away when it was published....as though Mother Jones was not as good a journalistic source as Fox's Hannity and WSJ's Krauthammer. :eyes:
But here are some other good sources on this:
what may startle people, including her supporters, is that the group she has associated herself with since 1993 which sponsors these groups as well as the National Prayer Breakfast is very conservative and exclusive. Known now as the Fellowship, it is a group that reporter Sharlet knows very well given his past investigative pieces in Harper's Magazine several years ago, and a Rolling Stone piece about Sam Brownback in 2006. Digby has written about this group as well. Even though Mother Jones will not post the piece online until Tuesday, I have been given permission to post segments of the piece in the extended entry. I encourage all of you to buy the current issue and read the piece for yourselves, because Hillary’s association with the Fellowship may lead some to question her judgment and true beliefs, given what the group stands for. http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/010937.phpHotline-- Sept 2006
Hillary Clinton: The Faith AngleHillary Clinton’s hiring of “faith guru” Burns Strider as an adviser to her presumptive presidential campaign, reported two days ago in the Hotline, draws
some rare attention to Clinton’s religiosity, as yet unexamined in the same way that ’08 heavyweights like Mitt Romney and, through his high-profile meeting with Pastor Rick Warren, Barack Obama have been.
In Clinton’s case, there’s plenty to examine: religion seems to be the only part of her life that hasn’t undergone rigorous scrutiny. Though Strider, as a onetime staff member for Nancy Pelosi, is squarely in the liberal camp,
Clinton is part of not one, but two, prayers groups with distinctly conservative bents: an exclusive Senate prayer group that meets on Wednesday mornings, and a women’s prayer group that she’s been a part of since her early White House days. The women’s group is run by Holly Leachman, a layperson at the McLean Bible Church in Virginia,
itself magnet for prominent conservatives, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Republican senators John Thune and James Inhofe, as well as several Bush staffers and their families.Leach's prayer group includes many prominent Republican wives, among them Susan Baker, wife of Iraq Study Group co-chairman James Baker, who along with Leachman ministered to Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Leachman, mentioned briefly in Clinton’s memoir, Living History, is the wife of Washington Redskins chaplain Jerry Leachman).
http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/12/hillary_clinton_4.html Most of the prayer groups are informally affiliated with a secretive Christian organization called the Fellowship, established in the 1930s by a Methodist evangelist named Abraham Vereide, whose great hope was to preach the word of Jesus to political and business leaders throughout the world. Vereide believed that the best way to change the powerful was through discreet personal ministry, and over his lifetime he succeeded to a remarkable degree. The first Senate prayer group met over breakfast in 1943; a decade later one of its members, Senator Frank Carlson, persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to host a Presidential Prayer Breakfast, which has become a tradition.
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Hillary Clinton’s proficiency in this innermost sanctum has unnerved some of the capital’s most exalted religious conservatives.
“You’re not talking about some tree-hugging, Jesus-is-my-Buddha sort of stuff,” says David Kuo, a former Bush official in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who worked with Clinton to promote joint legislation and who, like Brownback, has apologized to her for past misdeeds.
“These are powerful evangelicals she’s meeting with.” Like many conservatives, they are caught between warring dictates of their faith: the religious one, which requires them to embrace a fellow Christian, and the political one, more powerful in some, which causes them to instinctively distrust the motives of a Clinton. Everyone in Washington experiences their dilemma at one time or another—the lack of an Archimedean point from which to judge Hillary Clinton.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/green-hillary