Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st century faces one great opportunity and two great dangers. And American foreign policy will profoundly affect each.

For America today to truly be America, it must be the world’s leading proponent of human rights at home and abroad. It is when it answers this great national vocation (first glimpsed by the nation’s founders) that America most fully gives expression to what, in seed, it has been from the very start.

While I am an optimist with regard to global poverty alleviation, my optimism is sorely tested when it comes to my beloved birth continent, Africa.

African public theologians have, as their vocation, the study of the relation between religion and public life in Africa… so I presume their work will cast light on what Africans in general (or at the very least Africans actively participating in Christian churches) feel and think.

The next American president should shape the United States’ Africa policy in response to three questions: How can America help constrain Islamicist violence in the African Sahel? What can America do to help counter state collapse in the roughly 34% of Africa where there is no effective state control? How can American foreign policy best encourage economic growth in the rising parts of Africa (taking into account China’s growing presence in Africa)?

With student protests at the University of Missouri resulting in the resignation of that school’s president and concerns about Halloween costumes at Yale sparking a national debate about the commensurability of deeply held values such as free speech and anti-racism, the American conversation about what colleges and universities can and should promise students has entered a moment of reignited intensity. A similar conversation is raging in South Africa.