WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Vice President Joe Biden called on graduates at Wake Forest University on Monday to seize this moment in history to change the nation for the better, warning that failure to do so would leave the country falling behind.

Biden said he’s more optimistic about the nation’s future than he was when he graduated amid political turmoil in the 1960s. He called the current times an “inflection point” in history in which graduates will play a crucial role in rebuilding economic, environmental and education policy.

“We’re either going to fundamentally change the course of history or fail the generations that come after us,” Biden said at the private liberal arts school in an address that ranged in tone from ominous to optimistic.

The former Delaware senator acknowledged the immediate challenges facing the graduating class. He likened it to his graduation from law school at Syracuse University in 1968, around the time Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.

“You, too, are graduating into a world of anxiety and uncertainty,” Biden said. “You’re going to walk across this stage without knowing for certain what’s on the other side. Good jobs are hard to find. Two wars are being waged on the other side of the world. There’s a global recession, a planet in peril and a world in
flux.”

Biden, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree, warned that inaction on climate change could mean that Americans “literally drown in our indifference.” And when talking about the nation’s potential, he wondered aloud: “Imagine a country where our carbon footprint shrinks to nothing.”

Wake Forest honored about 1,500 graduating students Monday at the campus in Winston-Salem, where some 10,000 packed the quad to watch the proceedings. Biden gave the commencement address at Syracuse on May 10 and will give the commencement at the Air Force Academy in Colorado on May 27.

At Wake Forest, Biden recited the writing of poet Maya Angelou, who also serves as a professor at the university, in which she writes about the hope the world will find “when we come to it.”

“We have at once, finally, come to it,” Biden said. “So seize it, because if you do not, it will slip from our grasp and determine the world you live in while you sit idly by.”

Wake Forest’s initial commencement speaker was to be former NBC newsman Tim Russert, who died last year. Biden spent several minutes in his speech praising Russert, and Russert was honored with an honorary degree.

WASHINGTON-President Barack Obama on Thursday tapped a Wake Forest University specialist on the separation of church and state to advise him on faith-based social service programs.

Melissa Rogers, a lawyer who directs the Center for Religious and Public Affairs at the Wake Forest University Divinity School, was one of 15 secular and religious leaders appointed to a council overseeing the newly renamed White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Obama issued an executive order Thursday that brought several changes to the office, which supervised President George W. Bush’s contentious effort to give church groups a larger role in providing taxpayer-funded social services.

Critics of the office under Bush said it blurred the legal separation of church and state by favoring religious groups over secular groups in awarding grants and contracts, and allowing religious groups that received government funds to discriminate in hiring.

“The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another – or even religious groups over secular groups,” Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. “It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities, and to do so without blurring the line that our founders wisely drew between church and state.”

In an interview, Rogers, 42, said she believed she was selected for the unpaid position because of her years of experience working on Constitutional issues surrounding the separation of church and state.

“There has to be a reconciliation of two fundamental values – the desire to meet pressing community needs balanced against the need to protect Constitutional guarantees,” she said of the challenge facing the faith-based advisory council.

Rogers is the author of a book on religion and law. Before joining the Wake Forest divinity school, she served as executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and was general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, both in Washington.

Rogers lives in Northern Virginia, where she attends a Baptist church, and teaches classes for the divinity school in both Winston-Salem and Washington.

Bill Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest divinity school, said she is perfectly suited to advise the faith-based office.

Besides her legal background, “She is herself a church woman and she knows the issues that arise in the give and take of the average congregation,” Leonard said.

In December, Rogers co-authored a report for the divinity school and the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank, recommending several changes to the Bush-era program.

Some of those recommendations were rolled into the changes Obama announced Thursday, including the creation of the advisory council and the need to review and clarify church-state rules.

On the campaign trail, Obama said he was opposed to the Bush policy that allowed grant recipients to discriminate based on religious views in hiring.

The executive order issued Thursday did not reverse the hiring policy, but set up a new legal review process to address it and other issues with the program that tested the boundaries between church and state.

In the December report, Rogers said she opposed religious discrimination for jobs funded by government grants, but said more information was needed on the actual hiring practices of religious groups.

Critics of the program under Bush – including one who worked for the Bush White House – alleged that the White House gave grants to favored religious organizations instead of more qualified secular ones.

Changes in the review process are needed to ensure that does not happen, Rogers said.

“We have to be evenhanded, and not put a thumb on the scale to put one religious group over another, or a religious group over a secular group,” she said.

The Wake Forest Area Chamber of Commerce is hosting a Candidates Forum on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. at Wake Forest Town Hall. 

Candidates for the following positions have been invited to participate:  NC State Senate District 15, NC State House District 40 and Wake County Commissioner District 6, all of which represent Wake Forest. 

Candidates will have five minutes to discuss the issues they feel are most important and the forum will be followed by an informal meet and greet.

The following candidates have confirmed their participation at the Forum: 

Senator Neal Hunt, incumbent State Senate District 15

Chris Mintz, challenger, State Senate District 15

Jan MacKay, challenger, State Senate District 15

Representative Marilyn Avila, incumbent, State House District 40

Stan Morse, challenger, State House District 40

Commissioner Betty Lou Ward, incumbent Wake County Commissioner District 6

Larry Tilley, challenger, Wake County Commissioner District 6

The forum is open to the general public to attend.  The comments made by candidates will be rebroadcast for the two weeks prior to the election on Cable Channel 10.  For more information, contact the Wake Forest Area Chamber of Commerce at 919-556-1519.