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ABOUT PAUL SIMON ESSAY We are pleased to publish Illinois Issues' first Paul Simon Essay. And we are grateful for the generous support of the Joyce Foundation, which made possible this first contribution by political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Our goal in commissioning these annual essays will be to find new ways to frame policy questions. One of the magazine's founders, Simon had a deep interest in the moral and ethical dimensions of a wide range of issues. Though the magazine's mission has always been to publish in-depth analyses of policy questions, we have never consistently approached policy from an ethical or moral perspective. But these essays will be distinct in that they will take clear positions about the state's collective responsibilities. And this theme will be the thread that ties the project together over the years. We begin this month by exploring the moral imperatives of American civic life. This is a subject that interested Simon, who, before his death a little more than a year ago, devoted his life to public service. Illinois Issues, May, 2005 Civic virtues Moral imperatives grounded in religion call us to come to know a good in common we cannot know alone by Jean Bethke Elshtain Civil society is on the tips of many tongues these days. This shouldn't surprise us — not in the American democracy. American civic life was not lopsidedly state-centered, as in Europe, but more dispersed, more open to citizens within the purview of their particular communities. When we speak of civil society, we call to mind that world of associational enthusiasm that so enchanted Alexis de Tocqueville when he toured the fledgling republic during the Jacksonian era. Tocqueville observed something new under the political sun — a world of civic engagement that was neither officially governmental, nor specifically economic. Civil society, then, is neither work life nor structures of governance but, rather, the many-sided world of churches, voluntary organizations of every sort, community networks, far-flung national efforts with local affiliates, and on and on. Moral norms and notions are interlaced with civil society; indeed, people propel themselves into community and organizational life because there are things they care about, values they endorse, goods they embrace. Without morality, there would be no civil society as we have come to understand it. MORE>>>> Illinois Issues, May, 2007 Burning question How to help the poor? The answer might be found in the stories and the voices of Illinoisans who themselves live in the poorest communities in the state Essay and photographs by John Wesley Fountain I stand with one foot in each of two worlds. One in poverty, the other planted firmly in the American Dream. One man, with one soul and one dream borne in two Americas. I stand forever — at least in the scenes that play over in my mind like a grainy, black-and-white silent movie — on the impoverished block of 16th Street and Komensky Avenue in a community called North Lawndale, still among the nation's poorest, on Chicago's West Side, a place affectionately called K-Town. I also stand, in part, on an otherwise obscure plot of farmland in downstate Pulaski, where my great-great-grandfather — a thin, God-fearing man with chocolate skin, born a slave — reared his family as a free man in a rural town on the fringes of the Great Emancipation, through the misery of the Great Depression, in the depths of a great ocean of poverty. I stand eternally with one foot on Poverty Street USA and the other on the American Dream, forever rooted in the fertile soil of this Land of Lincoln where the Bible Belt and the Midwest-bred, hard-work ethic intersect like a tapestry of purplish dawn sky over an emerald prairie. Forever is my penchant for her flat, sun-drenched fields, golden or straw-brown or cornstalk green, to be spied across miles of highway. Forever is my affinity for the amber glow of the setting summer sun that stretches across fluttering tops of wheat and grain fields that tickle the horizon. Eternal is my love for this land, which runs so rich and yet so poor, with pockets of the most depraved poverty known to mankind still. In Illinois, poverty is a seamless and never-ending tale.MORE>>>> For information about how to subcribe to Illinois Issues go to: Go to Illinois Issues blog at http://illinoisissuesblog.blogspot.com/
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