One thing Obama discussed in his speech that is not as widely known as it should be: The Catholic Church in Chicago was his primary employer/sponsor as a young community organizer on the south side of Chicago.

There's an awful lot about the Roman Catholic Church that I dislike ~ enough to have made me an ex-Catholic ~ but there are always people of faith, of every faith, who exemplify the highest of human ideals.

Within the Catholic Church, there has long been a smallish subculture (e.g., Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement) more committed to social justice than to ideology and dogma. This community within the Church flourished in Chicago during the tenure of the late Cardinal Bernardin, and indeed had much to do with the growth and development of the young-adult Obama. We should all be thankful.

Some people are primarily concerned with doing good, and others are mostly interested in telling the rest of us what's right and wrong. Seems to me that those two approaches are pretty much mutually exclusive.