Thank You, John Updike

John Updike’s recent death took me back to the early 1970s and McGill University where I studied religion. The Rabbit books were big and Couples had explored the age’s new attitudes regarding sexuality.

It seemed to me that Mr. Updike was at heart a neo-orthodox Protestant, a critic of the innate depravity of the human condition. (For example, Couples was set in the aptly named town of Tarbox.)

As an aspiring Unitarian minister I silently dialogued with his literary jabs at my liberal religious tradition, with which Mr. Updike had considerable familiarity. His wife was the daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister.

Although I thoroughly disagree with a negative neo-orthodox appraisal of the human condition, I’m eternally grateful for Mr. Updike’s writing that so contributed to the development of my own worldview. I often think that his works offer the most important critical appraisal of the latter decades of twentieth century American culture.

Obama: Called to a Higher Purpose

At today's National Prayer Breakfast President Obama testified to his faith origins and evolution: "I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most spiritual person I've ever known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done.

"I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck – no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose."

In my estimation this brief narrative clarifies the centering role of religion/faith in Mr. Obama's makeup.

Earlier in his brief remarks he summarized God's purpose: "...to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife and rebuild what has broken; to lift up those who have fallen on hard times." My ears hear a variation of the Old Testament prophet Micah" “And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” - Micah 6:8

As I've been maintaining, Mr. Obama casts himself in a Prophetic Tradition that merges Martin Luther King, Jr faith rhetoric with the civic religion of Abraham Lincoln.