I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
President Barack Obama, dogged by persistent rumors he is a Muslim, explained why he is a Christian during an hour-long discussion with residents in an Albuquerque front yard Tuesday.
South Valley resident Lisa Murphy had told the president she had three ‘hot-topic’ questions for him, including “Why are you a Christian?”
Murphy’s question carried a particular resonance after a summer of contentious debate over a cultural center and mosque proposed for lower Manhattan, two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center.
“I’m a Christian by choice,” the president answered. “My family didn’t — frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn’t raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life. And it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead: being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me.”
“And I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings–that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God. But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people and do our best to help them find their own grace.”
Murphy, who described herself as an evangelical Christian, nodded her head.
Murphy was one of two dozen neighbors and friends invited by the Cavaliers for the president’s visit, which resembled a small invasion as several Secret Service agents, White House staffers and dozens of members of the local and national media camped out in their back yard.
The president answered Murphy’s two other questions – one about abortion and another in which she asked if he would accept some home-grown chile peppers.
As the president began to call on another questioner, Murphy stopped him.
“I want to make sure I get everybody in,” the president said to her.
Then, almost inaudibly, Murphy said, “I agree with you as far as the mosque in New York. I’m a Christian, but we base our faith on free will. And that’s what we were founded on, freedom. And I just — I just thank you for taking a stand.”
After the president’s visit, Murphy said she liked the answer the president gave her on why he is a Christian.
“Yes I did. Mother Teresa was simpler,” Murphy said. “She said that is where she serves God best.”
“This country, and the world, is getting so separate according to religion,” Murphy said. “And if we all had to be one religion, well, I guess we’d be robots. My faith believes in free will. It’s how. We are not perfect people. I get up every morning and I rely on my faith.”
