6/6/2022

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with an op-ed by Joseph M. Knippenberg, a professor of politics at Oglethorpe University and a Jack Miller Center faculty partner. He makes the case that a good civic education depends on receiving a liberal education that transcends particular experiences. “Our circumstances demand that we be able to communicate – and hence share understandings – with one another,” Knippenberg writes. Pointing to W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” Knippenberg argues that “we start where students are to bring them into full universal humanity.” He continues: “We honor and treasure the stories of our ancestors because they are ours. They’re both particular to us and part of the variegated human panoply. But that panoply is human, with its particular embodiments pointing to a nature that we share.”

At First Things, Vincent Phillip Muñoz argues that the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence is woefully out of step with the First Amendment. Twentieth century Court precedent in this area “effectively demand government hostility toward religion.” Muñoz says that in order to reach a better understanding of the Establishment Clause, the Court must recover the original meaning of the constitutional phrase “establishment of religion.” Analyzing the South Carolina Constitution of 1778, he posits that the Establishment Clause in fact “was designed to prevent the government from exercising the powers of a church and from delegating its legitimate power to churches.”

Olivia B. Waxman at TIME interviews the historian David Hackett Fischer about his latest book, “African Founders,” which is an examination of the experiences of slaves living in the United States from the 17th century to the 19th century. As Fischer explains, the book’s “central idea is the importance of what Africans did to help found this free Republic and how they made it more free than it otherwise would have been.” In fact, he says that their fight for liberty should be an example for Americans today: “We are all in their debt. And they have also given us the obligation of making it yet more free.” Regarding the 1619 Project, he also argues that it’s “centered too much on what went wrong and too little on the creativity of people who are responding to what went wrong.”