by Carrie Budoff Brown
President Barack Obama, who has been reversing course on a host of Bush administration policies, Thursday will make a bid to expand and strengthen one of the programs most closely associated with his predecessor.
George W. Bush created the White House faith-based grant program, and Obama intends to keep the same structure. But Obama is going a significant step further, with the creation of a new board of advisers whose recommendations will be woven directly into his policy-making apparatus.
Under Bush, a White House-based program to encourage grants to faith-based social service programs began with high hopes and a barrage of publicity. But over time this Bush hallmark suffered amid complaints from many of its backers that it had become marginalized and used for partisan purposes by White House political aides.
"The conventional wisdom suggests that, since Bush used much rhetoric about his commitment to working closely with religious leaders and communities, that the new Democrat coming to the White House might seek to diminish the role of religion in his administration," said the Rev. Jim Wallis, the president of the progressive Christian group Sojourners and a member of Obama's new council. "But I believe the opposite may turn out to be true. There will be a new paradigm of religious influence under the Obama administration."
More: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/05-0
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The spell of misuse of power, dominance, control over others, racial hatred, polarization, economic injustice has been broken. Beneath the "spell" are the rising of what we are calling the "universal humanity" and the "cocreative human." We have lived through the Shift Point. Not that the problems are solved, but the truth has emerged, that the "birth" of ourselves as a planetary species is real, if only embryonic. This is a rare privilege. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard
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