I've been trying to stay a safe distance from the presidential campaign and not get too dogmatic about my love for Barack Obama, because I think ultimately politics is not the solution to what ails us. But my dad, who lives in Iowa where he meets all of the presidential candidates every election and knows the ins-and-outs of all of their policies, keeps asking me why I like Barack Obama. "Oh, I don't know...he's just....cool and refreshing." Such a deep answer, I know, which I'm sure doesn't garner much respect from my father. He's probably just rolling his eyes.
David Brooks, my secret Republican crush, articulates me feelings about Obama in his column in the NY Times today.
I think what it comes down to, for me, is INTEGRITY and SELF KNOWLEDGE. Here's an excerpt from his column:
"Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.
Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall."
Okay, that's all I'm going to say about politics.
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Changing subjects: There's an interesting article in Salon.com today about why the new athiests are ignorant about God. You can read it here.
It's an interview with John Haught, a catholic theologian at Georgetown University. He has some interesting things to say about what athiests don't know about religion, how evolution and theology can be compatible. But what struck me was what he had to say when the interviewer asked him: "Why can't you have hope if you don't believe in God"
Haught says:
"You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don't have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason."
Believing Christ is the justification for hope is what I cling to during the holidays. My usual holiday depression has been kept at bay by my crazy schedule, a few days of sunshine, and Sufjan Steven's Christmas CDs. Oh, and the Lexapro probably helps a little, too. But our wonderful church, Old St. Pats, is the true salve. In church on Sunday I was wondering, really, what people do without God. During this advent season, each Sunday they have a member of the church tell his or her story. Last Sunday a woman told about how her husband died in her arms of heart failure, and 6 months later, her infant daughter died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. How do you find hope in the midst of that? I'm constantly amazed at the testimony of people who have been through the most horrific things that life brings. Sure, I feel beaten down by every day life. But these stories constantly remind me that there is something to this Christmas story. That if THEY can go through THAT and come out feeling loved by God....then yes, there is hope. Maybe that's what it means to being Christ in the world? Telling our stories of hope.
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