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Killing Jesus by Stephen Mansfield

Stephen Talks With Piers Morgan

The world would never be the same.

“The execution of Jesus was a crime born of the streets, the barracks, the enclaves of the privileged, and the smoke-filled back rooms of religious and political power brokers. Its meaning lives in these places still.”

It is the most fiercely debated murder of all time. Its symbol is worn by billions of people worldwide. Its spiritual meaning is invoked daily in time-honored rituals. In Killing Jesus, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Mansfield masterfully recounts the corrupt trial and grisly execution of Jesus more than two thousand years ago.

Approaching the story at its most human level, Mansfield uses both secular sources and biblical accounts to bring fresh perspective to the human drama, political intrigue, and criminal network behind the killing of the world’s most famous man.

Killing Jesus by Stephen Mansfield hits bookshelves nationwide on Tuesday, May 7 2013.

Visit the website at www.killingjesus.com

Video Produced by Worthy Publishing

The New Testament seemed from the beginning like someone else’s mail. It still had meaning for me. In fact, it was filled with the most meaningful words I had ever read. Yet I constantly felt the need for the backstory, the history, and the context—all in order to understand what was being said. I came to see the Bible as a collection of literature from a broader, centuries-old story. I had to understand the words against their times in order to capture all the meaning that was intended.

The whole experience was something like venturing into my attic and discovering a packet of my great-great grandmother’s letters. To fully understand what she wrote, I would have to know something of her times, something of the events she lived through.

Let’s imagine that my great-great grandmother’s letters mention a “war,” an “enemy,” a “president,” a “plague,” the “many dead,” and the “rapid changes in our nation.” To know what these words mean—and, more specifically, their meaning for me—I would have to know the story they referred to.

It might be that by “the war” she meant the American Civil War. This would mean that—in the case of my southern ancestors—the enemy was the Union army, that the president was Lincoln and that the plague was a plague of abolitionist sentiment. It would place the letters somewhere around the years 1861 to 1865.

Or, the war might be World War I. If so, the enemy referred to would be Germany, the president would be Woodrow Wilson and the plague would be the influenza epidemic that killed tens of millions in 1918.

Clearly, in my great-great grandmother’s letters as in the Bible—and in all literature–the context defines the meaning. If I take the view that people who wanted to abolish slavery around the time of the American Civil War were a “plague” on the nation, then I could easily absorb racist attitudes and perhaps deep and defiling bitterness over the Confederacy’s defeat. Yet if the references to plague were meant to indicate the influenza epidemic and if my great-great grandmother mentioned this plague by way of urging someone to take care of their neighbors, then a completely different lesson surfaces.

It is very much the same with the Bible. Though I believe scripture is holy, timeless literature, there is also a human side to the Bible that requires the same type of historical questioning that I would use to understand that packet of letters in my attic.

This leaves us with what scholars like to call a “dynamic tension.” In order to understand the Bible as intended, we have to approach it both as divine literature and as literature arising from a human story. This shouldn’t surprise us. Christians must understand Jesus in exactly the same way: as both God and as having a human story. Even the name “Jesus Christ” reflects a union of the human and the divine. It is the truth at the core of the Christian faith. It is also the union at the heart of the Bible.

Unfortunately, most people take either one view of the Bible or the other. Either they approach the Bible as history alone or they approach it as revelation alone. The first gives us mere human thinking. The second gives us mystical ideas disconnected from life. Both extremes give us bad theology, flawed ethics, weak faith and, frankly, boredom.

I believe the Bible is a grand drama—a gritty, moving, horrifying, gloriously human drama. And, at the same time, I believe that drama is the vehicle by which God gives us his eternal truth. These two truths together are what make reading the Bible a journey into truth, into an almost overwhelming variety of human experience, and into the heart of what it means to be human.

The more I talk about this, the more people tell me how eager they are to read scripture with new eyes, to escape their flawed beliefs and to enter the stirring adventure that the biblical story is meant to be. In fact, I think we may be entering an era of fascination with the story of scripture that will surprise us. The young are hungry for raw meaning. Their parents are weary of religious novelties. Society as a whole is desperate for words that penetrate the soul and bring change. The Bible answers all of these needs, but only if we let it speak as it insists upon speaking: as divinely inspired human literature.

I’ve been thinking about these themes a great deal recently because I’ve just written a book called Killing Jesus. I’ve simply never had a writing experience that was more emotional, more difficult and more profoundly transforming than the one I had writing this book.

I believe that the death of Jesus is the most important event in history, but I also believe it cannot be understood fully from the pages of scripture alone. This is exactly what God intended. When a gospel writer says “they crucified him” or “they flogged him” or “they took him to the ‘place of the skull’,” we can’t know what they mean unless we get some information from that writer’s times and allow them to frame the words he wrote.

What comes from this process is what thrills me so much. Put a bit of history next to the words of scripture and it becomes an even greater revelation of God and his purposes. I revel in it, as I think you’ll see in the pages of Killing Jesus. I hope you’ll buy it, read it and let it lead you into new spiritual territory and into more meaningful battles in your spiritual quest.

Let me leave you with this final thought from the introduction of Killing Jesus.

The Bible reveals sacred truth but it does so through a less sacred-seeming drama—an often earthy, troubling, lewd, starkly human drama. We are not meant to be embarrassed or rush quickly by. We are meant to know the story against the stormy age in which it happened—with all the grimy details fully in view—and to accept it as part of the way God speaks. Blood, spit, wine, semen, sweat, and the off scouring of generations spill out onto the page. No apologies are offered. This is the thrashing human drama of God, not some dainty pious tale. This is the Bible!

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My new book, Killing Jesus, is not about apologetics. It is, though, about the historical underpinnings of the execution of Jesus and this is why I decided to include an extensive section of notes, some of which have to do with confirmation of the Jesus story from outside of the Bible. Let me quote a bit from those notes here to answer a few of the questions I received.

I should say first that the gospels themselves are sufficient evidence of the life of Jesus. There are many fine scholarly works that confirm this. I’m happy to accept the challenge of providing evidence from outside of scripture but I do not want this willingness to be construed as agreement that the New Testament is not alone a credible historical document. It is, but I certainly agree—even with Christianity’s critics—that if the faith arose as the New Testament claims, there ought to be external evidence.

I’ll provide just a few examples here. There is much more in my book and far more than that in the many studies of the New Testament documents as history that skeptics ought to consult.  I would recommend, for example, F. F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 

I’ll also agree to lay aside one of the most famous statements on the historicity of Jesus, the one in Josephus’ work (A XVIII. 63). Now, I believe this is absolutely credible but I don’t want to take the time to defend it here. So, I’ll go with two others. Here, then, are two credible sources that confirm both the existence of Jesus and that he lived in the first half of what we now call the first century.

1. Cornelius Tacitus (Roman Historian),

“But not all the relief that could come from man, not all the bounties that the prince could bestow, nor all the atonements which could be presented to the gods, availed to relieve Nero from the infamy of being believed to have ordered the conflagration, the fire of Rome. Therefore, to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.” –Annals, 15.44, Loeb Edition. (116 A.D.)

2. Mara Bar-Serapion (Philosopher)

“What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise King? It was just after that that their kingdom was abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea; the Jews, ruined and driven from their land, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates did not die for good; he lived on in the teaching of Plato. Pythagoras did not die for good; he lived on in the statue of Hera. Nor did the wise King die for good; He lived on in the teaching which He had given.”–British Museum Syriac MS. Addition 14,658.  (just after 70 A.D.)

*Note that the phrase “their kingdom was abolished” refers to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. This destruction, according to this passage, came “just after” Jesus was executed, indicating that he lived in the first half of the first century.

I hope these two brief quotes answer the immediate questions so many had. There is much more in my upcoming book and, of course, far broader scholarship to consult for those who are interested. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

An interview about Killing Jesus with Stephen’s publisher also appeared in The Washington Post.

You can keep up with Stephen’s media about Killing Jesus and with all his major media appearances by following him on Twitter at @MansfieldWrites or by going to the “Recent Media” page of this site, which appears under “Press Room” on the pull-down menus.

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Like most beautiful ladies, she is a layered mystery. She always defies any single dimension imposed upon her. Outsiders who think of her as a painted lady of the stage, all sequins and hair, usually find themselves surprised by her industries—health care, the business behind the music, education, publishing and religion. Those who think of her merely as hostess to hillbillies are often stunned to find a sophisticated, urbane yet gracious Old South still vibrant. She has always been unique among American cities and now she is enjoying a unique and envied season of success.

I’ll leave it to others to chronicle the details of this ascent. Some of the nation’s leading publications—GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Forbes and the New York Times—already have.  The ten Grammys Nashville music won recently and her repeated mention on lists of America’s best places to live also confirm this new prominence. There isn’t much I can add.

I can, though, describe my Nashville and perhaps this will paint a bit of the New Nashville in your mind. Bev and I live in the downtown area, in what is becoming the heart of the city. Not too many years ago, it was abandoned, dangerous, and ugly. The new urbanism, a younger generation’s love of “village,” and a smart private investor/city government partnership is transforming Nashville’s downtown into something truly special.

Let me describe our world. Bev and I live in a townhome built on a floor of what used to be the Bellsouth building. On our street is a statue of Billy Graham, the only surviving ante-bellum house in the downtown area—now a restaurant and club run by my friend, Josh Smith—and an old school sporting goods store that is always buzzing. All of this aligns a street recently renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard to remind us of the nation’s struggle with civil rights and the famous Woolworth’s sit-ins of the 1960s that took place just a few blocks away.

As you might expect, the arts abound. Two blocks from our home is the magnificent Frist Museum, which is currently hosting an exhibit of Dutch Renaissance paintings that I first saw in Amsterdam decades ago. Almost as close is the Ryman Auditorium, the mother stage of country music. As many blocks in another direction is the Tennessee Performing Arts Theater where Flashdance is playing now and where Romeo and Juliet, the Lion King, and The Columnist will soon take the stage.

At any hour I can walk four blocks to “the strip” and hear live country music as fine as any in the world. Branson, Missouri, may have the big shows and auditoriums, but Nashville has the music—and perhaps a bit more of the love behind that music and its heritage. When I first moved here, I was not prepared for how close it all is, how much access there is. Music venues sometime seem more like living rooms than performance halls.

Every Monday night, one of the biggest stars in country music, Vince Gill, plays with a group called The Time Jumpers in a venue so homey you may very well bump into Vince—quite literally—in the men’s room. Recently, while a friend and I were walking to our favorite barbecue joint, we passed Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on the strip. In seconds we realized that not one but two country music legends were playing inside. It turned out they had been eating lunch several blocks away when they got the notion to drop in and let ‘er rip. This is not at all uncommon in Nashville.

Three blocks from my home is the immense new convention center that is likely to change everything about downtown. Hotels, restaurants, dance clubs and a dozen other ventures are starting to appear all over the area. The restaurant scene has been changing for quite some time. For foodies in particular, the offerings are—as they say in local speak— “tew dah fowah.” My new favorite place is The Southern and there are dozens of other delightful offerings like The Standard—in that ante-bellum house I mentioned—and Merchant’s. For Italian food, its Sole Mio. For barbecue, it’s Jack’s. For—well, everything else is here too. Occasionally, I sin by visiting Pralines by Leon, a transplant from New Orleans after the devastation of Katrina.

To work it all off, I go to the Downtown YMCA, one of the best in the nation just two blocks from my front door, or I can walk the greenways almost to Kentucky. Or, at least it feels that way.

Okay, I’m done. Something new and wonderful is happening in Nashville. The thirty-somethings remaking historic East Nashville will tell you so. The students at ever expanding Belmont University will tell you so. The dozens of movie and music stars relocating to the area will tell you so.

A final thought. Interwoven with everything I’ve described is a kind of heartfelt but nontraditional faith in God. Nashville was already a city of nearly a thousand churches, but now there seems to be as much genuine freelance faith as there are more mainstream religions. This makes Nashville both challenging and exciting for me. As a Christian, I love the friendly debates, the interplay of ideas and the fact that I can walk through a sports bar at game time and hear jersey-wearing men talk about that morning’s sermon or the new book by local publisher Thomas Nelson about that boy who had a vision of heaven.

You’ve got to love this city. More important, though, is to love where you live and put down roots—to belong and be fruitful.

Most of you know I feel this same way for very different reasons about my other city, Washington DC. The nation’s capitol is always there and much as she long has been—majestic, ennobling, glorious. But get to Nashville while this transformation is underway. And don’t forget about the pralines at Leon’s.

Originally aired on 8/31/2012

Stay tuned for more videos and updates on Stephen’s new YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/mansfieldwrites.

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Still it is an art of living to hear wisdom in the mouths of those with whom we disagree—even in the mouths of our enemies. Consider then, in the final days of this pope, a short compilation of his more trenchant statements. Some of these are insights into the modern world. Some are barbs. Some are descriptions of the forces tearing at the Roman Catholic Church, indeed tearing at Christianity in our age. All are worth pondering as Benedict XVI leaves the global stage.

______________

• “Truth is not determined by a majority vote.”

• “It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life. … Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in the course of its history.”

• “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

• “It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church’s pastors wherever it occurs. … The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in work, in action and in law.”

• “We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death, in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendor of God’s light, into true life. The modern world is… a spiritual and emotional desert of poverty, abandonment, loneliness… and destroyed love.”

• “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

• “Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.”

• “I’m not a man who constantly thinks up jokes. But I think it’s very important to be able to see the funny side of life and its joyful dimension and not to take everything too tragically. I’d also say it’s necessary for my ministry. A writer once said that angels can fly because they don’t take themselves too seriously. Maybe we could also fly a bit if we didn’t think we were so important.”

• “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary.”

• “Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think.”

• “Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”

• “It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater.”

• “‘Rock’ [music]. . . is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.”

• “Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

• “You might think that in today’s world people are unlikely to start worshipping other gods. But sometimes people do worship ‘other gods’ without realizing it. False ‘gods’ are nearly always associated with the worship of three things: material possessions, possessive love, or power.”

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Yeah, I know.

Now that even Fox News has parted ways with her, it doesn’t appear that this is true–or that it ever was. Rather, she already seems a sideshow of American politics, fruit of a cynical effort by John McCain to rescue a losing election.

I don’t know what McCain intended. I do know that Sarah Palin is an exceptional woman.

It is true that her resume was incredibly thin when McCain asked her to run for national office. She had been mayor of Wasilla, Alaska–population 4,000–for less than six years and governor of Alaska for barely three. This inexperience may have led to some of the misguided, damaging comments that have marked her political descent. It is also true that she gave some of the most embarrassing television interviews in the history of American politics and that she suffered debilitating information leaks from her own campaign–remember reports of temper tantrums, wardrobe excess and astonishing vanity?–and of a kind seldom endured by a vice-presidential candidate.

Yet, I repeat: Sarah Palin is an exceptional woman. She led Wasilla, Alaska, the fastest growing city in her state, with such skill that she won admiration from both sides of the political aisle. She then served on the three-member Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission where she helped expose long-standing corruption among her own party’s leaders.

As governor, she did exactly as she claimed in her memorable 2008 convention speech: she cut taxes, she cut expenses, she took courageous stands against big oil companies, she fashioned an historic partnership with members of the state legislature and she became the most popular Republican politician in the nation–with a jaw-dropping 93% approval rating.

So, what happened? My view is that she was positioned as, and eagerly became, the angry face of the American political right. She took her looks and her story and her quirky humor and refashioned them all to fit the role of attack dog. She knew the bitterness of the conservative movement and she gave it voice. She knew the anger of heartland America and she echoed it. She knew the power of political hatred and she fed it.

It didn’t work.

I believe it didn’t work because Palin is better than this, as her early political career had shown. Along with my co-author David Holland, I wrote a book about her entitled The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin. After much research­­–after drinking tea in her parents’ living room and meeting with her staffers and even speaking with her political opponents­­–we came to believe that the better angels of Palin’s politics are the nobility of the common man, love of the land, honor for the founding vision of America, and a deep commitment to God and his purposes. ­­

These were not the hallmarks of her politics as she articulated them in the 2008 campaign or after. In fact, David and I argued that Palin’s presentation of her faith as it appeared in her book Going Rogue was so vague and limited to a “God as revealed in nature” narrative that it might easily have been written by a young Barack Obama in the early days of his religious journey. She had been dumbed down on matters of faith, sent to bombard rather than ennoble on most other political themes. It was sad to watch, given what we knew of the ideals that had captured her heart as a girl and that had fueled her rise to prominence.

I see Palin’s parting with Fox News as confirmation of this. Political anger isn’t unique. Simplistic answers are in no short supply. Criticism of the left is easy. If Palin would not bring her love, her faith, her common sense conservatism and her heartland patriotism to the fore, what did she have to offer that was worth a million dollars a year to a network moving slowly toward the political center? Fox News is awash with pretty faces. And so the parting came.

I’ll end with a prediction. I think she’ll be back. She’ll be tempered, even repentant, and she’ll ennoble rather than degrade. She’ll be wiser, more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, and she’ll be better prepared to lead. Why? Because Sarah Palin is an exceptional woman. Because her story isn’t finished yet. And because F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. There are second acts in American lives.

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He explained that human beings seem ever in pursuit of “space.” He was not talking about “outer space,” as in Star Trek and Apollo missions. Instead, he said, “space” is “an arena of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority.” In other words, “space” is where there isn’t much more than what you choose. A reviewer of The Land summarized this well: “space is emptiness waiting for choice.”

Most people in this world, at least most people in the western world, want “space.” They want to go where they are left alone to choose their own life. They don’t want obligations. And they don’t want to be externally defined. They just want “space” to be free.

“Place” is much different. “Place” is territory—think of it as land—that has meaning. It has meaning because men have shared history there, because promises have been made, demands have been issued and destinies have been envisioned. “Place” is where you belong and where that belonging demands duty and rewards with heritage.

And here is one of the phrases I love most: “A yearning for place is a decision to enter history with an identifiable people in an identifiable pilgrimage.”

When I first read these words, they painfully exposed my wandering life. Unlike most people, I had wandering imposed on me. I grew up in a military family and lived all over the world, usually living for only a year at each assignment.  I then attended a wonderful university but in a city I had no plans to make my home. My first decade of professional life found me in West Texas. I loved the people there but I was always “the Yankee” in their eyes; I was always the outsider. I never belonged. By my early thirties, then, I had no “place.” I had no land. I had no tribe.

In 1991, I moved to Nashville. I loved it first because it was not West Texas. Then I loved it because of what it offered, and by this I meant what a tourist might have meant—the big, the dramatic, and the shiny. The food. The buildings. The stars.

In time, though–after some years of living, of bleeding, of loving and of battles fairly won—Nashville became “place” for me. I fell in love with her—her story, her flaws, her art, her graciousness, even her dreams. I hated what hurt her—even when it was self-imposed. I missed her people—my people—when I traveled. I grew to suspect those who did not love her or wanted her only for the night.

One morning, while at a favorite breakfast spot with friends, I found myself in a rant about an atrocious piece of Nashville “public art.” When I finished and three-quarters of the room applauded—mocking but with a smile—I knew that whatever mystical sealing happens between a man and a place had happened. I still tear up when I fly over her at night.

I have “place” in Nashville. It isn’t because of the popular TV series or because she has recently become cool—see the articles in GQ, the New York Times, and The Rolling Stone to find out why. No, my Nashville is somehow beneath and beyond all this and I want to introduce her to you. In my next few blogs, I’m going to describe what endears me about Nashville, where I find beauty, what allows me to do business here, where I eat and what I see coming.

Now, I imagine a few of you reading this are confused. I’ve spoken so glowingly of my other city, Washington DC, that it may be surprising to hear me still speaking tenderly of Nashville. I understand. I do. But I am uniquely blessed: it is rare for a man to have “place” at all in this life, much less to have it in two different cities. After three decades of wandering, I’ve been blessed with “place” two times at once. It is such a gift, such a defining force, that I want to bring you into the experience.

Maybe you’ll love my cities as I do. Maybe, if you don’t already have it, you’ll even find “place” of your own.

http://www.gq.com/food-travel/travel-features/201207/nashville-guide-travel-fashion#slide=1

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/best-music-scene-2011-nashville-tennessee-20110502

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Read The Tennessean’s recent piece on Stephen: http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013301060095

Why this is not the worst Congress ever: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2012/12/30/dysfunctional-congress-at-least-they-are-not-maiming-one-another/

More commentary on the idea of a Golden Age: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/actually-dont-write-like-youre-dead/266934/

And yet…

He lived under threat of death nearly his entire life. When he was two, an evil king tried to murder him. To protect him, his parents hid him in a foreign land. When they returned, they learned that the evil king’s son still lived and so his parents moved him to a town a hundred miles away from where he was born. It was a distance greater than the width of his country.

When he began teaching, the people of his own hometown rioted and tried to throw him off a cliff. His own brothers and sisters did not believe what he taught until after he was dead. Authorities conspired again him constantly but were too inept to execute their plans. He even spoke of it publicly, routinely asking his audiences why they were planning to kill him.

He was under constant strain. His family once tried to capture him and take him home because they said he was out of his mind. His enemies thought he was demon possessed.

He lived among a people oppressed by an empire. Corrupt priests ruled his nation. People lived hard and died young. The average age was 28. The average woman weighed less than a hundred pounds. Most kept their animals in their house, made their beds over their oven to stay warm and ate mainly cheese, grains, berries and nuts. It was not an easy time.

His own accountant was stealing from him. His followers ultimately abandoned him. He was arrested on false charges, brutally beaten and then tortured for hours before he died.

No one seemed to understand him in the end.

Yet one of his persecutors–who later devoted his life to the man–wrote that he had come at the perfect moment in history, just when everything had been prepared for him to be in the world. The timing was just right.

It probably did not feel that way to him for even a single day.

This is why: being destined and feeling in place are two different things. Being destined and living in a peaceful age are two different things. Being destined and being safe or loved or understood or prosperous or even happy are two different things.

Jesus chose being destined. Because he did, we are about to celebrate the “Mass of the Christ”–Christmas. Enjoy it. Feast in it. Worship in it. Love and rest in it.

Then, when it is over, live emboldened by the truth that you are chosen for your times. You may not feel a fit. You may not find pleasure. You may find it troubling and hard.

But you will likely feel the pleasure of the one who sent you, and your life will be measured as it should be–in terms of generations yet to come.

Just like the one we celebrate this week.

A very happy and inspiring Mass of the Christ to you this season.

In addition to being an author and speaker, Stephen does a great deal of leadership consulting. Early on in this part of his career, he helped to clean up after some very high profile leadership “crashes,” as he calls them. He acquired a stellar reputation for his work in this field. In time, though, he became convinced that better than cleaning up after a leadership crash would be helping people understand the factors he found to be common in all of the crashes he dealt with or studied. He created a presentation that communicated these ten signs and it became very popular, particularly among corporate leaders. Now, he has written the core truths of this presentation as a Kindle Single by the same name. Click here to download. Click here to receive further information about Stephen’s Ten Signs of a Leadership Crash presentation.

There is a fleeting moment early in Steven Spielberg’s recent American Opus in which Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln enters a White House room one night to find his son asleep on the floor. The President tosses aside the official papers in his hand, kneels to brush back the hair from the eleven-year-old’s face and then lowers himself onto the floor beside him. The child blearily stirs and, knowing the ritual, moves onto Lincoln’s back. The gaunt, war-etched father/president rises forcefully, from floor to full height, his son clinging tightly.

We are meant to feel the great power of this. Spielberg’s camera tightens on a huge hand as it grips a chair. Instantly, we remember: the prairie and the muscled boy with an ax and the young man who earned respect on the Illinois frontier with his almost otherworldly physical strength. If this is Spielberg’s metaphor for the meaning of Lincoln–he who though nearly prone himself lifted a generation and even the nation to his great height–it would be fitting of all that is yet to come in this masterful gift to America.

We could hardly ask more of any movie than what Lincoln might mean for our nation at this time. The film comes to us when we are a drained, disillusioned people after an election in which one political party may have lost because millions of its members cared too little to vote and the other party won mainly because it feared not winning. Storms of every kind–moral, economic and atmospheric–have lashed the land. Our most esteemed military man has fallen in moral disgrace. There seem to be no Churchills on the rise, nor much nobility or statecraft among our leaders. We come to the end of 2012 largely grateful it is not 2008 with its fearful economic turbulence, and grateful, too, that all years end with distracting celebrations of faith, heritage, and family.

This year, we can also be grateful for Lincoln. It may remind us of who we are just enough to remind us of what we now must do. That it comes to us just as an African-American president begins a second term and just prior to the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1 of next year seems somehow a summons.

Of all that producer/director Steven Spielberg and scriptwriter Tony Kushner might have chosen to portray of Lincoln’s life, they have settled upon one month–January 1865–and one event, the battle for ratification of the slavery-ending Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Even schoolchildren can set the context. The war is slowing to a close. Lincoln’s prophetic Second Inaugural Address is but a month away, on March 4. The Confederate surrender at Appomattox will occur a month later on April 9. By Good Friday the following week, Lincoln will be dead. Our knowledge of this progression–and, at the time, Lincoln’s own sense of the looming grave–infuse events with urgency: We will not have Lincoln always with us. Slavery has set the clock of divine wrath in motion. Should the South rejoin the Union under terms of a peace agreement, it would block any slavery-outlawing act. The political coalitions essential to passing the Amendment may not–almost certainly will not–hold. We must act, as Lincoln is made to say, “Now! Now! Now!”

Within this historical range, Spielberg gives us far more than a window into an era, but rather a grand riot of an era enlarged and expounded. We are allowed to see what kind of men carved a nation of disparate immigrants and then, when it fractured, carved it again. We see the adolescence of ideas we have mistaken as belonging to our time alone. We see the price and processes of politics. This portrayal has power to change us. Once we’ve seen the film, we should never again read of an act of congress a century and half ago and see only the words on the page, forgetting the life’s blood such acts usually demanded.

We can be changed by this film in part because we cease feeling ourselves visitors to a foreign time within the first minutes. Spielberg recreates the era with precision but also with rich consistency and an unembarrassed nod to the eccentricities of the age. If a hairdo is overdone it is because the historical figure famously overdid it and not because designers overplayed their art. Most hairstyles are a riot of disorder, as they were in that day. Intentional chaos reigns also on sets where rooms of classically crafted architecture are filled with piles of books, children’s toys, wood shavings and half-eaten meals, the idiosyncrasies of the age and the historical figures well in view. Even the sound of Lincoln’s watch in one scene–barely audible as befits the accompanying images of a president in contemplation–was recorded from the original in the Smithsonian. It all blends. It is all of a piece. Never are we jarred from thought by the kind of gaudy kitsch used in most period films.

Much in the same way, Spielberg allows his actors to simply be. We are transfixed by Tommy Lee Jones sitting motionless for what seem minutes just as the film reaches dramatic climax, when most movies are hurrying the audience to the chase. James Spader, a 1980′s Brat Pack favorite who began to reclaim his art some years ago on ABC’s Boston Legal, gives us the eighteenth century doppelganger of his older, less self-conscious, more corpulent self. He is a one man Greek chorus. Sally Field is perfectly nerve-wracking as the always-on-the-edge-of-sanity First Lady. We both weep for Mary Lincoln’s sufferings and hope she will soon leave the room. She is an unsettling woman and Field plays her perfectly: charming, vain, raw and psychotic.

What is certain, though, is that Spielberg’s Lincoln is, ultimately, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln. He does not act. He does not channel. He dissolves himself and then re-incarnates. He is why this film, for all its grace and artistry, is far more than the product of masterful performances: it is the impartation of the great man’s spirit. Day-Lewis sitting motionless as Lincoln radiates more of Lincoln than any text, certainly more than any other film. He is the suffering, is the lone hours in dank-wood rooms with books the only companions, is the haunting of the darkness, the grappling with God. He allows you to draw near and only then moves and speaks. It is magnificent.

We should be grateful, also, that Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis do not give us a narrow Lincoln. We are allowed all the mystifying complexity. Lincoln is crass and brooding and hard. He angrily slaps his adult son and tells aides they will do as he says since he is clothed in “immense power.” He admits to stepping beyond constitutional bounds in his pursuit of an end to the war. He admits he has doubts about the fate of blacks after freedom. He admits that Mary Todd has nearly sucked the life out of him, that her bottomless grief leaves no room for the mourning of Abraham or his son. He loves her and hates her. She loves him but blames him for killing her sons. It is madness. It is the Lincoln marriage. It is life unvarnished. It is Lincoln Agonistes.

The film has its flaws. An opening scene in which two white soldiers quote the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln with a black soldier giving the closing lines is Disney-esque and the closest Spielberg comes to the simplistic sentimentality of War Horse. The film may be too long for some audiences and it is certainly a “talkie,” meaning that talk, not action, propels the narrative forward. It is vaguely reminiscent of the historical novels of Gore Vidal, in which parlor scenes progress one upon the other, all action described by a stylishly attired character ensconced on the finest of chairs, sherry in hand.

Also disappointing is the treatment of Lincoln’s faith, so defining of the man and the president but nearly absent in this film. Indeed, in one of the few nods to any kind of religion, the film captures the president and First Lady on a carriage ride discussing where they will go after the war. Lincoln would like to go Jerusalem, to the city of “Solomon and David,” we are told. But the original account, given by Mary herself, has Lincoln saying that he would like to walk in the “footsteps of the Savior.” Why the change? Neither Spielberg nor Kushner, both men Jews, have ever retreated from Christian themes. Why now?

These, though, are the blemishes on the chin of The Mona Lisa. Spielberg’s Lincoln is a finely crafted gift to a beleaguered nation, an infusion of Father Abraham’s American heart when it is desperately needed. Some films remind us of the past. Some films bring the past to bear upon our own times. Few have the power to impart the spirit that was upon our fathers. Lincoln does.

This episode was originally released on March 26, 2011. In light of the recent article by Kalefa Sanneh in New Yorker magazine, we thought we’d share it again. You can read Sanneh’s “The Hell Raiser” at www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/26/121126fa_fact_sanneh

Yet this scant treatment of faith may be due to the unending problem of Lincoln’s spirituality itself. His religious life has been one of the most ill-defined, hotly-debated topics in Lincoln studies since nearly the moment he died. Historians still grapple with these matters and the filmmakers who must rely on their work may find the entire matter of Lincoln’s spiritual life too contentious and unsettling to pursue. Still, Lincoln’s great struggle for faith shaped him profoundly and we should know this story in order to fully understand the imprint he is having, even now, upon our age.

The challenge is that Lincoln lived through widely differing stages in his journey of faith, more than most men and certainly more than any other president. There is always the temptation to see his entire religious life through the prism of only one of these stages, thus neglecting the whole. To do this means missing the grand tapestry of faith that Lincoln wove during years of spiritual struggle.

There is, for example, the stage of Lincoln’s childhood years. Until early manhood, he was an intelligent, sensitive child who resented his father, found bombastic frontier revivals disturbing, and yet was capable of re-preaching the sermons he had heard almost word for word. Then there is Lincoln the young man, a voracious reader smitten with religious skeptics like Thomas Paine and remembered by the townspeople of New Salem as the village atheist.

The death of his son, Eddie, in 1850 devastated Lincoln. He turned for help to a Presbyterian minister friend, Rev. James Smith, who offered both comfort and learned challenge to his religious skepticism. It changed him. In this third phase of Lincoln’s spiritual life, he attended church, funded Christian ministries, befriended clergymen, and spoke more openly of God. It was during this phase that he entered the White House.

The bookends of his First and Second Inaugural Addresses define the transition to yet another stage of faith during his presidential years. Though in his First Inaugural on March 4, 1861, he referred to a God who has “never yet forsaken this favored land,” he perceived the war as under human control. “In your hands,” he told the departing Confederate states, “is the momentous issue of civil war.”

By his Second Inaugural four years later, he had seen too much suffering, had witnessed too many inexplicable Union defeats. He concluded that God had visited the war upon the nation as punishment for the sin of slavery. In this Second Inaugural, he spoke as prophet of an offended God, calling the nation to acknowledge divine purposes and “bind up the nation’s wounds.”

Clearly, he had begun to believe in a God who ruled men and nations, but had he yet become a Christian? We cannot know with certainty, though Mary Lincoln’s account of her husband’s final words raises intriguing possibilities. Confiding to a Baptist minister a decade after her husband’s death, Mary recalled that during a carriage ride on April 14, 1865, and later that evening at Ford’s Theater, the president assured her that following the war, “We will go abroad among strangers where I can rest. We will visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.” 

If Mary remembered correctly, these were the last words Abraham Lincoln ever spoke. John Wilkes Booth’s derringer ball entered his brain in the next seconds. If true, it means that a dramatic progression of faith had been underway in Lincoln’s life. We cannot know where it might have ended. We can know that Lincoln had journeyed at least as far as the religious vision of the Second Inaugural Address—to a just God both terrible and kind who works in history to draw men to righteousness.

Lincoln’s struggle for religious truth is a story Americans should know, even with its uncertainties and obscurities. It broke him, healed him, worked wisdom into him and helped to lift him to his great purpose. It was a struggle not unlike our own. We should be grateful then, for what faith element does appear in Lincoln, and grateful also that his spirit is being freshly imprinted upon our troubled times. Thank you, Steven Spielberg.

They come to us as tones of faith from Abraham Lincoln’s presidential speeches: “a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land,” “the Almighty has his own purposes,” “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” and “the judgments of the Lord are true.” They suggest a God who rules in the affairs of men and does so with both love and justice.

Yet this God was not always Abraham Lincoln’s God. In his early years, Lincoln hated this being. It was a natural response. He was thoroughly convinced that God, in turn, hated Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the most surprising facts of Lincoln’s life, a fact that makes his religious journey among the most unique in our history.

The sixteenth president of the United States was born on an American frontier swept by almost violent religious revivals. Men routinely responded to preaching and the “Spirit’s work” by shouting, convulsing, passing out and even barking. Few were caught up in this excitement more eagerly than Thomas and Nancy Lincoln.

Their intelligent, sensitive son found it all too much. Young Abraham rejected his parents’ loud, sweaty brand of faith and in part because he could not reconcile the weepy, religious version of his father with the man who beat him, worked him “like a slave,” and resented his dreams of a more meaningful life. Historian Allen Guelzo has written, “on no other point did Abraham Lincoln come closer to an outright repudiation of his father than on religion.”

Young Abraham chose reading over religion—and reading made him rethink religion. Alongside Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe, he read the works of religious skeptics. Books like Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Ruins by the French writer Volney gave Lincoln the intellectual tools for dismantling the edifice of religion.

His move to the Illinois village of New Salem did the same. As his friend and biographer, William Herndon, wrote of this time, “he was surrounded by a class of people exceedingly liberal in matters of religion. Volney’s ‘Ruins’ and Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’ passed from hand to hand.” Lincoln drank deeply from this anti-religion stream. Soon he began openly attacking Christianity. Friends recalled that he openly criticized the Bible, that he called Christ a bastard and that he labeled Christianity a myth. He even wrote a pamphlet defending “infidelity.” To protect his political aspirations, friends tore the booklet from his hands and burned it. Lincoln was furious. He had become the village atheist.

His closest friends doubted his atheism, though, believing that he used it to mask a deeper pain: the suspicion that God had cursed him. This grew from his mother’s “illegitimate” birth. Lincoln felt tainted by it. Herndon recalled “rumors of bastardy” that convinced Lincoln “God has cursed and crushed him especially.” His outspoken atheism was actually “a blast, Job-like, of despair.”

Lincoln lived under this angry cloud during his first ventures into politics, into a troubled marriage and through the sufferings that marred his life and assured him of his curse. Oddly, it was through the portal of these very sufferings that faith slowly returned.

When little Eddie Lincoln died in 1850, just shy of his fourth birthday, his parents were devastated. Ever haunted by depression, Abraham needed help pushing back the darkness. He turned to the Reverend James Smith, a Presbyterian minister in Springfield. The two met, counseled and prayed. Slowly, unsteadily, a change began.

It was the bugle call of Lincoln’s epic battle for faith. Though he never joined a church and seldom spoke of Jesus Christ publicly, he became our most spiritual chief executive, sometimes more prophet than president.

We see this in his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He told his cabinet he did it because of a covenant he made with God. He would end slavery where he could if God would grant the Union significant victories. He had become convinced the war was divine judgment upon a slave-trading nation. He believed the act of Emancipation could help lift that judgment.

This same sense of need to mediate between God and the nation infused his Second Inaugural Address, perhaps the greatest of American political sermons. God wills this war, Lincoln said, in order to purge the wickedness of slavery. Now, at war’s end, both North and South should humble themselves, honor God’s righteous judgment, and heal the land through forgiveness and mercy. It tells us much about Lincoln’s religious views in the latter years of his presidency that he expected the speech to disappoint the nation. Why? “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them,” he explained to a friend.

This “difference of purpose” was a reality Lincoln knew well. He had suffered under it, hated God for it, and, ultimately, tried to heal it in himself and in the nation. We should be thankful that he did, for these efforts helped to give us our greatest president.

The storms of the north Atlantic were so fierce and the ship so tossed that the main mast often dipped into the waves. It was a disorienting, stomach-churning experience even for the experienced sailors among them. The small band of believers on board — men, women, an expectant mother and small children among them — were kept in the “tween deck” for fear of the buffeting storms. Many were sick. Some wailed their agonies endlessly through the terrifying nights. The icy winds wailed with them. It was a filthy, smelly, terrifying time of testing.

But the elements were not the only opposition these Christians, who would soon be called “Pilgrims,” endured. There was one sailor who persisted in calling them “psalm-singing pukestockings,” which were the two things they spent most of their time doing. Though the Pilgrims forgave and prayed for the man’s soul, he was, mysteriously, the only person to die during the voyage.

For 66 days the little ship, no longer than a modern volleyball court, made the treacherous voyage from England to the coast of Massachusetts. And when they arrived, what must their thoughts have been as they scanned the howling wilderness which was to be their home? William Bradford, later their Governor, recalled:

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no house or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure. 

What could sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace. May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’

And perish they almost did. More than half of them died during that first winter, often called “the starving time.” At one point, each person’s ration for a day was no more than five kernels of corn and a few ounces of brackish water. Indian friends like Squanto and Samoset taught the white men how to harvest the bay and the land, but the yield would not be sufficient until the next year. So they buried their dead and prayed for the mercy of God.

In the spring they planted and soon after began sensing that God had heard their prayers. The previous winter had been the worst of times, but the harvest looked bountiful now, the settlement was growing and God seemed to be smiling upon them.

When the harvest was gathered that fall, their leaders called for some of the men to go hunting in preparation for a great feast to celebrate the goodness of God. Wild fowl, fish, and venison were gratefully prepared. They invited their Indians friends, too, who brought five freshly killed deer. The white women prepared hoecakes, cornmeal pudding and a variety of vegetables while the Indian women introduced delicacies made with blueberries, apples, and cherries. The most welcome new food which the Indians brought with them, though, was a new way of cooking corn in an earthen pot until it became white and fluffy — popcorn.

It was indeed a thanksgiving, but not just for safety and abundance of food. It was also a time to remember the words they had penned about their purpose for coming when they were still on The Mayflower. The came, they said, “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” “for propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

So they were. And we ought to remember them this Thanksgiving, and take their mission to our hearts.

***

“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”

William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

In this blog, I want to describe three other strategies for reading that have made a huge difference for me.

• Read in Categories: For most people, reading is entertainment. They read to pass the time, enhance a beach trip, or fall asleep. This kind of reader chooses books based on hot trends and current interests. More power to them. Reading is fun. They should enjoy it.

However, if you read for more than entertainment—in order to lead, to master a field of knowledge, to be knowledgeable about world trends, for example—you cannot read randomly, based on what’s hot or new. You have to read systematically.

For me, this means reading in categories. I am always working on a book, so research makes demands on my reading time. Beyond this, though, I read in four categories: History, Bible/Theology/Church History, Classics/Poetry and Contemporary Events. Then, after I’ve finished reading four books, each in one of these categories, I treat myself to one book on whatever I want: a good novel, a book on great hikes in Washington DC, a book on men and marriage, whatever interests me at the time. Usually, this fifth book is something a friend has recommended.

By reading systematically, I don’t allow the fashion of the moment or even my own preferences—I would read biography all the time! —to prevail. I can’t afford to. You see, leading, teaching and doing commentary like I do requires that I read “ahead” of the need. I need to stay current and constantly deepen my understanding because I never know what I’m going to be asked or how a trend shaping our world will be rooted in something ancient or unexpected. So, I read in defined categories to make sure I’m always informed in my field and as up to date about the world as I can be.

You will have different categories, certainly, but do develop a system. It takes nothing away from the pleasure and it helps you learn intentionally rather than accidentally.

• Mark Your Book: I know our teachers told us and told us often that we shouldn’t write in our books. They were right. If you attended public school like I did, your books were public property. Our teachers were right to demand respect. They were wrong, though, about how best to learn.

If I’m going to read a book, I’m going to mark it. I have a system of symbols I use to say, “I disagree,” or “This is important,” and even “What garbage!!” I make my own informal index on blank pages at the front or the back of each book. I mark the book so fully that ten years from now I can pull it off the shelf and use it for reference. By the way, psychologists tell us that when we mark a book using our own symbols we remember four to five times as much material.

I use this same system with e-books as well. I insert comments. I highlight. I use color codes. Most e-book reading systems create an index from comments and highlights. And most such systems—iBooks and Kindle, for example—allow this index to be emailed or printed. I often store these indexes with my project folders. This makes them searchable by Spotlight or some other disk searching utility.

The bottom line is this: Don’t just read books. Invade them. Drain from them everything you can and make sure you can go back to the meaningful material the day after you finish the book or five years after you finish the book. Make each book you read a tool for the rest of your life.

• Read Contra: You aren’t a great leader or a great thinker simply because you’ve mastered a narrow set of ideas. You start becoming great when you consider alternate views to your own and either answer them, modify them or make them yours. In other words, you have to read beyond your subculture, beyond your agreement, beyond your current understanding.

I read so broadly I make my friends nervous. I read gay literature. I read Marxist books. I read every New Atheist book I can get my hands on. I read the cutting edge Millennial or Gen X material. I read a huge amount of Black Liberation Theology and Hispanic underground literature. I read radical pro-abortion material and I’ve read vast amount of radical Islamist writing.

Why? Because it challenges me. Because I’m not afraid to have my ideas probed. Because if what I believe is really true then it will withstand all opposition. Because it means I can talk to almost anybody from any background no matter how removed from my own. Because I think it is the Christian and compassionate thing to do. And because it pushes me toward a sharper mind and a larger soul.

Also, there’s this: I’m an Christian and I’m tired of outspoken Christians being the least well read, least informed people in the public square. I want to urge a new intellectual depth amongst my tribe.

Read beyond yourself in every way. Its how you grow. Its how you reach for greatness.

I wish I could say this principle, still precious to me years later, has always been welcomed by my fellow Christians. I wish we were—together—thinking this way about American politics today.

It seems undeniably biblical to me. For example, the Bible teaches that God is sovereign but that man exercises his will also. Both statements are true, I understand, but because I’m a limited creature I can’t comprehend much more than this now, in this life. That’s fine with me. It’s a glorious mystery held in tension between two truths. I affirm both, hold both in my mind at the same time whether I understand either fully or not.

Most biblical truths are like this. We are saved and yet we are still being saved. God meets our needs but all who live righteous lives will suffer. Men are made holy by Christ but can descend to the nature of demons. God is near and removed, comforting and terrifying.

Thinking two thoughts at once. It is what we have to do when thinking about God and his truth. It is what the Christian life requires.

So you can understand why I am so disturbed by the standard Christian response to the current presidential election. Most Christian conservatives are so intent upon defeating Mr. Obama that they are intentionally keeping quiet about Mr. Romney’s Mormonism, a topic they would rage about any other time. Several prominent national leaders have told me how much they appreciate my book on Mormonism, but then they have touched their forefinger to their lips as though to say, “But let’s not talk about that now.”

I think my political views are fairly well known. I am pro-life and pro-free market (though not always pro-big business) and pro-family and so on. My lean in this election is obvious. But I do believe we can hold two thoughts in our minds at the same time. Yes, Mr. Romney represents our political values. And, yes, he is a member of a religion that rewrites every cardinal doctrine of traditional, creedal, biblical Christianity. Let’s vote for him if we so choose, but let’s not go silent on that other vital matter. In fact, let’s use the present moment as a chance to articulate truth. The one does not overrule the other. There is no reason to remain silent on theology because we have a political preference. In fact, it may be sin to do so.

Thinking two thoughts at once. It is how we understand God. It is how we understand the central truths of Christianity. It is also how how we live as citizens of this world while at the same time being citizens of a world that is yet to come.

The fact is that today we have to know more than human beings ever have—just to survive, much less thrive. I’m sure you’ve heard this fact: the amount of knowledge in the world doubles every three years. You can feel this even if you didn’t know it. You realize that if you don’t stay up to speed in your field, you’ll wake up one morning and find that you’re behind. Way behind. You’ll hear the clock of obsolescence devouring everything you learned to get your diploma or degree.

The solution to all this is actually pretty simple. We have to teach ourselves. We have to learn the skills of self-education. Yet if we don’t relax, develop a plan and commit to it over the long haul, we’ll be ruled by fear and we’ll spend time trying to catch up that we ought to spend on the essential matters of life—God, family, romance, and whatever else we are called to pursue. What we need then, are methods, tactics really, in the battle to learn.

I certainly have not mastered all this. I have, though, learned some helpful tactics. Here are a few of them, in this first of a series on learning how to learn.

• Keep it Raw: Everyday, I need data coming to me in distilled form. I need it raw and fast. I know that somewhere someone specializes in taking vast amounts of information and condensing into its most concise form so others can master it quickly. I hunt for people like this. I subscribe to services offered by people like this. I cut and cancel fluff. I keep concise and useful. For example, I get two newsletters everyday in my email box. They tell me much of the raw data I need to know about current politics. They are Politico’s “Playbook” (www.politico.com/playbook) and “Morning Score” (www.politico.com/morningscore). These are insider newsletters that provide statistics, analysis and links to a wealth of cutting edge articles and speeches. Now, I already have advanced degrees in political science, like you have training for your field. I don’t need someone to interpret Aristotle’s Politics for me. I need hard data. I read these newsletters because they are tight, current and worth it.

• Use Ingenious Apps: I read almost nothing online. I read almost nothing friends and experts send me when they send it. I read everything of this kind in an app and at a time I specifically set aside for this kind of reading. My favorite app for this is Instapaper. It allows me to read every kind of digital text stripped of pages and advertising and in a font and background I prefer. I think it is fair to say that I’ve doubled or maybe tripled my absorption of information because, first, I no longer read new material right when it comes to me and distracts me from other tasks, and, second, I read this material stripped of everything that hinders intake. Instapaper also allows me to read all of this material offline. Once I’ve read an article or blog, I can delete it, share it or send it to a folder of similar information.

• Use Zite: I do not read major magazines, journals and newspapers. I read a news journal of my own design called Zite. With this app, I choose from a pre-set list of broad categories like “politics” or “health.” I can also create unique categories like “public speaking” or “reading.” Zite finds articles that fit my categories and imports them into an elegant-looking magazine format. Then, once I begin reading in each of these sections, Zite lets me fine-tune. I can respond to each article, indicating whether I like it or not, whether I want to see more from that author or publication, whether I want to read more about two of the six topics in the article or whether I never want to see anything from this author or publication again. This means, for example, that I can turn my Health section toward racquetball and nutrition or that I can turn my Public Speaking section toward the technology of speeches rather than the language of speeches. I can get as sophisticated or as simple as I want to about theology, history, or science. I can rate and share, even store, everything I read.

• Join a Team of Learners: Hear this: You simply cannot learn all you need to learn alone. You need a team of scanners, thinkers and sharers in your fields. I have this. I have a gang of historians, lawyers, theologians, prophets, politicians and just plain back-bedroom geeks who are constantly reading, sharing and making their case. I do the same. We read. We learn. We share. We contend. We serve each other. This process streamlines. It condenses. It makes us all better, and brings us a huge amount of information we would probably never see otherwise.

• Don’t Just Read: I admit it. Listening isn’t my strong game. I’m very visual. I tell my family if I’m not looking at you, I’m not listening to you. However, I’ve begun working to increase my channels of information. I’ve begun realizing how much more I might learn, for example, by listening to podcasts and books on tape and the like. I live part of the year in Washington D.C. and I walk miles—hundreds of them. It is the perfect time for listening to an incisive podcast or a speech by a leading expert describing what’s about to happen in six months. I’m pushing against the habit of years in this, but I may end up doubling again the amount of information I take in. It’s worth it, then, not to depend exclusively on one avenue of information into my mind.

• Read Books—E-Books: I love the feel of a hardback book in my hand. I love the smell and the texture of the pages and how I look at the cover art again and again as I read the book, seeing it differently each time. I will always read great books, “real” books and many books. Still, I’ve found that books worth reading in my fields of knowledge should be e-books. Why? Because I can make more rapid, more extensive notes. Because when I use Kindle books (though not iBooks) I can copy sections of text for my writing or video presentations. Because I can do word searches in e-books. Because I can read any Kindle e-book on any of my devices—my laptop on a plane, my cell phone when a friend is late for lunch. Because when I’m done with a book, it lives in the “cloud” but is always ready for use without taking up space in my home. Simply put, e-books cost less, I learn more, I can mark them up more usefully, I can use them for reference more readily, and they don’t clutter my life.

Related Articles (linked at http://mansfieldgroup.com/category/podcast):

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”

A Q & A with Daniel Day Lewis and Steven Spielberg

The Time Abraham Lincoln and a Political Rival Almost Dueled on an Island

She stared wordlessly at the tragic mess, gripped by an eight-year old’s sense of cosmic injustice. Then, tiny hand to forehead, —and with the weariness of the ages in her voice—she declared, “This is the worst day in history.”

It was the despair of a child deprived. It was dispelled by a double scoop of chocolate and a sugar cone. Dispelling the type of despair that has attached itself to our generation will not be as easy.

We hear the voice of this despair every time some cable news expert confidently claims that we live in the “worst of times” or that our economic sufferings approach those of the Great Depression or some other similar nonsense.  Such complaints are offerings on the altar of self-pity, refrains in the overwrought mourning of the historically uninformed.

Yes, I’m being harsh. This kind of vanity disgusts me—particularly when it is mine. John Updike once wrote, “History buries most men but then exaggerates the height of those left standing.” In the same way, our fashionable self-centeredness diminishes the hardships of other generations and exaggerates our own. It makes us resentful, small and unfruitful.

I asked a man who insisted that ours is the worst of all ages when he would have preferred to live if given his choice. He said that 1918 was his idea of a better time, just as the First World War ended and the “Roaring Twenties” began. It was a year with some appeal, but it was also the year that nearly a quarter of the world’s population was infected by influenza and as many as 50 million died. A woman who told me she hated being alive in an age like ours said she would rather have lived in the “wonderful Middle Ages.” She had seen too many movies. The average lifespan then was only 30 years. Few could read. A single plague killed 75 million human beings. Superstition raged. There was much to admire about the Middle Ages, of course, but very few people today would choose to live then rather than now after reading even a single book about that time.

The fact is that there has never been a golden age. There has never been an age free of hardship and misery. Pain and struggle is simply part of the human condition—not everywhere and all the time, but certainly somewhere on earth at any given moment in history. To expect to be immune from the adversities common to all men is a cowardly brand of pride.

It gets worse. What many people living today see as astonishing hardship is really just inconvenience. We think ourselves cursed because things aren’t easy, because the devices that allow us to live with ease sometimes fail us or because the price of our magical electronic world rises a bit. We should admit what is true: we live as kings compared to any other age.

We should also be grateful. We should be generous. We should live simply, not out of fear but because it is good for the soul and leaves us more to give. We should also own a sense of duty. We talk a lot about calling and destiny these days. Sometimes the needs around us are all the call we get.

Life is sometimes hard. It always has been. A life willingly surrendered to despair is harder still. Rejoice. God yet rules and there is much to do.

Related Articles (linked at http://mansfieldgroup.com/category/podcast):

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Romney’s Mormonism

Christopher Hitchens on Romney’s Mormonism

Of course, if they knew my thoughts on defense, the First Amendment, taxation, federalism, and limited government, they would not have many doubts. Still, I take it as confirmation of my attempt to be more biblical than I am political that friends even have questions. My politics lean libertarian right up to the boundaries of scripture and this is certain to be confusing to a culture angrily divided between left and right.

As much regard as I have for my Democrat friends, there are two primary reasons—among others—that I cannot join them. Take a look below at the platform positions of the two parties on two different issues of great moral concern. You’ll see there is a difference between the political parties and this is why, whatever commonality I might have with my more left-leaning friends, the positions below determine the entire matter of party affiliation for me.

Once you’ve read these, you might also want to peruse the complete platforms of both parties. I’ve provided links.

On the Issue of Unborn Human Life

Democrat Platform: “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”

Republican Platform: “Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”

On the Issue of Traditional Marriage

Democrat Platform: “We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples. We also support the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference.”

Republican Platform: “The institution of marriage is the foundation of civil society. Its success as an institution will determine our success as a nation. It has been proven by both experience and endless social science studies that traditional marriage is best for children.” “We reaffirm our support for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

The Democratic Party Platform

The Republican Party Platform

#1 – Mention Repubs once the 1st night. Say Tampa shows they aren’t ready to lead. Then, talk America.

#2 – Apologize. None of the president’s predictions proved true. Admit it. Say both sides were wrong. Do better.

#3 – Emphasize heritage. Repubs didn’t–no Dad Bush, no Bush Jr., no Palin. Own your history. Celebrate it.

#4 – Follow Michelle’s lead: the less partisan the speech, the better. Anger isn’t leadership. Elevate!

#5 – Don’t hide faith. This race is faith-filled. Step into it early. Don’t run. Admit errors, be truthful.

#6 -Many Democrats are pro-life. Clinton said abortion “safe, legal & rare.” I don’t agree, but where are you today? Declare it.

#7 – Explain vision for free market. “Jobs” isn’t’ enough. Many are gov jobs. Def. state vs. market roles.

#8 – 1/4 of U.S. says Pres is Muslim. Speak to it. He must define his faith. Be specific. Use Bible. Resolve this.

#9 – Natural to be cocky after Clinton. Don’t. Be humble. Admit mistakes, inexperience. It’s right & right PR.

#10 – Grieve the partisan divide, the loss of a center. Speak of American common sense. Commit to specific action. Then do it.

Related Links:

On Speaking Well by Peggy Noonan

The Fear of Public Speaking: Hardwired 

Until, that is, one of those acquaintances asks me to entrust him with the power of a public office. Then, though I should remain polite as grandma would have insisted, I am not fulfilling the duty of citizenship unless I insist on knowing everything about this acquaintance that might come to bear upon his conduct in office. His religion, among other features of his life, then moves from the private realm into the realm of respectful public scrutiny.

Why is the religion of a candidate important? Because if he is sincere about his religion, it shapes him politically. Because our religion—again, if it is more than window dressing or social club—is the lens through which we see the world. Because law and public policy are rooted in concepts of fair and good and right and just that are as much product of religion as any other influence. Because my vote puts civil authority under influence of a politician’s religion merely by helping to place the man in his position.

Religion matters. And it matters in politics. To say so is not to require an unconstitutional religious test or to fuel bigotry or to force all religion into political correctness. It is to simply insist upon knowing before Election Day what factors will be of influence while a man or woman sits in office.

Revere Ronald Reagan as we might—and I do—we would be justified in wishing we had known more of his religious views before he entered the Oval Office. We would also be justified in wishing we knew what was influencing him religiously while he sat in office, particularly when he was learning about Armageddon from his informal night time reading and then making pronouncements about its meaning for his presidency. Something similar could be said of the religious views of Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush or even Dwight Eisenhower. Religion shaped each of these to some degree as public men. Did we have opportunity to know specifics of that shaping before they entered office?

This brings us to the 2012 presidential race. Though we have men running for office who are profoundly fashioned by their faith, we have yet to hear definitively from them about how religion informs their politics. Numerous Mormons spoke in support of Mr. Romney at the Republican National Convention in Tampa last week, but the candidate himself said nothing of consequence about his Mormonism in his acceptance speech. Yet the Sunday after the convention, Romney sat in a Mormon gathering and heard himself proclaimed an “ambassador” of Mormonism. The speaker was J.W. Marriott of the hotel chain Marriotts and the sentiments were echoed around the country. Perhaps it is true. Perhaps there is even much in Mormonism that might make a man a sterling president. Frankly, I believe there is, but may we not hear of this, fully, from the candidate himself?

If another candidate were proclaimed an ambassador of the Roman Catholic church or of the South or of the Ivy League educated, wouldn’t we insist upon knowing exactly what this meant before we sent the man to the White House?

The same is true of Mr. Obama. We should ask for clarity about his religious views as well. He reads the Bible almost daily, has a team of very respected spiritual advisors, has been profoundly influenced by his chaplain at Camp David’s Evergreen chapel and has given testimony of his Christian faith as fully as any president in recent memory. He has also made it clear that his policies grow from his faith. He supports same sex marriage because he is influenced by the Sermon on the Mount, he has said. He champions policies for the underprivileged because of the ethics Jesus Christ taught. He reaches to the Muslim world not just out of geo-political necessity but because of a common religious heritage. We might welcome it all, but shouldn’t we know more? Must his blend of traditional Christianity and progressive social values remain a mystery to us?

It is easy to understand why candidates shy away from the political implications of their religious lives. It means defining themselves in a way that distinguishes them from millions who believe differently and it potentially puts another club in the hands of their opponents. So be it. We live in a democracy. Presidents are not allowed undisclosed loyalties—to foreign governments, to political movements, to private clubs and, yes, to religions. It’s time for the media and the voters to ask the appropriate questions. Now. Two months before the election. Before a religion of some kind begins whispering in the ear of a man of some party as he decides matters of some national consequence.

#1 –  Be Churchillian. Stop being the Anti-Obamas. A finest hour nears. Define the fight. Envision victory. Lead.

#2 – Drop the birther/Muslim themes. Say its good that the black son of single mom can be president. Then, don’t mention him again.

#3 – Story is the medium of our time. Don’t just preach conservative principles. Use story to impart and inspire.

#4 – Say this: Both parties contributed to our economic crisis. Both share blame. One has learned. One hasn’t.

#5 -Government is not evil. The free market isn’t an ever-benevolent deity. Extol the need for both within limits.

#6 – Don’t shy from faith themes so as not to draw attention to Romney’s Mormonism. Pray, honor God. We’re Americans.

#7 – Stop devouring each other. Aiken misspoke but he’s a good man. Forgive and rally. Embrace Ron Paul, etc. Heal up.

#8 – You must frame/position Romney’s Mormonism. Gallop says 63% know little about it. Frame it or your opponents will.

#9 – Demonstrate that business leadership isn’t rape and pillage but a set of skills transferable to the public sector.

#10 – Take a moment for prayer. Genuine prayer like Reagan led at the RNC in 1980. Pray for the Democrats, too. And all others. There is no political party of God, but we can turn a nation toward God.

Related Links:

Pew Forum Report: Mormons in America

National Catholic Reporter: Paul Ryan and Joe Biden’s Catholicism

Rick Warren Discusses His Upcoming Forum on Religious Freedom

Obama vs. Romney 101: Israel’s Threats to Bomb Iran

Poll: Eighty Million Americans Will Not Vote 

When I first summoned a book—yes, that once non-virtual, mite-collecting, gloriously stainable density of language—as though from thin air, it felt like a miracle of God. The text of a literary masterpiece could appear on my iPad screen seconds after I had first heard the title of that masterpiece. My iPad could hold hundreds of such masterpieces, each adorned by my ingenious observations (notes) and each eager to accommodate my every visual need—reverse video for when I read by my sleeping wife, large print when my glasses hid from me, medium brightness when on a night flight to Istanbul. No longer was I forced to lug a second suitcase full of books when writing on the road. No longer did my briefcase bulge with the latest unwieldy McCullough tome or Paul Johnson magnum opus.

And how the enhancements pleased! To materialize from that same thin air—without cost—a sample of a book I wasn’t yet sure I wanted to read was glorious. To search a 1000 page masterpiece for a single word or to know that, as I read each page, the exact number of pages remaining—even the exact percentage of text yet unexplored—reported itself at the bottom of the screen. All this was, to my book-loving soul, wonderfully satisfying.

And so I read–everywhere, and in every light and mood and position. I read and I read more than I ever had.

But then the evolution stopped. No progress. No invention. No stunning unveilings. We had hoped for the book made better. What we got was the book in a lesser, more disappointing form.

I was driven from my bookish joy by the realization that I could read an e-book but could not use it as a tool the way I did a “real” book. First, the footnotes in most e-books were somehow knocked out of sync—or did not exist. I could not match a statement to a source. Not a problem, perhaps, when reading a novel but a crisis if my e-book was for research.

Then I discovered I could not footnote the material in an e-book. This was because there was nothing linking my specific location in an e-book to its corresponding page number in the “real” book. Every time I changed a font or a reading view, the page number in my e-book changed. Publishers apparently hadn’t figured out how to link any page in any font in any view from an e-book to a specific page number in the “real” book. Meanwhile, my publishers weren’t happy about footnotes without page numbers.

I also noticed that most e-books were lacking the index so helpful in paper books. Again, this was a problem of changing page numbers. Publishers—or, to be fair, publishers of the books I was using—failed to include an index that automatically recalibrated reference numbers as I changed my text settings.

Horrors mounted. I learned I couldn’t copy text by highlighting and cutting as I could, say, in my various digital Bibles. I learned that while I could email myself the extensive notes I had taken in a given e-book, this list of notes did not include page numbers or the portion of the book my notes referred to. I was left with a chapter title, my note minus context, and the date the note was written. No page number! And no link to the original location.

Okay, maybe it isn’t as big a deal as I’m making it out to be. But to make e-books wonderful would be so simple.

First, make it possible for the reader to see both his e-book page number and the page number as it would be in the paper version of the book.

Second, make indexes that sync reference numbers with each new setting, make text exportable (we can get the text by typing it anyway!) and make sure tables of contents and footnotes adjust to setting changes too.

Third, when we touch a given sentence on our screens, let footnote options appear that are already formatted according to the top two or three manuals of style. In fact, give us the form for both the first mention of a source in a footnote list and all the possible forms after the first mention. And make each of these footnote options exportable so we can insert them into our own text. Why not? Isn’t the point of digital text to speed the learning and lessen the hassle? Let’s take it all the way.

Fourth, do all that wonderful stuff you talked about doing at the birth of e-books: stunning graphics, embedded video, beautiful page designs, and so forth. You know, all the stuff publishers used to be proud of whether the reader noticed or not.

Finally, for heaven’s sake, let us export our notes from our e-books accompanied by the text each note is tied to and the accompanying page number. And offer this in hypertext so later we can access any noted location from any digital device we choose. Come on, you can do it.

Do all this and we will celebrate you, e-book publishers. We will even be willing to pay more for our e-books. And you, in turn, will deliver yourself from the dangerous flat lining of e-book sales that currently haunts you. This is only happening because most e-books, you know, suck. Change this. And change the world at the same time. Steve Jobs would be proud. Readers will be proud. And you will be proud of the legacy you leave.

Let the enhanced e-book experience begin—again.

Yet if we consider this important day through the eyes of our Founding Fathers, we find that the Fourth of July marked for them not so much a beginning as an end to a long and painful process, a troubled time some have called the First American Revolution—the one in the minds and hearts of men.

We must remember that the famous Lexington and Concord engagements, as well as the storied ride of Paul Revere popularized in the Longfellow poem, took place in April of 1775. But it was not until July of 1776, some fifteen months later, that Congress formally endorsed the Declaration of Independence. What took our Founding Fathers so long? What was the struggle that took nearly a year and a half to resolve?

The men who would ultimately sign the Declaration of Independence were not men for whom the idea of revolution came easily. A conservative lot who held dear their Christian faith, their English heritage, and the unique colonial society they had cultivated at great cost in the wilderness, these men were not the wild-eyed malcontents we think of as revolutionaries today. Instead, the Founding Fathers were men of strong principle who could not back down when their ideals and lifestyles were threatened by English aggression. When a war they did not want was forced upon them, when their values, their property—indeed, their very lives—were at stake, peace on British terms was never an option, and here we find one of the most misunderstood truths of our national origins.

The American Revolution was fought, unlike most modern revolutions, to preserve a social order rather than to overthrow one. What we have called a revolution was in reality a colonial rebellion against a power seeking to destroy a largely Christian and traditional way of life. As management genius Peter Drucker has said, the American Revolution was a “conservative counter-revolution,” fought not by power hungry radicals trying to overthrow an established government but by loyal citizens against grasping tyrannical rule.

The truth now so often forgotten is that it was England who first declared war on the American colonies. Attempting to consolidate her gains following the French and Indian War, late in 1775 the British Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act, which broke off relations with the colonists and declared them a “foreign enemy.” John Adams wrote in response that the Act “makes us independent in spite of our supplications and entreaties.” England forced the colonies out from under Royal Protection and declared itself the colonists’ adversaries. This belligerence stunned the colonial leaders and they sought every means available to prevent separation. Even after Lexington and Concord, they hoped against hope that England would turn from her harsh course. It was not to be.

Finally, with every possible remedy exhausted, the colonial leaders pleaded their case in a Declaration before the nations of the world, claiming America’s rights according to God’s law and the law of reason. These United States, they said, “are and of a right ought to be,” free and independent.

The Founding Fathers were not radicals seeking power; they were family men, business men, ministers and, for the most part, Christians, who were forced to fight a defensive battle, seeking a return to established legal principles and governmental boundaries—and it cost them dearly.

Many of the signers of the Declaration were killed during the War. Some were heartlessly made to watch while loved ones were tortured or hanged. Many lost their estates and a large number suffered physical ailments for the rest of their lives from wounds incurred during the war. They were hunted, vilified and despised by the British and some of their fellow colonists alike. Yet having pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” these founding heroes could not turn back, despite the horrors they faced.

Writing some years after the events of the Revolution but as an eyewitness to most of it, John Quincy Adams wrote, “Posterity, you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.” Perhaps, even yet, we will. Perhaps.

It is hot, after all. Let us not do too much.

The campaigns save themselves, of course, for the conventions. Then, after these exhausting bits of theater, there is the required post-convention “Inevitable Victory Tour,” which often takes the form of an “express” of some kind or another. This field exercise is followed by the perpetual bombardments of the six weeks leading up to Election Day. Mercifully, none of this seems imminent during the judgment-of-God-heat of mid-summer, traditionally the doldrums of the political cycle.

So it is even more difficult to imagine from this lazy, hazy vantage what surprising controversies might descend upon the contests to come. They always do, though: the unexpected assumes the national stage during every presidential campaign season. Sometimes it takes the form of a political storm that merely clouds matters for a while and moves on. Sometimes it comes like a sky full of black helicopters intent upon carrying the national stage away entirely. Rarely, but occasionally, these outliers can be detected in advance. In 2012, one of them—much to the surprise of many Americans—will be the controversy of religion.

It might seem that all that could be said has already been said on this subject. Mitt Romney is a Mormon and Barack Obama is some kind of Christian and a large portion of Americans suspect the former and doubt the latter and so it goes in what G. K. Chesterton called “the nation with the soul of a church.” Surely we need speak no more of these disturbing themes and can allow the people to decide such matters—privately—on their own.

It will not be so, and here are eight reasons why.

As sophisticated and postmodern as Americans believe themselves to be, a Gallop poll in 2011 revealed that 20 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats will not vote for a Mormon. These numbers are too large to ignore. Mitt Romney cannot win without decreasing that 20 percent. The Obama campaign—though careful not to appear bigoted— will be required by the press of a tight race to push the other way. It will move religion center stage.

2. These indicators of distrust have not changed substantially since Gallop began asking about Mormons in politics in 1967. Only gays and atheists have worse numbers. It is a revealing legacy that is sure to make this election, in part, a referendum on Mormonism itself.

3. This same Gallop poll revealed that Democrats are 50% more hostile to Mormons than Republicans. It is naïve, then, to think that Romney’s Mormonism will not be targeted, particularly should the political left feel the election at any point slipping away. Stay tuned to Bill Maher on this score.

4. Then there is Romney himself. If New York Magazine’s Jason Zengerle was correct in his May GQ article, “Mitt Romney’s Dark Knight,” Romney’s senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom wants his candidate to go silent on religion. Fehrnstrom apparently believes that part of Romney’s problem in 2008 was talking about his Mormonism too much. If this is true, it may explain why Romney flubbed George Stephanopoulos’s questions about Mormon doctrine in an interview earlier this year. As a Latter-day Saint bishop, Romney surely knew the answers. Perhaps he was determined to sidestep a grilling about religion and was clumsily in the attempt. It left the impression he was lying. If he continues on this course, he will only create a vacuum that will have to be filled. Critics, anti-Mormons and political enemies will be happy to step in.

5. There is also Barack Obama. The testimony of those near him is that the president has undergone a religious change while in office. No longer under the influence of Jeremiah Wright as he entered the presidency, Obama began being mentored by men like T. D. Jakes, Dr. Joel Hunter, Rev. Otis Moss III—men more theologically conservative than Wright. This may account for Obama’s evangelical-sounding speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in February of this year, in which he mentioned “finding Christ,” his “Christian walk,” and having been “overcome by the grace of God.” This was far removed from his often-uncertain utterances about religion in 2008. If candidate Obama continues to sound like the Obama of the National Prayer Breakfast, this will also force religion to the fore in the upcoming race.

6. Remember, too, that we still live in a world in which twenty percent of America believes President Obama is a Muslim. Of late, that number has been rising. The question for this segment of American society will be which candidate to choose: “the Muslim or the Mormon?” This cannot but fuel religious controversy between now and November.

7. Roughly a third of all Americans are evangelicals. Most of them believe that Mormonism is a dangerous cult that subverts every cardinal belief of traditional, creedal Christianity. There is going to be a heated debate among this one third of the country during the upcoming election season—between those evangelicals who believe Mormonism is wrongheaded but that Romney is the only alternative to the far worse evil of Barack Obama and those evangelicals who will not vote for a Mormon no matter the alternative. It is a debate that will spill over into the country as a whole.

8. Finally, while the central issue in this election season is, in James Carville’s immortal phrase, “the economy, stupid,” some of the attending issues are faith-based in the eyes of many Americans. The obligations of the rich, society’s responsibility to the poor, gay rights, health care, immigration, and, of course, the relationship between church and state—all are religiously-charged for millions of voters. Mr. Obama has long framed these issues in terms of his faith-based social vision. Mr. Romney has not, but he and his advisors will realize that they cannot yield the religious high ground on these issues. This, too, will force religion onto center stage.

There are other matters that may drive religion to the forefront of the 2012 presidential election. We cannot be certain of all of them now. What Americans ought to know by this time in their history, though, is that religion is seldom far from their politics, seldom much removed from American culture as a whole. The 2012 campaign is likely to illustrate this as much as any presidential election in the nation’s history.

It all may make the remaining months of summer, even with the heat, a welcome haven from the looming crusades.

CORRECTION: The audio version of Stephen’s book can be found here. Stephen mentions Oasis.com in the podcast, but is actually referring to OasisAudio.com. We apologize for the mistake.

We cannot know yet whether these hopes will be fulfilled. The central government of Iraq in Baghdad remains a scene of contention and conflict, with heated debate over the most fundamental rights. Americans have learned to their disappointment that non-Muslims have been forced to flee from the South of the country, that churches have been bombed, and that the rights of minorities have been denied. It is natural that many in the United States should wonder if their sacrifices will make for a better day anywhere in the Middle East–but particularly in Iraq.

On June 11, 2012, the government of Iraqi Kurdistan gave an answer. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG)—which is responsible for the northern quarter of the country, an ethnically Kurdish region—declared that its schools will now be religiously neutral. This means that they will teach the great religions of the world on an equal basis but will not press any one religion upon students or even make what is taught about these religions a part of the final examinations required for graduation. This is a profound change from the previous requirement that Islam be preferred in the classroom and that students master its doctrines as a requirement of graduation. It is an astonishingly broad-mined move by the government of a region that is 94% Muslim, that is bordered by nations like Iran and Syria, and in which an American teacher was shot and killed just weeks ago.

Iraqi Kurdistan is now the only region in the Middle East other than Israel in which the religions of the world are taught on an equal basis in the public schools but no one religion is given preference.

“This decision is a result of our Kurdish history,” says Mariwan Naquishbandi, spokesman for the KRG’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. “Kurdish Islam is not the Islam of Saudi Arabia or Iran. We have often been made to suffer by those who were our Islamic brothers. It has made us more tolerant, more able to see the good that other religions offer to Kurdish society.”

It is an attitude that comes as a surprise to many in the West who view all Muslims as alike—equally radical and equally oppressive of other religions. The Kurds, though, are a unique people among the nations of the Middle East. They are not Arabs but are historically identified with the Medes, an ancient people closely connected to Persian heritage and culture. Most Kurds were Christians long before they began converting to Islam in the sixth century. In fact, many Americans will know the Medes primarily from the pages of the Bible. The Medes played a prominent role in the story of the prophet Daniel, for example and are listed among the nations present on the Day of Pentecost, the day of the Christian Church’s birth.

Both their history and the heartrending suffering endured at Muslim hands have made the Kurds—already a people known for their hospitality—particularly welcoming of other religions. Older Kurds in Kurdistan today tell of how in 1948, when Israel became a nation and the Kurdish Jews left Kurdistan for their Holy Land, Muslim neighbors wept over the loss and frequently maintained abandoned synagogues—in some cases for decades after—in honor of their departed Jewish friends

It is an openness the Kurdish government has had to protect. When the Central Government in Baghdad insisted upon sending its teachers to start schools in the northern region of Kurdistan, the KRG refused. “The religious sectors in Baghdad are filled with religious fanatics,” says Naquishbandi. “We knew what they were trying to do. So we refused because we are trying to achieve a more democratic society.”

Naquishbandi found the KRG’s decision particularly satisfying. He has been working on this and similar reforms for years. As an example of the Kurdistan he hopes for, this intense, pleasant man with a ready laugh keeps both a Koran and a Bible on his desk. He has gained a reputation for his fairness. When he received complaints about an Arab evangelical pastor in the region, a man named Pastor Yousif Matti, Naquishbandi refused to move against the man until he had met him. After lengthy conversation with Matti, the official called those who complained and said, “I will not act against this man, but perhaps I will write something against you for condemning him.”

Over time, Matti and Naquishbandi became friends. The official eventually accepted an invitation from Matti to visit the United States. Along with his brother, a general and military judge, Naquishbandi toured parts of America, visited evangelical churches Matti was connected to and even met with Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn in Nashville, where the U.S.’s largest concentration of Kurds live. “I had asked a Mullah to join us on the trip to America,” Matti says. “People in America could not believe it, but this is how Kurdistan is different. An evangelical pastor, an Islamic Mullah, and two high-ranking government officials can travel as friends to the United States. It would not be possible for some other nation in the Middle East. It is possible here.” Matti founded and runs the Classical School of the Medes, which will soon have some 2500 students from all over Kurdistan.

The KRG’s change in school policy regarding religion is a stunning break from the traditions of the region, but it is a step closer to what many Americans have hoped for in these last years. For Naquishbandi, it is simply what his society must do: “This law is going to help with tolerance between the religions. This is what Kurdistan should be.”

I’ll write more of Saddam and genocide later, trust me, but the value of being able to type in that situation took me back to Berlin American High School in 1972. There was a short, gregarious Mexican teacher named Lou Moreno. He called himself “SuperMex” and he was the type of character who played cards with students between classes but who then would keep his assistants in check with the constant worry that they were on “The List” for some minor infraction.

He wouldn’t have loomed as large as he did in my life except that I once said in his presence—me ever the posturing jock—that typing was for girls. Mr. Moreno was the teacher of any course involving business machines and it turned out that for him typing was more than a skill—it was a pillar of life. So, he leaned into me right there in the hall, all 5’2” of him, and told me that he challenged me to take his typing class to see if it wasn’t as challenging as football practice.

I don’t know why but I did. I was the only male in the class and it truly was hard at first—though ultimately nothing near as hard as football practice. Sorry, Mr. Moreno. But it was not long into the experience when something—probably some hint of destiny—began winning me to the clean crisp way I could put words on the page. My handwriting has always been like tangled wire and so it was impressive to me that even I—servant of the unwieldy pen—could make myself understood on paper just like the rest of the world. I fell in love with it, got good at it, became one of Mr. Moreno assistants, and spent several high school years bouncing on and off “The List,”—which meant in and out of his very Mexican grace.

I was fortunate. This was in the mid-1970s. High speed, multi-featured electronic typewriters came next and then, by the time I graduated from college, the personal computer. I felt made for it all. I have an almost mentally imbalanced love of lists and calendars, I’ve always leaned toward the humanities and I am congenitally horrible at math and the technical side of science. My technological age gave me tools that compensated for my deficiencies and extended my gifts.

When I got my hands on a personal computer–PC for years and then the glories of Mac– it felt like destiny confirmed. I was gifted for nothing about the technical side. There is very little geek in my DNA. But the ability to have my already rapidly typed words enhanced in some way or moved at light speed around the world was intoxicating. How many times I have sat alone in a room and voiced my thanks to Mr. Moreno.

What I have not had a chance to tell him is one of my great regrets about his class. I learned to type letters with speed and confidence but I must have cheated or been on some sports trip when he taught the other students how to incorporate numbers and symbols into the whole. I’m embarrassed to this day that I can soar when typing letters but have to hunt and peck for anything else.

Now, two dozen books later, I don’t know how I could have done what I have without the fruit of Mr. Moreno’s challenge and the magic of typing. If I were not called upon to write thousands of words a week, hunting and pecking would be sufficient, even fun. But I spend months at a keyboard a year turning out tens of thousands of words and so I’m delighted with anything SuperMex taught me that makes it all go more smoothly. I even sit around thinking about how to improve the fine art of typing. Having wide shoulders and long arms, I tend to dislike small keyboards. The one I use fans out ergonomically, but what I really want is a desk chair with a split keyboard built into the arm rests. Weird that I think about such things, I know, but I also think a lot about how to redesign my racquetball racquet and the planes I fly.

I’ve read that we use a QWERTY keyboard made for the speed of typewriters in the late 1800s. Apparently the typewriters at that time would jam up if someone typed too fast. To prevent this, specialists studied the best design for typewriter keyboards and came up with QWERTY because it didn’t allow typists to move beyond the capabilities of the machine. A later design for the keyboard, called DVORAK, apparently allows typists to move much faster and make fewer errors. I’m tempted to learn it—I understand a modern PC can be set for both QWERTY and DVORAK—just to see if it makes any true difference. This is my sickness, you see, but it is also part of my craft.

So, I write this in praise of old Mr. Moreno and the wonder of typing. I’m grateful for it, even when I have to use it to describe the most ghastly of human crimes. In fact, as I prepare to fly home from Iraq in a few days, I realize I’m especially thankful for typing when I have to—get to—record the evils of mankind by way of addressing them.  And I remember with a laugh and a deep sense of indebtedness the challenge of a little Mexican teacher who somehow found his way to Berlin, Germany, to prepare me for my life.

But then Mark Twain won me. And Jules Verne. Orwell, Hawthorne and Crane sealed the deal. Soon I was hooked. I became one of those geeky kids who had to be ordered to the dinner table, forced by threats to leave my other, literary world.

Now each of my summers is a read-fest, with beaches, picnic tables and even the space under a tree calling me to a book. Most everyone I know has had the same experience.

Since I want only to encourage this summer addiction, I thought I would offer a few suggestions for great books to read over the next few months. These ten books provide some fascinating journeys, perfect for the refueling, re-inspiring and just plain fun that summer reading ought to be.

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1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
This big canvas treatment of introverts and their value to the world is my favorite book of the year so far.

2. Mrs. Kennedy and Me, Clint Hill
Secret Service Agent Clint Hill’s tender account of guarding Jacqueline Kennedy is a moving answer to the recent antics of less honorable agents.

3. The Demise of Guys: Why Boys are Struggling and What We can Do About It by
Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan
This is an e-book by the folks at TED on a vital subject. It is short, written by brilliant authors and it makes you want to be a better man–or at least help grow one.

4. 11/23/63 by Stephen King
This time travel novel centered around the Kennedy assassination is both an exciting read and a story that raises important questions about free will, memory, and the forces that shape culture.

5. Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt
Hyatt, the former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, is an expert on social media in the service of a brand and he pours his wisdom liberally onto these pages.

6. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo
The skill of presentation as story is the heart of this book and, though you can easily read it at the beach, it may transform your career.

7. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels by N. T. Wright
I can’t say it any more clearly: this may be the most important Christian book of the year.

8.  Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier
Frazier gave us the magnificent novel Cold Mountain and the same gifts are on display in this rich story of the Cherokee of North Carolina during the Great Removal, better known as the Trail of Tears.

9. Don’t Quit Your Day Job, edited by Sonny Brewer
This e-book is subtitled “Acclaimed Authors and The Day Jobs They Quit,” which hints at how inspiring this book is.

10. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
I think every summer’s reading should include some classics and this one is perfect, since most people today thing it is a horror story but it was intended as a stark statement of man’s agonized longing for God.

The Mansfield Group conducts its training intensives in Nashville and Washington DC at elegant private locations and is known for customizing its approach to fit individual needs. Stephen Mansfield explained, “I think our work in this arena is increasing because we make our sessions fun, because we do extensive analysis before the sessions begin in order to develop wise strategies and because we stick with our clients for months after to make sure that their political campaign or promotional tour is a success. We thoroughly enjoy seeing the folks we work with achieve new heights.”

The Mormonizing of America helps explain the faith of the other candidate in the presidential race, Mitt Romney. Though the book rarely mentions Romney, it is an engaging, hard-hitting overview of Mormon beliefs and history that illuminates one of the most critical issues in the 2012 race–What does the rising influence of Mormonism mean for America?

The expanded, updated edition of The Faith of Barack Obama is in stores now. The Mormonizing of America releases in late June. Watch this website for interviews and updates on both books.

She carried the best of nearly everything. Her staterooms, ballrooms, restaurants and fifty-foot wide promenades were the talk of Europe. She shone with the best art, books, furniture, and even gold bathroom fixtures. She boasted a gym complete with exercise bikes, a rowing machine, a swimming pool, and a squash court. She even carried a Renault car, the finest hunting dogs available, four cases of opium, and luggage bulging with such valuables that one woman’s suitcases were estimated  as worth more than $177,000.

Her passengers were a cross-section of the age, from the mainly Scots-Irish passengers below in third class to the stunningly wealthy many floors above. The rich included John Jacob Astor, Macy’s founder Isidor Straus and a millionaire playboy named Guggenheim. President Taft’s military advisor, the music teacher to Theodore Roosevelt’s children, a squash pro, a movie star, a thief, several gamblers, the Titanic’s architect, and hundreds of far more common people were aboard. The Titanic, despite her name, was the world in miniature.

“Madam, God himself could not sink this ship.” It was something a steward had said. Hundreds heard him on the day most passengers came aboard. Several couples were discussing the boast over a late drink one evening when it suddenly felt as though the wind had picked up. It was 11:40 p.m. on April 14. Titanic had collided with an iceberg on her starboard side. It left a twelve foot gash.

Ships God can’t sink don’t need their full complement of lifeboats, so there were only enough for 1,178 of the 2,207 passengers. As the shrill alarms sounded throughout the warm, sleepy ship, the cruel reality settled first into the mind of the captain and then his crew: hundreds of people were about to die.

Two hours later—after panic sent half empty lifeboats out on the oil-black sea and a few men posed as women to save their own lives and husbands lied to get their wives to leave them–the ship, which had been slowly sinking nose-down, suddenly groaned and lifted its twenty-three foot propellers high in the air as it slid into its grave.

Titanic. We seem unable to finish with her story. A hundred years later she still fascinates and speaks to us as a symbol of pride, folly and of the fragility of man.

She begs comparison with a second ship that left from the same port and crossed the same ocean 300 years before in 1620. This ship was a far humbler offering. No larger than a volleyball court and but a few stories high, she would have fit completely inside one of Titanic’s ornate ballrooms. She leaked profusely, carried only 103 souls and allowed little space for supplies. 

Her passengers suffered. One third were children. One was a pregnant woman. Most had never been on the open seas. They endured violent North Atlantic storms and piercing, icy winds. It was a terrifying, bone-breaking season in hell, made worse by incessant vomiting and screaming. It lasted sixty-six days.

Yet this more unlikely ship, named The Mayflower, arrived. She has become a symbol of persecution, sacrifice and suffering turned redemptive by a people’s faith. She carried the people we now call “the Pilgrims.”

It is the tale of two ships. One should easily have completed its maiden voyage, the other—an old wine barge—would have raised few questions had she sunk. The one carried the wealth of an age, the other a people harried from their nation for their faith. The greater was launched with a dismissal of God, those of the lesser looked to God as their hope.

The Titanic and The Mayflower as symbols have been made to serve many agendas, have been fitted into widely varying schemes. They were, at the least, two ships carrying two different types of people for two very different purposes. None of this determined what happened, of course. But that it did happen—that the mighty may fail, that the downtrodden may eventually succeed, that neither escape suffering, that neither are without flaw, and that God may play a role—teaches us what we need to know.

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#5: Critics are not enemies.

We have all had this experience. We are listening to a speaker who has been stung by a critical word. He is hurt, enflamed. He uses his speech to strike back. He hits hard and does not let up. But he is talking past us. We do not know what has been said and we do not understand why we are subjected to this angry tirade. Moreover, rather than being impressed with the persuasiveness of his argument, we leave more impressed with how small and vain this man is. He has lost us, and all because he could not rise above, could not let criticism go unanswered and unavenged.

It was the great missionary statesman E. Stanley Jones who said, “My critics are the unpaid guardians of my soul.” It is a truth that would serve Sarah Palin well. There is wisdom to be heard in the mouth of one’s enemies and she would be well served by knowing this. Critics hold up a mirror we would not otherwise see, allow us a clarified view of ourselves that we cannot get any other way. We have to discriminate, of course, and pick out the diamonds of wisdom from the dunghill of hate. Still, there is truth to be had and the wise leader learns to face criticism, discover the truth in it, and change accordingly. It distinguishes greatness of soul from vanity and rage, carefully crafted performance from genuine largeness of heart. Sarah Palin is capable of these, but only if she refuses to be embittered by those who strike at her.

#6: The poor and the needy are conservative concerns, too.

It is an oddity of modern politics that while conservatives believe they have the solutions for the poor, they seldom mention them. Conservatives prefer to speak in general terms about a healthy economic, about opportunities to achieve, and about the character that leads to prosperity, but rarely do they mention the poor or the underprivileged. It is almost as though they think that to mention the poor is to play into liberal hands. What they end up doing, though, is losing the battle in the popular mind by yielding the high ground of compassion and benevolence to their opponents.

Sarah Palin knows better. She comes from a family that, while far from poverty, fought hard to meet its needs. Both her parents worked a variety of jobs to serve the family and the Heath obsession with hunting was about more than sport. It was about feeding six hungry mouths. Then, when she married, she lived on a blue color workman’s salary and often struggled to make ends meet. In her family experience and in decades of life in the Mat-Su Valley, she has seen want and poverty and she knows the interplay of injustice and low character that can lead to both. She can connect these issues to conservative answers in a manner that few politicians today are able to achieve.

She should break out of the Republican manner of years and become a champion of conservative solutions for the poor. She should reintroduce words like “poverty,” “needy” and “hurting” to the Republican lexicon and prove the power of non-statist solutions for one of the desperate needs of our time. As a mother, as an oil field worker’s wife, and as a woman who has been willing to know and love the destitute, she is qualified to do—and perhaps courageous enough to do—what most politicians on the right are not: challenge the political left on the home turf of underprivileged America.

#7 Know your boundaries.

Sarah Palin is a woman of scripture and so she knows the pleasant words of Psalm 16: “My boundaries have fallen in pleasant places.” They are words that suggest the contentment, the effectiveness and the peace of living within ones range of abilities. It is a truth she should grasp anew as she steps on the stage of whatever is next for her in life.

Most people who become prominent reached their position by challenging barriers. They are African-Americans who defied racism or women who charged glass ceilings or the many who overcame some potentially defining flaw in their lives. They are not cowards and they are not weaklings. They have known their battles.

Yet the one of the great lessons of their victories should be the power of concentrated force. You do not break through by applying strength broadly. You penetrate at a defined point. You force through at a pinprick and then you broaden once you have broken out to the other side.

Many who have reached prominence have not learned this. They interpret their victories as an affirmation of their strength in all things. Rather than learning their lane and gaining a clear understanding of their boundaries, they overreach and attempt what is not theirs to achieve.

Sarah Palin has done this. She is a gifted woman who has had much success and this could leave her with the sense that she should charge Sarah Barracuda-like into realms that are not hers. It would not serve her well, as her embarrassing television interviews have shown. Yet, if she could take stock of her strengths and gain a clear understanding of what she is not gifted to do, she could engage the challenges of American society where she can do the most good.

The alternative is a messiah complex, what Harry Truman called, “Potomac Fever.” It is believing oneself the answer to all things, assuming that there is no realm which should go unchallenged. But this leads to defeat and distraction from the few arenas in which victory could be sweet and meaningful.

There is good to come from Sarah Palin’s presence on our national stage, but only if she confines herself to those realms for which her God, her life and her principles have prepared her.

“Mansfield is one of the nation’s most respected voices on religion and culture,” said Byron Williamson, President and CEO of Worthy Publishing. “His most recent book, Where Has Oprah Taken Us? (Thomas Nelson, 2011), is a remarkable example of his objective, yet insightful view of faith as variously expressed in contemporary culture.”

In February 2012, Mansfield was selected as a blogger on religion for the Huffington Post. He appears regularly on CNN, Fox News and other networks as a commentator on religious issues as they impact popular culture.

During his decade as pastor of a Nashville church, Mansfield completed his doctorate and helped lead extensive relief work among the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In 2002, he transitioned to full-time writing and lecturing, and authored best-selling works on George W. Bush, John Paul II, and Barack Obama among others. In 2005 Mansfield was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq in the process of writing his book The Faith of the American Soldier.

“I’m excited about the opportunity to work with the Worthy publishing team – they get my vision for both non-fiction and fiction and are committed to aggressively marketing and distributing books through traditional and digital channels,” says Mansfield.

Mansfield’s first book with Worthy is The Mormonizing of American: How a Fringe Sect Emerged as a Dominant Force in American Politics, Entertainment and Pop Culture, which releases in the summer of 2012. Mansfield’s analysis will add to the national conversation as America moves toward the presidential nominating conventions in late summer and the election in November 2012.

About Worthy Publishing: Worthy Publishing, a division of Worthy Media, Inc., is a privately held Christian publishing company based in Nashville, Tennessee. Focusing on a select list of new books each season, Worthy publishes a wide variety of categories including fiction, spiritual growth, current events, biography, devotionals, and Bibles.

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#3: Do not run away from Faith. Articulate it.

It is conventional wisdom in some quarters that politicians should de-emphasize their religious lives in deference to a secular society. This reasoning contends that the public wants to know that their leaders have a meaningful faith, thus assuring lofty values and morality, but that they don’t want that faith to be too visible. This view has led many a politician to publicly distance themselves from their most cherished beliefs and it may have moved Sarah Palin to downplay her faith to the point of extremes in her autobiography, Going Rogue, as we have seen.

There is a counter argument, though, that the public is eager to know what their leaders actually believe but are nervous about unexplained religious platitudes. When George W. Bush said that his favorite political philosopher is Jesus Christ “because He changed my heart” and yet let this stand without explanation, the public was left wondering how this private belief might shape the life of the nation. When Ronald Reagan began pondering the eventuality of Armageddon, the conflagration that some students of the Bible believe will bring history to a violent end, many Americans were naturally concerned about what he might conclude. And Jimmy Carter spoke of being “born again” but took no pains to explain what this might mean in for his role in the White House.

The lesson is not that modern politicians should run away from their faith. The lesson is that modern politicians should explain their faith and what it might mean for their conduct in office. Sarah Palin is uniquely equipped for this. Despite negative press to the contrary, she is a well-read, well-pastored, well-taught evangelical who could easily articulate the meaning of her brand of faith for public policy. She should turn from the dumbed-down approach she chose in Going Rogue and become the articulate evangelical politician that she is perfectly positioned to be.

#4: Dare to grow.

It was hard to watch. In a January, 2010, interview, Fox news star Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin a simple question: “Who is your favorite Founder?” Palin, flustered, answered, “You know, well, all of them, because they came collectively together with so much….”

Beck interrupted. “Bullcrap” he said. “Who’s your favorite?”

Palin kept going. “…so much diverse and so much diversity in terms of belief, but collectively they came together…. and they were led by, of course George Washington, so he’s got to rise to the top.”

It was not the first time that Sarah Palin had flubbed an interview and by her own admission. Yet this one, and all the ones before, provides her with an opportunity: Grow. Deepen. Increase. Right there in public view. Read and learn and broaden and put the fruit of it on public display.

There are those who will urge her otherwise. Some in American politics believe that it is best to stay in the shallow end of the pool. It is safe there and free of embarrassment. There is no need to admit that there are things you don’t know. Cover your ignorance and charge your staff to make sure your lack of knowledge is never exposed.

Yet this approach is not befitting a serious leader who intends to effect profound change. It is also not worthy of Sarah Palin. She should draw from her strengths. She is an aggressive reader and she retains what she learns. This is her heritage. She should build on it. She should read and let the public hear about it. She should consider an Oprah-like, conservative book club and so become identified with great literature and great ideas. She could even call the occasional summit of notable conservative minds and tell them, “Look, I’ve been in public office for more than a decade and I don’t know some of the things I should. Many Americans probably feel the same way. Let’s talk about the seminal ideas and solutions for our time.”

There is no shame in not knowing. There is even no shame in not answering well. There is shame, though, in not knowing or answering well the second time around.

#5: Critics are not enemies.

We have all had this experience. We are listening to a speaker who has been stung by a critical word. He is hurt, enflamed. He uses his speech to strike back. He hits hard and does not let up. But he is talking past us. We do not know what has been said and we do not understand why we are subjected to this angry tirade. Moreover, rather than being impressed with the persuasiveness of his argument, we leave more impressed with how small and vain this man is. He has lost us, and all because he could not rise above, could not let criticism go unanswered and unavenged.

It was the great missionary statesman E. Stanley Jones who said, “My critics are the unpaid guardians of my soul.” It is a truth that would serve Sarah Palin well. There is wisdom to be heard in the mouth of one’s enemies and she would be well served by knowing it. Critics hold up a mirror we would not otherwise see, allow us a clarified view of ourselves that we cannot get any other way. We have to discriminate, of course, and pick out the diamonds of wisdom from the dunghill of hate. Still, there is truth to be had and the wise leader learns to face criticism, discover the truth in it, and change accordingly. It distinguishes greatness from vanity and rage, carefully crafted performance from genuine largeness of heart. Sarah Palin is capable of these, but only if she refuses to be embittered by those who strike at her.

Further reading: After Birth Abortion: The Pro-Choice Case for Infanticide by William Saletan.

I love what we got on the page and I loved running around Alaska with Dave—having tea in Palin’s parents’ living room, meeting with her pastors and friends. It was a ball. And we grew to love our country even more because it is where a gifted, ambitious woman can rise.

In our last chapter, we dared to make some suggestions, to offer some truths that would serve Governor Palin well. After watching HBO’s Game Change this week, I thought of this chapter and decided to offer it as a series of blogs. So, here are the first two of seven principles we offered. They are more relevant now than ever—for Palin, for me, for every leader.

By the way, our book is as cutting edge now as it was in 2010. I hope you’ll pick it up at your bookstore, or order it from Amazon here.

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#1: Love ennobles politics.

This may seem a sickly sweet, syrupy thing to say. It may sound too much like Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “politics of meaning” or George H. W. Bush’s “thousand points of light.” These are the types of phrases that speechwriters love for their euphony but which fall empty upon the public’s ears. To speak of love anywhere in the proximity of politics may simply sound like more of the same.

Yet, any statesman who is serious about leading well, who is intent upon leaving a lasting impact upon society, must find the highest, most genuine motive for their politics. They must sort through the popular rhetoric just as they sort through the crowded rooms of their own inner life to discover the linear connection between their times, the needs of those they serve, their skills, and the political passions of their heart. This is how statecraft grows from soul craft.

It does not require an exhaustive review of Sarah Palin’s political career to discover that she is at her best when she is leading out of love. Her best speeches grow from her love for Alaska and her people. Her most dramatic acts of service have come from a desire to end the corruption that grew like a cancer on the civic body she loves. She has shown herself most noble in the care of her family, in her welcoming of a special needs child, in her honor for her friends. All of this is about love.

From the time of John McCain’s summons, Palin has been on the attack. This is what that critical moment in the 2008 election required, what Republicans were desperate for and what wrung the most thrilling response from the crowds. Palin rose to the call. She transformed bedeviling Obama’s every act into an art form and later served both John McCain’s senatorial race and the Tea Party movement with large doses of well-crafted venom.

There is more to her than this, though, and she must re-discover it for herself before the clock runs out on her current plan of assault. She knows what love is. She grew up in a loving home and entered public life largely for what she held dear rather than for who she wanted to destroy. She must recover this inspiration and do it now, remembering that while politicians carp and spat for a season, the work of statesmen endures for generations, ennobled by love of truth and love of those they serve.

#2: Hang a lantern on your weaknesses.

It is perhaps too much to expect genuine humility from politicians. They arrive at their heights by fiercely believing in themselves and it is not surprising that this should sometimes bleed over into pride and even arrogance. Tending these weeds in a politician’s soul is a matter for spouses, close friends and clergy. The public, however, should not be surprised that their leaders are flawed in such a way. Even Winston Churchill once wrote to his wife, “I am so devoured by egoism that I would like to have another soul in another world and meet you in another setting.” It should comes as no surprise that the lesser lights of our own day might feel much the same.

Yet there is a bit of wisdom that has come down through the years and which, if not a fruit of character, ought to at least be a tactic of self-preservation for public figures. It is this: Hang a lantern on your weaknesses.

The smart politician describes his faults before his enemies get a chance. He admits his failings with a laugh before his opponents have opportunity to portray those failings in dark and dangerous terms. This is not only a means of disarming the opposition but of endearing oneself to a forgiving and similarly flawed public.

There is a case in point to be imagined from the life of George W. Bush. It was widely known that he was beset with some syndrome of verbal confusion. Some experts said he was an undiagnosed dyslexic. He was famous for mangling terms like “strategerly” and for summoning his listeners to choose “the high horse or the low road.” This weakness on the part of the sitting president was a raucous playground for late night comics but it was a serious inability to communicate which tragically damaged his presidency.

Suppose he had decided to hang a lantern on his weaknesses. Suppose that rather than cover his inabilities he decided to have himself tested, admitted publicly that he had wrestled with a minor form of dyslexia all his life, and committed himself to address the issue. How this might have endeared him to an American society ever cheering for the underdog. How this would have made his rise to the presidency seem an even more astonishing feat. And what might this have meant for dyslexic school children the world over that an American president faced similar challenges?

This is a lesson that Sarah Palin must absorb. She has built her public success on her “Sarah Barracuda” reputation, on the strength of an inner force that blows past failings and flaws as though they do not exist. But this is unwise in public life, particularly in a media age where every blemish and discoloration is transmitted in high definition. Better the knowing laugh, the homey expression of self-deprecation, and the confession of weaknesses the world already sees. This will require a new skill set for Sarah Palin, and it will feel awkward and unnatural for a time. But it is more than posturing. It is the fruit of wisdom and a reaching for humility that at least reflects a respect for virtue if it is not a virtue in itself.