FBF Contributor: Stanley Carlson-Thies, former leader for White House Faith-based and Community office and Co-author of “Revolution of Compassion” with Dave Donaldson
stanley@cpjustice.org

White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

On June 26 and 27, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives hosted a conference to celebrate and evaluate developments in the partnership between government and civil society organizations, including faith-based organizations. In connection with the conference, a new website now highlights “Innovation in Effective Compassion.”

Religious Exemptions
Constitutional law expert Carl Esbeck explains the First Amendment rationale for providing robust religious exemptions in “When Accommodations for Religion Violate the Establishment Clause: Regularizing the Supreme Court’s Analysis.”

Rethinking Role of Faith-Based Organizations
The Baylor Institute for Studies in Religion recently released Not by Faith or Government Alone: Rethinking the Role of Faith-Based Organizations, a special research report edited by Byron Johnson, with short essays on various aspects of the faith-based and community initiative. Among the essays is “The Paradoxical Role of Faith in the Faith-Based and Community Initiative,” by this editor, arguing that the hard work to ensure the religious freedom of faith-based organizations has not been a distraction from the initiative aims but rather the catalyst for all the reforms requiring government to be more respectful of its civil society partners.

Religious Staffing
For the legal, constitutional, and policy rationales for the religious staffing freedom, download The Freedom of Faith-Based Organizations to Staff on a Religious Basis, by Carl Esbeck, Stanley Carlson-Thies, and Ron Sider (Center for Public Justice, 2004).

Other Faith-Based Articles
Is protecting the religious identity of faith-based organizations that collaborate with government an extremist, sectarian policy, as some charge, or rather the middle position–the equal treatment alternative to the extremes of obligatory secularism and soft theocracy? Read Keith Pavlischek’s reflections on Senator Obama’s proposed faith-based policy, “Doubting Obama.”

Peter Steinfels wrote a thoughtful evaluation of Senator Obama’s proposals for the New York Times: “Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government.”

For a thought-provoking review of John DiIulio’s recent book on the faith-based initiative, Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future (2007), focusing on the religious staffing issue, see Joseph Knippenberg’s essay, “Faith Friendly?”

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