religion conference ‘Religion in the Public Square’ Athens campus hosts annual symposium
Faith
& CITIZENSHIP
Religion in the Public Square
S
tate Representative Stacey Abrams and CNN writer/producers John Blake and Jessica Ravitz were among the presenters who conducted workshops at the Piedmont Conference on Religion and the Liberal Arts held at the Athens Campus in February. “Faith and Citizenship: Religion in the Public Square,” was the theme for the college’s sixth annual Religion and the Liberal Arts Conference, which featured addresses by professor of religion Barbara Brown Taylor and by David P. Gushee, director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. Abrams represents the 89th House District and serves as Minority Leader in the General Assembly. Blake and Ravitz both cover religion and politics for CNN Digital. Also heading up the workshops were Thomas G. Camp, Spiritual Director for the Samaritan Counseling Center of Northeast Georgia; Plemon T. El-Amin, Imam Emeritus at the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam; and Jeffrey Selman, Atlanta Chapter President of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “While last year’s presidential election served to focus issues, the debates do not end once votes are cast,” said conference organizer and Piedmont Chaplain Ashley Cleere. “Concerns about justice, privacy, hospitality, neighborliness, and compassion occupy both religious and political discourse.” In the workshops, participants examined the role religion plays in questions such as, “Who may be married? Is torture ever right? How much responsibility do humans bear for climate change? When does life begin? When is prayer appropriate in public settings? Under what circumstances are immigrants to be welcomed? How are health care needs to be met?” In the keynote speech, Gushee recounted his experiences after writing an article in 2006 for Christianity Today on the issue of torture. Gushee is a professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer, where he also chairs the Mercer Lyceum initiative on rebuilding democracy. He is the author of several books on ethics, including “The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust,” and he serves on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In his article, Gushee proposed five reasons for why torture is always wrong. Not only does torture violate the dignity of the person being tortured, he said, it exploits the vulnerability of prisoners. Gushee wrote that authorizing torture places too much trust in the government because of the lack of accountability. Finally, he said, torture dehumanizes the torturer and erodes the character of the nation that tortures. Gushee noted that Senator John McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner in Vietnam, said, “It is not about who they are. It is about who we are.” Gushee said he was surprised by the torrent of mail he received from people opposed to his conclusions, as well as from those who agreed. The article placed him in the center of the debate on torture as it applied to the 2008 presidential election, and led to his cofounding Evangelicals for Hunan Rights, an organization that seeks to broaden the anti-torture coalition to include more evangelical Christians. (Continued on Page 25)
Barbara Brown Taylor
This year’s conference covered topics such as... “Who may be married? Is torture ever right? How much responsibility do humans bear for climate change? When does life begin? When is prayer appropriate in public settings? Under what circumstances are immigrants to be welcomed? How are health care needs to be met?”