Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Austen IvereighNovember 04, 2008

When I was first invited to contribute to "In All Things", I wrote as a European envious of what the rise of Barack Obama showed the old continent about the United States.

Enlightened religion is deficient in piety, feeling, and popular power, while Evangelicals are too prone to give reason the day off. Without each other as counterbalance, they fall into sterility on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other; yet blended, in American civil religion, and in a leader like Obama, they are a potent force for greatness ....

... "Yes we can" is not a policy but the promise of a capacity to change by harnessing transcendent forces. It’s the not just the man, but the culture which created him, that can deliver. American religious culture, and the genius of its constitution, harbor not just the seeds of political renewal, but the fertilizer and the water too.

I hope Obama’s policies will be great for America, and for the world -- and that Catholics, in particular, come to recognise in him their partisan and friend. But today is not about policies, ideology or even politics in the traditional sense. It’s about the harnessing of energies, the uniting around a common purpose, the transcendence of narrow interests and the triumph of the hope of a people.

It’s the US that won last night. Congratulations.

(And congratulations to America magazine, and to my "In All Things" colleagues, for peerless coverage.  I’m only sorry I never found a US citizen to marry in time to vote.)

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley chat with Christopher White about his new book, ‘Pope Leo XVI: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy.’
JesuiticalJune 30, 2025
Kerry Weber, incoming president of the Catholic Media Association, and executive editor of America Magazine, speaks June 26, 2025, during the Catholic Media Conference in Phoenix. (OSV News photo/Bob Roller)
Kerry Weber is an executive editor for America. On May 20, 2025, the Catholic Media Association announced that she was elected president,
Grace LenahanJune 30, 2025
"The whole church needs fraternity, which must be present in all of our relationships, whether between lay people and priests, priests and bishops, bishops and the pope," he said during his homily at Mass on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul June 29.
Many aspects of Pope Francis’ remarkable program of ecclesial renewal weare prefigured in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s vision for the church.
Travis LaCouterJune 27, 2025