A couple of articles for you to enjoy.

Richard Mouw, “A Teaching Moment for Mormonism,” on his blog. Some are calling for Mitt Romney to offer a “Houston speech” concerning his faith and how he governs. The “Houston speech” is an allusion to John F. Kennedy’s speech in which he said that his baptism didn’t exclude him from holding office and in which he assuaged worries that he would take orders from the Vatican. Mouw doesn’t want a Romney “Houston speech,” but a pronouncement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of how Mormons and Mormonism can engage within a pluralistic democracy without damaging their church or democracy. He draws on the Roman Catholic Church’s pronouncement along the same lines that emerged from Vatican II.

The fact is, however, that the Kennedy position did not really solve the problem. The real objection was that there was something basically incompatible between Catholicism and American pluralistic democracy. What Kennedy was clearly implying in his Houston address was that he would not be influenced by his Catholicism, which actually reinforced the notion that Catholicism was intrinsically incompatible with democratic values.

Virginia Heffernen, “Sweeping the Clouds Away,” in The New York Times Magazine. The first few seasons of Sesame Street are being released on DVD. With parental warnings. “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.