This week a group of scholars and theologians released the “Evangelical Manifesto” at the National Press Club. It is a thoughtful, ambitious, if somewhat uneven, treatise and I wonder if the decision to premiere the document in Washington D.C. was necessarily a wise one.

It might have received a more serious reading (which it deserved) had it been unveiled at Wheaton or Taylor, or some other Evangelical college of distinction. After all, a doctrinally freighted statement like, “All too often we have been seduced by the shaping power of the modern world, exchanging a costly grace for convenience,” is not the type of claim that most journalists are equipped to assess without calling their contacts at the local seminary.

It is perhaps for this reason that media coverage of the text focused on the desire of the group to “depoliticize” faith or “take religion out of politics.” I think it’s a bit more complex than that. In fact, it’s a lot more complex than that and the lesson to theologians and intellectuals should be clear: if you willfully insert your message into the meat grinder of the national media it will come out unappetizingly reprocessed.

The Manifesto strikes me as much more a statement about the plight of contemporary Evangelicalism than a treatise on politics. In the following short and brutally incomplete contribution (which I hope to continue in my next post), I want to identify some of the themes I see in this text with special attention to how they interface with what we are encountering this election season.

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The global food crisis came like a tsunami, with amazing speed and stealth. Development institutions everywhere are scrambling to face the urgent problems and questions that come in its wake.

There’s the immediate problem: How to find funds to buy enough food to meet steep increases in demand to feed hungry people here and now.

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"What do the American people think of Ayatollah Khomeini?” an Iranian TV reporter asked me on my first visit to Tehran in 1999. For a moment I was stumped. If I answered truthfully, I would have to say that the vast majority of Americans had never heard of Khomeini. But Iranian hardliners might easily exploit this observation. And so I simply suggested that most Americans didn’t follow international politics—this was the task of a foreign policy elite whose opinions on Iran were as divided as ever.

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I would like to make a few observations about last night’s primaries, in particular the themes and images struck by the candidates in their respective victory speeches. But first, permit me one unsolicited--and unoriginal--observation: Oh Good Lord what a friggin' mess the Democrat nominating process is!

Between pledged delegates and Super Delegates and the popular vote and secretive caucuses and Florida and Michigan, I confess to being utterly dumbfounded as to: a) whom the totality of Democratic voters (as opposed to, for example, Republican voters who gleefully participated in primary day festivities) actually favor, and, b) whether the whole convoluted process can in any way, shape, or form yield the most electable candidate.

But let’s get to the imagery and oratory, shall we?

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Music is a well known path for crossing wide cultural divides. Music speaks without words. It can epitomize a mood as well as a culture. And it can stir up emotions and preconceptions. There’s a fascinating venture afoot in Fes, Morocco, to use those very qualities to bridge divides between the Muslim world and western cultures and faiths. The idea is that people can, through their love of music, explore new realms and appreciate the world’s wonderful diversity. But even more, the hope is that with emotions roused through music and art, people will open their minds as well as their hearts to new ideas.

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It is midweek. Reverend Jeremiah Wright has spoken and every national news outlet has gone to Code Red.

The fallout from the pastor’s triptych of fulmination (Moyers/NAACP/NPC) has whipped the punditry up into a frenzy. The pollsters are re-tabulating. The Super Delegates are posturing and re-positioning. The operatives are shouting their talking points. The moderators are appealing for calm.

Footage of Wright doing his (not un-amusing) “But-Black-Folks- Do-It-Like-This!” routine is being looped endlessly. As is the image of a tense Obama standing on a runway and looking like his head is about to explode.

And then, almost as an afterthought, the major news divisions all feel obliged to show a clip of Hillary Clinton.

It has a dreamlike quality to it.

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Standing on a tarmac yesterday a rather tense Barack Obama said of Jeremiah Wright: “He does not speak for me. He does not speak for the campaign.”

True enough. But how exactly should the Senator speak in the aftermath of the Reverend’s recent attempts to McGovernize and Mondaleize his candidacy? Permit me to rehearse some possible responses to the existential threat posed by Wright. But please recall that none of the forthcoming proposals is particularly good. Like America's foreign policy options in Iran, the Senator’s alternatives in this crisis can be described as “bad” and “worse”:

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In recent weeks I have given a lot of thought to the flap over Barack Obama’s assertion that economic frustration inclines people to “cling to guns or religion.” Beyond the domestic debate, the hullabaloo provoked by the Senator’s remarks offers a useful point of departure to probe the complex motivations that animate Islamist movements and ideologies.

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For guts combined with grace, Thoraya Obaid has few rivals. A proud Saudi Muslim, she leads what is probably the United Nations' most controversial agency, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – which addresses women's reproductive health. Recently she was the speaker at the Washington National Cathedral's Sunday Forum, arguing that religious leaders must address the sorry state of women in much of the developing world.

She even dared utter the words "unsafe abortion." She wanted this issue, usually avoided in polite discussion, front and center because the suffering and loss of life it causes women the world over need to be addressed forthrightly. The Cathedral's dean (who moderated her talk), she said, told her as they moved towards the podium that those words had probably never been uttered before inside the Cathedral's hallowed walls.

Ms. Obaid reels off heart-rending statistics about what women suffer – how many still die each day in childbirth, how many girls are taken out of school, or married without a say before they are 14, and on and on. She also exudes confidence that things can change. Her experience convinces her that it can be done.

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As with most analysts who cover the 2008 election I receive my share of spin-related e-mails (referred to from here on in as “Spreemails”) from the campaigns of those running for high office.

A Spreemail may be described thusly: a political infomercial directed exclusively at pundits in hopes of getting these clueless dimwits to tow a presidential aspirant’s party line in their forthcoming blogs, columns, radio shows, web videos, mixed media installations, etc. In an effort to quell the inveterate suspicions of aforesaid pundits, a Spreemail will often, but not always, contain references to credible journalistic and scholarly sources.

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