{"id":163,"date":"2011-02-07T09:43:41","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T09:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/faith-based-office-has-new-advisors.html"},"modified":"2011-02-07T09:43:41","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T09:43:41","slug":"faith-based-office-has-new-advisors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/faith-based-office-has-new-advisors.html","title":{"rendered":"Faith-based Office has new Advisors!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, the White House rolled out<\/a>
\nthe first dozen names of those who will serve on the second iteration
\nof the 25-member Advisory Council of the Office of Faith-Based and
\nNeighborhood Partnerships (OFANP). Given that the last Council wrapped
\nup its work a year ago, you wonder why not just wait for the full 25.
\nBut the wheels of nomination grind exceedingly fine in the Obama
\nadministration, and an unofficial body with no designated task to
\nperform is not going to be way up on the vetting agenda.<\/p>\n

So far, the list is very strong on prominent Protestants, including
\nthe top bishops of the Episcopalians and the Lutherans (ELCA) plus the
\nhead of the National Association of Evangelicals. The White House also
\nscored the Greek Orthodox archbishop. A couple of semi-prominent Jews
\nare thrown in as well. <\/p>\n

There’s no sign yet of
\nnon-Judeo-Christians, however. And the absence of major Catholic figures
\nis getting embarrassing. Last time around, the Council counted<\/a>
\nthe head of Catholic Charities and the legal counsel for the
\nUSCCB–institutional players, to be sure, but hardly the kind of
\nprominent cleric rounded up from other religious bodies. The only
\nofficial Catholic on the new list is Sr. Marlene Weisenbeck, a
\nFranciscan nun who once headed her order and served as president of the
\nLeadership Council of Women Religious. If the Obama White House can’t
\nround up a single Catholic bishop for this Council, it should be ashamed
\nof itself. (Indeed, the administration’s inability to establish decent
\nrelations with the Catholic hierarchy represents its single biggest
\nfaith-based failure.)<\/p>\n

Exactly what the new council will do is
\nanother question. The first body, supplemented by other religious and
\nsocial service types, was organized into task forces that came up with a
\nlong list of policy recommendations. The most important of these, on
\nreforming the office itself, usefully rectified<\/a> some of the inadequacies of the Bush faith-based effort. Something new will have to whomped up for this round.<\/p>\n

Nothwithstanding WaPo blogger Jacques Berlinerblau’s smack<\/a>
\nof last week, the Obamaites have done a reasonably good job of
\ntransforming the Bush effort from a largely misguided and contentious
\npolicy initiative to a non-controversial exercise in
\ngovernment-sponsored do-goodism–as regularly cataloged on the OFANP blog<\/a>.
\nThis has been made possible in no small measure by the Advisory
\nCouncil, which has drawn the bulk of such media coverage as there has
\nbeen, and succeeded in dressing the effort in the cotton-wool of
\necumenical good cheer. But to keep the thing going, there’s got to be
\nsomething for the advisors to appear to be doing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, the White House rolled out the first dozen names of those who will serve on the second iteration of the 25-member Advisory Council of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP). Given that the last Council wrapped up its work a year ago, you wonder why not just wait for the full…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nFaith-based Office has new Advisors! - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/faith-based-office-has-new-advisors.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Faith-based Office has new Advisors! - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last Friday, the White House rolled out the first dozen names of those who will serve on the second iteration of the 25-member Advisory Council of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP). 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}