"My faith is the key to my optimism."

When former President George H.W. Bush died in November, the glaring contrast between him and the current White House occupant made for fulsome eulogies from all sides. After all, whatever he was, he was an adult, not a toddler; courageous in war, not a whining coward; and competent, not an self-indulgent bumbler. I couldn't much praise him -- his pardons sweeping the Iran-Contra crimes under a legal rug disqualified him from my admiration. But others differed and many chose to speak well of the dead.

It all reminded me that we do have a living former president who has proved himself over decades to be a genuinely decent human being. Jimmy Carter (in office 1976-80) was perhaps not the wisest of presidents. By unnecessarily inviting the deposed Shah (dictatorial monarch) of Iran into the country for medical treatment, he set in train events which have put the US in conflict with Iranian nationalism to this day. As a US politician, he didn't understand the importance of unions to the Democratic coalition, contributing mightily his Republican successors' successful assault on labor.

He wasn't a great president.

But he has been a fine example of how a former president can make himself (still no herselves!) a socially useful force for good. The media always focuses on the warm fuzzy stuff, like building houses in poor communities with Habitat for Humanity and teaching Bible classes at his humble Georgia Baptist church. But Carter has traveled the world encouraging free elections and civil peace, while speaking unpopular truths when he has felt he must. For example, he was excoriated for labeling Israel's treatment of its Palestinian subjects an analogue of South Africa's white supremacist "apartheid."

So GHW Bush's obsequies reminded me that I wanted to read Jimmy Carter's latest and probably last of 32 books, issued last year in his 93rd year. Faith: a journey for all strikes me as likely akin to the Bible study talks he has been delivering for decades, yet designed to provide the contours of the life story he'd like told at his own funeral. I read it in an audio version which he reads himself, clearly and sweetly; I would highly recommend this to anyone curious about Carter.

We know he's a Christian, a forthright follower of Jesus, but not therefore a closed minded fundamentalist, a type he abhors. He makes it clear that his faith set his path.

I believe ... 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.

... To me, God is the essence of all that is good, and my faith in God induces a pleasant feeling of responsibility to act accordingly.

In a time when the religious right has overrun white evangelical Protestantism, it's hard to recall how simply conventional these views once were in those quarters. In 1978, while serving as president, he sought to convey the breadth of the calling he believes should define his co-religionists while speaking to a Baptist audience:

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.

No wonder the political world thought/thinks him a crazy idealist. Yet his faith enables him to call out the precariousness of human society with a forthrightness practicing politicians know they must avoid.

It is sobering to realize that the average human intelligence's probably not changed appreciably during the last ten thousand years. In fact, the total capacity of 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, 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.

Carter declares himself calm inside and ready for death, knowing death must come soon. His faith tells him that "the love of God will prevail" in the creation that God has made.

When Carter dies, I doubt he'll receive the sort of effusive send-off that we've just seen for Bush the Elder. Though Carter undoubtedly lacks for nothing, he didn't use his post-presidency to make himself wealthy or even to try to continue to exercise power, conventionally understood. His faith may seem incomprehensible to folks who are not Christian or even not his kind of Christian. But he sure seems to have gotten something admirable out the moral and ethical structure within which he has rooted his life.