http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:22:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/05/21/remembering-obama/ http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/05/21/remembering-obama/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 13:11:00 +0000 Lawrie Balfour http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=1756 A More Perfect Union," Obama's groundbreaking speech on race. Together, these addresses indicate how Obama negotiates among three senses of the past. The first sense, the one best represented by the Inaugural Address, is the idea of a hallowed past that draws upon American civic and religious traditions. The democratic implications of such an invocation, I contend, depend on the ways in which it intersects two other notions of pastness. Following legal scholar Robert Westley, I call these notions "the past as prologue" and "the past as bygone."]]> http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/05/21/remembering-obama/feed/ 0