"Amidst great expectations President Barack Obama delivered the Commencement Address at Notre Dame on May 17, 2009. The excitement owed partly to protests against the Catholic university’s choice to honor someone so famously supportive of legal abortion. Mostly it was eager anticipation of the same provenance: what would Obama say at America’s flagship religious institution about the relationship of religious faith to abortion – and to the other pressing moral issues of our time?"(...)