The Social Science Research Council’s homepage is featuring an interview with David Kyuman Kim, acting program director for SSRC’s programs on religion and the public sphere and editor-at-large for The Immanent Frame:
Americans pride themselves so highly on their freedoms. Are you saying we’ve lost touch with what has to be done to preserve them?
In the United States we are living under conditions in which freedom has become ordinary. While the urgency—the sense of crisis about the need to fight for freedom, for justice, and for liberation—isn’t entirely lost, it has become harder to identify motivating moral, social, and political movements and causes. Of course many will say that a counter-argument is the Obama phenomenon. Obama mobilized all these young people—actually, people of all ages—during his campaign. There was surely a widespread sense of felt engagement. The challenge, though, is how—and also whether—the folks who were energized will be able to sustain a comparable sense of urgency now that Obama is serving as president.The last word of your book is “hope.”
Is it really? I’d forgotten. Well, the great energy and drama of the Obama campaign was moving and important and exciting. It was absolutely important to elect someone like Barack Obama. But you don’t want to confuse that event with the completion of history. All sorts of hard work remains to be done. Agency, to me, is about committing and re-committing to a set of ideas and values. In the book, I talk about agency as a vocation—being attuned to something that calls you. One of the hangovers of secularism is that it has made us a bit tone-deaf to vocation.
Read the full interview, conducted by here & there contributor Nathan Schneider.