Since Romney's "Faith in America" speech happened on Thursday, doing a Friday news wrap on it seemed a little hasty. (Well, if you want the whole truth, I got pulled off onto something else.) So a week removed, here we go.

I'm content having other members of the FPL news team scan the right-leaning news, but I save the pleasure of CBN's Brody File for myself. Brody spends a lot of time on the trail and has a knack for capturing the tenor of a room, and he thought Romney's speech was dynamite:

Someone wake me up! I could have sworn this was December 2007. But today in College Station, Texas, as I watched Mitt Romney deliver his long awaited faith speech with American flags draped behind him, it felt like January 2009.

The MSM was markedly less enthusiastic. In particular, Romney's pointed exclusion of nonbelievers from his inclusive American family received thoughtful criticism from EJ Dionne, David Brooks, Steve Waldman, and FPL's Jennifer Butler, among many others. Dionne's historical perspective, Brooks' cultural and intellectual context, Waldman's demographic insight, and Jen's frame of coalition-building all made essentially the same point, but from different angles. And editorial observer Eduardo Porter illustrated their point well in today's New York Times:

I’m an atheist. When people trot out the well-worn John Adams quote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” I can’t help feeling squeezed out of the polity. Mr. Romney was trying to sound ecumenical. But speeches like his confirm the impossibility for an atheist to be elected to national office in this country. Any atheist with political ambitions would have to drop the atheism first.

On the analytical side, Amy Sullivan's TIME piece was pithy and insightful.

The speech marked a shift in approach for Romney, who has previously sought to highlight areas of agreement between his faith and evangelical Christianity. Now he is attempting to take it one step further, drawing a circle around religious conservatives that includes evangelicals and Mormons, and defining them as in common cause against what he termed "the religion of secularism."

I guess it's my inner historian talking, but my favorite on-the-ground reports were those gauging viewers' reactions out on the campaign trail. Good examples in the Des Moines Register, CNN's Political Ticker and the Dallas Morning News.