Barack Obama – Lisa Miller

With health-care battle not yet over, Obama must reach out to religious leaders

At the funeral of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in August 2009, Boston’s Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley pulled President Obama aside for a quiet word. It was a sign of things to come: the first failure of the president to understand the moral dimensions of his health-care proposal. The bill that has become known by its opponents as “Obamacare” […]

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Catholics caught between bishops, Obama’s birth control mandate

On Faith, Washington Post

Mommy and daddy are fighting, and the anguished children don’t know where to turn. This is the state of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States today. A small group of very conservative bishops has hijacked the church, or at least the public voice of the church. The bishops are playing the role of

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Obama and Romney offer differing views of God

On Faith, Washington Post

People always ask, “What would Jesus do?,” but in America today, it’s impossible to know. And that’s because there are (at least) two prevailing views of God at work in our public and political conversation. It would not be an exaggeration to say that when you pull the lever this November, you will not just

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“I Want to Be Like Jesus.”

New York Magazine

Cornel West is a self-proclaimed prophet who believes in the virtues of love and justice. But in his own life, he can’t seem to find either. In November 2007, Cornel West got onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and before a hollering crowd of more than a thousand people, with much arm-waving and wrist-flapping, along with

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Obama’s embrace of gay marriage makes for a spiritual Mother’s Day

On Faith, Washington Post

When President Obama threw his support behind same-sex marriage, he did something much more than please the members of the LGBT community and the people who love them. He gave hope and encouragement to millions of Americans struggling to do right by their children in unconventional or nontraditional families by implicitly asserting “as a practicing Christian”

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The religion and politics of division

On Faith, Washington Post

Last week, the Christianity police, in the persons of Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham, came forward to discredit the president’s religious beliefs. First, Santorum called President Obama’s theology “phony”; then, on “Morning Joe,” Graham refused to accept Obama into his Christian band of brothers: “He has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he

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How Obama should fight the ‘war on religion’

On Faith, Washington Post

A very wise Trappist monk once told me that unless everyone gets to heaven, no one will. It’s this sense of mutual responsibility — fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition — that President Obama needs to emphasize now. It seems far-fetched, from my perspective, to think that God should have any opinion at all about contraceptive

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Believers wonder: Where is the old Obama?

On Faith, Washington Post

“We worship an awesome God in the blue states!” That was Barack Obama in 2004, not yet a U.S. senator, at the Democratic National Convention. And for the next four years, he did something extraordinary. He convincingly articulated a set of American values for the center-left. “Values” were not something God gave to Republicans

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Detailed stained glass depiction of the crucifixion featuring Christ and religious icons.

Christians on both sides of budget battle claim to fight for the poor

On Faith, Washington Post

After this week’s debt-ceiling deal in Congress, trillions of dollars of spending cuts are on the table. New cuts will sink deep, laying bare the nation’s moral priorities. The tough choices will be left to a new Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. But let’s imagine for a minute that the Christian Lord could pore over the

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One Nation Under God

Newsweek

Powerful new rhetoric on the religious right pits Obama and big government against ‘God’s America’—and promises to galvanize Christians in 2012. On Nov. 30, about a dozen moderate Christian leaders gathered for a meeting in Washington, D.C. Their colleagues on the religious right had been delivering a potent new message about God and country, of fear and

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