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Faith: A Journey For All Paperback – Unabridged, April 2 2019

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• Print length 192 pages
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• Publication date April 2 2019
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Unabridged edition (April 2 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501184431
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501184437
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 156 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm
• #901 in Christian Faith (Books)
• #1,094 in Head of State Biographies (Books)
• #1,170 in Adventurer & Explorer Biographies (Books)

About the author

Jimmy carter.

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, An Hour Before Daylight and Our Endangered Values. He received a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy Award for his recording of Our Endangered Values. All of President Carter's proceeds from this series will go to the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia.

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Faith: A Journey for All Hardcover – 27 Mar. 2018

• Print length 179 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date 27 Mar. 2018
• Dimensions 15.24 x 2.54 x 21.59 cm
• ISBN-10 1501184415
• ISBN-13 978-1501184413
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (27 Mar. 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 179 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501184415
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501184413
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 2.54 x 21.59 cm
• 1,375 in Christian Faith
• 3,169 in Political Leader Biographies
• 11,100 in Religious History of Christianity

About the author

Jimmy carter.

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, An Hour Before Daylight and Our Endangered Values. He received a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy Award for his recording of Our Endangered Values. All of President Carter's proceeds from this series will go to the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia.

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Faith: A Journey For All

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this powerful reflection, President Jimmy Carter contemplates how faith has sustained him in happiness and disappointment. He considers how we may find it in our own lives. All his life, President Jimmy Carter has been a courageous exemplar of faith. Now he shares the lessons he learned. He writes, “The issue of faith arises in almost every area of human existence, so it is important to understand its multiple meanings. In this book, my primary goal is to explore the broader meaning of faith, its far-reaching effect on our lives, and its relationship to past, present, and future events in America and around the world. The religious aspects of faith are also covered, since this is how the word is most often used, and I have included a description of the ways my faith has guided and sustained me, as well as how it has challenged and driven me to seek a closer and better relationship with people and with God.” As President Carter examines faith’s many meanings, he describes how to accept it, live it, how to doubt and find faith again. A serious and moving reflection from one of America’s most admired and respected citizens.

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The Faith of Jimmy Carter

When Billy Graham died in February at the age of 99, commentators offered dueling perspectives. Was the world-famous evangelist “the last high-profile bipartisan evangelical,” as some eulogized? Or had America’s Preacher started a strain of Gospel-infused white nationalism that still exists today?

Simon & Schuster. 192p, $25.99

But if Graham is either the foil or forefather of current evangelical politics, then Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is the road not taken. Today it may seem inevitable that evangelicals gravitated to the Republican Party in the 1980s; but Carter, the wealthy peanut farmer from Georgia who won the 1976 election as a Jesus-loving Democrat, complicates the story. Like the evangelical politicians who succeeded him, Carter talked about his “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” (and famously confessed to Playboy magazine, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times”). Yet as other evangelicals drifted to the religious right, Carter advocated universal health care, proposed cuts in military spending and denounced the tax code as “a welfare program for the rich.”

Voted out of office after his first term, Carter has dedicated himself to humanitarian work through the Carter Center, the nonpartisan human rights organization he and his wife founded in 1982. But Carter, now 93, remains adamant about the role of Christians in the political sphere. “I believe now, more than then, that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world,” he writes in Faith: A Journey for All , “and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing.”

Jimmy Carter: “I believe now, more than then, that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing.”

The goal of Faith: A Journey for All , as Carter states loftily in the Introduction, is “to explore the broader meaning of faith, its far-reaching effect on our lives, and its relationship to past, present, and future events in America and around the world.” Fortunately, the book is far less stuffy than such a description suggests. Peppered with stories from Carter’s political career and quotations from theologians, Faith is the religion-infused appeal of an elder statesman to the country he once governed. Though Carter’s evangelical faith is on full display, his appeal to readers is religiously neutral. Whether through the Bible, the Quran or the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Carter entreats his fellow citizens to draw on “these visions of improved human interrelationships...to meet the challenges of the present moment.”

These challenges weigh heavily on Carter. Two paragraphs into the Introduction, he resorts to italics to remind readers the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation “ still exists .” By the last chapter, Carter’s concerns about the United States include its reliance on military might, refusal to outlaw assault weapons, acceptance of oligarchy, inaction on climate change, skyrocketing levels of incarceration and intensified polarization. Yet his tone—and message—is optimistic. “I still have faith that the world will avoid self-destruction from nuclear war and environmental degradation,” writes Carter, “that we will remember inspirational principles, and that ways will be found to correct our other, even potentially fatal human mistakes.”

The source of his optimism is faith, including his “broader” faith in the American people as well as his religious faith in God. To a degree some will find surprising, Carter’s religious faith is deeply relational: “To me, Jesus Christ is not an object to be worshipped but a person and a constant companion,” he writes. Through this relationship with God, Carter feels known, understood and loved. And this loving relationship with God has given Carter a “pleasant feeling of responsibility” to share that love with others, including his work on behalf of human rights. When people from different parts of the world work together “as equals,” explains Carter, they experience “an instant and overwhelming melding of cultures, languages, and interests into a spirit of friendship and love.”

The sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith identify this relational impulse as a defining characteristic of white American evangelicals. Yet as they explain in their 2000 book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America , this worldview often leads white evangelicals to believe “there really is no race problem other than bad interpersonal relationships.”

Carter makes this mistake. Though his faith instilled in him an absolute conviction that racism has no place in American society or churches, Carter sees racism primarily as something that happens when people “assume a superior relationship to others” and thus suggests relational solutions. After criticizing religious congregations for failing to address “the racial and social barriers that still divide us,” he asks: “How many of us white people actually know a poor black family well enough to have a cup of coffee in their living room or kitchen? Or know the names of their teenage children?”

Building interracial friendships is good, explain Emerson and Smith, but this “let’s be friends” approach favored by many white evangelicals does not change the structures that perpetuate unequal access to health care, quality education, political power and wealth. “Present-day white evangelicals attempt to solve the race problem without shaking the foundations on which racialization is built,” they write. “As long as they do not see or acknowledge the structures of racialization, they inadvertently contribute to them.”

Which brings us to the current occupant of the White House. Carter never mentions President Trump by name and only once criticizes “the president” directly for his “irresponsible and uncontrollable public statements and tweets on social media.” Yet Carter uses some of the strongest language we have heard from any of our past presidents to deliver a fiery critique of the 2016 election. During that election, writes Carter,

The existing trend toward control of our democratic system of government by a small group of powerful and wealthy citizens and corporations was enhanced and solidified, false and illogical political claims have been rampant, ad hominem attacks on political opponents became normal and accepted, and serious allegations are being investigated about direct Russian involvement and interference in the electoral process.

In short, he believes that our faith in the government, democracy, and the “basic principles of justice” have been threatened.

But then comes a plot twist. After summarizing the political issues he finds most distressing, Carter pivots: “Most church members are more self-satisfied, more committed to the status quo and more excluding of dissimilar people than are the political officeholders I have known,” he writes. “In considering these issues, many congregations are more like spectators than participants, usually waiting for an aggressive pastor or professional staff to inspire any corrective programs in their local communities.”

Jimmy Carter: “Civil disobedience is in order when human laws are contrary to God’s demand.”

Carter then does what he failed to do when addressing race; he calls on people of faith to stop being “spectators” and start challenging injustice. “What is the proper response from people of faith when there is an obvious disparity between our government’s policies and our religious beliefs?” asks Carter. Several sentences later, he answers: Look to the example of Jesus and his disciples, who demonstrated that “civil disobedience is in order when human laws are contrary to God’s demand.”

It is a radical conclusion. Despite his obvious displeasure about the current state of political affairs, the former U.S. president saves his most forceful criticism—and his strongest appeal to take action—for the church.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “An American Journey,” in the Spring Literary Review 2018 , issue.

Betsy Shirley, of Washington, D.C., is associate editor of Sojourners magazine.

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Faith: A Journey for All (Thorndike Press Large Print Core) Library Binding – Large Print, June 27, 2018

• Print length 227 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Thorndike Press Large Print
• Publication date June 27, 2018
• Dimensions 5.8 x 0.8 x 8.7 inches
• ISBN-10 1432852523
• ISBN-13 978-1432852528
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thorndike Press Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (June 27, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Library Binding ‏ : ‎ 227 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1432852523
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1432852528
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 0.8 x 8.7 inches
• #4,125 in US Presidents
• #5,457 in Christian Faith (Books)
• #13,208 in Religious Leader Biographies

About the author

Jimmy carter.

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, An Hour Before Daylight and Our Endangered Values. He received a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy Award for his recording of Our Endangered Values. All of President Carter's proceeds from this series will go to the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia.

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Watch CBS News

Excerpt: Jimmy Carter's "Faith: A Journey for All"

March 23, 2018 / 12:07 PM EDT / CBS News

In this excerpt from his new book, "Faith: A Journey for All," published by Simon & Schuster (A division of CBS), former President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jimmy Carter writes about the importance of faith to help man meet today's challenges and evolve a future of peaceful coexistence. 

Don't miss Jane Pauley's interview with President Carter on "Sunday Morning" March 25!

INTRODUCTION

Living faith always involves love. —Richard Niebuhr Faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. —Galatians 5:6

The issue of faith arises in almost every area of human existence, so it is important to understand its multiple meanings. For many of us, a question that needs to be answered is "Am I a person of faith?" The answer is almost always affirmative. In this book, my primary goal is to explore the broader meaning of faith, its far-reaching effect on our lives, and its relationship to past, present, and future events in America and around the world. I also emphasize the religious aspects of faith since this is how the word is most often used, and I have included a description of the ways my own faith has guided and sustained me, as well as how it has challenged and driven me to seek a closer and better relationship with people and with God. Faith, in both its religious and broader dimensions, influences our individual and communal lives, our lives in religion, and our lives in government and in secular affairs.

The most important element of faith ever imposed on me, and on another person simultaneously, involved the threat of the total elimination of human life on earth by a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. My ultimate responsibility as President of the United States was to defend my country against a military attack, and I learned soon after my election that we and the Soviets had enough atomic weapons in our arsenals to destroy each other and that the resulting radiation and other collateral damage would kill most of the rest of the world's population. This was a constant haunting realization that dominated my conscious hours during my term in office — and I shared the responsibility with Leonid Brezhnev, President of the Soviet Union. Our common goal, of course, was to avoid a nuclear war. Brezhnev and I had to have faith in ourselves, and in each other. Every decision I made was affected by this threat, and it still exists , as the same responsibility is passed on from one president to the next.

We face many issues within which religion, politics, and private matters tend to mix, sometimes explosively, creating sharp divisions among us, in our private and public lives and between and within religious denominations. It is increasingly difficult to keep issues of religion and government separate, as even the purely religious issues are routinely addressed by politicians — and vice versa. I have confronted the separation of government and religion from both directions. I think often of the strong reaction of our visiting revival preacher in my mother's home when I decided to run for the state senate back in 1962. He asked me, "How can you, as a Christian, a deacon, and a Sunday School teacher, become involved in the dirty business of politics?" Without thinking, I gave him a smart-aleck response: "I will have 75,000 people in my senate district. How would you like to have a congregation that big?"

I believe now, more than then, that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world, and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing. At the same time, there must be an absolute prohibition against granting any control by government over our religious freedoms. More recently, since our years in the White House, I have tended to move away from politics and toward religion, but the two are still related. There is no doubt that my having been a national political leader is what attracts most visitors to my Bible classes, and it is clear to me that many of these worshippers are eager to help shape our nation's political agenda.

In a speech to my fellow Baptists in 1978, I tried to explain the duality of my personal responsibilities as a president and a Christian:

Thomas Jefferson, in the original days of our country, said he was fearful that the church might influence the state to take away human liberty. Roger Williams, who created the first Baptist church in America, was afraid that the church might be corrupted by the state. These concerns led to our Constitution's First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of any official state religion and, in the same sentence, prohibits the passing of any laws that might interfere with religious freedom. Separation is specified in the law, but for a religious person, there is nothing wrong with bringing these two together, because you can't divorce religious beliefs from public service. At the same time, of course, in public office you cannot impose your own religious beliefs on others. In my office at the White House I have to deal with many domestic and international problems: peace, freedom, nuclear explosives, the sale of weapons, terrorism, rapidly expanding populations without adequate food. But this is more than a list of political problems. These are also moral problems for you and me, because they violate the very precepts of God in which we believe. I want our country to be strong enough in all elements, military and otherwise, so we never have to prove we are strong. Reinhold Niebuhr, in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society , pointed out the difference between a society and a people. The expectations from a person are a much higher standard. A person should have as our goal complete agape (self-sacrificial love). The most we can expect from a society is to institute simple justice. So, we as people have to do better, particularly if we are blessed with the opportunity to demonstrate our worth. Leaders also must be careful not to be too timid. ... A country will have authority and influence because of moral factors, not its military strength; because it can be humble and not blatant and arrogant; because our people and our country want to serve others and not dominate others. And a nation without morality will soon lose its influence around the world. What are the goals of a person or a denomination or a country? They are all remarkably the same: a desire for peace; a need for humility, for examining one's faults and turning away from them; a commitment to human rights in the broadest sense of the words, based on a moral society concerned with the alleviation of suffering because of deprivation or hatred or hunger or physical affliction; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to share one's ideals, one's faith with others, to translate love in a person to justice.

I was brought up in a family that was stable, cohesive, and remarkably isolated from the outside world, except for the small community of Plains, Georgia. Home was our unchangeable haven, in times of pain or pleasure. There was no doubt that my father made the final decisions, but we all knew that Mama's influence and opinions were always major factors in the management of our family. There were certain aspects of life, particularly in the running of the household and the raising of my sisters, that were almost exclusively my mother's purview. Together, our parents were dominant, and we children respected and obeyed them. In fact, I never deliberately disobeyed either of them. It was my mother, then my father, in whom I had absolute faith.

Nowadays, most Americans move around frequently and are exposed to many influences, and our environments and customs are multifaceted. But for me as a child, there were just a few sources of knowledge about myself or any other people. Our contacts with the world beyond our community were limited. We didn't have running water or electricity in our house, so time on the battery radio was restricted, even on the rare evenings when we stayed up after dark. On special nights, keeping our eyes fixed on the radio, we listened as a family to The Lone Ranger , Little Orphan Annie , Fibber McGee and Molly , and Amos 'n' Andy . My parents would sometimes let me stay up until 8:00 p.m. to hear Glenn Miller's band playing the current musical hits for fifteen minutes. That was all the outside world I knew. In addition to my family and our close neighbors, all African-American, I encountered other people just through school and the church in Plains. Our prom parties, which parents would support for entertainment and primarily to let boys and girls get acquainted in preparation for future marriages, were orchestrated by the church.

Sunday mornings were for Sunday School and preaching at Plains Baptist Church, where Daddy was a teacher and a deacon. I remember vividly that after church we always had the best meal of the week, usually fried chicken, mashed potatoes, hot biscuits, and vegetables from our big garden, followed by pies made from sweet potatoes or fruits of the season. Afterward, our activities were severely limited. There were no stores open, movies in the county seat were out of the question, and shooting a gun or playing cards was prohibited. Fishing in the nearby creek or pond was a close call, but eventually it came to be permitted if done discreetly. It would not have been appropriate, however, to walk down a public road with a fishing pole. My mother and father played cards, mostly bridge, but certainly not on Sunday. At the age of twelve, when I was deemed old enough to drive a car by myself, my sisters and I went back to the church on Sunday evenings for meetings of the Baptist Young People's Union (BYPU). This was very important, because it was the BYPU that sponsored most of the teenage social events. I need not go on, since the picture is fairly clear. It was a simple, family-centered, deeply religious, working existence, with interracial labor and play on the farm with my black neighbors. All the farmwork was done by humans or mules, and we grew corn as the common fuel for both. I imagine that, except for the radio, automobile, and a hand-cranked telephone, our lives were quite similar to those of our great- grandparents.

During those early years, I witnessed the racial discrimination that still survived almost a hundred years after the end of the Civil War. Mandatory segregation of black and white citizens was supported and enforced, at least in the Southeastern United States, by state and federal laws, and was not questioned by anyone of influence that I knew. The only person who paid no attention to these racial customs was my mother, and she treated everyone the same because, I presumed, she was a registered nurse and a member of the medical profession. When I was a child, all my friends and playmates were African- American, and the one who was preeminent at any time was whoever had caught the biggest fish, killed the most rabbits, or could run faster, jump higher, or pick the most cotton in a day. When I rode to our county seat with one of my playmates, we always sat in different railroad cars and at separate levels in the movie theater, attended different schools and churches, and I knew that white students rode in buses and black students walked to and from school. I do not remember knowing that only white adults were permitted to vote and to serve on juries.

My first awareness of how segregation affected me and my friends was when my playmates and I were about twelve years old, when we were leaving the field and approaching the barn through what we called the "pasture gate." The two black boys stood back to let me pass, and I presumed there was a trip wire there or some other reason for them to want me to go through first. Only much later did I realize that their parents had probably told them it was time for them to defer to me in some way. In a poem I wrote as an adult, I said,

We only saw it vaguely then, but we were transformed at that place. A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.

The next event that affected me directly was when I was a submarine officer and President Harry Truman ordained as commander in chief that all our military forces and the U.S. Civil Service end racial segregation. There was no trouble in implementing this command, and all of us on the ship saw the advantages gained by both black and white members of the crew. When our family returned home from the navy in 1953, this commitment to racial equality had become a part of our lives.

My father taught me that there should be a strict divide between religion and politics, and he also resented very deeply any intrusion of state or federal laws into our private affairs. I remember that Daddy opposed changing our clocks from "God's sun time" to "daylight saving time," and although a staunch Democrat in other elections, he never voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt after 1932, because the New Deal agricultural program provided, to stabilize farm prices, that half-grown pigs (shoats) should be slaughtered and that part of our growing crops of cotton and peanuts had to be plowed up. For many years afterward, Daddy recalled how difficult it was to force a trained mule to walk on top of a planted row to plow it up instead of in the middle to cultivate. I guess that today he would be known as a libertarian.

When I look back on my life, I can see how startling the changes have been. Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), the self-educated longshoreman and philosopher, described the years during my childhood as a time of hope, and the time of my adulthood as a time of desire. I knew the Great Depression years to be a time of hope, when the economic situation in America was so bad that everyone believed it could only improve; when things became plentiful, we tended to want not only what we already had but also what everyone else had.

Both at my presidential inauguration and when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, I quoted my favorite teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, who summarized her advice on how to accommodate the uncertainties in our future: "We must welcome changing times, but cling to principles that never change." I would say that "cling to" meant "have faith in." I have thought often about Miss Julia's advice over the years, and especially during some of the most trying times of my life, when I had to decide which enduring principles should be applied to a particular event or situation, and sometimes I use it in my church and college classes and in counseling people who are distressed about current crises that we have to face.

Today, of course, family life even in the small Plains community is quite different. Some activities that were once strictly concealed in our "proper" society are probably no more prevalent but are now out in the open. Divorce has become acceptable, even for active church members. Without trying to analyze it too deeply, I see that one of the most significant changes is the relationship between young people and their parents. My siblings and I had an intimate and subservient relationship with our parents until we left home, but now the ties are substantially broken during the early teen years, no matter how much parents want to retain a strong influence over their growing children. The outside world is a much more powerful factor in life, with the availability of rapid transportation, television, social media, and particularly a broader circle of friends (and possibly rivals or adversaries), whose influence often exceeds that of immediate families. But perhaps just as many in today's world would still like to have certain faith in a core of principles that do not change. Where do we turn now when there is a moral question to be answered? What things in the twenty-first century are the same as they were eighty years ago? We still need a permanent foundation on which our lives can be fashioned. Without a central core of beliefs or standards in which to have faith and by which to live, we may never experience the challenge and excitement of seeking a greater life. We will have ceased to grow, like Jesus, "strong; he was, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him" (Luke 2:40).

We must accommodate life's challenges, some welcome and others quite painful, but we don't want the verities of our lives to change. We need to have something unshakable in which to have faith, like a mother's love — something that can't be changed or destroyed by war, political events, the loss of a loved one, lack of success in business, a serious illness, or failure to realize our own ambitions. We need some foundation on which we can build a predictable and dependable existence.

This cannot always be found in either our nation's laws or our social customs. I would like to say as an American who has been president that the cherished values of our country are constant, but they are not. There are always powerful forces that work against the idealistic principles of peace, truthfulness, equality, justice, and even hospitality, freedom, and friendship. There is a lot of secret maneuvering that is never understood or even known by the public, and a great deal of unpublicized change in the interpretation of laws or the passage of new ones. Some laws violate what seem to be accepted principles and create serious divisions within our society. Also, almost every major religious faith — Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Islamic — is divided over controversial secular issues like abortion, gay rights, the role of women in society, or even female clothing. But despite the confusion and controversy in secular affairs and among religious organizations, the basic principles I've just mentioned have never changed. These are the foundation for our faith.

People have always tried to improve their own lives, through communal living and the evolution of secular laws and rules considered to be beneficial, at least to a dominant portion of them. So far as I know, a concerted worldwide effort to encapsulate high ideals into a common agreement has been made only once, and included the nations who had been victorious, or at least neutral, in World War II. This common agreement is known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I remember that I followed the United Nations proceedings in San Francisco very closely as a member of the U.S. Navy, either as a midshipman at Annapolis or from a battleship in the Atlantic Ocean. The key nations that founded the U.N. in October 1945 were the "Big Four" — China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States — and they were joined by forty-seven others. The overriding objective was to prevent further armed conflicts after more than 60 million people had been killed in the war, and to agree on a set of peace incentives that could prevent warfare among future potential disputants. For many complex reasons, the United Nations's primary goal of preserving peace has not been reached.

Since that time, the military forces of our own country have been involved in conflict with more than twenty other nations, in wars that cost the lives of 10 million people, and the potential for further military engagements remains. As of November 2017, the United States military forces were actively engaged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Niger, Somalia, Jordan, and Thailand. Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel who lost a son in Iraq, made an accurate comment: "A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America." One major reason for our citizens' lack of concern about warfare is that most families are not directly affected by these conflicts, since the burden of combat now falls on just the 1 percent of Americans who serve in the military.

To live in peace is only one of the key human rights, and in December 1948, when the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it described these principles in thirty brief articles. To the best of their ability, those who drafted this declaration extracted the highest moral and ethical ideals of the world's great religions and expressed them in secular terms that could be understood by lawmakers and private citizens of all nations. The Universal Declaration promised to all people the economic, social, political, cultural, and civic rights that underpin a life free from discrimination, want, and fear. As with the United Nations's promise of sustained peace, these promises of human rights have not been realized. It seems that there is a steady reduction in the number of things in which we can have faith.

We know that evolution is a global process, usually progressive, that results from the adaptation of living organisms to natural selection and sudden mutations. I believe it has been God's plan to evolve human beings, and that after thousands of centuries we now find ourselves uniquely endowed with an understanding of who and what we are and have the knowledge and freedom to help shape our own destiny. This freedom to help in affecting our future evolution is a great challenge and opportunity, and it is our inherited duty to contribute to moral and spiritual advancement.

It is sobering to realize that the average human intelligence has probably not changed appreciably during the last ten thousand years. In fact, the total capacity of the brains of Neanderthals has been found to be greater than that of modern humans. We also know that the process of learning has greatly accelerated during recent times with our improved ability to share information rapidly. For the first time, we have become aware that our own existence is threatened by things such as nuclear weapons and global warming. These recognized threats are, perhaps, already an ongoing test of our human intelligence, our freedom, and our ability to shape our own destiny. The human challenge now is to survive by having sustained faith in each other and in the highest common moral principles that we have spasmodically evolved, and through mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation in addressing the discerned challenges to our common existence.

It is urgent that humans take a new look at the rapidly growing need for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Ten Commandments, the Koran, or the teachings of Jesus Christ and to see if these visions of improved human interrelationships might be used to meet the challenges of the present moment and evolve a future of peaceful coexistence, based on faith in each other.

Excerpted from "Faith: A Journal for All" by Jimmy Carter. Copyright © 2018 by Jimmy Carter. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

       For more info:

• "Faith: A Journey For All"  by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster); Available via  Amazon
• The Carter Center , Atlanta
• The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum , Atlanta
• Jimmy Carter

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My Journey To The U.S & How I Ended Up In Prison | A Test Of My Faith Our Daily Bread Podcast With Josuè

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In this inaugural episode of "OUR DAILY BREAD PODCAST WITH JOSUE," I delve into my gripping journey of faith and resilience. This episode lays bare my path to the United States—a path fraught with unexpected challenges and a surprising detour through prison. Despite the setbacks, my unwavering trust in the Lord provided me with the strength to persevere. Join me as I share the lessons learned and the unshakeable faith that guided me through the darkest moments to a life of hope and new beginnings in the U.S.

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‘Where Did Justine Go?’ One Woman Disappears Into Devotion

Justine Payton was drawn to a Hare Krishna ashram for its yoga, meditation and vegan meals. She’s still figuring out what went wrong.

Justine Payton on Kure Beach near her new home in North Carolina. Credit... Travis Dove for The New York Times

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By Ruth Graham

• Published May 22, 2024 Updated May 23, 2024

A few days before Christmas in 2020, quarantined with Covid in the basement of a Hare Krishna ashram in Philadelphia, Justine Payton admitted to herself how bad things had gotten.

She was 28 years old and had $72 to her name, after spending years working seven days a week in a cycle of cleaning, cooking, teaching, worship and selling books on the street. She rose at 4:30 each morning and her days ended at 9:30 p.m. If she violated the home’s strict rules — sneaking a piece of chocolate, say — her fellow devotees would report her to their leader, whom they knew as Mangal-arti.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Ms. Payton had moved to Philadelphia to help open the Mantra Lounge meditation center at the behest of Mangal-arti’s “spiritual master,” Devamrita Swami, a New York-born, Yale-educated leader in the Hare Krishna movement.

The responsibility was an honor, she believed at the time. The movement had given her joy, purpose and community when she desperately needed it. Now she was reaching new followers with the same things that first attracted her: cheap yoga and vegan meals, and then meditation, chanting, and volunteer work.

But over time, the experience soured into something she would later describe as emotionally and spiritually abusive. Although she was bringing in money for the center through book sales, she kept none of it, she said, and had to use her savings to pay for some toiletries and other necessities.

After Mangal-arti, who had no formal medical or psychological training, told her she had borderline personality disorder, she said, she had begun to doubt her own instincts about even the most basic facts of her existence, doubts that reflected Hare Krishna teachings about not relying on one’s own emotions. (Mangal-arti, whose legal name is Aarti Khoda, said in a statement to The New York Times that she did not make a diagnosis, but inquired whether Ms. Payton might have the disorder because of her “extreme behavior.”) Ms. Payton contemplated taking her own life. She was paranoid, lonely and very, very tired.

Ms. Payton didn’t think of herself as part of a larger story about the popularity of alternative spiritual practices in the splintering religious landscape of 21st-century America. She hadn’t yet parsed the borderlines separating willing self-abnegation, mental illness and abuse. She craved transcendence, and like an increasing number of Americans, she didn’t find it in Christianity or another historic monotheistic religion.

She found it instead in a much younger movement that, for previous generations of Americans, conjured hippie freedom or cult conformity. For her, though, those associations were long in the past. The Hare Krishna movement seemed to answer her deepest questions. She was a seeker, and for a while, she had found what she was looking for.

When she got sick in the first year of the pandemic, however, the basement quarantine was the first time in five years that she had been alone for a sustained period of time. It was the first time she had time to think.

She picked up the phone and called her dad.

A Search for Faith

Ms. Payton was raised on a leafy downtown street in an affluent suburb of Chicago. She was close to her parents and her three siblings. When the children were little, the family had dance parties in the house. Ms. Payton would toss her hair around to the “Be-In” song from the musical “Hair”: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” she would sing. “Beads, flowers, freedom, happiness.”

She was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, from which she imbibed the lesson that a large religious institution could have ugliness in its past, but still do good in individual lives. Her family later joined the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination.

In an essay she wrote for a confirmation class in eighth grade, an experience meant to usher her into adult faith, she wrote that she wasn’t sure she believed in God. Ms. Payton’s highest value at the time was independence. She moved across the country for college, then took a semester off and lived in Rwanda.

She was about to leave for a study-abroad program in France when she came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves. She was temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. She had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and now she lived at home in the suburbs and couldn’t feed herself.

She turned 21 during her convalescence, and the radical loss of control made her question everything. She began thinking about what it meant to be separated from her own physical existence.

She read and reread “Siddhartha,” Herman Hesse’s novel and a defining text of 1960s youth culture. The story follows a man in India seeking spiritual enlightenment in the time of the Buddha.

“What is meditation?” the protagonist asks himself. “What is leaving one’s body? What is fasting? What is holding one’s breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self.”

She recovered from Guillain-Barré and decided to finish her college degree in New Zealand. There, an acquaintance passed along a flier for a Sunday feast at a Hare Krishna temple. Ms. Payton knew little about the Hare Krishna faith, beyond those childhood days of twirling around to music from “Hair.”

The environment she walked into that Sunday seemed made precisely for her. Since the 1990s, the movement has attempted to appeal more directly to Westerners.

The Hare Krishna movement evolved from a 16th-century Indian tradition, and exploded as a worldwide phenomenon when a charismatic Hindu guru known as A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in the United States in the 1960s, attracting crowds of young people to Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan with his chanting and his saffron robes. He called the movement the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON.

His timing was impeccable, meeting a counterculture primed to embrace ISKCON’s practices of communal living, ecstatic dancing and asceticism. Within five years, the chant “Hare Krishna” was everywhere: among throngs of devotees proselytizing in airports; in “Hair”; in a No. 1 hit song by George Harrison .

The first wave of American followers were mostly white, but over time the movement became more Indian American and less high-profile. By the 1980s, it was beset by scandals, including lawsuits over sexual abuse and accusations of “brainwashing.” In the late 1990s, the movement’s own official journal exposed widespread physical and sexual abuse of children at Hare Krishna boarding schools.

Some American followers still live at ashrams — the standard form of membership in the 1960s and ’70s — but many more have typical homes and jobs and attend services on weekends. A spokesman, Anuttama Dasa, estimated that ISKCON currently has roughly 100,000 fully initiated members around the world, and 15 million who attend meetings.

“There’s very few Western, American people that are joining the Hare Krishna movement today,” said E. Burke Rochford, a professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College who has studied the faith for decades. “Yes, they’re interested in yoga and yes, meditation, but not in what ISKCON is requiring of their members.”

There is a sense of urgency among the aging first generation of devotees, he said, to recapture the imagination of younger white Americans — not to push out Indian immigrants, but to preserve Swami Prabhupada’s calling to reach non-Indian young people.

The center Ms. Payton wandered into in New Zealand in 2014 was headed by an American-born guru named Devamrita Swami, who has a mission to attract “Westerners,” meaning non-Indians. Devamrita Swami’s innovation was that ISKCON should be what the scholar Nicole Karapanagiotis has described as “an edgy meditation- and mindfulness-based social club.” Instead of temples with elaborate statues of Hindu deities, he opened “lofts” and “lounges” where Hindu imagery is minimal. He encouraged programming on environmental sustainability, rebranding ISKCON theology’s emphasis on giving up material pleasures as a tool for addressing climate change.

“You felt like an honored guest when you walked in there ,” Ms. Payton recalled in an interview. “The whole thing was kind of ethereal and captivating .” There was a vegetarian meal, music, incense and yoga. She started attending and volunteering regularly, and a few months later she moved into an ISKCON ashram in Wellington, New Zealand.

At the end of 2015, Devamrita Swami encouraged Ms. Payton to help Mangal-arti start an outreach program in Philadelphia.

Before she moved there, she went to Illinois to spend a few weeks with her parents, Dean and Lisa, who had initially been accepting of her entrance into the movement. They understood that the Hare Krishna faith spoke to their daughter’s compassion, as well as to her interests in climate change and veganism. By this point, however, they were becoming concerned.

“She had lost her autonomy,” Mr. Payton said. “Her tone changed, her bearing changed.”

“Where did Justine go?” Lisa Payton wondered.

Her witty, vivacious daughter now rose at 4 in the morning to chant, and spent all her time cooking, ceremonially offering each meal to the deity Krishna before allowing her family to eat. Her voice was getting softer, almost melodic.

Lisa tried to understand. Picture a mountain, a pastor at her church would tell her later. God is at the top, and Justine is on one of many paths up the mountain. But it felt as though her daughter’s path was leading her farther and farther away from her family, and from any semblance of the life they had imagined for her.

When Ms. Payton left for Philadelphia, she sent her father a handwritten letter that he still keeps in his wallet.

“I wish you could see how my heart has changed, how it is open to the world around me in a beautiful way,” she wrote. “I am happier and more content than ever.”

The Mantra Lounge

In Philadelphia, Ms. Payton moved with Mangal-arti and a few other devotees into a temple, and then into a rented house, while they worked to open the Mantra Lounge in the trendy neighborhood of Fishtown.

Mangal-arti was born in Calcutta. She found the Hare Krishna movement in her early 20s, while working in a bank in Australia, and she chose Devamrita Swami as her spiritual master, a role akin to a priest or mentor. She is charismatic and bright-eyed; in video recordings of her teaching, she speaks cheerfully and seems to make intense eye contact with her listeners.

Ms. Payton said in an interview that her mental health was already deteriorating badly by the time she got to Philadelphia. She had been raped in college, and was experiencing symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Mangal-arti was the first person Ms. Payton told about having been raped. Ms. Payton recalls her suggesting that her ensuing struggles were caused by insufficient faithfulness: She wasn’t bowing deeply enough during prayers, wasn’t working hard enough, and was trusting too much in her own instincts. Ms. Payton listened, and tried to purge herself of desire and disobedience. She began covering her head with her sari, as a sign of devotion.

In an initiation ceremony in 2017, she swore to abstain from “illicit sex,” intoxication, meat-eating and gambling, and she received a new name designating her as a servant of God: Gaura-bhakti.

The ceremony was standard for devotees seeking deeper commitment to the faith. What was not standard was that Ms. Payton felt that Mangal-arti was becoming the most important person in her life.

Three women who lived in the house said that they shared private information with Mangal-arti, only to discover that Mangal-arti later shared it with others. They said that Mangal-arti extended and then withheld affection in ways that were emotionally manipulative. Ms. Payton would later say that Mangal-arti fostered an “atmosphere of fear.”

Mr. Dasa, the spokesman for ISKCON, said the organization acted quickly to investigate Ms. Payton’s and other followers’ claims that Mangal-arti engaged in emotional abuse and manipulation.

“We in no way condone” Ms. Payton’s experience of “serious problems” at the ashram in Philadelphia, Mr. Dasa said in an interview. “It doesn’t at all represent the typical experience of a Krishna devotee at any of our hundreds of temples around the world.”

Mangal-arti did encourage Ms. Payton to pursue therapy independently, which her parents paid for.

“Mangal-arti appeared to be the only person whom Justine had a personal relationship with, intensifying her reliance on her,” her therapist wrote in a later statement summing up their sessions.

Ms. Payton stopped seeing that therapist after less than a year. Her last session was a joint meeting with the therapist and an “intense and overbearing” Mangal-arti, according to the therapist’s written account.

Other devotees reported similar experiences. After meeting Mangal-arti in Canada, Shannan Mann moved into the ashram in Philadelphia with Ms. Payton and a handful of others who worked at the Mantra Lounge. Mangal-arti had a long list of rules, down to how she should shower and how she should part her hair, Ms. Mann said. Ms. Mann, too, said Mangal-arti would be sweet and maternal one moment, and jealous and hostile the next. (In a statement, Mangal-arti called Ms. Mann’s account of her experiences “completely false and baseless”.)

Ms. Mann had known Ms. Payton in New Zealand. In Philadelphia, she was struck by how much Ms. Payton’s appearance had changed. She had lost weight and become strikingly pale, and she barely spoke. She had been transformed from a person Ms. Mann saw as bold and inquisitive to someone reduced to staring at Mangal-arti and “just wanting her approval for everything .”

In a statement, Mangal-arti disputed almost every element of Ms. Payton’s account of her time in Philadelphia, and said Ms. Payton seemed to have embarked on a “targeted campaign” against her. She also pointed out that Ms. Payton often thanked her during this period for her support.

Some people at the small ashram were happy. Mangal-arti provided multiple testimonials to The Times from people who spent time at the ashram in Philadelphia or who said they had known Ms. Payton and Ms. Mann in the past. All of them appear to remain involved in ISKCON or its practices. They described Mangal-arti as generous and fair, and characterized Ms. Payton and Ms. Mann as behaving erratically at the time, and as spreading falsehoods afterward.

‘Things Are Really Wrong Here’

Ms. Payton had been in Philadelphia for five years when she got Covid and moved into the basement of the ashram. For three weeks, she was on her own, free from the grueling schedule of selling and cooking and cleaning that had felt increasingly oppressive to her. “Things are really wrong here,” she remembers thinking.

Lisa and Dean drove to Philadelphia after Christmas to retrieve their daughter, picking her up on the curb outside the ashram early in the morning. She had stuffed her belongings into a few black garbage bags. They barely spoke as they drove back to Illinois.

Over time, she came to see what had happened to her in Philadelphia as abusive.

In 2021 she and three other former and aspiring devotees registered formal complaints against Mangal-arti that were reviewed by ISKCON’s governing body, a board that oversees the global organization. Some of the four complainants, and others, also made complaints about Devamrita Swami’s leadership.

After two years, the board’s North American branch ruled last year that Mangal-arti must apologize in writing to Ms. Payton and the other Mantra Lounge community members whom she had “hurt (mistreated, abused, shamed)” by her “actions and words,” and that she must not lead any ISKCON event or organization for three years, among other consequences.

In her statement, Mangal-arti described the ruling as hastily completed only after the The Times contacted ISKCON leadership last year, an accusation Mr. Dasa strongly denied. She said the organization did not follow up on the evidence she submitted to defend herself, and that ISKCON had issued an adjudication without an investigation.

ISKCON’s committee overseeing gurus reached a decision in early May requiring Devamrita Swami to undergo education on trauma and to submit a written plan to ensure that the “unhealthy dynamics” of Mantra Lounge would not be repeated, among other things. Mr. Dasa said the organization was also considering new training protocols “for ISKCON leaders to avoid these problems.”

The Mantra Lounge in Philadelphia closed in 2021.

Ms. Payton has tried to start her own life over, enrolling in graduate school in North Carolina, writing about her experiences, and restoring her relationships with her parents. Her boyfriend of two years recently proposed to her in a rented geodesic dome in the mountains near their home.

But it would be too simple, in her view, to call hers a happy ending. She lost friends permanently, she remains deeply ashamed, and she struggles with a sense that she has lost time she will never get back.

She still finds beauty in certain religious texts, including the Bhagavad Gita — although not the translations by the Hare Krishna movement’s founder. But she no longer practices any religion, and said she cannot imagine associating with a religious institution again.

She tries to be open to the experience of wonder, she said. “I think that’s at the root of what I was seeking all along.”

Susan C. Beachy , Alain Delaquérière and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

Read by Ruth Graham

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst .

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times. More about Ruth Graham

CEO tells his story from rags to riches while never compromising Catholic Faith

James W. Keyes / jameswkeyes.com

CV NEWS FEED // James Keyes, former CEO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster, recently shared his journey from growing up with very little, to becoming a successful businessman, all the while never compromising on his Catholic Faith.

“I grew up in a house without running water, without indoor plumbing. So to be able to live a life of adventure is an amazing thing,” Keyes told news outlet the Catholic Weekly in a May 28 article written by Marcus Middleton. “You have to treat every opportunity as a trail to explore, and let faith be your compass.”

Middleton noted that Keyes “didn’t have the connections, Ivy League Education (although that came later), or generational wealth as his launching pad. Instead, his navigational stars were faith, fortitude, and a well-rounded Catholic education.”

Keyes graduated from College of the Holy Cross with a bachelor’s degree, and in 1980, he graduated with an MBA in Business from Columbia Business School. In 1986, he became the chief financial officer for 7-Eleven, and served in this position until 2005. 

From 2007 to 2011 Keyes became the chairman and chief executive officer for Blockbuster, then at the top of its commercial success. 

Middleton reported that as Keyes climbed the corporate ladder, his Catholic Faith remained essential to his business strategies.

“His faith led him to believe that shareholder value and social good are not mutually exclusive, that his role as CEO of globally recognised brands provided a unique platform from which to do good,” Middleton wrote. 

Keyes also spoke about how Catholicism has shaped his approach to handling polarization and social conflicts as a business leader. 

“As a CEO you’re always under pressure to take a stand on whatever the social issue is of the day,” he said. “The problem is, when you captain large companies, your business employs all people, your customers represent all sides. This is where being a Catholic is an advantage. Because we learn to look at all issues in a measured and compassionate way.”

While his Faith has informed his business decisions, Keyes said, “I discovered that it wasn’t necessary to impose my religious beliefs on others, but instead I could accomplish the same objectives through leading by example, letting my faith be the guide.”

From 2012 to 2019, Keyes was chairman at Wild Oats Marketplace. He is currently chairman at Key Development LLC, a position he has held since 2005. He also enjoys frequently flying small aircraft, including his own “T-6 Texan” plane.

In February 2024, Keyes published his book, “Education is Freedom: The Future is in Your Hands,” about leadership and the importance of education.

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