Acceptable 'Pastor Rick' steps forward

Acceptable "Pastor Rick" spoke from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta today, and promised to reappear at President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration tomorrow in Washington, D.C.

In his keynote Martin Luther Kind Day address, Warren said, according to the Associated Press:

Tomorrow when I pray the invocation for my friend, Dr. King and a whole host of witnesses will be shouting. Martin Luther King was a mighty tool in the hand of God. But God isn't through. Justice is a journey and we're getting further and further along.

Controversial Rick Warren, whose views on homosexuality and the role of women in marriage and in the church brought protesters out today, seemed to be absent from the pulpit of the church where King preached from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968.

Instead there was a man whose voice may have been very much like the one Gustavo Arellano prayed for in the Los Angeles Times opinion piece we wrote about today. For this was a Rick Warren who urged the crowd to follow King's example of service and selflessness.

One with whom Obama can work, but who to play the role of a national unifying voice will have to make changes in style and content back home at Saddleback Church.

Time will tell, don't you think, whether the self-contradictory Rick Warrens the Boston Globe wrote about today will resolve into a man of sweeping compassion with whom the late Dr. King would in fact have been pleased to work.