In the last part of my opening statement, in Part 6 yesterday,  I said that Barack Obama was a Christian. I realize that this statement is controversial with many. (I’ve already noted that 17% of Americans think he is a Muslim and I have to guess that a lot of these people are conservative Christians.) I have had so many conservatives tell me that there is simply “no way that Barack Obama could be a real Christian.” I understand why these Christians say this but it reveals a lot more about their misunderstanding of following Christ, and believing the good news, than about Barack Obama’s faith and practice. Stories of Obama’s personal faith abound and significant numbers of evangelical pastors have spent private time with him and testify to his vibrant, deep faith. As for his social views they are shaped far more by the famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr than by totally secular sources. But what is most intriguing to me, in the Maraniss account, is the role that Pastor Alvin Love had in his life when Obama was a single man in his mid-20s living […]

In this review article of David Marniss’s account of the early life and formation of Barack Obama I will now attempt to tie various loose ends together and draw some conclusions based upon this lively and well-written social biography of the early life of our 44th president. My seventh review article, published tomorrow, will complete this series.

My personal conclusion, after reading this lengthy work based upon obviously careful research, is that Barack Obama is our first postmodern, globalist president. I also believe, based upon his own words and the witness of numerous friends of his that I know in public and (and in several instances) in private, that Barack Obama is a thoughtful and deeply engaged Christian. I will define these three terms at the conclusion of my seventh article tomorrow.

Barack Obama was deeply impacted, as a developing boy, by the absence of his father. This is true of so many children in our time. This is one reason that he seems to care so deeply about the breakdown of the family. I know critics will say that his policies are not helpful to families, and […]

In David Marniss’s fine book, Barack Obama: The Story, we learn that Obama himself would later reflect on his young adult life and say, once again from the White House: “There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people” (453). He came to believe that what made sense of life was a sense of commonality, something that was essential to human truth, hopes and passions that reached beyond our differences (453). He says of himself that this thinking is “at the core of who I am” (453). I am not commenting on political ideology in these review blogs, quite intentionally. Yet I must say that I deeply resonate with this self-reflective idea of who I am as a person.

In Obama’s first two serious relationships with girlfriends he wrote that he was avoiding Alex (one of the girls) because, as Maraniss reports, “he was consumed with finding himself” (464). By early 1984 he was deeply involved with […]

We have now seen several powerful influences in Barack Obama’s early formative years. Another influence that was pounded into him by a black leader at Occidental College, during his freshman year, “can be summarized in three words: listen, analyze, decide” (359, italics are author’s). One of Obama’s classmates at Occidental said he was a “floater” (376) in terms of his ability to move easily from one culture to another. This development is understandable given his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii. At Occidental College he first came in contact with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous treatise “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” This powerful call for justice had a profound influence in shaping his identity and, eventually, his beliefs.

The family rift, which led to his complete separation from his birth father, and later for long periods being separate from his mother, clearly took its toll on young Barack Obama. His mother Ann tried so hard to never speak of the pain of their broken family. She intentionally chose to not criticize Barack, Sr. She did this in order to preserve Barack, Jr.’s ideals about his father. I recently […]

Numerous conservative talk show programs and commentators have stirred a great deal of controversy about President Obama’s birth and background. David Maraniss plainly puts several of these myths to rest. (I will not, however, hold my breath that conspiracy theorists, especially if they hate the president, will stop spreading these ridiculous lies!) Barack Obama was legitimately born on American soil as the son of an American citizen who was born in Kansas and married to his father in Hawaii. She was married to his Kenyan father seven months before his birth. His father was married to another women in Kenya but Stanley Ann Dunham, and the American judicial system, had no knowledge of this fact when the president’s parents were married. The physician who delivered Barack Obama is named and discussed in Barack Obama: The Story. He actually jokingly told another doctor the day he delivered Barack that he had delivered a baby that day whose mother was named “Stanley.” Maraniss plainly shows that any serious research will prove facts to be true beyond any doubt whatsoever. Argue about a birth certificate if you wish but […]

Barack Obama grew up without a father and his mother was quite frequently absent from his life. This prompts David Maraniss to conclude that in a very real sense he “raised himself” (xix). He “worked his way alone through many confounding issues life threw his way” (xix). If this is true then an argument can be made against Maraniss’s idea that genealogy and family have very little to do with how he became the man that he is today.  But there is more, so much more, to be seen in this observation. Maraniss says the questions about nature and nurture are completely fair and then explains why this is true. Even though family is “certainly . . .  not everything . . . [this social influence] is crucial” (xix), he writes. One can, for example, easily see how the imprint of Obama’s mother, and maternal grandmother, are deeply impressed upon him from the very earliest stages of his life.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama acknowledged that his mother and maternal grandmother shaped him into the man that he eventually became. In his best-selling memoir […]

The much-anticipated book, Barack Obama: The Story, is a 641-page volume written by Pulitzer Prize winning author-journalist David Maraniss. I got more insight from this lengthy book into the early life, development and personality of our forty-fourth president than through anything that I have previously read. If you want a political study of the man, pro or con, then you should look elsewhere. If you want a “puff piece” aimed at re-electing the president then you should look somewhere else too. And if you are looking for ammunition to attack Obama then you must also look elsewhere. There is hardly a single syllable in this massive book about politics, at least in the normal way that we speak and write about politics and political ideology. This is a deeply studied, and yet masterfully written, generational biography. It shows how Barack Obama developed intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. It addresses the classic nature/nurture debate about shows well how we are shaped as living, breathing individuals.

David Maraniss was born in 1949 (my birth year). He is a journalist and author, currently serving as an associate-editor for the Washington Post.  […]