In three major appearances in the last four days, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. offered a full-throated historical defense of black church traditions. But his re-emergence on the national stage has certainly served to provide more sound-bites that already have begun to haunt Senator Barack Obama on the campaign trail. With Senator John McCain’s fresh criticisms of the pastor and Republicans painting him and Mr. Obama as extremist in commercials using snippets of sermons, Mr. Wright, longtime pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, defiantly and passionately argued that such criticisms were attacks on the black church...