ABSTRACT
Clifford Geertz described culture as “webs of significance which we ourselves have spun” and what we need to know is more about how those webs affect our choices and provide structures for our collective decisions. Religion (belief, faith, and practice), moral conviction, and cultural diversity are among the poor stepchildren in academic research, yet in most of the recent presidential elections they have provided swirling storms of controversy that have tossed about many an aspiring presidential vessel. Our socio-political context is like a micro-weather system with currents and pressures and constantly changing internal structures. The micro-weather system metaphor seems an apt one to describe the political and civic contexts in which we live out our lives. In order to better understand the ways that these forces affect the collective choices we make, we need to develop methodologies and structures of inquiry that enable us to analyze the complex interactions that produce our “socio-political weather.”
