In a move that has stunned even many of his supporters, President Obama has stigmatized and enraged one of the most important institutions in the American electorate: the Catholic Church.

The death of an international figure often invites a raft of revisionism: an effort to interpret the person’s legacy in terms that suit political or ideological prejudices. Recent commentary over the passing of an evangelical leader, the Reverend John Stott, exemplifies this vice, perhaps most grievously in an essay by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

News of the ousting of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could not have arrived at a better time. It provided, literally, a teaching moment.

For years, the international community and human rights activists have campaigned for the freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s democracy leader and Nobel laureate. Watching her leave her house after 15 years and 20 days in detention was as momentous as the scenes of Nelson Mandela leaving a South African prison 20 years ago.

For philanthropists inspired by their Christian faith, don’t shrink from publicly identifying your cause with the moral and spiritual claims of the gospel.

It’s a good thing that the FBI agents who thwarted a terrorist bomb plot in Portland, Oregon over the weekend didn’t read President Obama’s 2010 National Security Strategy (NSS). If they had, they never would have suspected the Somali-born teenager, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, of any unpleasant intentions or any link to radical Islamic jihad.

Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1980, a very strange thing happened in one of the Soviet Union’s satellite states: workers in Poland, supposedly dutiful members of the “United Workers’ Party,” staged a spontaneous revolution.

People of faith have long assumed that the Devil’s principal stratagem is to tempt his victims with thoughts of revenge, deceit, lust, pride, and other deadly sins.

Although July 4, 1776 marked the date when the American people dissolved “the political bands which have connected them” with Great Britain, July 4, 1940 signified just the opposite: the moment when the two great democracies solidified their “special relationship.”

To the degree that Obama believes in promoting democracy, his efforts will flounder if they continue to lack moral realism: a deep sense of religion’s corruptibility.