He's back

For the first time since his retirement last spring, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright preached on Sunday at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. And he had a lot to say.

In a special service to celebrate the church's 47th anniversary, Rev. Wright said Barack Obama had made a "bad decision" by distancing himself from Wright and the church but said he was still supporting the president-elect.

Wright also offered an explanation of Obama's decision to leave the church. "The hatred of the media and the haters in politics may have caused him to distance himself from us, but the love of Christ will never allow me to distance myself from him,'' Wright said. "I can no more disown him than I can disown any other child of mine who makes [a] bad decision. He made a bad decision, but he's still my child," he said.

The language was similar to words used by candidate Barack Obama in a celebrated speech on race, when he said of Wright: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother." Obama said, "These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."

Speaking on Sunday, Wright told the congregation that he is proud of "the only church that produced the first and only African-American president in the 211-year history of the United States," according to an account reported in the Chicago Sun-Times. "No other church can say that," he said.

Wright also took issue with Elisabeth Hasselbeck of ABC's "The View," who he referred to as a "broad" and "that dumb broad" without mentioning her name, according to the Sun-Times.

The special service also drew the presence of the Rev. Michael Pfleger, who ran into trouble this year over controversial remarks he made about Senator Hillary Clinton.

Wright caused difficulty for Obama during the primary campaign when a video of an old sermon of his was released and repeatedly aired on cable news networks. "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Wright said in the video.

In his remarks on Sunday, Rev. Wright reportedly compared the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison to the abuses of colonial powers. "What we doing with a base in Cuba?" he asked. "We just take stuff."

"Any preacher who dares to point out the simple ugly facts found in every field imaginable is demonized as volatile, controversial, incendiary, inflammatory, anti-American and radical," Wright said, according to an account of the sermon in the Chicago Tribune.

Rev. Wright became pastor of Trinity in 1972 and embraced the church's motto, "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." a phrase coined by his predecessor, the Reverend Dr. Reuben Sheares. Under Wright's leadership, the membership of Trinity grew from 87 members to more than 6,000.

Obama left Trinity earlier this year and has not indicated what church, if any, he will join once he moves to Washington.