Filmmaker Ken Burns, author David McCullough, actors Sam Waterston, Matthew Broderick, Stephen Lang, and Medal of Honor recipient Paul W. Bucha recite one of the most famous speeches in American history.
Musical Score by Academy Award-winning composer John Williams….
Listen to it all–still amazing, still so important; KSH (Hat tip: Jeff Miller).
Thanks, Kendall.
So elegant, so moving a tribute to one of the greatest speeches of all time. Today, 150 years later, we still need “a new birth of freedom” in this land. Not least in terms of religious freedom, which is now emperiled in a way that no one back in 1863 could ever have imagined possible.
Today it is the Culture War that has torn the nation apart. Fortunately, the battle has been fought more with the pen than the sword, and the line between Red and Blue states isn’t as simple and clear as the Mason-Dixie Line, but the struggle is just as momentous for the future of the Union. Lincoln was right, after all, when he invoked Jesus’ saying that “[i]a house divided against itself cannot stand.[/i]” Ultimately, our nation can’t survive the ideological conflict now rendering it asunder without some clear resolution to that philosophical conflict emerging. The battle is being fought in the courts and in political elections across this country, but it is also being fought in the countless debates that are embroiling and dividing families and congregations as well as denominations in America. Whatever the outcome of that societal civil war may eventually prove to be, it’s already clear that there will be heavy casualties on both sides. Just like 150 years ago. Lord, have mercy.
May that noble ideal of Goverment “[i]of the People, by the People, and for the People[/i]” long endure. But what happens when that great nation loses its confidence in the Christian faith and turns to false gods and a secularist, relativistic worldview that is incompatible with the Christian worldview that gave birth to that ideal in the first place?? Alas, I suspect that the freedoms we take for granted as Americans will shrivel and die like cut flowers, once those ideals are cut off from their roots in the biblical vision of the created order. For we are no longer a nation “under God,” as Lincoln assumed would always be true.
David Handy+