Portside

With its numerous religious awakenings and repeated instances of religiosity as political theater, it's easy to forget US civic life is secular. Author Kevin Kruse argues that the effort to ground political rights in spiritual authority and not in democratic discussion and decision-making originated with a coterie of corporate heads, right-wing politicians, reactionary pastors and cultural icons as a bulwark against progressive politics and New Deal legislation.

The compendious catalogue of a recent exhibit offers representations of art as practiced by numerous Plains tribes from first encounter with Europeans to their near decimation not only from military conquest and rough frontier justice but from European-spawned disease. Much of the work is likened to that of Italian painters of religious scenes during the Renaissance, which might be defined as the depiction of social life sustained by a sacred sacrifice of blood.

Born into the segregated rural South, James Gustave ("Gus") Speth didn't see the oppression and poverty his black neighbors faced. A confrontation at a northern university with civil-rights advocates in the early 1960s triggered a life-long moral compulsion to support the burgeoning civil rights struggle. The newly minted anti-racist grew into a leading environmentalist, political activist, prolific author and Yale dean. The book under review is his memoir.

Successive High Court decisions have done more than enfranchise corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The same logic in the same cases now defines public corruption down: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo must be seen to operate. Absent that smoking gun, the financial elite has no limits on bankrolling campaigns whose candidates then vote their interests. To the nation's founders, that untrammeled influence was the essence of public corruption.

Last week, Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, made PEN/America Center's shortlist for the Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The prize goes to "an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction" "notable literary merit and critical perspective" that highlights "important contemporary issues." Allen's book was published last year to a host of lively reviews. Here is one of the earliest, by Steven B. Smith. Also included below is a link to Allen's homepage.