I keep coming across so many wonderful and true quotations in my preparations for the class. I am teaching at Auburn for the Oshner Lifelong Learning Institute this fall on the First Amendment and Freedom of Religion.

The U.S. Constitution is “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man”—William Ewart Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, North American Review, Sept./Oct. 1878.

Every week, my class and I recite the First Amendment out loud together, sensing together the power of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the founders, who had the courage and brilliance to set forth a clear bill of of rights: freedoms of religion, conscience, press, assembly, and identified them as universal, inalienable, and non-negotiable. They are principles worth fighting and dying for, but also worth living for. Most importantly, a principle is only as real as our willingness to grant it to those with whom we most vehemently disagree.

Ponder this moment. Read the founding documents again. We must find our way not in the mutually assured destruction of our Lilliputian partisanships, but in recovering the courage of that glorious, radical vision. It must live in us again.