The Afternoon News: Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012 | Sojourners

The Afternoon News: Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012

Huffington Post: An Interview with United States 39th President Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter is the 39th president of the United States, founder of the Carter Center and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He has authored many books, the most recent being "Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President." In this wide-ranging interview, HuffPost's Senior Religion Editor spoke to President Carter by phone about the role faith played in the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, the time of his greatest alienation from God, faith in the White House and his personal daily devotional practice.
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Religion News Service: Romney’s Evangelical Problem Starts with Theology
The good news for Mitt Romney: he won the Iowa caucuses. The bad news for Romney: evangelicals remain reluctant to support him.
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Huffington Post: On Scripture: Mark 1:4-11: Does Baptism Make for Better Presidents?
Christians seem to have a genetic disposition for describing people and events through a biblical lens. It makes sense. We are story-formed people, and the Bible shapes our political, moral and social imaginations.
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Huffington Post: Obama Fails on Minimum Wage Pledge
In 2008, then-President-elect Barack Obama made an ambitious pledge as part of his agenda to fight poverty, one he claimed would help "make work pay for all Americans" in an era of widening economic inequality: By the end of 2011, he would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour and index it to inflation, "to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage," as his transition team's website put it.
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Slate: NAACP Condemns Rick Santorum’s “Black People” Gaffe
Does Rick Santorum think everyone on welfare is black? Santorum was blasted by the NAACP on Wednesday for apparently making a racial assumption about people who recieve government assistance. He's since denied he ever said it, claiming that a video of the incident proves it was just an unfortunately homonymic tongue-tied stumble.
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TPM: Defense Secretary Panetta: Defense Cuts Come With ‘Additional But Acceptable Risk’
President Barack Obama at the Pentagon on Thursday said that even though the Defense Department’s budget will shrink, the U.S. military will remain a strong force.
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CNN: Controversial Catholic program for gays begins in Connecticut
The Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, this month is beginning a program that ministers to gays and lesbians, CNN affiliate WFSB-TV reports.
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CNN: What happens when candidates called by God drop out?
On Wednesday, blogger and sitcom writer Kelly Oxford sent a tweet about the Republican race for the presidency that got a lot of folks asking: Is this God’s idea of a joke?
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