National Prayer Breakfast and White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships

I've subscribed to the White House's blog, and found these recent posts interesting regarding the National Prayer Breakfast and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership (which I believe is a rebranding of the Bush's Faith Based and Community Initiatives). I found it interesting to learn that the prayer breakfast movement actually started in Seattle. Obama also shared briefly about he came to faith:

I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most spiritual person I’ve ever known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done.

I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck – no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog_post/this_is_my_prayer/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog_post/working_with_faith/