Over at Religion & Politics, the still fairly new online journal of the Danforth Center, my friend Mark Silk looks at how an earlier religio-political divide in my home state of Connecticut was healed, that between the Yankees and the Catholics. At the center of the story is a "swamp yankee," Wilbur Cross, so called because he came from east of the Connecticut River. I am a swamp Catholic, also coming from east of the Connecticut River.
The tale shows all the usual suspects in sramas set along the fault line between religion and politics - there is prejudice, there is a politican's wiliness, there is the vanity of the clergy and the politicians, etc. But, there is something else too, the hope that, sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, divisions that seem carved in stone suddenly give way.
