Today is Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar.
The feast commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ: Christianity's founding event. Easter's date is linked with that of Passover, which marks a central moment in the life of the Jewish people -- their liberation from slavery in Egypt.
In one sense, these two great holidays -- holy days -- should interest not only religious believers, but all Americans. They remind us that our Judeo-Christian heritage is the font of two principles at the heart of our national project: Liberty and equality.
America was founded on the belief that God is the source of both.
The political philosophy that inspired our nation's democratic revolution was very different from the Continental European philosophy that produced the French Revolution.
That bloody tradition grounded its political thinking in autonomous human reason. America's founders, on the other hand, looked "to the sovereignty of God as to the first principle of its organization," as the theologian John Courtney Murray has written.
Think of the Liberty Bell, emblazoned with an inscription from the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof."
Think of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."