“Lincoln’s responsibilities precluded the luxury of the simple detachment of an irresponsible observer. Yet his brooding sense of charity was derived from a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning than that of the immediate political conflict.”43 Lincoln’s distance on the situation was made possible by the fact that American history was not the only story he inhabited. His “religious awareness”—which, in Lincoln’s case, was a distinctly theological attunement—gave him a vantage point from which to see the irony and horror of the two sides of a war who “read the same Bible and pray
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