The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University has set up an indispensable Internet tool for those tracking religion in the 2008 presidential election. Any reference to faith by a major presidential candidate is logged on the Web site and categorized by topic. Which presidential candidate last mentioned church and state issues? It was Democratic candidate Barack Obama. In fact, Obama was the last to mention the issues of morality, society and global religious matters. Obama has been quite religious in his speeches and statements lately.

Leading Republican candidate John McCain hasn't mentioned a religious issue according to the site since Oct. 17, 2007, and that was at the Values Voter Summit. Former Democratic candidate John Edwards hasn't said a word about religious issues since Dec. 4, 2007.

In general, except for former Arkansas Republican Governor Mike Huckabee, the Democrats are mentioning faith issues in much greater frequency than their GOP counterparts, but that's just based on my unscientific measurement. Hopefully the minds behind this tool will come out with charts and graphs to track this sort of information, and if they don't, perhaps some journalist will do it for them.

Bookmark this site because it's certainly going to be useful in the future.