Tag Archives: National Prayer Breakfast

February 3, 2012, 1:10 am

Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

Remember that young phenom who rocked the 2004 Democratic National Convention with the refrain “we worship an awesome God in the blue states!”? Well, in style, at least, he was nowhere to be found at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast. Indeed, listening to President Obama deliver his remarks I was struck by the dirge-like joylessness of his oration.

In substance, however, his speech quietly drove home many of the core-beliefs of the ever-mobilizing, ever-regrouping, ever-coming-in-second-place American Religious Left. Listening carefully to Obama’s sedate address, one could detect a rather tenacious, albeit sometimes disheveled, defense of the principles that Progressives of Faith live by:

We are not separationist secularists: The president has been distancing himself from separationist secularism since as far back as The Audacity of Hope. And he did so again…

April 20, 2011, 6:43 pm

Obama’s Easter Christology: What Rankles, What Works

By Jacques Berlinerblau

This past Tuesday morning President Obama delivered a short address at the Easter Prayer Breakfast.

In attendance were various Christian leaders such as Bishop T.D. Jakes, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Archbishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, among others.

Obama’s speech will be of interest to those who study religion and politics in America for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the way it demonstrates (yet again) how far we have fallen from a lofty mid-century standard in which presidents made restrained, muted, and infrequent reference to God.

No such restraint was on display yesterday. For the president not only made reference to God, but offered us a veritable Christology to boot. Could George W. Bush—whose favorite philosopher, as you will recall, was Christ—have topped this?:

During this…

February 24, 2011, 4:10 pm

When a Christian Conservative Calls You a Bigot. . . .

By Jacques Berlinerblau

Christian Rock Hard
Tags: SOUTH
PARK more…

You should:

a) Ignore the slight

b) Call your lawyer

c) Respond in kind

I think the appropriate answer here is “c.” For the past few days I have been receiving Google alerts about a screed written by former Time Magazine reporter turned Patrick Henry College Professor, David Aikman.

The piece keeps popping up in Christian and Conservative and Christian Conservative Web sites and I keep getting astonished at Dr. Aikman’s disquisition on my “bigotry.” The cycle completes itself when I receive rather unamiable e-mail correspondences from readers of these sites. And then it starts afresh. . . . . .

The offending article in which I expose my alleged anti-Christian grotesqueries was published first here on Brainstorm and then cross-posted on the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” page. My piece was a critique of President…

February 4, 2011, 12:07 am

Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

By Jacques Berlinerblau

President Obama spoke on Thursday morning at the 59th annual National Prayer Breakfast. The gathering is one of those peculiar Washington pageants that elicits diametrically opposed reactions from those who bother to take note of its existence.

Those hostile to the NPB view it as a raging Christ-fest. Those in support of it view it as good, clean, absolutely necessary, public worship of God.

I, as you may have surmised, could do without the NPB. But part of being what I might call a “New Secularist” consists of dealing with reality as it is, not reality as it might have been 50 years ago.

Well, when the President of the United States of America (a Democrat) delivers a 22-minute address about his personal faith, drops half a dozen Scripture bombs along the way, and declaims “I came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace Him as my lord and savior”—all I can say is…