Presidents don’t just execute policy, or design plans, or haggle with legislators, and oversee and manage a large bureaucracy.  They also present, in a way, as the first human among us—the one who will register reality in their body, on their face, in the tone of their voice.  They incarnate the nation, in a way.  That is part of the magic of their charisma, and it can never be reduced to a bureaucratic algorithm.  It is foolish to imagine a candidate for president will not be judged as a person.  It’s part of why presidential elections can so easily feel so very personal.  And it’s not entirely wrong to think of them, properly, as just that: for the presidency is not just a set of tasks to perform; it is a role to inhabit.  And the role is at least as important as the tasks.  

In 2016 I wrote about this with my colleague Nichole Flores in a small piece for the Miller Center, a Presidential studies center at UVA.  Here's the piece.  We predicted this would be hard for Trump to manage.  Everything we said then has turned out to be correct, not that anyone is surprised at that.

Now happily we can consider the possibility--just the possibility--of another person in that role: Joe Biden.

This piece is about Biden as communicator and curator of grief; given his history, and his personal predilections, he seems designed to see the individual, and speak about them, in their finitude, and perhaps most completely in their ultimate finitude, determined by their death.  When we think about “public religion,” we ought to think about the ways that all people encounter ultimates of our contingency all the time, most obviously and perhaps most painfully in mortality, and how we respond to it can be, and probably will be, informed by our religious background and beliefs and the cultural ambience around us.  Worth considering it all.