From the Chicago "free registration required" Tribune:
Sen. John McCain, who is known for his reticence and even discomfort invoking faith on the campaign trail, was once dubbed a "Hell's Angel" for rioting against his captors in Vietnam in order to hold Sunday church services.
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In an extended interview, McCain talked about how his faith was tested during his
"There were many times I didn't pray for another day and I didn't pray for another hour — I prayed for another minute to keep going," said McCain, who was brought up Episcopalian but now worships at North Phoenix Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist church. "There's no doubt that my faith was strengthened and reinforced and tested, because sometimes you have a tendency to say, 'Why am I here?' "
McCain said his faith in God informs his decisions on issues of public policy. Christian conservatives are skeptical of McCain's commitment to many of the issues they care about, such as abortion and marriage. They have also been disappointed in his embrace of embryonic stem cell research. But McCain said he wrestled with that decision and hopes technology soon renders it obsolete.
Although polling suggests voters view faith as an essential ingredient in a president, McCain has never been a candidate to invoke God or dwell on religion. "In our case, faith is private," said his wife, Cindy, adding that once voters get to know him, "they will know he is a man of faith."
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How amazingly coincidental that Sen. McCain's "cross in the sand" story is sublimely similar to a story revealed in 1973 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
ReplyDeleteSen. McCain has admitted he admires Solzhenitsyn who was himself a political prisoner in a Soviet forced-labor camp (he recently passed earlier this month).
As Solzhenitsyn tells it, on his darkest day he simply stopped working, knowing full well that a guard could beat him to death at a moment's notice just for sitting. Another gulag prisoner silently drew a cross on the ground and that act gave Solzhenitsyn the strength and courage to toil on.
Solzhenitsyn story is remarkable enough, but that Sen. McCain would have experienced something just like it half a world away and decades later is even more emarkable, no?
Even more remarkable given that the McCain campaign has seen fit to crib recipes from Rachel Ray and the Food Network in order to make Cindy McCain sound like an apple-pie housewife and to add lines to foreign policy speeches that are amazingly similar to entries found at Wikipedia...