First, I'm glad he wants to see the good in all of us. He wants to give the benefit of the doubt that we are people of our word and will work for the common good.
Unfortunately, that's not how the Hillary Clinton supporters (Bill Moyers and Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds) think. Did you miss that Hillary Clinton connection? A supporter of Hillary got Rev. Wright into the Nat'l Press Club. So perhaps we now know why she did not issue a statement yesterday - she was behind this media circus. It's time for democrats of sound mind to defeat Hillary and Bill Clinton for President. It's not just that Wright wanted to respond. It's that the Clinton's put him up to it.
In case you went looking for this today, you reached a dead link. Or a blank page. Or maybe you got crafty.
So who is Barbara Reynolds?
Rev. Barbara Reynolds is a graduate of the Howard University School of Divinity and the United Theological Seminary, where she earned a doctorate degree in ministry.
She first published a pro-Wright essay in January, then another in March of this year.
Pastor Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio, who is a spiritual adviser to Republican front-runner John McCain, has made ugly comments about destroying "the false religion of Islam" at a time when American- born Muslims are fighting for the United States in Iraq. Somehow this hate speech doesn’t provoke outrage.
While Sen. Obama may have to distance himself from his pastor to play the game of politics, it is unwise for any of us to burn the bridges that brought us across.
Excerpts below.
Black, Beautiful And Holy By Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds
"As Christians reflect on the passion and suffering of Christ this is also a proper time to honor the many Black martyrs that died protecting their Christian beliefs.
It is a sad commentary that while Blacks are being taught how fortunate we are that White missionaries came to Africa to save us in the 19th century, African Christians were being torn by lions and sawed in half for their devout faith in the first and second centuries after the Crucifixion of Christ."
"As a child I attended an elementary school in Columbus, Ohio named after Saint Cyprian, who was Bishop of Carthage, a city in Northern Africa in the early third century. As primate of Africa, Cyprian brought his scholarly talents to his ministry, becoming one of the greatest African writers in church history. His service to the church brought him in opposition with the Roman government, who ordered him beheaded."
America needs Jeremiah Wrights
Pastor Jeremiah Wright is no weird, anti-American hater and separatist cult leader. He loved his country enough to serve in the U.S. Marines. His denomination, the United Church of Christ, is a 90 percent white denomination. As a pastor, Wright married the Obamas, baptized their children, and a Wright sermon provided the title of Obama’s best-selling book, "The Audacity of Hope."
Pastor Wright is being brutally trashed for his controversial sermons. The mainstream media are the guilty culprit in all of this partly because of ignorance of the historic role of the Black Church, which was born out of the crucible of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow, If those injustices had not been raised with passion, Blacks would still be on the plantation, a point that Trinity’s new pastor, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, nicely raised in an interview on CNN.
Secondly, Pastor Wright seems so radical because so many churches aren’t saying anything. Instead of preaching and organizing against the unjust war in Iraq that has claimed more than 4,000 U.S. lives and 30,000 Iranian lives, the cradle to grave prison industrial pipeline, inadequate education and other social ills, so many mega-church leaders are whooping about prosperity and allowing politicians drive through photo ops in their churches without holding their feet to the fire.
Wright stands out because so many others are sitting down.
Do we now admit wherever it is that Reverend Wright is going, Barack Obama does not carry that baggage, and is obviously not even on the same flight? (Yes Peggy, he gets the worker's plight...)
As someone a bit more spiritual said..
Wright's idea of racial progress is to keep alive the memory of past injustice and the rage and shame they caused. He is typical of a certain theological movement that stresses social involvement in the black community, but not many people are buying that smokescreen. Wright uses his words, gentle or inflammatory, to promote Africanism as being the heart and soul of the Bible. He identifies with the oppression of the Jews in the Old Testament as a model for black oppression today, and he calmly equates Jehovah's damning of sinners with his own damning of America for segregation and racial intolerance. In Wright's world view, there is us and them, going back thousands of years. Therefore, he belongs, or so the public perceives, to the divisive camp in racial politics, not the uniting camp. A great many people, black and white, are firmly entrenched in the same camp, and if Obama wants change, he couldn't have gotten a more perfect challenge than his own pastor, who seems as committed today to his views as he ever was.
which sure as heck beats this...