Authors: Jimmy Carter
ISBN-13: 9781615547494, ISBN-10: 1615547495
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Date Published: September 2006
Edition: Bargain
Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, An Hour Before Daylight and Our Endangered Values. He received a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy Award for his recording of Our Endangered Values.
President Carter has written importantly about his spiritual life and faith. In Living Faith, a huge bestseller, he recounted the values and experiences that shaped his personal and political life. In his companion book Sources of Strength, also a bestseller, he meditated on fifty-two of the favorite Bible lessons he has taught.
In Our Endangered Values, Carter offers a personal consideration of "moral values" as they relate to the important issues of the day. He puts forward a passionate defense of separation of church and state, and a strong warning of where the country is heading as the lines between politics and rigid religious fundamentalism are blurred.
Now, he describes his own involvement and reactions to some disturbing societal trends that have taken place during the last few years. These changes involve both the religious and the political worlds as they have increasingly become intertwined, and include some of the most crucial and controversial issues of the day -- frequently encapsulated under "moral values."
Many of these matters are under fierce debate. They include preemptive war, women's rights, terrorism, civil liberties, homosexuality, abortion, the death penalty, science and religion, environmental degradation, nuclear arsenals, America's global image, fundamentalism, and the melding of religion and politics.
Sustained by his lifelong faith, Jimmy Carter assesses these issues in a forceful and unequivocal but balanced and courageous way. Our Endangered Values is a book that his millions of readers have eagerly awaited.
By adding his own voice to the discussion, Carter reminds us of a time when religion was tied to such virtues as humility and to such practices as soul-searching. He may not have been one of our best presidents, but he is undoubtedly one of our finest human beings.
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | America's Common Beliefs-and Strong Differences | 7 |
2 | My Traditional Christian Faith | 16 |
3 | The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism | 30 |
4 | Growing Conflicts Among Religious People | 36 |
5 | No Conflict Between Science and Religion | 47 |
6 | The Entwining of Church and State | 53 |
7 | Sins of Divorce and Homosexuality | 65 |