This Newsweek piece on Barack Obama's faith - by which the reporter really means his campaign's faith - is mostly useless. It does contain a mini-profile of Josh DuBois, who's a swell guy. So that's welcome.

But the last few paragraphs are worth the price of admission:

The rift between the candidate and the pastor had been growing for months. Wright was wounded when Obama—already worried about stories questioning Wright's controversial views—disinvited him from delivering the opening prayer when Obama announced he was running for president. Obama knew the pastor was not pleased with his Philadelphia race speech, in which the candidate said he disagreed with Wright's controversial comments but could no more disown him than he could his grandmother, who had also held opinions he did not share. Obama reached out to Wright during the controversy surrounding his sermons and offered to help him manage the onslaught of reporters who were coming at him day and night. But Wright refused. The pastor didn't even bother to tell Obama about his upcoming trip to Washington. The campaign learned about it from reporters.

Aides and friends describe that night as the toughest of the entire campaign for Obama and his wife, Michelle. They were anguished and dismayed. Wright had been a friend and mentor. Obama had said before that he couldn't cut him off; but after this bitter performance, how could he not sever his ties? "It was a circus," says the senior Obama aide. "Not only was Wright repeating things that were objectionable, but he was also impugning Barack's sincerity."

This time, Obama did not try to temper his remarks or put them in a larger context, as he had done in his measured Philadelphia speech. On Tuesday, he called Wright's speeches "appalling" and a "show of disrespect to me." He said he had given Wright the benefit of the doubt before, but now said "there are no excuses. [His words] offend me, they rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced. And that's what I'm doing very clearly and unequivocally here today." Now guys like Roemer and DuBois can give a simple answer when they're asked about Obama's relationship with the controversial preacher: it's over.

This opens for me an intriguing possibility that it was in fact Wright who threw Obama under the bus, not the other way around. Some folks have speculated that Wright might have been deliberately provocative to give Obama the opportunity to reject him. The thought had crossed my mind. But this article suggests something even beyond that: Wright didn't want his friendship with a middle-of-the-road politician gumming up his ability to critique American politics and society. So he came out guns a-blazing, making it clear that he wasn't going to let small details like Obama's electability get in his way.

It's worth a thought. And since Obama's stronger if anything post-Wright, if true, it was a gamble that seems to have paid off in the end.