Dewey’s faith

 Barbara Stengel's contribution to the John Dewey Society Democracy Initiative. She contemplates how fear is operating against collective community action, and argues in favor of having a "working faith" in human nature to ground us. 

Stengel writes: "There is a critical truth in all this that John Dewey understood clearly, that was evident in the United States of 1939. Fear can't ground a community; it takes faith. The required faith is not a faith in the divine but a faith in the oh-so-human. The faith Dewey calls out and calls forth is a "working faith" in the possibilities of human nature, in the capacities that humans possess to address one another without "fear or favor.""