Leadership

Barack Hussein Obama, born August 4, 1961, is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and the nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential election. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer, served as a law school professor, and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving in the Illinois Senate and the U.S. Senate.

This is a long way from the time when black people in America had to drink from separate drinking fountains, eat at separate lunch counters, ride at the back of buses, watch movies only from the balconies of theatres, and could not vote This is familiar territory for our own country but unfamiliar to the most powerful nation on earth: one American commentator has noted that “Race is the issue that changed us, shaped us, determined our path, and even defined the meaning of our faith. Now a black man is running for president of the United States. Amazing grace.”

Let us pray for a world where race, nationality, or gender is not the method used to determine the value of a person. And let us pray for leaders who have the courage to stand for the truth, irrespective of the cost to their popularity or personal enrichment.

Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change. - Robert F. Kennedy, in a speech in Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966