Obama
Obama at the AME
By Mark Silk — July 7, 2008
Now up on YouTube, Obama’s speech to the African Methodist Episcopal Convention in St. Louis Saturday continues the theme of service that he spoke of in his earlier addresses last week. The Fourth of July could not be, he said a “passive celebration,” but had to involve “service, and sacrifice and each of us doing […]
Which sharp edges?
By Mark Silk — July 6, 2008
Yesterday, Obama had the following to say about appealing to white evangelicals (according to Jonathan Weisman’s dispatch in today’s WaPo: “If we show up,” Obama told reporters aboard his campaign plane as he left Montana on Saturday, “if we let folks know that we’re interested in them and we share a lot of common values, […]
Gerson, disarmed
By Mark Silk — July 4, 2008
Michael Gerson, who’s sort of an unreconstructed pre-9/11 compassionate conservative, likes the Obama faith-based plan. He elides the hiring issue with this probably willfully ignorant sentence: “Obama is characteristically opaque on the issue of hiring — seeming to promise that religious parent institutions can select employees based on their beliefs, while denying this right (depending […]
Faith-Based Hiring
By Mark Silk — July 3, 2008
Steve Waldman pooh-poohs the real, on-the-ground significance of the hiring discrimination issue in the new Faith-Based Debate, but in my view he misses the crux of the matter. What the president has always loved about faith-based programming is its promise of transforming lives (and thereby society) by bringing suffering and troubled people to Christ. That’s […]
Ancien Regime
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
The old guard of the religious right hath assembled in Denver, even as the hated Obama was taking in the sights in Colorado Springs, and announced its support of the hitherto loathed John McCain. Have they changed their minds, and discovered hitherto unknown Virtue in the GOP Standard Bearer Presumptive. Not quite. “None of these […]
Up the Flagpole
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
It seems to me that Obama’s Zanesville and Colorado Springs speeches of the past two days have to be read together as constituting the core of his campaign’s general election appeal. It’s the Kennedy Inaugural message updated for a more faith-based, less government-centric age. Yesterday: “The fact is, the challenges we face today – from […]
AP
By Mark Silk — July 2, 2008
Not to beat a dead horse, but what may have happened to misdirect the AP on Obama’s faith-based proposal was that an unnamed senior campaign adviser told reporter Jennifer Loven: “Obama proposes allowing religious institutions to hire and fire based on religion only in the non-taxpayer-funded portions of their activities.” This is a backwards way […]
The Obama Approach
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2008
Here’s the Obama faith-based proposal. On first blush, it looks like a pretty modest thing, mostly directed toward building capacity among grass-roots religious (and secular) organizations: training, partnering, evaluation. The only actual program initiative is a $500 million summer learning program for 1 million children–with the money to come, in the usual campaign promise way, […]
Son of Faith Based
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2008
In response to my little excursus on President Bush’s faith-based initiative, I’ve received an extended comment from Bob Wineburg, a professor at UNC-Greensboro who knows a whole lot more about the subject than I do. I’ve posted his comments after the jump below, and would only make a couple of remarks proleptically in response. First, […]
Dobson 0, Obama 1
By Mark Silk — June 28, 2008
Dobson <a href="lays an egg with former Bush White House apparatchik Peter Wehner. The jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme petition is up to 10,000 and counting. The beginning of a movement? Cf. Sam Freedman pushing from this end.
Obama and the Evangelicals
By Mark Silk — June 27, 2008
Brother Greenfield explains. But there’s starting to be a little evidence that O may be making some actual inroads.
Word!
By Mark Silk — June 26, 2008
Fr. Pfleger sticks by the substance of his remarks from Tinity UCC’s pulpit, as opposed to the manner of delivery. Did Hillary Clinton feel entitled to the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s hard not to think so. Does this express a more general feeling among whites that we’re entitled to be at the front of the […]
Caldwell v. Dobson
By Mark Silk — June 26, 2008
James Dobson seems to have done Obama a big favor by taking after him the way he did. This was not another Wright-centric assault but an attack on the only speech I can recall an American politician giving that at once lays out his own spiritual bona fides and seeks to be precise about how […]
Dobson Ipse Dixit
By Mark Silk — June 24, 2008
OK, you can now listen to James Dobson’s chat with his sidekicks Tim Minnery and Bill Maier about Obama’s views on the proper role of religion in the public square. Here’s the extended direct quote, with elipses to indicate interpolated soundbites from Obama’s 2007 speech to the UCC: He’s trying to make the case that […]
