Christian left sees optimism in Obama’s second term

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/02/08/christian-left-sees-optimism-in-obamas-second-term/

Chris Herlinger | Feb 8, 2013

NEW YORK (RNS) Heartened by his inaugural calls for gay marriage and for bold action on climate change, leaders of the Christian left are confident that President Obama will now claim the progressive legacy they believe he craves.

While acknowledging disappointment over specifics in president’s first term — worry over the use of drones as a foreign policy tool is a repeated refrain — progressive Christians say they believe the president’s solid re-election in November has emboldened him, and freed him to pursue concrete progressive goals they say always have been in his heart.

Still, those goals and the legacy they could produce won’t come easy, says Gary Dorrien, an ethicist at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, one of the nation’s most prominent liberal Protestant seminaries.

“He’s got to ‘plant a flag’ on something,” said Dorrien, whose 2012 book, “The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective,” offered a nuanced view of a figure whom Dorrien describes as full of “protean irony and complexity.”

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