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    Obama’s Search for Christ

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    The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.

    His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.

    “My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where the religious education was cursory. When he was 10, he returned to his birthplace of Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attended a preparatory school with a Christian affiliation but little religious instruction.

    Years later, Mr. Obama met his father’s family, a mix of Muslim and Christian Kenyans. Sarah Hussein Obama, who is his stepgrandmother but whom Mr. Obama calls his grandmother, still rises at 5 a.m. to pray before tending to her crops and the three orphans she has taken in.

    “I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.

    This polyglot background made Mr. Obama tolerant of others’ faiths yet reluctant to join one, said Mr. Wright, the pastor. In an interview in March in his office, filled with mementos from his 35 years at Trinity, Mr. Wright recalled his first encounters with Mr. Obama in the late 1980s, when the future senator was organizing Chicago neighborhoods. Though minister after minister told Mr. Obama he would be more credible if he joined a church, he was not a believer.

    “I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

    It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.

    In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”

    Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.

    It also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.

    Mr. Obama has written that when he became a Christian, he “felt God’s spirit beckoning” and “submitted myself to His will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.” While he has said he shares core Christian beliefs in God and in Jesus as his resurrected son, he sometimes mentions doubts. In his second book, he admitted uncertainty about the afterlife, and “what existed before the Big Bang.” Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones.

    You can read the whole article here...

    Here's an interesting article on Barak Obama and his spiritual journey. Here are bits and pieces of the article featured recently in the New York Times: Obama's embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”

    Comments

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    1. Peter Hamm on Tue, May 01, 2007

      Interesting. I want to know more about this guy.


      But… (I apologize for the politically-incorrect statement that follows…)


      Anybody who thinks that America (where senior citizens with all their prejudices and pre-conceived ideas about non-caucasians) vote in droves and young idealistic folks do not, is ready to elect this man president, regardless of his accomplishments or his readiness… raise your hand. Not if YOU’D vote for him… but if you really think that he’ll win an election.


      Don’t get me wrong, when the election comes I will vote my conscience, but Obama’s ahead of his time. A future african-american president will have him to thank perhaps, but make no mistake, he is paving the way for others, not making his own.

    2. nora on Tue, May 01, 2007

      (Raising hand).  Wow, Peter, I couldn’t disagree more strongly with you.  What the democrats should have learned from their last election, and from the election of Bill Clinton, is that if American elects a democrat, that candidate must at least look like a moderate.  Kerry did not qualify on that score, and neither does Hillary.  Obama, however, at least up until this point, seems to.  Out of all of the present candidates, Democrat and Republican, he is easily the most charismatic.  I’ll grant you that I may be more representative of the young idealists who don’t vote (although I do vote), but for me his color is a non issue.  What may be more troubling for some is the Muslim connections in his family.  But yes, I do think Obama has a very good shot at winning the next election.

    3. Peter Hamm on Tue, May 01, 2007

      Nora, whether or not Obama is the best man for the job is moot. Whether or not he’s a true moderate is moot (and I agree… America wants to elect a moderate…) He could have no scandal in his past, he could have six advanced degrees, could be summa cum laude from his university and have the endorsement of every living past president. Doesn’t matter. The people who vote in this country are older, they are more prejudiced (color doesn’t matter to me either, btw), they will simply, by and large, not vote for a man who 1.) is African American and 2.) has a “foreign-sounding” name. Heck, if you look at recent history, we won’t even elect a man who isn’t really tall! When was the last “short” president? Certainly before the TV age… It’s sad, but it’s the state of affairs. (For the record, I think the same voting block will not consider voting for Hilary, or any other woman, because of her gender… sad, but I’m afraid it’s true.) This older generation votes in VERY high percentages, and some might argue they just about completely control the elections because of that.


      I don’t mean to debate the merits of the candidates… It’s a simple question of voters’ habits. They want a white moderate male with a normal sounding name. (Certain pastors of my generation and younger who believe woman are incapable of leading don’t help this much, do they…) http://www.mondaymorninginsight.com/images/smileys/wink.gif


      I hope I live to see the day when America will be truly color- and gender-blind in electing the highest official in the land, but, the more I hear from some of the younger generation which has learned this generational racism and sexism, the less I think it is likely.

    4. nora on Tue, May 01, 2007

      Peter, I hope I didn’t come off sounding like I was accusing you of racism—certainly not.  I just think that Obama’s charisma might carry him farther than what you think.  The fact that he seems to be the darling of the media right now may not hurt either.  However, unfortunately, your points do have merit, and the outcome remains to be seen…......

    5. Peter Hamm on Tue, May 01, 2007

      Thanks, Nora.


      I didn’t think you were accusing me, so don’t fret. Although I think any amount of charisma will make no difference (I’m a little cynical about the average senior-citizen voter, as you’ve guessed by now) he may be the kind of person that makes HUGE strides for the person or persons who follow him… And isn’t that worth it?


      One thing all us voters should remember… the one who seems to have the election all “locked up” this early… pretty much never wins…

    6. Stewart on Tue, May 01, 2007

      Unfortunately I think Peter is right.


      To be honest though - I don’t think the ‘younger generation’ is all that less racist. I’m GenX just to give perspective.


      In my experience there is a segment of the under 30 crowd that is more biblical on race matters, but by and large I’ve been disappointed to find that when you scratch past the surface you find a lot that betrays a deep-seated racism still alive and well.


      What’s particularly sad is the ‘white’ folks seem to be the only category of people that don’t see the continuing problem. Most will acknowledge that things are better than they were 20 years ago, but we (both in church and in society) are still a long, long way from ‘neither Jew nor Greek’.


      I will likely vote for Obama. Not because of his faith or race, but because (thus far) he strikes me as reasonably honest and also more often than not advocates policies I can support.

    7. Christopher Fontenot on Sat, May 05, 2007

      Mr. Obama’s “Christianity” is definitely a product of the modern evangelistic message.  How can someone profess Christianity and firmly believe in a woman’s “right” to destroy the child she carries in her womb?  How can someone profess Christianity and believe in the “Big Bang” deception?  He recently admonished the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban on partial birth abortions.  How can the Spirit of God reside in someone who supports the barbaric procedure of piercing the base of a baby’s skull and evacuating its brains until the head collapes?  I know only God can see the heart yet the fruit gives away the tree.


      Remember that the next President will probably appoint 2 Justices in his/her next term so the state of our country’s moral health is at stake.

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