Why Presidents Need Prayer

[DonViejo]

Joshua DuBois

These 44 flawed, brilliant men have carried burdens we'll never know in the loneliest job in the world.

It’s shortly after 9 a.m. on a muggy Tuesday morning in Sarasota, Florida. You’re reading a book—The Pet Goat—to a group of 16 children at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, a normal event in a national push for education reform. All of a sudden, your chief of staff, Andy Card, walks up and whispers in your ear: the United States has just been attacked. An airplane has flown into the World Trade Center. We don’t know who did it, and the attacks may be continuing.

If you stop reading, and leave in a flurry, you’ll scare the kids in front of you and project panic on the nation. If you pause and finish the story, you’ll surely be criticized for that, too. The country you lead is staring war in the face, and your own family, including your wife Laura in Washington, may be in the crosshairs. If you’re President George W. Bush, what on earth do you do?

It’s mid-December, 2012. A madman has just ravaged an elementary school in Connecticut, leaving 20 children and six faculty dead in his wake. You travel to Newtown to try and provide some measure of solace to the grieving families, and offer thoughts to a country so rocked by repeated tragedies that they’re on the verge of desensitization. You’ve known sorrow and death—quiet meetings with military families who lost their sons or daughters in Afghanistan, memorial service remarks at disaster after disaster—but this one hits too close to home. These babies looked like your babies. In the faces of these parents, you see yourself. If you’re Barack Obama, when the spotlight comes on, and it’s time for you to speak, how do you hold it together? How do you do what you’re called to do?

It’s late February, and the cold of winter outside your house is nothing compared to the icy pain inside. Your son, Willie, contracted a terrible sickness, likely after drinking the water from the place that you moved him to, the White House. After a brief illness, your dear boy dies. His body lies in state in the Green Room downstairs, while his mother, your wife, joins you upstairs, grieved to the point of brokenness. And as much as you want to comfort Mary on that afternoon, there is something else tugging at your attention: Jefferson Davis has just been inaugurated as President of the Confederacy, and years of war and bloodshed for the country loom large, if you’ll even have a country at all. If you’re Abraham Lincoln, how do you grieve and lead in these two distinct spaces? What do you do?

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/17/why-presidents-need-prayer.html

[DetlefK]

1. Ok, I'll do it and ruin the mood: This is but an empty feel-good article.

Flawed, brillant, broken and brave. You can't tell whether somebody is ready for the job until he has the job.

And prayer won't change that if a president turns out to be incompetent or malevolent.
Pray for the most powerful head of a nation in the world?
How about praying for the downtrodden and forgotten?
How about helping the downtrodden and forgotten?

[DonViejo]

2. It's interesting you believe you're able to "ruin the mood."...

Are you the all powerful Oz? And just what "mood" are you talking about?

[DetlefK]

3. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." ;-)

It's difficult to track the mood on DU. Sometimes the most sensible (yet unpopular) statements can get you into trouble if a loud minority runs afoul of it.

[DonViejo]

4. ;-)

Very true! Thanks for the great response!

[okasha]

11. Why not do all of the above?

Why do you think it's an either/or situation?

[Warren Stupidity]

5. intercessionary prayer studied and found to do no good at all.

The templeton foundation, hoping for a different result, funded a study that didn't turn out so well for wishful thinking and its advocates. I'd put up a link but I'm sure the google is working.

[hrmjustin]

6. So does that mean we should stop praying for people?

[Warren Stupidity]

7. It means that if it makes you feel good, have at it, but there is nobody listening who can

have any effect on the real world.

[hrmjustin]

8. Well that is debatable.

[Warren Stupidity]

9. fine, provide evidence that prayer is effective.

That is exactly what the templeton foundation set out to do.

[hrmjustin]

10. I can't prove it.

I pray for strength for the lost part and I sometimes ask for something.

[okasha]

12. A single study, whose results

have not been replicated.

By your apparent criterion, we should have accepted cold fusion.

[Act_of_Reparation]

13. LOL

Day, Kirk Patrick. "The Effect of Intercessory Prayer on the Physical Health of College Students." Order No. 3127405 Spalding University, 2004. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.

Harrison, Gloria Marie. "Long-Distance Intercessory Prayer: Personality Factors of the Prayor and the Prayee and their Effect on College Success of the Prayee." Order No. AEH9926065 1999. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.

Hill, Trey Louis. "Null Hypothesis Significance Testing, the File Drawer Problem, and Intercessory Prayer: A Bayesian Analysis of the Effect (Or Effectiveness) of each." Order No. AAI3059501 2003. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.

Turner, Derek D. "Just another Drug? A Philosophical Assessment of Randomised Controlled Studies on Intercessory Prayer." Journal of Medical Ethics: Journal of the Institute of Medical Ethics 32.8 (2006): 487-90. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.

Masters, Kevin S., Glen I. Spielmans, and Jason T. Goodson. "Are there Demonstrable Effects of Distant Intercessory Prayer? A Meta-Analytic Review." Annals of Behavioral Medicine 32.1 (2006): 21-6. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.

Sloan, Richard P., and Rajasekhar Ramakrishnan. "Science, Medicine, and Intercessory Prayer." Perspectives in biology and medicine 49.4 (2006): 504-14. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.

Kavanagh, Brian D. "Clinical Trials of Intercessory Prayers?" Academic Medicine 77.2 (2002): 109. ProQuest. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.


You're killin me, smalls