Rick Warren's Prayer

Justin Taylor posts the transcript here. Warren had an incredibly difficult task and he showed much wisdom and grace in answering it.

Oprah and Obama

Today is a day of grand, sweeping statements. I know that I commended Peggy Noonan's advice earlier to "suspend all disbelief" but this is too much:

Asked her feelings about being here, Oprah said "it's beyond the dream. We're just here feelin' it with the throngs of people. It's amazing grace personified."

If that's not messianic language, I don't know what is.

How to Enjoy the Inauguration

Peggy Noonan offers great advice on how to enjoy the Presidential Inauguration:

What is required for full enjoyment of an inauguration, from opening prayers to speeches to marching bands is, in the great 19th-century phrase, the willing suspension of disbelief. If you don't put your skepticism aside, you will not fully absorb and experience the drama. You must allow it to be real for you. Those two young people on the stage did not really take poison and die, but Romeo and fair Juliet did, and that is the reason the audience, which knows the actors still live, says, with genuine feeling, "Oh, no!"

To believe, suspend disbelief. We have been through this before, the flags and fine speeches, the brass donkey paperweight, the glass elephant, the rise and fall of administrations, the coming and going of figures great and small. It's good to put that aside for a few days, to remove yourself from politics, partisanship and faction, to suspend your disbelief, to be grateful that the signs and symbols endure, as does the republic, and raise a toast: "To the president of the United States."

I hope I'm marked with such graciousness.