The most interesting American presidential primary contest in living memory has drawn to a close, with an outcome that 12 months ago would have seemed truly extraordinary. The young Illinois Senator Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother American, has pipped Hillary Clinton, former First Lady and clear favourite last year, to the finishing post, represented by winning a total of 2,118 or more committed delegates to the Democratic National Convention later this summer. The Democratic primary contest was a collision of two kinds of American dream - that a woman could overcome discrimination against her gender to reach the highest office in the United States, and that a mixed-race American could overcome racial prejudice to achieve the same goal. And it is Senator Obama who has won the right to make that bid next November, although a political alliance with Senator Clinton has still to be negotiated in order to bring her and her supporters over to his side. A place as his running mate might be offered, if she wants it.

The simple image of a black American president would transform America's sour relations with the rest of the world at one glance. If racial division and disharmony is the single most important issue facing America today, as many Americans would recognise, this result opens a dramatic new chapter there too. Even the Republican contender, Senator John McCain, admits, to the discomfort of many in his own party, that America needs healing after the Bush years. The planet's most prosperous nation is also one of the most unequal, with infant mortality, for instance, higher than anywhere else in the Western world due to the poverty and the lack of affordable health care among poor black and Hispanic minorities.

Religion has played a very different role so far from the Bush-Kerry contest of four years ago. Then, Catholic leaders fell in with Republican efforts to drive a wedge between the Democrats and their traditional Catholic constituency, in the ...

Relations between Christians and Muslims have never been more sensitive nor crucial to the peace and prosperity of the planet. Both have their fundamentalists, to whom outright conversion of the other is the only acceptable goal. The mainstream in each case, meanwhile, finds dealing with its own fundamentalists almost as tricky as dealing with the other faith. The Church of England is to debate a motion at its summer ...

Three major events in the past week have offered insights into the family of today and the family of the future. First, there was the wedding of the Queen's grandson, Peter Phillips, and Autumn Kelly, attended by the divorced and remarried parents of both bride and groom, together with their new spouses. It was a complicated situation familiar to many Catholics who suffer as much from marital breakdown as the rest ...

Cardinal John Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster at the time of the publication of Humanae Vitae 40 years ago this summer, described the crisis of authority it triggered as "the greatest shock the Church has suffered since the Reformation". With hindsight that was an exaggeration, though the encyclical brought about a profound change in the way Catholics saw the Church. Remarks a week ago by Pope Benedict ...

Seen through Western media eyes, the Catholic Church's main contribution to the battle against HIV-Aids in Africa and elsewhere has been its opposition to the use of condoms as a protection against infection. That perception was made worse by the way certain churchmen, most notably the late Cardinal López Trujillo, offered flawed scientific arguments in support of the condoms ban. The reality is rather different. ...