Here’s a story in Newsweek reporting on a change in President Bush’s speechwriting staff. The big news, not yet formally announced: Michael Gerson is moving into a policy position and so will not be directly involved in the day-to-day speechwriting tasks. Newsweek presents this as a major loss of the President, comparing Gerson to Peggy Noonan and Theodore Sorensen in the pantheon of presidential speechwriters and implying that the religious undertones in Bush’s speeches may be absent in the future.

Ramesh Ponnuru in yesterday’s NRO’s "The Corner" (scroll down a bit) doesn’t think so:

[T]hey’ll have McGurn’s religious undertones instead--just read his recent articles for NRO or First Things or the New York Post and you’ll see that he is not so far off from Gerson’s (or Bush’s) understanding of the proper role of religious language in public life.

If you want some insight into the mind of McGurn, you could look here, here, here, here, and here.

Hat tip: Democracy Project.