The Lackawanna Bar Association marked the National Day of Prayer on Thursday with sacred words and civic scripture.
The annual Interfaith Prayer Service at the Scranton Cultural Center included readings from Jewish, Christian and Islamic holy texts as well as the words of Abraham Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Address and Emancipation Proclamation were delivered 150 years ago.
Attorney Morey M. Myers used his keynote address to highlight the complexity and evolution of several of Lincoln's positions, including on slavery, race and religion.
"We're here today to recognize him as a challenger to religious observance evolving into one who subscribed to it," he said.
Lincoln was a critic of religion as a young man and chose not to affiliate with any church, but he respected diverse religious freedom and expressed a clear belief in God in his later years, Mr. Myers said.
Lincoln's second inaugural address was "really a religious speech," he said.
"What do you do about this man who was such a contradiction of observance and nonobservance?" he asked. "I think that when you look at him you say today, Abraham Lincoln was a man of contradiction, but he was a man of considerable growth."
The event in Shopland Hall included local clergy, lawyers, elected officials and judges.
Bar Association President William J. Hall Jr. said it was "only fitting" that an interfaith service used to celebrate the constitutional freedoms of assembly, speech and religion "honor a president who brought those freedoms to untold numbers."
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