Title
Recognizing and Honoring American Bible Society on the Occasion of its 200th Anniversary.
Body
WHEREAS, American Bible Society was founded on May 11, 1816. Philadelphia native Elias Boudinot, a president of the Continental Congress, served as its first president. Other early leaders of American Bible Society included John Jay, Francis Scott Key, and John Quincy Adams; and
WHEREAS, American Bible Society originally sought to unite more localized Bible societies with the goal to distribute the Bible across the country. This vision soon expanded worldwide. Over the past 200 years, American Bible Society has distributed approximately 6 billion Bibles around the world; and
WHEREAS, American Bible Society has supported the American military since its founding. It distributed Bibles to the American military for the first time in 1817, and it has delivered Bibles and New Testaments to American soldiers in every war in which American troops have participated since the Mexican-American War in 1846; and
WHEREAS, In a 1901 address to an auxiliary of American Bible Society, then-Vice President Theodore Roosevelt remarked, "Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes what a very large number of people tend to forget that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally...impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standings toward which we, with more or less of resolution, strive to raise ourselves"; and
WHEREAS, A pioneering spirit has always been a vital part of American Bible Society's success and longevity. It co-published the first Bible in Braille in 1842. Between 1918 and 1919, American Bible Society appointed its first women board members and two women vice presidents, a year before women had the right to vote in Americ...
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