Most of the NYT‘s inaugural reporting hasn’t really been reporting at all. It’s the would-be scripture of civil religion, much taken with the glory of it all, of the world but not really in its mess and contradiction. An exception is Michael Powell’s “2 Churches, Black and White, See Inaugural Hope,” a lovely piece of daily news writing that escapes the shock and awe of the inaugurations — Obama’s, and Lincoln’s — by telling a story that in miniature is almost as good as Gilead, the Marilynne Robinson novel said to be among Obama’s favorites in a more typically reverent piece on the president-elect’s reading habits.