The day Barack Obama first showed up in the office of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., more than 20 years ago, the pastor warned him that getting involved with Trinity United Church of Christ might not be “a feather in your cap.”
Obama was a community organizer trying to build support for his group on the South Side of Chicago, and a friendly minister at another church had suggested he’d have more luck with black clergy if he joined a congregation himself.
“Some of my fellow clergy don’t appreciate what we’re about,” Wright told him that day, as Obama would later recount it. “They feel like we’re too radical. Others, we ain’t radical enough.”
Obama ended up joining, a story he tells in his memoirs, and later was influenced enough by Wright to derive the title of a subsequent book, “The Audacity of Hope,” from one of the pastor’s sermons.
But despite the warning, the association did not seem to be a terribly risky one for Obama, given the arc of the career he was beginning to craft even then….
Bad directions?
Irenaeus, 🙂
There are spiritual issues that speak to the human soul and are ‘colorless’ and there are mortal issues that result from the ‘brokenness’ of mankind and which have their roots in that brokenness.
Pastor Wright has attempted to create a theoosphy which has its problem solving roots in human brokenness and which rejects the ‘colorlessness’ of the spirit.