Our Endangered Values

America's Moral Crisis

De: Jimmy Carter

Narrado por: Jimmy Carter

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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

• 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 book

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

A true democrat

This affected me very much. Carter had strong convictions and stood up for those convictions, right or wrong. We should all be able to defend our beliefs and even stand firm in our defense of them.
Let us seek common ground on which we can Make America Great again. Jimmy Carter exposes major problems in our nation. Let’s fix those problems. Primarily, Too much money at the top.

Mostly good with some bias

I have great respect for President Carter and his commitment to integrating faith and public service. I enjoyed hearing about the experiences that shaped his character. This book makes some good points about social justice as a moral value that despite its strong roots in Christian theology has been undervalued (ignored?) by many politically active fundamentalist Christian leaders. As someone who, like Mr. Carter, grew up in a Southern Baptist church, I was especially interested in his descriptions of the movement of the SBC away from traditionally held Baptist beliefs.

Unfortunately, Mr. Carter's treatment of the Iraq war, torture allegations, and defense spending amount to a partisan attack on the Bush administration. If you dislike Bush you will probably be cheering along with these passages, but I found the lack of balance and constructive criticism on these and other issues disheartening. For more practical insight into foreign policy in the Middle East I would recommend reading Thomas Friedman; for a more balaced look at torture allegations, read Inside the Wire by Eric Saar. I was also disappointed by his treatment of economics in relation to moral values. For example, he criticises the low minimum wage in the US compared to European countries, but fails to mention Europe's high unemployment rate and relative economic inflexibility.

Mr. Carter's left-leaning foreign and domestic policy positions are no doubt deeply rooted in his understanding of Christianity and I agree with some of them in principle, but ultimately he proves his point that it is perilous to mix church and state. Unfortunately we live in a fallen world and positions that are morally justifiable for individual Christians do not always translate well into national policies that preserve and protect the prosperity of a pluralistic free society.

This book gives hope

President Carter is one of our most admired former presidents. In this well-written commentary on the current state of our Union, Mr. Carter reminds us of our most cherished values AND points out ways to return to those roots. Anyone who considers themselves a serious Christian AND a patriotic American should read this book. In a time of war, torture, divisive social issues and mounting national debt, President Carter gives hope to the notion that America can rediscover its soul.

Our Endangered Values

Excellent! Jimmy Carter has a handle on the threats to our society, no our world. He is inciteful and should be heard. Too bad some of our politicians are not listening. He should have remined president for the second term.

A must read

Jimmy Carter shows once again why he is the brightest president we have had. Insightful and full of well thought out answers to complex issues.

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.