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Books by
Barack
Obama
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
/
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream
Obama's Greatest Speeches (CD set) /
Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters
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A Caring and Just
Society
Remarks by
President Barack Obama
National Prayer Breakfast
Washington Hilton, Washington, D.C.
3 February 2011
Thank you so much.
To the co-chairs, Jeff and Ann; to all the members of
Congress who are here, the distinguished guests who’ve
traveled so far to be here this morning; to Randall for
your wonderful stories and powerful prayer; to all who
are here providing testimony, thank you so much for
having me and Michelle here. We are blessed to be here.
I want to begin by just saying a word to
Mark Kelly,
who’s here. We have been praying for Mark’s wife,
Gabby Giffords, for many days now. But I want Gabby and Mark
and their entire family to know that we are with them
for the long haul, and God is with them for the long
haul.
And even as we pray for Gabby in the aftermath of a
tragedy here at home, we're also mindful of the violence
that we're now seeing in the
Middle East, and we pray
that the violence in Egypt will end and that the rights
and aspirations of the Egyptian people will be realized
and that a better day will dawn over Egypt and
throughout the world.
For almost sixty years, going back to
President
Eisenhower, this gathering has been attended by our
President. It’s a tradition that I'm proud to uphold
not only as a fellow believer but as an elected leader
whose entry into public service was actually through the
church. This may come as a surprise, for as some of you
know, I did not come from a particularly religious
family. My
father, who I barely knew—I only met once
for a month in my entire life—was said to be a
non-believer throughout his life.
My mother, whose parents were
Baptist and
Methodist,
grew up with a certain skepticism about organized
religion, and she usually only took me to church on
Easter and Christmas—sometimes. And yet my mother was
also one of the most spiritual people that I ever knew.
She was somebody who was instinctively guided by the
Golden Rule and who nagged me constantly about the
homespun values of her Kansas upbringing, values like
honesty and hard work and kindness and fair play.
And it’s because of her that I came to understand the
equal worth of all men and all women, and the
imperatives of an ethical life and the necessity to act
on your beliefs. And it’s because of her example and
guidance that despite the absence of a formal religious
upbringing my earliest inspirations for a life of
service ended up being the faith leaders of the civil
rights movement.
There was, of course,
Martin Luther King and the
Baptist
leaders, the ways in which they helped those who had
been subjugated to make a way out of no way, and
transform a nation through the force of love. But there
were also Catholic leaders like Father
Theodore Heshburg,
and Jewish leaders like Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Muslim leaders and Hindu leaders. Their call to fix
what was broken in our world, a call rooted in faith, is
what led me just a few years out of college to sign up
as a community organizer for a group of churches on the
Southside of Chicago. And it was through that
experience working with pastors and laypeople trying to
heal the wounds of hurting neighborhoods that I came to
know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace Him as my lord
and savior.
Now, that was over twenty years ago. And like all of us, my
faith journey has had its twists and turns. It hasn’t
always been a straight line. I have thanked God for the
joys of parenthood and Michelle’s willingness to put up
with me. In the wake of failures and disappointments
I've questioned what God had in store for me and been
reminded that God’s plans for us may not always match
our own short-sighted desires.
And let me tell you, these past two years, they have
deepened my faith. The presidency has a funny way of
making a person feel the need to pray.
Abe Lincoln
said, as many of you know, “I have been driven to my
knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I
had no place else to go.”
Fortunately, I'm not alone in my prayers. Pastor
friends like
Joel Hunter and
T.D. Jakes come over to the
Oval Office every once in a while to pray with me and
pray for the nation. The chapel at Camp David has
provided consistent respite and fellowship. The
director of our Faith-based and Neighborhood
Partnership’s office,
Joshua DuBois—young minister
himself—he starts my morning off with meditations from
Scripture.
Most of all, I've got friends around the country—some
who I know, some who I don’t know, but I know their
friends who are out there praying for me. One of them
is an old friend named Kaye Wilson. In our family we
call her Momma Kaye. And she happens to be Malia and
Sasha’s godmother. And she has organized prayer circles
for me all around the country. She started small with
her own Bible study group, but once I started running
for President and she heard what they were saying about
me on cable, she felt the need to pray harder. By the
time I was elected President, she says, “I just couldn’t
keep up on my own. . . . I was having to pray eight, nine
times a day just for you.” So she enlisted help from
around the country.
It’s also comforting to know that people are praying for
you who don’t always agree with you. Tom Coburn, for
example, is here. He is not only a dear friend but also
a brother in Christ. We came into the Senate at the same
time. Even though we are on opposite sides of a whole
bunch of issues, part of what has bound us together is a
shared faith, a recognition that we pray to and serve
the same God. And I keep praying that God will show him
the light and he will vote with me once in a while. It’s
going to happen, Tom. A ray of light is going to beam
down.
My Christian faith then has been a sustaining force for
me over these last few years. All the more so, when
Michelle and I hear our faith questioned from time to
time, we are reminded that ultimately what matters is
not what other people say about us but whether we're
being true to our conscience and true to our God. “Seek
first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these
things will be given to you as well.”
As I travel across the country folks often ask me what
is it that I pray for. And like most of you, my prayers
sometimes are general: Lord, give me the strength to
meet the challenges of my office. Sometimes they’re
specific: Lord, give me patience as I watch Malia go to
her first dance—where there will be boys. Lord, have
that skirt get longer as she travels to that dance.
But while I petition God for a whole range of things,
there are a few common themes that do recur. The first
category of prayer comes out of the urgency of the
Old
Testament prophets and
the Gospel itself. I pray for my
ability to help those who are struggling. Christian
tradition teaches that one day the world will be turned
right side up and everything will return as it should
be. But until that day, we're called to work on behalf
of a God that chose justice and mercy and compassion to
the most vulnerable.
We've seen a lot of hardship these past two years. Not
a day passes when I don't get a letter from somebody or
meet someone who’s out of work or lost their home or
without health care. The story Randall told about his
father—that's a story that a whole lot of Americans have
gone through over these past couple of years.
Sometimes I can't help right away. Sometimes what I can
do to try to improve the economy or to curb foreclosures
or to help deal with the health care system—sometimes it
seems so distant and so remote, so profoundly inadequate
to the enormity of the need. And it is my faith, then,
that biblical injunction to
serve the least of these,
that keeps me going and that keeps me from being
overwhelmed. It’s faith that reminds me that despite
being just one very imperfect man, I can still help
whoever I can, however I can, wherever I can, for as
long as I can, and that somehow God will buttress these
efforts.
It also helps to know that none of us are alone in
answering this call. It’s being taken up each and every
day by so many of you—back home, your churches, your
temples and synagogues, your fellow congregants—so many
faith groups across this great country of ours.
I came upon a group recently called “charity: water,” a
group that supports clean water projects overseas. This
is a project that was started by a former nightclub
promoter named Scott Harrison who grew weary of living
only for himself and feeling like he wasn’t following
Christ as well as he should.
And because of
Scott’s good work, “charity: water” has helped 1.7
million people get access to clean water. And in the
next ten years, he plans to make clean water accessible
to a hundred million more. That’s the kind of promoting
we need more of, and that’s the kind of faith that moves
mountains. And there’s stories like that scattered
across this room of people who’ve taken it upon
themselves to make a difference.
Now, sometimes faith groups can do the work of caring
for the least of these on their own; sometimes they need
a partner, whether it’s in business or government. And
that’s why my administration has taken a fresh look at
the way we organize with faith groups, the way we work
with faith groups through our
Office of Faith-based and
Neighborhood Partnerships.
And through that office, we’re expanding the way faith
groups can partner with our government. We’re helping
them feed more kids who otherwise would go hungry.
We’re helping fatherhood groups get dads the support
they need to be there for their children. We’re working
with non-profits to improve the lives of people around
the world. And we’re doing it in ways that are aligned
with our
constitutional principles. And in this work,
we intend to expand it in the days ahead, rooted in the
notions of partnership and justice and the
imperatives
to help the poor.
Of course there are some needs that require more
resources than faith groups have at their disposal.
There’s only so much a church can do to help all the
families in need—all those who need help making a
mortgage payment, or avoiding foreclosure, or making
sure their child can go to college. There’s only so
much that a nonprofit can do to help a community rebuild
in the wake of disaster. There’s only so much the
private sector will do to help folks who are desperately
sick get the care that they need.
And that's why I
continue to believe that in a caring and in a just
society, government must have a role to play; that our
values, our love, and our charity must find expression
not just in our families, not just in our places of work
and our places of worship, but also in our government
and in our politics.
Over the past two years, the nature of these
obligations, the proper role of government has obviously
been the subject of enormous controversy. And the
debates have been fierce as one side’s version of
compassion and community may be interpreted by the other
side as an oppressive and irresponsible expansion of the
state or an unacceptable restriction on individual
freedom.
That's why a second recurring theme in my prayers is a
prayer for humility. Now, God answered this prayer for
me early on by having me marry Michelle. Because
whether it’s reminding me of a chore undone, or
questioning the wisdom of watching my third football
game in a row on Sunday, she keeps me humble.
But in this life of politics when debates have become so
bitterly polarized, and changes in the media lead so
many of us just to listen to those who reinforce our
existing biases, it’s useful to go back to Scripture to
remind ourselves that none of has all the answers—none
of us, no matter what our political party or our station
in life.
The full breadth of human knowledge is like a grain of
sand in God’s hands. And there are some mysteries in
this world we cannot fully comprehend. As it’s written
in Job, “God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways. He
does great things beyond our understanding.”
The challenge I find then is to balance this
uncertainty, this humility, with the need to fight for
deeply held convictions, to be open to other points of
view but firm in our core principles. And I pray for
this wisdom every day.
I pray that God will show me and all of us the limits of
our understanding, and open our ears and our hearts to
our brothers and sisters with different points of view;
that such reminders of our shared hopes and our shared
dreams and our shared limitations as children of God
will reveal the way forward that we can travel together.
And the last recurring theme, one that binds all prayers
together, is that I might
walk closer with God and make
that walk my first and most important task.
In our own lives it’s easy to be consumed by our daily
worries and our daily concerns. And it is even easier
at a time when everybody is busy, everybody is stressed,
and everybody—our culture is obsessed with wealth and
power and celebrity. And often it takes a brush with
hardship or tragedy to shake us out of that, to remind
us of what matters most.
We see an aging parent wither under a long illness, or
we lose a daughter or a husband in Afghanistan, we watch
a gunman open fire in a supermarket—and we remember how
fleeting life can be. And we ask ourselves how have we
treated others, whether we’ve told our family and
friends how much we love them. And it’s in these
moments, when we feel most intensely our mortality and
our own flaws and the sins of the world, that we most
desperately seek to touch the face of God.
So my prayer this morning is that
we might seek His face
not only in those moments, but each and every day; that
every day as we go through the hustle and bustle of our
lives, whether it’s in Washington or Hollywood or
anywhere in between, that we might every so often rise
above the here and now, and kneel before the Eternal;
that we might remember, Kaye, the fact that those who
wait on the Lord will
soar on wings like eagles, and
they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and
not faint.
When I wake in the morning, I wait on the Lord, and I
ask Him to give me the strength to do right by our
country and its people. And when I go to bed at night I
wait on the Lord, and I ask Him to forgive me my sins,
and look after my family and the American people, and
make me an instrument of His will.
I say these prayers hoping they will be answered, and I
say these prayers knowing that I must work and must
sacrifice and must serve to see them answered. But I
also say these prayers knowing that the act of prayer
itself is a source of strength. It’s a reminder that
our time on Earth is not just about us; that when we
open ourselves to the possibility that God might have a
larger purpose for our lives, there’s a chance that
somehow, in ways that we may never fully know,
God will
use us well.
May the Lord bless you and keep you, and may He bless
this country that we love.
Source:
WhiteHouse
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President Obama speaks at National Prayer Breakfast
2009
Obama
Speaks at National Prayer Breakfast 2010 /
Obama Speaksat National Prayer Breakfast 2011
A Theology of
Obligation & Liberation
By Rudolph Lewis
God of the Oppressed
By James H. Cone
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Slavery and Its Legacies at Emory University: Reflections on History and
Accountability
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A Tale of Two Moralities
One side of American
politics considers the modern welfare state—a
private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s
winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net—morally
superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had
before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side
believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The
other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and
that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to
theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent
rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation
as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.— NYTimes
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The Race between Education and Technology
by Claudia Goldin and
Lawrence F. Katz
During the 20th century
both technology and education raced forward in the US,
generating massive economic expansion and rising standards
of living. Throughout the century, technological changes
increased the relative demand for skilled labor, while the
rapid expansion of first high schools and then higher
education simultaneously increased the relative supply of
skilled labor. Goldin and Katz carefully examine the
historical and economic forces behind this expansion in
education, extracting crucial evidence from the remarkable
Iowa State Census of 1915, and they argue very plausibly
that the relative demand for skilled labor grew at a fairly
constant rate over the century. They conclude that
"education ran faster" than technology "during the first
half of the century," causing a considerable drop in
economic inequality, but that "technology sprinted ahead of
limping education in the last 30 years," leading to the
recent upsurge in inequality. The rate of return on
educational investments has become, once again, very high.
Why have education levels increased so sluggishly in the
face of these massive rewards? The answers are not entirely
clear, nor are the optimal public policies, but the authors
offer much food for thought. A must read.—R.
M. Whaples (Choice ) |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 4 February 2011
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