Stop throwing stones and get to know them. Finally, Mr. Wineburg accuses the President of creating the faith-based initiative simply to curry favor with the Black vote. I spent an hour with Governor Bush months before he announced his run for President. He argued plainly and sincerely about the need for church and state to work more closely together to help needy people. No President in memory has spoken so clearly and passionately about the vital resources--material and spiritual--that religious charities can offer people in need. No one could miss the President's consistency on this theme, and only a cynic would dismiss it.Last time I checked, cynicism was not among the Christian virtues.

Respectfully,Joseph Loconte

William E. Simon Fellowin Religion and a Free SocietyThe Heritage Foundtion

Author of "Seducing the Samaritan: How Government Contracts Are Reshaping Social Services" (Boston: The Pioneer Institute, 1997)

From: Bob Wineburg

One obvious problem with the status quo is that the thousands of smaller, lesser-known, but spiritually robust organizations have been ignored--or bullied--by government for years. The Catholic Charities model, though useful and appropriate in some ways, is simply not a model endorsed by many (if not most) of the faith-based charities doing the best work.

Mr.Loconte, this sadly is more overstatement than fact. Is there one academic study that demonstrates that thousands were bullied or ignored? Best work? What is best work. I spent 12 days in 1995 working on Visions 2000 with Catholic Charities USA. They were developing several models? They have 1200 charities ranging from big ones like NYC and Boston to small ones in East Tennessee or Winston Salem. Those people were so sincere in trying to be thoughtful and Catholic. You sound like you were there too.

I have spent the last 6 years on the street working with the organization about which I am attaching a file. It was merely a dream when I started with them. For the 14 years before that, I worked with every church and faith based organization that called on me. I know, from my work on the street that things are much more complex than you are making them out to be.

Mr. Wineburg also claims that "social engineers" who care little about religious charities are really behind the President's initiative. This sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory.

Mr. Loconte --is this the way scholars at the Heritage Foundation engage in academic discourse? I took part of the Social Engineering right out of the Preface of Professor Olasks'y The Tragedy of American Compassion written by Charles Murray who said " What is required is no more complicated and no less revolutionary, than recognizing first, that the energy and effective compassion that went into solving the problems of the needy in 1900, deployed in the context of today's national wealth can work wonders; and secondly, that such energy and compassion cannot be mobilized in a modern welfare state. The modern welfare state must be dismantled.

You can do better than calling me names? I am not some ideologue. They only gave me 750 words Mr. Loconte.

Anyone who has spoken to the key players in the Administration implementing the President's policies realizes they come from all races and ethnic and religious backgrounds, and they care deeply about the poor and the organizations trying to offer help. Stop throwing stones and get to know them.

Mr. Loconte, once again I am saddened by your assumptions about whom I know, and what I do and don't know. I have been on this circuit for a long time (I'll bet you a dinner I have been doing it longer than you --my first article was started in 1984 and finally got published in 1986. It was called "Using Church Volunteers to Fight The Feminization of Poverty). Nobody cared about church social services in 1986. I did and still do --think about them every day!

I was invited to Wingspread when Dan Coats and other early thinkers like Stanley Carlson Thies, Jay Hein (Hudson), Amy Sherman, (the scribe of this movement) Bobby Polito (HHS) Ryan Streeter (OFBCI) Don Willet, former Texas point man for the faith based initiative, and others, laid out a framework for charitable choice to be expanded. I know many of those, people particularly Stanley --whom I know the best and actually reviewed his book. Jay and I are actually not too far off on our views and respect each other. While Stanley and I, and Jay and I differ, we are friends. Do you think you could reframe what you said to be a little less dogmatic and a bit kinder?

Finally, Mr. Wineburg accuses the President of creating the faith-based initiative simply to curry favor with the Black vote. I spent an hour with Governor Bush months before he announced his run for President. He argued plainly and sincerely about the need for church and state to work more closely together to help needy people. No President in memory has spoken so clearly and passionately about the vital resources--material and spiritual--that religious charities can offer people in need. No one could miss the President's consistency on this theme, and only a cynic would dismiss it.

Mr. Loconte, you are mixing apples and oranges. Who said the president's faith and ideas aren't sincere. Tell me what you say to the following quotes in red?

Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper CompanyThe Boston Globe March 11, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A14 LENGTH: 1604 words

HEADLINE: BUSH TARGETS SUPPORT OF BLACKS FAITH-BASED EFFORTS FOCUS ON CHURCHES

"President Bush also understands the challenge before him, and that is growing the Republican Party," said Watts, who chairs the Republican party conference in the House.

Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state and a leading black Strategist in the GOP, said the White House and Republican National Committee are making "a tightly choreographed effort" to become a "stable majority party" by targeting African-Americans and getting 30 percent of their vote in future presidential elections."The risk of us attaching ourselves at the hip to the status quo is enormous," Blackwell said. "If we don't improve the numbers through legitimate outreach, we can lose the Senate and the House in 2002."

GOP pollster Frank Luntz said the faith-based initiative is the president's best outreach tool. "If he continues on this road, that becomes the first successful effort I have seen to penetrate the black mind-set," Luntz said.

Do you know these fellows Mr.Laconte --maybe a tiny bit of politics here?

Your tone was very mean spirited --are you like that in real life when you disagree with someone? Whatever happened to civility?

Have a good day!

From Loconte:

Mr. Wineburg,

There's nothing mean-spirited about calling a cynic a cynic, which is what you plainly

have become. Your commentary was a tissue of innuendos and half-truths. You should be ashamed of yourself. I stand by what I wrote.

Joe Loconte

From Wineburg:

Mr. Loconte,

I have been out of town and just opened your post, and am again saddened by your mean spirit and basic disregard for scholarly protocol. I know the Heritage Foundation has a political agenda, which in our exchange seems to be: Attack everything and anything that is against the administration's view, and don't worry if it is a not so veiled Ad hominem attack. In and of itself, that stuff is OK for a think tank. It has that right. You get paid to do it.

However, when one wears the garb of an academician, like you seem to do with your title, one would think, as I have apparently done mistakenly, that the level of discourse would be honorable, even if you hated my ideas --which apparently you do. However, you both attacked some of the ideas, and implied that I had no awareness of faith-based charities --so as to discredit the ideas by discrediting me. I gave you enough information in my first post that should have put to rest some of that misdirected, and less than scholarly slap.

In return, I also asked you for some proof of your claim about thousands of bullied religious charities. Just one study. Instead you told me that I should be ashamed of myself. Your response was to attack, not respond --an old game Mr. Loconte.

An academic is a cynic by definition. In the sciences and social sciences one starts out with the null hypothesis. Those of who have come through the academy and done doctoral research, are taught in both the sciences and social sciences that one starts with the premise that the intervention, treatment, the policy one is analyzing, or whatever, is null, or will make no significant difference. In other words: "be a cynic." Then one sets up methods to determine the truth by a complex process of elimination. There is plenty of literature on academic research and what the role of a scholar is.

Mr. Loconte, first off I am not a liberal academic. I follow my own nose, which a good scholar should do. I am sort of a John McCain type academic. Some of my liberal colleagues don't like me. When they become blinded by their ideologies I never fail to challenge them. Same goes for many of my conservative colleagues, some are ideologues too, and I call them on it too. That role makes me very happy and not popular. The academy is not the church, it is about seeking and speaking the truth. If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, after careful study, I just may I'll call it a duck and pay the consequences if I am wrong. It took me a long time to be against Charitable Choice and I am against it for reasons that I have written about elsewhere. Most of the ideologues aren't sober enough to understand my position.

I am now coming to the understanding that you weren't trained as a scholar and that may be the reason why you haven't behaved like one in this little exchange.

Your pitbull-like attack on me was so far off that I was stunned enough to do a ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials search and only found one article for you, and it wasn't in a peer reviewed journal. I may be wrong but it doesn't seem like you have published in any scholarly journals where you had to put your work up for review by people who know what you are talking about as well as or better than you? If I missed something, I apologize. It may explain why you have chosen to be so unscholarly like.

Mr. Loconte, I may have come to conclusions that you don't like, but I arrived at my conclusions in a time tested fashion, through the scholarly channels, thoughtful research, with careful and many varieties of study. I have read both those who are considered liberal and those who are considered conservative. I have done two (3 year) studies of social services and religious congregations which were funded by the Lilly Endowment, and several before that, long before funding such work was sexy. I have been at this a long time. I stand by my conclusions until they are proven otherwise in a scholarly way!

B----

Bob WineburgJefferson Pilot Excellence ProfessorDepartment of Social WorkUNC Greensboro

From Loconte:

Mr. Wineburg,

Let me respond to your latest note by directing you back to your essay:

"So why is there a second Faith-Based Initiative? The answer is in a braided, yet discernable set of motives and activities that underscore the President's efforts: religious, social engineering, and votes, namely, black votes."

Any fair reading of this paragraph, and what follows, can convey only one meaning: that the author can see only dubious and crass motives behind the Administration's faith-based agenda. A single quotation was used to justify this assertion, but no other evidence was considered--not the President's prior commitment to this issue as governor, or the appointment of Democrat John DiIulio to head his faith-based office, or the President's consistent use of the bully pulpit to extol the virtues of church-based ministries helping the poor. The fact that the President's supposed conservative Christian base remains deeply divided over the proposal was also ignored.

You say: "So the political architects are buying votes but doing it through the church." When a liberal politician proposes policies that help African-Americans, he's considered to be responsive, progressive, and representative. But when a conservative politician does the same, he's assumed to be "buying votes." This is not an argument, it's an irrational emotional appeal.

This kind of argument, I submit, is the very definition of an "ad hominem" attack (an attack on a person's character, not a response to his contention). Academics, especially, ought to be above this nonsense.

It's not clear to me that you even understand the nature of your profession. You said that "An academic is a cynic by definition." Yet a cynic is defined as "a fault-finding captious critic; one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self interest." That may well describe you, Mr. Wineburg, but I doubt most academics think of themselves that way.

You seem to be confusing a healthy skepticism with cynicism. Trained as a journalist, I'm as skeptical as the next guy, especially about claims coming from political figures. But I'm not a cynic. And though I'm not an academic, my training and journalistic careeer make me passionate about backing up my statments with real facts, and getting the facts right. My views about religious charities have been shaped by qualitative research studies I've done over the last 10 years or so. Some are contained in a book called "Seducing the Samaritan: How Government Contracts Are Reshaping Social Services (Boston: Pioneer Institute, 1997), a work commissioned by Prof. Peter Berger at Boston University. Another source is a recent report published by the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. Commissioned by Prof. John DiIulio, it's called "Churches, Charity and Children: How Religious Organizations Are Reaching America's At-Risk Kids." If you're interested in studies documenting government's discriminatory policies toward religious charities, check the White House website that contains the 2001 report on this very topic (with data compiled following audits of five federal agencies). You might also check Bob Woodson's National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which released its own report on this topic a few years ago.

Finally, I might direct your attention to a fellow academic, Theda Skocpol, prof of government and sociology at Harvard: "The academic literature on 'social welfare policy' has been so dominated by leftist secularists that it has written out of the record positive contributions from religiously inspired service to the poor. If noted at all, such ministry has transmuted into machiavellian acts of class or reacial domination." (See "Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare," 2000). This is the posture of the cynic, the posture of too many people in government and in academia. It's precisely this attitude, embodied and entrenched in government policy, that the Bush Administration is trying to reform. You may disagree with aspects of the plan (I certainly do), but maligning the motives, and the person behind it, cannot represent a scholarly or academic approach.

Resectfully,

Joseph Loconte

From Wineburg:

Any fair reading of this paragraph, and what follows, can convey only one meaning: that the author can see only dubious and crass motives behind the Administration's faith-based agenda. A single quotation was used to justify this assertion, but no other evidence was considered--not the President's prior commitment to this issue as governor, or the appointment of Democrat John DiIulio to head his faith-based office, or the President's consistent use of the bully pulpit to extol the virtues of church-based ministries helping the poor. The fact that the President's supposed conservative Christian base remains deeply divided over the proposal was also ignored.

Mr.Laconte, You have gone from being like an executioner, to pitbull, to a mean Chihuahua, but you are getting better! I think you do have it in you to stop with the unnecessary attacks. If you need to win so badly --OK JOE, BOB SAYS UNCLE! You win!!!!!!

Now let's try to find some common ground! Look, you are very black and white --and this initiative is very nuanced. I only had 750 words, so what the public got was the unzipped file with 20 years packed in, and of course there was some hyperbole. Your attacks on me have been almost nothing but hyperbole.

You have some decent points this go round, but there are certain things you just don't know, that I do. For example in 1992, the Lilly Endowment introduced me to the people at Partners for Sacred Places in Philly. The purpose: to link the preservation of historic churches to their community service activities. Not a Republican or Democratic idea.

I was the only person in the country studying community service activities of congregations that at the time. The crux of my differences with most folks on this issue (FBI and CC), is around their basic lack of understanding of how community service systems, the interlocking local network of agencies and organizations, with their complex histories and local traditions, actually operate. This is where the President's initiative hits the road, and in my book it has not done it well. These systems are complex. There are public and private organizations that are intertwined.

There is no such thing in the US as one stop-shop social services, so everything is collaborative --some voluntary, some mandated, some hybrid. It is goofy but understandable; and it is FIXABLE, but not the way this initiative is doing it

To get the just released ex-con services, a church for example, will almost always have to work with the courts, if money is owed for kids --the DSS, if there is drugs or child abuse or a learning disability, again the courts, maybe nonprofits or vocational rehab --a state agency with federal money.

The local system is akin to a grocery store where every time you have a different food group, you would have to change lines. If communities are to solve, manage, or prevent the range of complex problems they face, a plan must be developed to get buy in from the players in the different sectors, and methods then must be mapped out for developing sustainable partnerships to make things work.

None of this has been done so far and it could have been. The Intervention strategy is awful!! It lacks a way to get local buy in. It lacks a comprehensive plan. It lacks a way for communities to assess resources, measure needs, and work toward matching resources to need. In other words where is the plan to evaluate the results?

I have already worked with NEBHANDS, Nebraska's Compassion Fund recipients and Mission Tree, North Carolina's Recipient. In a nutshell the Republicans are behaving like Dumbocrats. I care about fixing the interlocking system of service on the ground and others have been more concerned with winning an ideological war.

Every time I speak at the Rotary or other civic group, I bring a GIS map and show where the jobs are, where the buslines are, where the daycare centers are, and ask two simple questions: how can a woman get her kid to day care and catch a bus to a job where the bus doesn't go; and can the churches solve this problem? Even the attack dogs, who assume I am a liberal because I am from the University, start to see the complexities and many are willing to talk soberly about the issues. Two things have to work intandem in solving, managing, or preventing just about every social problem, a change in values -- you are right there, but along with that there has to be attention paid to redeveloping the delivery systems at the community level -- you cannot have one without the other!

So it is hard to argue with you Mr Loconte because I am not sure if you know you know how social service departments, public health departments, courts, schools, mental health agencies under several block grants, link up daily with congregations or fbos, or for that matter smaller community service organizations. I do, to the point of knowing the boring unsexy details of how to do community planning and service integration. It is messy but could be done well with a plan. This initiative was long on the wind and short on the plan and everyone is fighting unnecessarily.

Back to the Partners story. To make at least a chapter short --Partners asked me to do the study that Ram Cnaan eventually did. I told the people at Partners that they were too "anal" for me to do the study. They are art historians in Philly and I am a social scientist in Greensboro --not a good combo. I told them that I would introduce them to someone who could do the study and was near by.

Cnann, whom I fight with and hate, but love much more, will be staying at my house in a couple of weeks, as my family and I did his in December. I am having some medical problems and he and his wife e-mail me daily. We were doctoral office mates together and are best friends, but disagree on many parts of CC and this initiative --we also agree on many. Never has he attacked me like you because he knows that in the ring we are like Ali and Frazier --and we were taught how to disagree on ideas leaving the other person's dignity in tact --which you seem to be having a hard time doing.

There is more.When he visited the agency, about which I sent you the attached article, he said you have to write a book about this. I am doing it.

Anyway --when the data started coming in --John D showed up at Partners and Cnaan and John became good buddies. John never did a shred of research on the faith based organizations, but I watched him use Cnaan's data brilliantly to position himself, Ram, and to some degree Partners on the national scene by getting Joe Leiberman and Bill Bennett (have you written about his virtue lately? Joke) to kick off the findings of that study. That was 1997.

Subsequently, John advised both presidential camps. I have done enough research on John D and Byron Johnson at the Institute that you cited, to catch him doing what academics should not do --stretch the truth. Two examples:

John Dilulio: March 12, 1999 Wall Street Journal

Scientific studies testify to the efficacy of faith-based efforts. In a 1998 report issued by the Manhattan Institute, criminologist Byron R. Johnson of Vanderbilt University summarized the results of a systematic review of more than 400 studies testing the relationship between all sorts of religious influences (churchgoing being just one) and crime and delinquency. (I read the major article EVANS etc. al. they use, and it comes nowhere close to saying that.) Byron wrote a nonreviewd study which I read and it was sad.

The academy pays attention:

John Dilulio FEB 14, 2001 Wall Street Journal

There are, as yet, no suitably scientific studies that "prove" the efficacy or cost-effectiveness of faith-based approaches to social ills, or that support the success claims of certain well-known national faith-based programs.

Cnaan's work allowed these guys to have some data but once the sleepy academy weighed in, they wanted to know where's the beef --and faith doesn't cut it. So while the spin for the first year was about the effectiveness of faith based organizations --once there wasn't any proof -- boom! A new strategy -- You cited it I believe without giving it a name --The Unlevel Playing Field --I have it in front of me and I can't find the thousands of bullied organizations --what page is it on? It is packed with civil rights language and all it talks about all of this unfairness. It is not about poverty, not about linking services, not about measuring need, not about building community, but whining about little churches not getting to play in the big time. That is not the issue locally Mr.Loconte!

The issue is seeing these little churches along a continuum --some not ready to play, others not yet bilingual enough to play the street and the system, to some being ready to go! The continuum needs a plan for the successful development of the capacity to build ministries and then a plan for the successful development of partnerships, and a plan to monitor and change along the way --plain and simple. There are 16,000 plus cities in the US this has to be done in everyone of them. There are 3000 plus counties and since much of the social service provision gets parceled out among the states, counties and cities and then delivered in a strange way, --mucho coordination has to take place. Why haven't you been talking about this? Those things are the details. Let's engage in discussions about that sort of stuff. It is important and not yet mentioned. Yes, I did not talk about the President being a Christian. I have been at this a long time and that is a trivial matter in the scheme of concerns facing to poor of this nation.

It's not clear to me that you even understand the nature of your profession. You said that An academic is a cynic by definition." Yet a cynic is defined as "a fault-finding captious critic; one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self interest." That may well describe you, Mr. Wineburg, but I doubt most academics think of themselves that way.

Mr.Loconte you were doing well until you got here then back to the Chihuahua! I was stretching the definition only to mean one who is often habitually negative which is part of my dictionary's definition of cynic. I meant negative in the null sense. I am sorry you beat me, but I said UNCLE before.