Opinion
What would the founders do?
By Mark Silk — January 17, 2009
Steve Waldman has a good overview of the declining inclusivity of inaugural prayers over the past half-century. I find his overall argument persuasive and would only take slight exception to his claim that the country’s founders would have disagreed on the desirability of having prayers at the inauguration at all. Steve bases his claim on […]
Many, many mansions
By Mark Silk — January 16, 2009
Yep, Archbish Wuerl will be on hand at the National Prayer Service, delivering a prayer for the nation as antepenultimate batter up. Jim Wallis will get to help “symbolize America’s traditions of religious tolerance and freedom.” As will Uma Mysorekar of the Hindu Temple Society of North America. Uh-oh, not a Buddhist in the house. […]
Why FDR Did it
By Mark Silk — January 16, 2009
It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, at his second inaugural on January 20, 1937, began the practice of having prayers at the inauguration ceremony. Prior to that, the only manifestation of religion in the ceremony was the habitual use of a Bible for the swearing in—accompanied by the traditional (but not constitutionally mandated) phrase, “so […]
Hope Dreams
By Mark Silk — January 16, 2009
It’s hard not to see Flight 1459 as a metaphysical bookend to 9/11, signaling the setting of the Age of Bush and the dawning of an Age of Obama. There, airliners were crashed into Manhattan buildings by Forces of Evil, while the massively ill-prepared and disastrous response of rescuers was occluded by bravado and pseudo-heroism […]
COFANP?
By Mark Silk — January 16, 2009
Still waiting to see who will be named to head the new President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Has this dropped off the table?
Why We Can’t Just Get Along
By Mark Silk — January 16, 2009
It’s been so hard to get past the culture wars because 1) they involve real differences of belief and principle; and 2) a lot of our politics has come to be structured around them. It is a bit churlish–OK, I’m a bit of a churl–to diss those who, with the best of intentions, are trying […]
COMMENTARY: Father Abraham
By Tracy Gordon — January 15, 2009
(UNDATED) Two hundred years after his birth on Feb. 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln remains our most admired president. Yet, before his election in 1860 to the White House, Lincoln had served only two years as a Congressman from Illinois, and in 1858, he was defeated in his bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. […]
Culture Wars Over!
By Mark Silk — January 15, 2009
Not. But according to the big story of the day in our little neck of the woods, that’s the goal of Third Way‘s exercise in brokering a “Come Let Us Reason Together” agreement on a few issues between some of the usual middle-of-the-road evangelicals and some of the usual bien-pensant progressive evangelicals. With the imprimatur […]
Prayers for the President
By Mark Silk — January 15, 2009
Unaware of the awesome magnitude (to say nothing of the wonder-working power) of religion in inaugural festivities these days, some of us chatterers have misunderestimated the extent of Barack Obama’s commitment to religious pluralism in organizing the members of the praying class for his ascension to the presidency. Yeah, there are the two Protestants at […]
COMMENTARY: Congratulations, Mr. President
By Phyllis Zagano — January 14, 2009
(UNDATED) To help document Barack Obama’s inauguration, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress wants religious congregations to send sermons about the nation’s first black president. The “Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project” wants audio and video recordings of talks delivered between Jan. 16 and Jan. 25 so they can be preserved for […]
Moderation in defense of Republicanism
By Mark Silk — January 14, 2009
Ambinder notes a possible moderating trend taking place among Republicans in the hinterland. You might add to that the selection of social moderate Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) as second-in-command at the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. The key indicator will be who wins the race for chairman of the Republican National Committee, but it looks like […]
Asymmetries
By Mark Silk — January 14, 2009
In today’s column, Tom Friedman offers his thoughts on how Israel should proceed in its latest asymmetrical war against a foe with less military might but an ability to inflict harm at once physical, psychological, and in the court of world opinion. On the same op-ed page, Jeffrey Goldberg writes about a different type of […]
COMMENTARY: Shifting course
By Tom Ehrich — January 13, 2009
(UNDATED) Twenty-five years ago, I met my first “survivalist.” He wasn’t a glowering extremist from back-country Idaho. He was a suburban homeowner and technologist who realized that he needed to be more self-sufficient. A bad recession was in full swing. An intricate global economy based on Arab oil looked like a house of cards. So […]
FDR and the Money Changers
By Mark Silk — January 13, 2009
Here are some of the “words that burned and scourged” (as the NYT’s Arthur Krock put it) that Franklin Delano Roosevelt employed in his first inaugural address 76 years ago: And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers […]
Israeli Take-away from Clinton Hearing
By Mark Silk — January 13, 2009
“You cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements”–or as Yediot headlines it: Clinton says ‘no’ to Hamas talks Hillary Clinton says US won’t talk to Hamas before it recognizes Israel’s right to exist Sounds more Bushian than Obamaite to me.
