%1

Part of the success of Mike Huckabee’s and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns has been their promise of transcending partisan politics. Huckabee talks of wanting to “make Americans, once again, more proud to be Americans than just to be Democrats or Republicans.” Obama invokes a vision of “one nation” that is more than “a collection of red states and blue states.” It’s time, Obama repeatedly says, “to move beyond the bitterness and the pettiness and the anger that has consumed Washington.”

Christian Churches Together in the USA—the nation’s broadest and newest group devoted to ecumenism—says it will stay out of the presidential campaigns but hopes to convey its top concern—combating domestic poverty—to the president-elect before his or her inauguration.

The fledgling pan-Christian organization, which formally launched in January 2006 in Pasadena, California, held its annual four-day meeting last month in Baltimore. Attendees spent part of that time at Bread for the World offices and touring the sites of S.O.M.E. (So Others May Eat) in Washington, D.C.