Regarding US President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame: Speaking on the need to find “common ground” regarding fundamental issues such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research President Obama tempted students at the University of Notre Dame that they can “doubt” their religious faith even as they “cling” to it. His call for “Open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words” is, ultimately then, a plea to doubt the objective tenets of one’s faith. In such a world, doubt becomes the criterion for truth.

This doubt about God’s covenant and the accompanying invitation to human beings to free themselves from their limitations has appeared in various forms throughout history. It began in the Garden of Eden with the serpent who rather than deny God outright made an apparently completely reasonable request for information, which in reality, however, contained an insinuation that provoked the human being and lured him from trust to mistrust: Did God say, ‘you shall not eat of any tree of the garden’? (Genesis 3:1). The first thing is not the denial of God but rather doubt about his covenant, about the community of faith, prayer, the commandments – all of which are the context for living God’s covenant.

Once people begin to doubt God’s covenant they are well on the way to building their own worlds. President Obama, though he speaks of “The Golden Rule – the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated” – does not practise the same conviction in regard to his own political policies (on abortion and embryonic stem cell research). He instead treats the weak, powerless and defenceless as a subclass of human beings. May God preserve us from doubting our religious faith and from following his pragmatic example and agenda.

Paul Kokoski

Hamilton, Ontario

Canada