"The separation of church and state doesn't mean separation of faith and politics. Those are two different things. Many of our great presidents have made it very, very clear, from Washington on up, that if you don't stress faith as president then you've really lost out on understanding what America was founded for. They have all expressed that we were founded as a people to bring help to others, not just to ourselves (which, of course, is important), but also freedom from oppression and injustice to the rest of the world. That is a mission that we've almost lost -- we really don't talk about it much. It seems to me that without that we will lose our way. We will simply become a rather boring, materialistic society unless we can get that kind of dimension back into who we are as a world power -- as the world power -- with all of the extraordinary potential that we have."
-- The Rev. Charles Brock, founder and director of the Institute on the American Dream at Penn State Behrend, and emeritus fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. Brock spoke at the Penn State Forum luncheon Sept. 3 on the topic of "holy warrior presidents." To learn more about the series, visit http://sites.psu.edu/forum/.