Some people mellow with age. Others grow more passionate.
If the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s weekly sermons seem overly zealous, Barak Obama's outspoken minister has earned his outrage over decades of social injustice, a longtime friend said yesterday.

"I look at Rev. White as controversial but prophetic," the Rev. G. Daniel Jones said. "He is informed and he informs. He is a religious analyst coming out of the biblical tradition who denounces social ills and warns people on how to become more just and more humane."

Jones is pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Germantown, Wright's spiritual home when he was growing up in Philadelphia.

Wright's father served as pastor there from 1938 to 1980. His portrait hangs in the entryway, above a plaque commemorating the church's centennial in 1992. The family was   more »