Our Endangered Values

America's Moral Crisis

By: Jimmy Carter

Narrated by: Jimmy Carter

Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

President Carter has written importantly about his spiritual life and faith. In Living Faith, a huge best seller, he recounted the values and experiences that shaped his personal and political life. In his companion book Sources of Strength, also a best seller, 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.

©2005 Jimmy Carter (P)2005 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

Critic reviews

• Grammy Award Winner, Best Spoken Word Album, 2006

"Carter speaks eloquently of how his own faith has shaped his moral vision and of how he has struggled to reconcile his own values with the Southern Baptist church's transformation under increasingly conservative leadership. He also makes resonant connections between religion and political activism." (Publishers Weekly)

a great citizen of US and the World

This is a GREAT listen. I wish my writing skills for this review could do justice to his book.
He does not pull any punches going thru dozens and dozens of hot topics from Abortion, Iraq, Korea, Executions, Poverty, Religion... Each is discussed with background, facts, bible quotes for and against and a idea where this current direction will take us and ways to handle the problem more effectly.

He's a bible scholar and STRONG christian; One issue he discusses is abortion which he is against. He comes up with many great middle ground ideas. Did you know that 2/3 of women get abortions because they cant afford the kid. The current administation is actually causing more abortions with this bad economy, no health care and all the other ways it is draining money from the middle class family. Any idea why abortions are way up from the clinton years.

Straight from the news today, he talks about why Bush should not give nuclear help to India. (If you couldnt think of a few reason yourself)

To steal a statement from another reviewer
"If you are interested in what a Nobel peace prize winning thinker has to say ..."

I also listened to his book "An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood", which was great. Very much like the painted house.

A must read

This is a well presented and soundly researched work. It is must read in view of contemporary political and cultural values and trends.

A great book

A great book that is read masterfully and with perfect intonation and inflection. I highly recommend this book!

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black!

There's nothing more disheartening than the American people being lectured from on high again by one of the most incompetent and dreadful Presidents to ever hold office. Please Mr. President shut up and go back to doing the good things that helped redeem your image in the first place after being soundly kicked out of office by the American people in 1980.

Pronouncements of Mr. Peanut

To hear Carter pontificate about moral values is irritating to the extreme. Here we have a lecture from the very man who brought us the Islamic revolution and betrayed the Shah of Iran -- who was a firm ally of America. This is the man who enabled the creation of the fundamentalist Islamic state which is now bent on America's destruction. Carter displays a complete lack of common sense as he criticizes a sitting American president both publicly and in his untimely book. This man is a menace to every American. If Carter was still president we would all be praising Allah.

Bait and Switch

In Our Endangered Values, chapters one through ten are oftentimes thought provoking and worthy of praise. Beginning in Chapter eleven, The Distortion of American Foreign Policy, the writer makes the switch to an annoying and redundant liberal triad against 2001-2005 American Policies. The balance of the book is based on extreme liberal agendas arguably based irrespective of post 911 reality.

Worthless

Having a liberal lecture America on what our values are is really quite a laughable notion. Abortion on demand, pornography in libraries, the removal of God from society, the idea that courts, rather than voters, are better able to decide the great moral questions of our time, are some of the values the left in this nation holds dear. Hopefully, Carter is right and these are endangered values.
Jimmy Carter should stick to something he's good at, like building houses.

A good idea...

This book started out pretty good, and I thought I was going to like it - but ultimately, I didn't. I had expected a book that would talk about the positive effect of virtues of 20, 30 or 40 years ago that have been lost today, but this book did not really touch on any of those. It was a very politically oriented book that was basically taking shots at the current Republican admistration - very deceptive given the title. In most cases I disagreed with Carter - this is not surprising, I am politically a conservative. What was strange to me is that we share very similar religious views, and yet I still found myself not agreeing with him on his values. Of course, this is always a danger when discussing either religion or politics - but it was much worse than usual here. I have never listened to a CS Lewis book and thought that he had completely missed the point - even when I disagreed, but that is how I felt with Mr. Carter.

Couldn't finish the book

I tried very hard to finish the story, but honestly gave up before I made it 1/3 way through the book. Mr. Carter has many talents, but I wouldn't rank audio performances as high on the list. I really wanted to support the former president in this endeavor, but cannot recommend the book. Thank you for your service, Mr. Carter, anyway.

Awesome

Way to go Mr. President.