular, plural society? I'm obviously not saying that Christians must love modernist institutions as I've just depicted them: those kinds of institutions need to be resisted and reshaped in ways I'll gesture toward shortly. But if my sketch of a postmodern view of social formations is anywhere near on target, then Christians, I'll suggest, have to move beyond a model of mere dynamic relational networks if they are to exercise the kind of cultural influence that actually advances justice and peace. Consider some illustrations (they are only that) of why I think the relational networks model alone, useful corrective though it is, won't cut it. I'll start with the church itself. Christians drawn to postmodern thinking are also often attracted to new, emergent models of doing church. For the sake of the gospel, they claim, we must leave behind, or at least work around, mainstream denominational institutions with their hierarchical authority structures, inflexible mission strategies, and lifeless antiquated liturgies. I happen to agree with much of that diagnosis. Yet history suggests that every authentic renewal movement in the church, if its unique gifts are to be passed on to succeeding generations and not die out with the first, will need to take on some durable institutional form at some point. Even the radical sixteenth-century Swiss Anabaptists emerging in reaction to the compromises of the magisterial reformer Zwingli would not have bequeathed their remarkable gifts of peaceableness and toleration to the world had Anabaptism not assumed denominational forms like that which became the Mennonite church. One immediate implication of this suggestion is that ecclesial emergentists should exploit every opportunity to transform existing defective denominational practices from within before launching out on a course that, however successful and intoxicating in the short run, may eventuate in yet another deficient denominational structure appearing just around the corner. Many Christians, I realize, are already busy with precisely that work of internal transformation. My point, however, is that we can't do church in a long-term, transformative way unless we begin to crystallize and codify new mission initiatives within institutional structures, however much these structures may be leaner and fitter than previous ones (they'll certainly need to be). This kind of institutionalization is what happened in the early church, before its leadership started to go off the rails in a corrupting alliance with Roman imperial structures. I doubt we will be able to improve on their act today. My main interest here, however, is how Christians can contribute to the generation of loving, faithful institutions outside the church, and to unpack that, I'll develop another illustration at greater length and use it as a platform for some broader remarks. Consider what has been happening in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. There we have witnessed, at least in certain sectors, a notable paradigm shift away from the traditional modernist model of bureaucratic, hierarchical, vertical-line management toward a model of horizontal, decentralized, participatory decision-making processes in which employees are situated within networks and ceded much greater autonomy and flexibility. All to the good. This may have led to increased worker satisfaction and perhaps even to greater productivity. But as far as I can tell, this internal shift in management style has not made much difference to the way corporations conduct themselves outside the factory gates (if you'll forgive a lapse into old-fashioned modernist language, but actually, lots of factories still exist; in fact, most of our stuff is still made in them. You might try visiting one sometime, they are much cleaner than they used to be). For example, I don't see much evidence that this shift has pushed corporations toward a change in their investment or growth priorities, modified their commitment to maximizing shareholder value as the overriding corporate goal, caused them to redesign their manipulative marketing strategies, or inspired them to redefine the reductionist indicators of efficiency and productivity on which they have hitherto relied. In other words, a network model of management hasn't been able to challenge the dominant faith in the corporate world, which is essentially a secular, utilitarian, and materialistic one. Introducing a relational networks model may be a good thing as far as it goes, but it won't be enough to move large corporations closer toward a genuine commitment to economic justice and solidarity. A much broader structural transformation is required, and this will involve asking a very basic question that is hardly ever asked in mainstream debate, and the answer to this question will be inescapably shaped by one faith-perspective or another: what unique human purposes can business corporations properly serve, and how can they be (re)designed to serve them better? A Christian vision of economic life will have some distinctive things to say about that.3 Fleshing this out further will require that we imagine models of what normative business corporations within a globalizing twenty-first century would actually look like. And we won't get such models if we only continue to indulge in perpetual deconstructive critique. Instead, we need to take up (again, we won't be the first) the difficult, slow, unflamboyant and often unremarked on, task of constructive institutional thinking and institution-(re)building. Nor will we get normative business corporations if we suppose that the only suitable models are dusted down medieval guilds or small-scale workers cooperatives. Both of these have exemplary virtues, and I certainly wish there were more of the latter. But if greater economic justice and solidarity are to be achieved against the constraints of the mega-structural architecture of our globalizing society, we will need bigger players than that. I'd add, however, that some big players started out as very small players indeed. The amazing Grameen Bank began its work in rural Bangladesh providing low-interest microfinancing to groups of poor women, boasting repayment rates rivaling the biggest banks in the world. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.4 And while Grameen is not officially religious, it undoubtedly operates out of a very different economic faith than the mega-banks whose naive faith in mathematically sophisticated, short-term, profit-driven, risk-management investment strategies led the global financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008. To transform the institutions that are shaping our globalized world, then, involves not only the deconstructive task of exposing their dehumanizing characteristics, but also the much more demanding constructive task of identifying their normative purposes and fleshing out how to advance these more adequately through specific and attainable institutional changes, tasks which will be decisively shaped (inevitably) by one faith or other. Let me state my general point from a rather different angle by invoking some biblical terms: those who want to be prophets had better first immerse themselves in law and wisdom. This, of course, is what biblical prophets actually had to do before any of their fellow prophets would let them loose denouncing the idols of their time: most prophets weren't lone-rangers (the progressive equivalents of one-man ministries) but tended to hang out in schools. So, for example, everyone's all-time-favorite prophet Isaiah wouldn't have been able to come up with a denunciation like "woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room" (5:8), unless he'd spent a lot of time meditating on the law of the Lord, from which he'd have learned (from sources like Leviticus 25) that economic activity Yahweh-style involves a legal guarantee of an equitable distribution of productive resources (i.e., land) for every Israelite family. Without the law of Jubilee, a cardinal component of the Covenant, how would any prophet have had the right to denounce the rich for the injustice of unlimited capital accumulation? Prophecy is calling people back to covenant obedience, and the content of that obedience is laid out in the rich array of norms (or pathways) governing the social, economic, family, political, and religious life of Israel, norms that called for institutional embodiment and that pointed the way toward a common life of justice and solidarity (shalom). And while the people of God in the New Testament are no longer bound by the specific rules of ancient Israel, they are indeed bound by the law of love, which, as Jesus and Paul both make clear, is the fulfillment not the abrogation of the law. This, I hope, begins to sharpen the sense of what I mean by loving institutions. I mean institutions that, even in limited ways, can embody the central norm of love, a norm which in turn needs to be fleshed out in more specific directives about justice, solidarity, peaceableness, stewardship, and so on. Our challenge is to work toward developing institutions that can serve as conduits of this kind of love, with all its differentiated concrete applications on the ground. Such institutions we should indeed learn to love. But they will be loving institutions only if they are directed by a faith that is responsive to the Creator's pathways for flourishing. One illustration of this task, I've been suggesting, is to develop faith-guided models of normative business corporations (rather than just lambasting the shortcomings of existing ones). This won't come easy. It will require a combination of extensive practical experience of the business world at many levels and extensive knowledge of the traditions of Christian-inspired social and economic reflection. Without the resources of business entrepreneurs, theologians, philosophers, or ethicists can fulminate against oppressive global capitalism until the cows come home (if you'll now forgive a lapse into pre-industrial language), but Christian business practitioners will not give them the time of day. Yet without the resources of the traditions of Christian social thought, the result will be similar to what I have all too often encountered from business students at (even) Christian colleges. From their accounts, it becomes clear that their business professors often have neither the training nor the inclination to take any real critical distance from the reigning secular, utilitarian, liberal economic paradigms in their field. And the result of that deficiency is that generations of young Christian businesspeople will be sent out into the world of work thinking that the currently dominant structure of the business corporation is already normative from a Christian point of view. Some of these young businesspeople may turn out to be generous benefactors to Christian causes, but few will be transformers of the corporate sector in the direction of an economy of hope, justice, and solidarity. I've dwelt on just one example of a large social institution that needs to be reckoned with and transformed if we are to nurture hope of greater justice and solidarity. But my point applies to all types and sizes of institutions. One could, for example, run the analysis through political institutions; let me briefly hint at how it could go. The conclusion would be similar: we need to develop creative models of what normative governmental structures might look like. Equally, such models need to be forged out of dialogue between seasoned political practitioners, public officials, elected politicians, but also civil society leaders and grassroots campaigners, and Christian political theorists or political theologians. Such discussions would need to ask some tough questions: not only, what is the normative purpose of the state in classical Christian thought?, the kind of question theorists like me love to spend lots of time on, but also, how can our existing labyrinthine, lumbering, bureaucratic administrative structures be incrementally restructured to enhance citizen participation rather than kill it off?, the kind of question theorists like me would love other people to spend lots of time on. Proposals for such incremental changes at the margins of our current systems probably won't sound very prophetic; they'll be more sapiential in tone. It's certainly a lot more fun to declare to a sympathetic academic audience that "our dehumanizing modernist bureaucracies must be replaced by human-sized communities of reciprocity," than to propose to a skeptical audience of government officials that "health care cost centers should devolve control of budgets to local stakeholder boards." Sometimes I sit in those academic gatherings and I think they have some value. But lasting institutional transformation will only emerge out of piecemeal, normally below-the-radar moves by principled practitioners advancing ideas like the one I mentioned, but who yet are guided by a larger, faith-inspired vision of justice and solidarity. I am encouraged to see that there are many more budding sapiential institution-transformers active in British political life than there were a generation ago. I think of a prominent politician, John Battle, who, drawing deeply on the legacy of Catholic social teaching, works tirelessly as a passionate and articulate champion for many disadvantaged people living in his parliamentary constituency in Leeds, England. Such institution-transformers also exist in the corporate sector. I think of my friend Cal Bailey, the marketing and sustainability director of a medium-sized construction company (also in Leeds), who, inspired by a robust Christian vision, is doing his level best on a daily basis to edge this most wasteful of industries toward greater environmental responsibility.5 Such people do not receive enough honor within our churches, and they are not helped by theologians who simply demonize the modern state or capitalism and all their works without pointing toward attainable alternatives. Notwithstanding the brilliance and originality of theologian John Milbank, this is a charge that can be leveled against his own writing, though it is encouraging that some writers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement (for example, Phillip Blond 6) are beginning to take up the challenge of devising constructive alternatives. Let me conclude, first by calling attention to the rich historical resources Christians have at their disposal as they take up this challenge, and second, by recognizing the contexts of secularism and pluralism within which they do so. Christians who aspire to transform institutions will certainly require great gifts of courage, imagination, and innovation. Yet at the same time, they will also need to rediscover the deep veins of traditional Christian insight into the nature and purposes of institutions,7 in order then to critically reappropriate and rearticulate such insight for the radically new challenges of globalizing twenty-first-century societies. As the Brazos Press strapline puts it, they'll need to find ways of bringing the tradition alive. And the tradition must be read to include not just the intellectual tradition but also the legacy of the practical witness of the saints. Here I mean not just those whom the church has officially venerated as such, but all faithful believers from all walks of life and all ages who have left behind durable, concrete institutional embodiments of love, schools, hospitals, political movements, and yes, business enterprises, that can still speak to and inspire us today as we seek to be faithful witnesses to the gospel in the challenging context of a globalizing but fragile twenty-first-century world.8 But what are the prospects for developing faith-based institutional proposals or models in a context so deeply penetrated by, on the one hand, secularist modes of thought (such as economic utilitarianism) and, on the other, a deepening pluralism of faiths? One of the striking, and at the same time disorienting, features of our current situation is that the latter is actually opening up spaces to resist the former: pluralism is undermining secularism. The growing recognition that no single faith perspective is able any longer to dominate public institutional life isn't only corroding what's left of Christian triumphalism, it's also problematizing the two-centuries-old secularist presumption of a sole entitlement to shape the terms of modern institutional life. Combined with the creeping erosion of the modernist project that is driving our larger institutions, the experience of pluralism is now beginning to crack open the door through which we can glimpse the possibility of a new, post-secular institutional settlement. In such a settlement, the classic institutions of modernity, corporations, universities, governments, will no longer be able to get away with presenting themselves, unchallenged, as guided exclusively by secular, objective, universal standards of rationality and as reliable guarantors of progress. The influence of contestable and contested faiths on their mode of operation will be increasingly evident, leaving space for alternative faith perspectives to make their distinctive contributions. These contributions could either be made from within existing institutions, formerly marginalized voices now acknowledged as worthy of a hearing. They'd appear as, for example, courses on Christian or Buddhist perspectives on health care in mainstream public universities or as so-called sharia-compliant financial instruments offered by leading banks (these already exist, but why are there no Torah-compliant ones yet?). Or they could be mounted from the platform of distinct institutions: openly faith-based social investment companies, credit unions, environmentally-friendly mining enterprises, property developers committed to social housing, fair-traded food coops,9 and so on. These faith-based contributions should not, however, speak in tribal theological languages unintelligible to the wider publics whom they must perforce address and engage. Yet nor will they merely mimic the dated secular Esperanto that liberal secularists would still like to impose on the rest of us. In striking the right tone and content, they will be guided by communicative guidelines such as the following. First, a great deal of faith-inspired language, especially Christian language spoken in Western or Western-influenced societies, is already perfectly intelligible to secular-minded people, and sometimes we need to call secularists bluff when they feign deafness in the presence of religiously inflected language. When Desmond Tutu called for the end of apartheid because "every human being is made in the image of God," he didn't have secularists scratching their head in puzzlement. In this sense, faith-inspired language can be public if the audience has already been historically shaped by the relevant faith. Second, to secure support in a mixed public audience for a proposal to reform a particular institution (e.g., a corporation, university, or government), it is normally prudent, to say the least, to couch the proposal in terms of the subject matter of that institution (e.g., production, knowledge, or law) rather than to lead with one's explicit faith language (e.g., blessing, revelation, or judgment). Such language will certainly be public because the subject matter in question is public. Yet it will not thereby have become secular or neutral, at least so long as its content remains continually fed by its deeper faith-based sources. There may be Desmond Tutu moments when our faith inspiration has to rise to the surface, but they'll probably be the exception. The norm is more likely to be the principled practitioner I cited earlier, working below the radar in government and speaking in a sapiential register but guided by a larger vision of faith. Finally, Christians will seek to be those, on the one hand, who stand ready to declare the reasons for the hope that is within them when the opportunity arises or the occasion demands, and those, on the other hand, whose words are seasoned with salt, committed to truth, winsome in tone, inviting of dialogue, hopeful of agreement. And the prospects for success? That's a modernist question.

Guelph Mercury covers Cardus research in a March 26 article on, "Guelph must discover the value of houses of worship." Read it online here.

(Click here for the official Cardus press release on the 2010 Federal Budget) Jump to:Introduction Are we getting what we paid for? Can we keep up with the payments? Can our income sustain this? ConclusionIntroduction This is the Cardus analysis of the Government of Canada's Budget for fiscal year 2010-2011, released by the Hon. James M. Flaherty, Minister of Finance, on Thursday, March 4, 2010. This budget continues to provide tangible short-term stimulus but leaves major questions about long-term demographic and social changes unanswered. It is uncertain whether this government's preoccupation with physical infrastructure will yield the long-term benefit we hope, especially as our social deficits become increasingly evident: a shrinking charitable core, an aging and urbanizing population and an increasingly competitive global environment are tomorrow's problems untouched in this budget. Like the rest of the global north, Canada needs visionary—rather than managerial—fiscal leadership as we ride out this "demographic bomb." The Canadian recession was an international construction. It is in part the prudent policies of this and previous governments in Canada that mitigated its effects in our own economy, thinking that privileged long term sustainability over short-term indebtedness. The Canadian government joined the world in responding in last year's budget; a response that, if anything, was more muted than most members of the opposition desired. But the panic has subsided. The Canadian economy is growing again, our banks have weathered what appears to be the worst of it and—comparatively—the federal stimulus was modest and strategic enough that we need not feel overwhelmed by the long-term challenges. Changing fiscal realities mean a changing focus. This year the federal budget focuses on completing the initiatives announced last year in the Economic Action Plan, including $19 billion of federal stimulus to be complemented by an additional $6 billion from other partners (primarily provincial and municipal governments). The budget introduces a series of measures designed to "create the jobs and economy of tomorrow," primarily through modest industry-specific initiatives along with a focus on reducing regulation and tariffs. Finally, the budget focuses on eliminating annual deficits, projecting a reduction from the current $53.8 billion to $1.8 billion in 2014-15. This will be accomplished through a three-part strategy: ensuring that the Action Plan expenditures are temporary and end as scheduled; curtailing $17.6 billion of spending growth with defence, international assistance, and government administration the primary areas of focus; and a program review intended to eliminate the lowest-priority and lowest-performing government programs. In the 2010 Cardus budget analysis we'll be asking three questions:Are we getting what we paid for? Everyone who has invested money knows that the goal is to turn short-term liability into long term assets. Yes, Canada has fulfilled its international obligations and provided substantial stimulus to the global economy, but will we see long-term assets provide value and economic dividends? In short, did the Economic Action Plan provide value for money?Can we keep up with the payments? In particular, does this budget factor in ongoing maintenance costs? Demographic data being released suggests that our maintenance costs in health and social assistance may be far higher than anticipated, eating up what assets we've managed to build in the long term. Does the plan to rebalance the books yet ensure the necessary investment to maintain our social and physical infrastructure?Can our income sustain this? Ultimately every buyer puts capital down with a certain margin of risk. The federal budget has projected GDP growth of 3.4% for the period 2009-2014. Are these assumptions realistic? In particular, are the plans for economic growth credibly taking account of the known demographic changes which are facing the country?1. Are we getting what we paid for? The critical question about the stimulus spending of the last federal budget is whether we have turned our deficit liabilities into assets. It is true that Canada joined a multinational network of states in injecting massive amounts of capital into global markets. Internationally speaking it is difficult to imagine another government forging a different track. But did we get strategic value for the manner by which we made those injections? This question is essentially about how the government's overall stimulus game plan is working. The answer is mixed. In the first place, recent projections of federal debt relative to GDP suggest an alarming trend. The government rightly points out that Canada's debt to GDP ratio is the lowest in the G7 but short-term comparisons do not address what could be a long-term trend. Second, the what of our investment is as important as the how. The federal government's stimulus spending has rightly focussed on physical infrastructure, long term projects which will serve Canada and its future well. The return on these projects is measurable and effective. Yet, physical infrastructure is only part—if a critical part—of the picture of Canada's future. Economic growth depends both on the foresight of physical and social infrastructure to sustain it. This budget does provide $1 billion to support deferred maintenance repair and construction at our colleges and universities. It also invests in ports, bridges, and energy projects. However, it neglects to sustain our equally vital social architecture. It neglects worrying trends in Canadian culture, like our dwindling civic core; the 6% of Canadians who volunteer and donate at disproportionate levels. It leaves fundamental questions about looming demographic challenges in health care, elderly care, social insurance, labour shortages and more unanswered. Many elements of long-term projections are uncertain, but the demographic transition that is underway in Canada is not. Canada may be getting short-term value for its dollars, but in the long-term we may have wished we'd diversified our portfolio.2. Can we keep up the payments? The " new population bomb ," as Foreign Affairs put it in January, is as global a crisis as the recession. And these phenomenon are not disconnected. The proportion of GDP produced by Europe, the United States and Canada fell from 68 percent in 1950 to 47 percent in 2003 and is expected to decline further. If the growth rate of per capita income (adjusted for purchasing power parity) remains the same from 2003 to 2050 as it was between 1973 and 2003, then Canadian GDP will double by that date. The rest of the world will grow by a factor of five. The global proportion of GDP produced by Europe, the United States and Canada in 2050 will be less than 30 percent—smaller than in 1820. The question is not merely can we pay for the stimulus of physical infrastructure, but can we afford not to attend to the looming questions of social architecture? A shrinking charitable core, an aging population, a dwindling labour pool and soaring foreign economies present the challenge not simply of the next fiscal year, but of the coming decades for Canada. Ultimately, the cost of ignoring these demographic swings may prove far higher than the short-term physical stimulus. In October 2009, a study by Cardus entitled A Canadian Culture of Generosity pondered the implications of Canada's impending social deficit: how our institutions are going to suffer from the steady decline in charitable giving, volunteering and civic engagement. The study showed how a relatively small proportion of the population—dubbed the "civic core"—provides the vast majority of needed resources in the charitable sector. A major concern is that this civic core is declining by 1-2 per cent per year, raising obvious concerns regarding what this social infrastructure will look like a decade from now. In February 2010, Cardus added to this analysis a careful look at The Shifting Demand for Social Services, revealing trends in demographics, immigration and urbanization that will put exponential pressure on Canada's social infrastructure, charitable organizations among them. In 2001, one in eight Canadians was over the age of 65. By 2026, it will be one in five; by 2030 one in four. An increasing proportion of the population will be asked to care for the elderly. We will, of course, continue to rely on immigration. But the programs that assist integration—settlement and language training—are driven by non-profits. It is projected that the immigration populations in Canada's cities will increase by about 10% between 2001 and 2017; few of them coming from French and English countries. This year will be the first time in history that the majority of the world's population will live in cities rather than in the countryside. Whereas 30 per cent of the world's population was urban in 1950, according to U.N. projections, more than 70 per cent will be by 2050. The same U.N. studies suggest that the relative demographic weight of the world's developed countries will drop by nearly 25 per cent, shifting economic power to the developing world; the developed world's labour will age and decline, constraining growth and raising demand for immigration; and most of the world's population growth will be concentrated in the cities of today's poorest, youngest and most religious countries. The net impact is a concentrated upward surge in the demand for social services, just when we in Canada are least able to meet that demand. And we are not alone. These alarming shifts are at the heart of every long-term economic projection in the developed world. In this budget the government accounts for these changes by projecting that elderly benefits will increase from $33.8 billion in 2008-09 to $ 45.2 billion by 2014-15. However government transfers are not all that seniors rely all. The budget is conspicuously silent on the necessary investment that needs to be made in the social infrastructure which Canadians rely on for our present assumed standard of living. Other worthwhile provisions that respond to this include:amending the disbursement quota rules for charities to increase flexibility;amending the taxation rules for the Universal Child Care Benefit so single parents receive comparable tax treatment to single-earner two person families;a seniors program to encourage volunteering;But collectively this amount to very little in the context of a looming problem. This budget ignores the well-known warning signs regarding the demographic challenges we face.3. Will our income grow enough to sustain this? It is impossible to say, with certainty, that government projections for return on investment are either correct or incorrect. However, given what we can expect demographically it is worth considering whether even our most optimistic projections of GDP growth and economic expansion will be capable of both absorbing this extra burden and bridging the gaps made by strong stimulus spending. Fiscal sustainability, to say nothing of return on investment, requires looking beyond the medium term projections of a sitting government's budgetary balance or debt. It is not an academic exercise to plan for a coming demographic shift; it is prudent management. This is being recognized by more OECD countries, who being alerted to similar demographic trends are beginning to routinely prepare long term fiscal projections. The infamous inverted demographic pyramid will catch up to Canada too, if in a longer term manner than other countries like Japan. The government is returning to the Advantage Canada framework relying on tax, fiscal, entrepreneurial, knowledge and infrastructure advantages to position our economy favourably. As we noted in our analysis of the 2007 budget which was framed around this model, the missing component in this strategy is building the capacity in non-governmental institutions. While there are various specific measures that, if properly implemented, have merit and will assist particular subsectors of the economy, for the most part this is a "tinkering with the status quo" budget that trusts market forces to solve the problem. On the one hand this is commendable: market forces are more reliable innovators than government programs. On the other hand, markets require workers and consumers. Our argument is that the foundation of the Canadian market itself—which depends on the complex system of Canada's social architecture—is facing serious problems that cannot be fixed overnight.Conclusion This is a good budget, but it's not visionary. Canada will begin facing down critical problems in the coming decades that need visionary fiscal leadership, leadership that looks beyond the short-term physical stimulus that this and the previous budget have competently provided. The sage advice, "don't panic" is right about this budget. Short term, it will serve Canada in a variety of important ways. It is not blithely delivered nor fundamentally unsound for our moment in economic history. But it has the seeds of future challenges: the investments we've made with our recessionary largess may not be worth what we think they will, the ongoing costs of maintenance are certainly far higher than this budget suggests and the tab is going to be picked up by fewer and fewer of our children. (Click here for the official Cardus press release on the 2010 Federal Budget)