Obama's early exposure to Eastern religions and culture.

As I have been reading through "Dreams from My Father", I have found Obama's exposure to Eastern religions and culture very intriguing. The setting of his story is so vastly different from my own. Rather than living in the center of one culture, religion, and economy, he learned of multiple cultures, religions, and economies, living in the margins of the world (Hawaii, Indonesia).

He says that his grandfather's "only skirmish into organized religion" was his time spent at a Universalist church, where he could hear "scriptures of all the great religions of the world" (17). Obama seems to have an admiration for principles taught by the religions of the world. But I think most importantly, he was very influenced by the poverty that he witnessed in Indonesia. He was put into circumstances where he was forced to question the issue of poverty on his own. Also, by all of this religious diversification, I think that he was able to understand other people in a raw and genuine way, able to reconcile the problem of suffering by dedicating his life to a valuable, noble purpose. It's plausible, then, that Obama rejects Western idealism and endorses something closer to what I call Claiborne's Kenotic idealism, which has strong ties to values in Eastern idealism such as a connection to the "native soil". However, I can't be so sure of this since part of Claiborne's ideology is joining the poor, but it could still be the case because Obama may be closer to Claiborne's dream of getting the rich to meet or know the poor.