"So every year, colleges award bachelor's degrees to millions of students who cannot name the first book of the Bible, who think that Jesus parted the Red Sea and Moses agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane, who know nothing about what Islam teaches about war and peace, and who cannot name one salient difference between Hinduism and Buddhism. Think of the ripple effect if recipients of B.A. degrees in communications -- our future journalists, newscasters, television producers, and film directors -- knew something about the world's religions. Or if college graduates going into politics or business were even mildly conversant with the Quran."
     Stephen Prothero, author of "Religious Literacy," writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I would like to end the week by posing a question and asking for your thoughts. These are always my favorite TN&Vs, because so many of you know so much more than I do about so many topics, and because your collective answers provide real illumination.

The email address is daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Prothero raises an important question that we will simply move from his context [religious illiteracy] to ours [a profound misunderstanding of what the real issues are in the battle to save vulnerable unborn babies and the medically dependent-- and what led us to where we are today].

To borrow from Prothero, we can't "outsource" democracy: public policy is too important to be left to politicians and to "television's talkocracy."

But how can people participate in the abortion debate without a more-than-passing acquaintance with the basics? Indeed, if people know next to nothing about abortion–what it is, its impact on the wider culture, what led us to where we are today, to name just three-- how can they meaningfully participate in the public square?

My question to you is this: what precisely are those basics? Put another way, if you were able, what fundamentals would you weave into the intellectual warp and woof of our culture in order to raise the public's literacy on abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia?

Part of that might require posing the following and then coming up with ways to remedy the problem.

In the debate over whether/why/how to protect innocent unborn life, what are the equivalents of such rampant religious mythunderstandings as the conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah were a happily married couple; that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife; or that Billy Graham preached the Sermon on the Mount?

Give it some thought over the weekend and get back to me, won't you?  The email address, again, is daveandrusko@hotmail.com.  

Part Two