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The central tenet of Christianity as it has come down to us is that we are to reach out when our instinct is to pull inward to give when we want to take to love when we are inclined to hate to include when are tempted to exclude.

Jon Meacham

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Jon Meacham
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 20
Biographer
Editor
Editor-In-Chief
Historian
Journalist
Chattanooga
Tennessee
Jon Ellis Meacham
Hate
Include
Give
Tempted
Come
Inward
Take
Central
Giving
Pull
Love
Instinct
Tenet
Reach
Exclude
Christianity
Inclined

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Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
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From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.
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America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the broad, sun-lit uplands.
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Given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.
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Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.
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Liberty is precious. But so is life. It should not be so difficult for men and women of good will and good heart and sound mind to find the right balance between the two.
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Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological.
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Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt - an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there's a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it's really, really hard, and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard.
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Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.
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In the fullness of time, I suspect that bigotry against homosexuals will seem as repugnant as racial prejudice does today. Or so one hopes.
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Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists, for instance, take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority, then we would be more open to slavery, to the subjugation of women, to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms.
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It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.
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The more we can do to support and promulgate the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic faiths - of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the better armed we will be to fight fundamentalism.
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We often talk too much & listen too little. The surer route to winning a friend isn't to convince them that you're right, but that you care what they think.
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As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom - not least freedom of conscience.
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Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.
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Barack Obama is many things among them, he is a tough and even ferocious political warrior.
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An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.
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Whenever there is news of a terrible shooting, I wonder why America has so miserably failed to enact even common-sense gun legislation.
Jon Meacham
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I am a southerner who grew up with and around guns. I own some still. My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10.
Jon Meacham