Jim Wallis Blog Entries

I'm on a plane to Portland, Oregon, to begin the West Coast swing of The Great Awakening book tour that will also take us to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego-all back to back. The events are quite diverse and very interesting, from universities, churches, various civic forums, [...]

Learn more about The Great Awakening at www.sojo.net/greatawakening. There you'll find

Tonight, President Bush delivers his 7th State of the Union address. We are certain to hear about the President's plan for stimulating the economy.

Yet, for many people of faith, there is a hunger for a new vision of our life together where bold changes are enacted to address the most pressing moral issues of our time. I've written about this hunger for change in my latest book,

This early primary election season has clearly demonstrated the limits of the pollster's predictions, the pundit's prognostications, and the ability of politics to really address our deepest problems.

The polls have gotten it wrong several times now. And the political commentators have wrongly told us what was going or not going to happen so many times that many have just stopped listening. Obama would never catch up to Clinton's inevitability - then he won Iowa. The Clinton dynasty [...]

An unfortunate exchange of words between the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama this week threatened to explode into real conflict, involving the always volatile U.S. issue of race. The dust-up was as unexpected as it was unfortunate, and was sparked in part by comments made about the respective roles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson in achieving the historic goals of the civil rights movement. But race is the wrong way to view this escalating war of [...]

With the pivotal event of the Iowa Caucuses, news analyses have said that Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are now the defining candidates of this campaign-even if they don't win their respective nominations. It appears Obama has a better chance to do that than Huckabee does, but there is no telling how far he can go and, win or not, he could help redefine the Republican Party. In Sunday's New York Times, Frank [...]

This evening, the presidential election of 2008 officially begins with the Iowa caucuses-intense political contests taking place in every county of that Midwestern state. The national campaign, of course, has already been going on for many months (with the earliest start in the history of presidential politics), but now the endless polling will be replaced by actual election results in state caucuses and primaries. Iowa is the starting gun in the political battle that leads to the party [...]

The year of 1968 was very significant in my life, and a decisive one for the nation. It was the year when the hopes borne by the social movements of the 1950's and 60's were dashed by the assassinations of, first, Martin Luther King Jr., and then Robert F. Kennedy.

If Robert Kennedy had lived to become president on the inside (as he surely would have) and Martin Luther King Jr. had lived to lead a movement from the outside, the U.S. and the world might be very different today. But the [...]

Joy and I woke up yesterday morning at 5:00 a.m. to the sounds of our screaming four-year-old, Jack, who was suffering from extreme abdominal pain. We tried to console and cuddle him, but to no avail. "Don't touch me, it really hurts!" he cried, when we tried to examine or gently rub his sore tummy. This was not like him at all; he is not an overreactive kid. We had to go get him at school that day because he was vomiting and had diarrhea. He had a quiet afternoon at home and went to sleep [...]