Garry Wills continues to amaze me. Trained as a Classicist, he is quite skilled at breaking open texts for the benefit of those of us who don't read Greek, and whose Latin consists of rusty recalled bits of the Catholic Mass. In his current essay in the New York Review of Books, Wills makes an argument for a morally infused politics that is not reactionary or regressive.
Here is Wills, talking about President Carter's new book --
"He proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic, any more than a patriotic American has to be punative, narrow, and self-righteous. He defends the separation of church and state because he sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics and pragmatism. That is a combination that once was not rare, but is becoming more so. We need a voice from the not-so-distant past, and this quiet voice strikes just the right notes."
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