The Buzz

“It’s perfectly fine to bring your religious conviction to the public square…but you don’t get to say ‘I’m religious, and I get to win’ or ‘God spoke to me last night, and I got the fix for Social Security.’”
Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, at a Forum panel discussion on “The Pope and the Future of Religion in Global Politics.”

“The military has clearly gotten a job they didn’t expect to get.”
Martha Raddatz, senior national security correspondent for ABC News, speaking at a brown bag sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in April about the difficulties facing U.S. military troops in Iraq.

“It is wrong in a country with our wealth and our prosperity to have 36 million people who wake up in poverty every single day.”
Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who served as a visiting IOP fellow during the spring semester, speaking at the Forum about how citizens and government can work to eradicate poverty in America.

“What the great majority of people have embraced as expectations of what our military can do is radically opposed to what our founding fathers imagined.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, at a talk sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy in February about American citizens’ infatuation with America’s military might.