I’m not going to reinvent the wheel in examining the President’s speech in Oslo this past week. Nor will I give you my opinion on it; however, here are others who examine it:

Then came the echoes of the man Obama has called one of his favourite thinkers, the 20th century American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The whole speech had a tone that American political commentators like to call Niebuhrian, either in its phrasing or its tough mix of political realism and moral thinking. For example:

– “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes”– Obama (” Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime” — Niebuhr).

– “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people” – Obama (We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power — Niebuhr).

– “We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected” — Obama (”The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world” — Niebuhr).

Building up to his crescendo, Obama recalled the   cardinal virtues expounded by Saint Paul:

– Faith: he spoke out for the faith in human progress that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King showed: “If we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naive, if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.”

Read the rest here: Reuters.com.

You might want to read Rodney’s take as well.