As someone who works for a living on campaigns I know first hand of the value of volunteers and the hours that they put in on behalf of the candidate.  They are the gears that make a campaign move forward.  The more you have the faster your campaign is going to move and progress towards an Election Day victory.  

That’s why I am thoroughly impressed with the new campaign initiative from Tom Perriello’s bid for Congress.  They just launched a 10% tithe of volunteer hours to go back towards the community and service projects around the district (Devilstower beat me to it).  The campaign kick started the idea with 42 volunteer hours over the past weekend by constructing a house for Habitat for Humanity in Charlottesville, participated in a food drive and serving food to the hungry at a church.

In the interview that I had with Tom a few weeks back I was struck by this:

Q: How has your faith tradition helped shaped your political and social views?

A: I grew up in a church that preached the social justice message of the Gospels and called me to the teaching of Mathew 25. Sunday was a time that we heard about poverty, torture, and war and our moral obligation to care for and love our neighbor. My political views and my efforts to live a life of service were shaped by the prophetic call in Micah to serve the least among us and to "do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." As a Catholic, I know I will always fall short of this aspiration, but it remains my guiding light.

With this new initiative it seems that Tom and his campaign are further practicing what they preach.  They are actually taking time away from campaigning to help out in the community.  Granted the community service is good publicity for the campaign and is in a way campaigning the overall effects are moving towards the common good in Virginia’s fifth district.  I think it's a testament to the kind of representative that he would be in D.C.

Here the words of the prophet C. Vann Woodward.  Written in 1952, ostensibly about The Cold War, these words are just as applicable to us today.

Psychological surveys, polls, sociological theories, and other cerebral means of determining why people act the way they do have been utilized to measure this variable, or that variable, as regarding how people will vote and who they will vote for.

Here, the words of the radical Rabbi Jesus.  Emphasis mine and H/his.  

Jonah Goldberg was on the Daily Show last night, pimping his new book Liberal Fascism. I don’t have the time or the energy to refute much of what he said, that’s been adequately done in blogs here and here.

You can view the interview here.

Jon Stewart does a great job of slapping ole Jonah around for most of the interview but he lets Goldberg get away with saying something very troubling to me as a Catholic at about the 4:45 mark.  

Will Bunch eats a turkey for breakfast, but this is the part that worried me:

In addition to policy successes, the Reagan revolution realigned the country politically. "Reagan Democrats" came to the party because of their belief in core American values of respect for life, support for the traditional family, and a strong national defense. Many of these voters were Catholics who also brought with them more of a concern for the poor and less of an aversion to government programs.

In the 1990s this integration resulted in a conservative movement based on the Catholic concept of subsidiarity. Described by Pope Leo XIII in the late 1800s, the principle of subsidiarity suggests that social ills should be addressed by institutions that are as close to the need as possible, starting with the family and working out.

What I call "common-good" conservatism not only relies as much as possible on private charities and faith organizations, market forces, individual choice and decentralized decision-making, but also sees a role for government in empowering the nongovernmental institutions of civil society that serve the common good.