H. Mark Roelofs

Teaching the Gettysburg Address: A Critique

The Address is an icon, and as such has become an essential part of the American political systems religitimization process. Its remarkable effectiveness in this role is largely due to its literary form being borrowed from Biblical covenent renewal ceremonies. But we have paid a high price for this effectiveness. The Address is essentially misleading about the nations founding and simply wrong about the democratic character of our political institutions. Most important, it ignores the issue of slavery - which one way or another lay at the heart of the civil war struggle - and it perpetuates the lie that the nation was founded on the principle that all men were created equal.

Teaching the Political Ideas of the Bible

Governmental Studies during the CARP project and is currently engaged in studies of organizations that operate technologies of such criticality that nearly failure-free performance is demanded. David Hadwiger is a doctoral candidate and was project coordinator and field supervisor. He has recently returned from the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission in Washington, D.C., where he was studying the effects of military spending on congressional re-elections.