Faith & Values

It's not enough that Barack Obama is having trouble with conservative Christians who either think he is not really Christian at all or that if he is, he is one of those liberal sort of Christians. Now he's also in hot water with America's Muslims. So much of this nation's anxiety over matters religious seems to be swirling around Obama this season. On the Internet, there continues to be the chatter that Obama is secretly a Muslim, that he never really embraced Christianity. More publicly, James Dobson, the very conservative doctor who founded Focus on the Family, has ripped into Obama's understanding of the Bible. All this, of course, on top of Obama's well-publicized difficulties with the words of his long-time (and now former) pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But in its effort to portray Obama as a good Christian, not a closet Muslim, his campaign has... READ MORE

As June was just beginning, in those days just before the rain fell and the rivers rose and the levees broke and the floods poured through the Midwest, one of the scripture readings in many churches was the familiar story of Noah and the ark, the story of God destroying most of creation and starting over again. It's a story that gets used as a reference point for those who want to interpret every natural disaster as a form of God's punishment on humanity. You heard it from preachers like Rev. John Hagee of Texas after Hurricane Katrina, who linked the destruction of New Orleans to plans for a gay pride parade. You heard it from Muslims after the tsunami of 2004 overwhelmed the Indian Ocean coastlines saying that immoral living had brought on this catastrophe. There's another view of that Noah story. It's a view that attributes it to the way the early Jewish... READ MORE

Now that the new ties have been folded and put away, the cards are taped to the wall for the next few weeks and the last "Happy Father's Day" has been spoken, we are left with a couple of extraordinarily important images from Father's Day 2008. Interestingly enough, they come from two fathers whose public lives were remarkably intertwined over the past year. It was NBC's Tim Russert who first publicly elicited from Democrat Barack Obama that the first-term senator might be planning to run for president in 2008. But Russert made his mark on this culture in more than just politics and media. His book about his own father, Big Russ and Me: Father and Son: Lessons of... READ MORE