Dan Gilgoff, formerly of Beliefnet, briefly interviewed Clark Evans, the Library of Congress’s head of reference services, rare books, and special collections division about the Bible Barack Obama will use at the inauguration.
Before the election, we cross-posted several posts from Gilgoff when he was politics editor at Beliefnet. He has moved to a new role at U.S. New & World Report and has an excellent new politics & religion blog.
In the interview, Evans tells Gilgoff that the Bible has an inscription.
On the back flyleaf, you find the seal of the Supreme Court and a record of the event written out by William Thomas Carroll. What jumps out at you is that the Supreme Court justice at the time [who administered the oath to Lincoln] was Robert Taney, who had written the majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that permitted slavery to spread into the territories. There was a palpable tension between the justice and the president.
