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In an NHPR interview about his new book, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, Chair of the Department of Religion Randall Balmer, the Mandel Family Professor of Arts & Sciences, says the 39th president was elected to the nation’s highest office “by an electorate weary of political corruption, and enamored, however briefly, of Carter’s evangelical rectitude.”

Carter inherited a bad hand—an economy that was in shambles, an unstable foreign policy, and a host of other troubles—Balmer says, adding that “it’s a hand that in many ways he played badly.”

But NHPR notes that Balmer’s book “shows how Carter rose again from the ashes, this time as a citizen, devoting himself to humanitarian causes and eventually finding his personal redemption.”

Listen to the full story, broadcast 3/24/14 by NHPR.