Is Israel pushing for war now? June 5, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, Government , 1 comment so farIs Israel using the end of the Bush administration to push for war with Iran? Is this a case where two leaders may entangle their nations in a war based on speculation , at a time when Iran has made corrective steps to comply with the IAEA ? Or is it that we want them to thumb their nose at the IAEA to justify an attack on Iran? Somebody needs to remind the President sometimes being a friend means saying no.
The Washington Post is reporting that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is expected to use his White House visit today to push President Bush to take a more aggressive approach toward Iran — and there are some signs that he’ll have a receptive audience.
Both Olmert and Bush are badly wounded . Olmert is facing corruption allegations that could drive him from office. Bush is unpopular, with even the Republican candidate trying to keep him at a distance. It’s in this environment that the Jewish Telegraph Agency reports: “Ehud Olmert will urge President Bush to prepare an attack on Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported.
“Citing sources close to the Vice President Cheney appears to be on the warpath, pushing if not for a preemptive U.S. attack, then for an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities or U.S. airstrikes on suspected training camps for Iraqi insurgents within Iran — either of which would presumably provoke a protracted U.S. military campaign.
According to the conventional wisdom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been holding Cheney at bay. But as Helene Cooper and Isabel Kershner write in the New York Times, Rice “escalated the Bush administration’s anti-Iran rhetoric on Tuesday, accusing its government of pursuing nuclear weapons and calling any dialogue with its leaders pointless until they suspend the country’s enrichment of uranium.
Will Bush cave to the pressure?
Fact or Farm Waste? May 2, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Ethnicity , add a commentAs I have pointed out this week, you can’t always trust a sound bite to be entirely accurate and that there are both similarities and differences in between Rev. Dr. Wright and Manning. I read this article yesterday and will share some excerpts here. For the entire article click here
The Real Reason Why Rev Wright Dissed Obama (excerpted)
‘Newt Gingrich said on ABC’s Good Morning America that Rev.Wright “went out of his way to weaken Obama…I think Reverend Wright has a greater interest in his self-importance”. Indeed Rev Wright is deliberately damaging Barack Obama-but for a more cynical reason than ego preservation’
… Rev. Wright’s real purpose — keeping the pledge payments flowing and collection plates full. Wright’s root agenda,… has been to capitalize on the misfortunes of others, to stoke both race and class resentment, offer a platform and voice pipe for the permanently aggrieved all to fill his own coffers. Rev Wright has amassed the equivalent of a small fortune not by finding solutions but by recycling a permanent state of self-inflicted misery, despair and bitterness. His appeals to the perpetually aggrieved have been rewarded by their willingness to part with their treasure to hear their complaints, some imaginary the remainder of their own making, resonate from the pulpit and center stage at Trinity Church.
As a grievance monger, instead of problem solver, Wright never promises — and would never promise — actual solutions. Why would he? Solutions would dry up the money pipe. Why would the permanently aggrieved willingly part with their treasure to hear that their complaints have been fixed? They wouldn’t. How could the politics of indignation be sustained when one of their own became the president of the United States? It couldn’t.
Rev Jeremiah Wright’s worst nightmare would be Barack Obama as president.
Do you Agree or Disagree with Mr. Hunt’s premise?
“It is customary and appropriate in many Christian denominations, including the United Church of Christ, for local churches to offer housing provisions for retiring clergy, especially in cases where pastors have served long-term pastorates,”
according to the democratic underground:
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Wright’s church (Trinity United Church for Christ) has built ex pastor Jeremiah Wright a mansion worth $1 million dollars in the Tinsley Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
Trinity United Church of Christ is building Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor a million-dollar Tinley Park home complete with an elevator, whirlpool, butler’s pantry, circular driveway and four-car garage, building plans show.
A wikipedia search turned out the following demographics data from Tinsley Park:
As of the 2000 census<4>, there were 48,401 people, 17,478 households, and 12,793 families residing in the village. The population density was 3,236.9 people per square mile (1,250.0/km²). There were 18,037 housing units at an average density of 1,206.2/sq mi (465.8/km²). The racial makeup of the village was 93.16% White, 1.92% African American, 0.13% Native American, 2.38% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 1.11% from other races, and 1.27% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.13% of the population.
Ben Stein interview with R C Sproul April 26, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Theology , add a comment
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4609561480192587449&hl=en |
Hillary’s faith April 26, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, Government , add a commentTwo interesting articles of Hillary and faith:
Andrea Billups at the Washington Times tries to tell us that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is more devout than public perception has allowed, her Methodism carried close to her heart alongside her political interests, even if she is almost reluctant to talk about it.“Just in terms of her Christian commitment, I think she is one of the most authentically and deeply committed Christians I know,” said her former youth pastor, the Rev. Donald Jones, a 77-year-old retired professor of social ethics at Drew University in New Jersey who is her longtime friend.
“You can’t really understand Hillary apart from the centrality of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has affected her life. I think more than any other influence, it’s her Christian faith that has shaped the core of her character.”
Mrs. Clinton, who has downplayed religion for much of her campaign, called her Christian journey a “serious search” as she opened up at a recent Compassion Forum at Pennsylvania’s Messiah College.
“I worry that you have to walk the walk of faith,” she said at the forum, where she offered a glimpse of the role that faith has played in her political life. “Talking about it is important because it’s important to share that experience. But I also believe that, you know, faith is just — it’s grace. It’s love. It’s mystery. It’s provocation. It is everything that makes life and its purpose meaningful as a human being.
“We have created this democracy where we choose our leaders, and we have to be more mindful of how important and serious a business this is,” she said
Exit polls during the presidential primaries show that the New York senator seems to do well with religious Democrats and church attendees, along with white and Hispanic Catholics and Protestants. But in a Pew Forum survey last summer, Mrs. Clinton received a very low rating when pollsters asked likely voters how religious they perceived the candidates to be.
“There were people in the Clinton campaign who were just flabbergasted,” said John C. Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “Somehow, many Americans have developed this image of Mrs. Clinton as largely a very secular politician.”
“I think there is plenty of evidence that she is a woman of strong faith, but a lot of people don’t believe that and see this as opportunism,” said Mr. Green.
Mrs. Clinton has written about her faith in two books and has attended Methodist churches for most of her life. At a Sojourners forum sponsored by CNN in June, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that the power of her faith sustained her during former President Bill Clinton’s infidelity.
“I am very grateful that I had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought,” she said at the forum, also attended by her Democratic rivals John Edwards, who has since dropped out of the race, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. “I am not sure I would have gotten through it without my faith.”
As first lady, Mrs. Clinton joined prayer partners from local churches who visited to pray with her regularly. She and Mr. Clinton regularly attended Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington when they lived at the White House.
As senator, she has attended a bipartisan breakfast prayer group with other members of Congress. In Chappaqua, N.Y., where she and Mr. Clinton moved after his presidency, she is known to occasionally attend the United Methodist Church of Mount Kisco.
Mrs. Clinton also has continued to pair her faith with her politics. In late 2006, when she began to launch her presidential campaign, she hired a faith guru as part of an election strategy geared at attracting evangelical and religious voters. Democrats, said Mr. Green, have recognized that in the 2000 and 2004 elections, they ceded the religious or faith vote to their Republican counterparts. But no more.
“This election cycle is unusual,” Mr. Green said. “The Democratic candidates have been much more vocal about their faith and how it’s connected to their politics. The volume of religious rhetoric is much higher than it was four years ago. Republicans, ironically, are probably talking about it a little less, although we’ve had plenty of discussion of faith and values in the Republican primaries.”
Conservatives have attacked Mrs. Clinton on faith. In July, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas wrote that Mrs. Clinton was “not a person who believes in the central tenets of Christianity.”
Yet, as her detractors have said, she has quietly spoken out when appropriate. In November at a Global AIDS summit at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., — an evangelical megachurch led by “The Purpose Driven Life” author Rick Warren — she received a standing ovation for a speech in which she quoted Scripture about faith and acknowledged the Golden Rule.
“I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of faith of any of the candidates. As a nation, we are becoming more and more thin theologically. But I think that as long as you profess a belief in God, and it appears to be a Judeo-Christian God, I don’t know that people will want to have a discussion beyond that. I don’t know that voters really want to … discern authenticity of faith.”
He added that Mrs. Clinton avoided saying too much about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the firebrand pastor of Mr. Obama and the object of much criticism for numerous racist, anti-American and conspiratorial remarks from the pulpit.
“Hillary invited the press to have a theological discussion when she said that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright ‘would not be my pastor,’ but nobody took her up on it,” Mr. Kuehne added. “Nobody bothered to say: Who is your pastor? And what does that mean, and how does that reflect who you are as a person?”
Mr. Jones said he thinks Mrs. Clinton is largely misunderstood on the issue of religion. He thinks that some in the press have a “thin” understanding “of the meaning of Christian faith.”
Mrs. Clinton, he added, has been a lifelong scholar and that knowledge would significantly inform her presidency.
“I think her Christian understanding of the human condition is an influence,” he said. “When Hillary has talked about her sense of social responsibility, it’s in part her sense of her understanding of her Christian faith and her commitment to improving the world through social action.”
Hillary wearing a Madonna Bracelet?
Exclusive: On day of PA primary, Hillary Clinton wears Madonna Bracelet!
Check out this photo of a celebratory Hillary Clinton taken on the night of the PA primary:
Now let’s have a closer look at that bracelet she’s sporting:
To many Catholics, it’s instantly familiar as a “Madonna bracelet”, such as this one (maybe exactly this one):
So, here it is: on the day of a crucial primary for her campaign, in a state with a large Catholic vote, Hillary Clinton deliberately wears a piece of religious jewelry identifying her with a popular Catholic devotion.
Am I surprised? Not at all. After all, it paid off. She won the “Catholic vote”.
But I thought it should be pointed out nonetheless…. what do you think of her choice?
________________________
Comments?
Ben Stein w/ R.C. Sproul April 22, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Government , add a commentWhere is the outrage? April 15, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Government, Media , 4commentsNotice the press has been quiet as a church mouse protecting one of its own (again) from exposure on this story.
“Bill Maher went on a tirade against Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church, only days before the Pope’s visit to the U.S.. He stated that the Pope “used to be a Nazi” and compared him to a cult leader. He then went on to call the Church a “child-abusing religious cult” and “the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia.” “And that’s the Church’s attitude: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
In fact, whenever a cult leader sets himself up as God’s infallible wingman here on Earth, lock away the kids. Which is why I’d like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. That’s right, the Pope is coming to America this week and ladies, he’s single!”
Pope Benedict didn’t “used to be a Nazi.” In fact, as the New York Times itself reported after the Pope’s election in 2005, Pope Benedict’s father was anti-Nazi, and “Joseph Ratzinger [the Pope’s birth name] huddled with his father and older brother around a radio and listened to Allied radio broadcasts,” an act that if they were caught doing, they would have been sent to a concentration camp.
f you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.’ It’s like, if you can’t pay your mortgage, you’re a deadbeat. But if you can’t pay a million mortgages, you’re BearStearns and we bail you out. And that is who the Catholic Church is: the BearStearns of organized pedophilia – too big, too fat. When the current pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul’s Dick Cheney, he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the Statute of Limitations ran out. And that’s the Church’s attitude: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’ which is fine, far be it from me to criticize religion. But just remember one thing: if the Pope was — instead of a religious figure — merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of day care centers, where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he’d be arrested faster than you can say ‘who wants to touch Mr. Wiggle?’
Maher grossly misrepresented the contents of the 2001 letter then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to the bishops. He did not tell them to “keep the sex abuse of minors of State of Limitations ran out.” The letter clarified that the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had jurisdiction according to the Church’s law (canon law) to try clerics concerning abuses of the sacraments, and also, as the letter put it, a “delict against morals, namely: the delict committed by a cleric against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue [thou shall not commit adultery] with a minor below the age of 18 years.” (Quote excerpted)
I am NOT Catholic and I have a different view of the Pope than Catholics. But I take a look at all the people who have lost jobs this past year making statements about people that were considered tasteless or non-professional and then I see this by Maher and not a peep, not a call for his job? That is unbalanced.
Here is the link until the video is transcoded.
Also see CNS’s article here
bitter April 15, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Government , add a comment
Homeschool Ruling Vacated; Court Will Reconsider April 8, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Government , add a comment|
In doing some promised follow-up, I just went to the Pacific Justice Institute and there was this notice posted. Special Bulletin: Homeschool Ruling Vacated; Court Will Reconsider |
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| Pacific Justice Institute has just received word that the court ruling which declared most forms of homeschooling unlawful in California has been vacated. This means the Rachel L. decision, which has sparked a nationwide uproar, will not go into effect as it is currently written. The Second District Court of Appeal has instead decided to re-hear the case, with a new round of briefings due in late April. It would likely take the court several additional months to schedule oral argument and issue another decision.Today’s announcement by the court that it will re-hear the case reinforces PJI’s position that homeschooling families should continue their current programs without fear of governmental interference. PJI will be actively involved in the upcoming briefs and will continue to post updates and special bulletins on this vital issue.Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, commented, “We are pleased that the Court of Appeal has decided to re-hear the Rachel L. case, and we are hopeful that the fundamental rights of these parents, our clients Sunland Christian School, and the tens of thousands of homeschooling families in California will be honored. Homeschooling parents should be treated as heroes - not hunted down or harassed by their own government.”
Online Petition to Governor Schwarzenegger http://www.petitionstoday.org/ ______________________
_________________________ I posted the vacated appeal here In re RACHEL L. et al., Persons Coming Under the Juvenile Court Law. JONATHAN L. et al, Petitioners, v. THE SUPERIOR COURT OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY, Respondent; LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES, Real Party in Interest. B192878 COURT OF APPEAL OF CALIFORNIA, SECOND APPELLATE DISTRICT, DIVISION THREE 160 Cal. App. 4th 624; 2008 Cal. App. LEXIS 292 |
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No right to educate your own child? April 7, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Government , add a commentI should not be stunned, yet I am. I should not be shocked, but I am. The article below by John Stossel is quoted in full . Hopefully the case will be on Lexis shortly.
I will reiterate what I said to some homeschoolers earlier–If there is ever a case for civil disobedience that could be effectively applied, this is it. If 166,000 cases demanded a jury trial on their case in California, it would overload the system. Use the math to your advantage. If you do not fight for your rights you will lose them.
By JOHN STOSSEL
“THE CAT is finally out of the bag. A California appellate court, ruling that parents have no constitutional right to homeschool their children, pinned its decision on this ominous quotation from a 47-year-old case, “A primary purpose of the educational system is to train schoolchildren in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”
There you have it; a primary purpose of government schools is to train schoolchildren “in loyalty to the state.” Somehow that protects “the public welfare” more than allowing parents to homeschool their children, even though homeschooled kids routinely outperform government-schooled kids academically. In 2006, homeschooled students had an average ACT composite score of 22.4. The national average was 21.1
Justice H. Walter Croskey said, “California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children.” If that is the law in California, then Charles Dickens’s Mr. Bumble is right: “the law is a ass, a idiot.”
The California Constitution says, “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement.”
That doesn’t appear to rule out homeschooling, unless you read it as a grant of absolute power to politicians.
Admittedly, the education code is vague. It requires children to attend public school or a private school (where certified teachers are not required). But they can also be taught by state-credentialed tutors. Homeschooling is not directly addressed. There’s disagreement over what that means. The court and the teachers’ union claim homeschooling is illegal unless the teaching parent has state credentials.
Homeschooling parents, many of whom have declared their homes private schools, say what they do is legal. Up till now that’s been fine with the California Department of Education. And California reportedly has 166,000 homeschoolers.
Nationwide, the National Center for Education Statistics says that in 2003 (the latest year for which it has a number), almost 1.1 million children were being homeschooled. The numbers keep increasing, so clearly homeschooling parents think their kids get something better at home than they would from public schools.
The Los Angeles Times isn’t sure where the state law stands. “If no such right (to homeschool) exists, as a court ruled, the Legislature should make it an option,” the newspaper’s editorial board said. The editorial wondered why parents who teach one or two children at home need credentials, while private-school teachers in classes full of kids don’t.
The danger in having the legislature clarify the law is that the legislature is controlled by politicians sympathetic to the teachers’ union, which despises homeschooling. “(H)ome-schoolers fear that any attempt to protect home-schooling would end up outlawing it,” writes Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut.
It reminds me of what New York Judge Gideon Tucker said in the 19th Century, “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
This particular case is muddied by suspicions of child abuse, but as the Times said, the court improperly “used a single example of possible child abuse to throw the book at tens of thousands of home schoolers.”
I think the state court is looking at the state Constitution upside down. The court finds no constitutional right to homeschool one’s children. But in a free country, people are free to do anything not expressly prohibited by law. If the Constitution is silent about homeschooling, then the right is reserved to the people. That’s how the Framers of the U.S. Constitution said things are supposed to work.
Last week, the appellate court surprised everyone by agreeing to rehear the case.
On top of that, state Schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell says he thinks homeschooling is legal and favors choice in education.
That’s reasonable news. But why is education the business of government?
It’s taken for granted that the state is every child’s ultimate parent, but there’s no justification for that in a free society. Parents may not be perfect — some are pretty bad — but a cold, faceless bureaucracy is no better.
Let’s hope the court gets it right in June.”
John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News’ “20/20″ and the author of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.”
Once a mistake, twice a rank idiot March 21, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Church/State, culture, Ethnicity, Government, Media , add a commentDr. Jeremiah Wright told us a year ago who shaped his worldview and his theology. If any of the “news people” had bothered to simply check out who Dr. Wright named there would be no ‘real shock’ at the rhetoric of Dr. Wright. Mind you, “no shock” does not equal agreement with a statement, rather it means you understand a state of an existence of a theology being taught in our seminaries and in some churches.
Lets do for ourselves what the paid MSM failed to do. James H. Cone, is a Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary. First, Union Theological is not some backwater , obscure institution, but rather has been in existence since 1836. But many are not quite aware of the fact they proudly state:
“Our ecumenical, interfaith commitment grows and strengthens through programs of exchange with churches and seminaries throughout the world. Informed by the insights of liberation theologians, the Seminary embraces and addresses the richness and realities of religious pluralism. “
If people grasped religious pluralism then Wrights rhetoric would be no surprise.James Cone has been featured in PBS’s This Far by Faith Series
A CRISIS IN FAITH
It was the voice of Malcolm X that first made James Cone question his theology. Malcolm X proclaimed loudly that “Christianity is a white man’s religion,” and said that blacks should adopt an understanding of God that grew out of their own history and experience. He railed against a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus and a belief in the delayed rewards of heaven.
Still, Cone, then on the faculty of Adrian College in Michigan, continued to believe in the nonviolent, Christian love of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It was the northern riots and Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power!” during the Meredith March in Mississippi that led him to a crisis in faith.
CHRISTIANITY AND BLACK POWER: REINTERPRETING HIS FAITH
“For me, the burning theological question was, how can I reconcile Christianity and Black Power, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea of nonviolence, and Malcolm X’s ‘by any means necessary philosophy?’” (Preface to Black Theology and Black Power, p. viii.)
Christianity, as he understood it, no longer explained or held meaning in the turbulent years of the late 1960s. “I was within inches of leaving the Christian faith.” If he were to remain a Christian, Cone would have to reinterpret his faith to respond to such demanding times.
Not exactly what most of us would find to be common in church on Sunday Morning, but how can the informed Christian be ignorant of the existence of this? Corruption of the seminary has ahistorically been the beginning of the theological shifts in denominations to a more liberal stance.
It would be good to note, both Dr. Wright and James Cone comes from the generation prior to the American Civil Rights Movement and their experiences shaped a worldview of resentment towards the treatment blacks had received in that area. That their rhetoric reflects that should no more surprise us then the rhetoric of the colonial pastors inspired the American Revolution.
Dr. Wright also mentions , Dr. Dwight N. Hopkins, whose works include: Being Human: Race, Culture, and Religion; Walk Together Children: black and womanist theologies, church and theological education; Another World Is Possible: Spiritualities and Religions of Global Darker Peoples; Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic (coeditor); Heart and Head: Black Theology-Past, Present, and Future; Introducing Black Theology of Liberation; Down, Up and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology; and Black Faith and Public Talk: Essays in Honor of James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power (editor). His previous texts include Black Theology USA and South Africa: Politics, Culture, and Liberation; Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology; and We Are One Voice: Essays on Black Theology in South Africa and the USA (coeditor). He is an editor of Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases; Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and Cultural Analysis; and Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas.
Dr. Hopkins is a Professor of Theology in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. This school is well known and respected for it’s scholarship in the study of religion and religious tradition.
Chicago reflects only one orthodoxy: that the rules of evidence and argument must discipline conversation, and that such rules are especially important when the topic is religion. Our faculty and students present a remarkable range of attitudes about religion as a force for good and for ill in the world. These attitudes bespeak the shared view that religion is one of our most fascinating and enduring windows into central truths about human life and being. The School aims to develop out of that conviction the richest possible conversation, and direct it to the central, complementary ends of scholarly excellence and moral engagement.
Dr. Hopkins is more of an academic than James Cone, but whose worldview is certainly shaped by the James Cones and the Jeremiah Wrights he grew up under. Dr. Hopkins , an American Baptist minister believes,
The descendants of American slaves are due reparations. Their foremothers suffered oppression because of the slaveholding structure of American society, and they suffered injustice at the hands of individual Americans, both those who owned them and those who acted like they owned them. White Americans forced these women to work as house and field laborers, and white American men treated these women as objects, not humans, when they raped them. The ancestors of today’s Americans even suffered the additional outrage of rape as a form of profit maximization: If an enslaved woman gave birth, her child would increase her owner’s wealth and provide him with yet more free labor. The psychological damage that these women and their families suffered is incalculable. Yet enslaved American black women did not retreat into passivity. They forged a theological understanding of their relationship with a God who would one day pass judgment on the slaveholders and compensate the enslaved-In Heaven and on Earth. What we need now is a discussion of how we can best compensate the descendants of these women and thus strengthen our society today.
None of this is secretive information, but rather readily available in a google search, yet people are “shocked”. Some will even say, well that is racist and I won’t even acknowledge racism . That is like not talking about sex, 
STD’s , drugs or alcohol with our children will make it go away. It has the same effect, you leave people unprepared. And “shoocked” it even exists, instead of armed and prepared.
In all probablity this type of theology and the black experience had more effect on shaping Michelle’s worldview than it did Barack’s. This is reflected in her Princeton thesis which you can read here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Barack on the other hand was raised in a mixed cultural environment that was not walled in by the black experience (which why many claim he is not black enough). He was taught Islam, but from a political more than a religious standpoint in his home in Indonesia as a child. But Barack has more of a antropological view and reaction to society than his wife Michelle does.
I am much less concerned about Dr. Wright’s view than most, it is what it is. I tend to believe the social political aspect of Trinity UC church is part of the political reality of a Chicago politician more than a true indicator of Barack Obama’s belief system. I believe even though Dr. Wright had a lot of influence on Barack and is loved and respected by Barack as a fatherly type figure, he is intelligent enough to hold Wright’s radical (to us) views in tension and keep them in perspective.
Why? Because of his mother. HIs mother and his grandmother and his wife are powerful influences in his life. But not so much that he married a white woman. He married a true black woman-nobody will ever question if Michelle is black enough. Barack loves and respects her and she runs the house.Never underestimate the influence of a wife who b-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator.
”I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a fundraiser in February 2007.
“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.” Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.
Michelle Obama speaks with great warmth of her mother-in-law . “She was kind of a dreamer, his mother,” Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. “She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don’t pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don’t in this country.” How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair in pursuit of a political agenda.
I think time has come to put this whole Trinity church affair in perspective and realize it is what it is. However, lets learn the lesson from it. Let’s not wake up a year from now and realize someone told us something and we missed it.Words have meanings and do not trust the Sean Hannity’s and the Fox’s and the CNN’s to do their research, do your own.
I would be much more concerned about the effect Michelles worldview has on Obama than Jeremiah’s.