In my 11 years as a reporter, I can’t recall an editor or fellow journalist discussing the legal concept known as the “freedom of association.”
Free to associate or discriminate?
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Antony Flew brings deism back
In The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Mark Oppenheimer built a lengthy case that the philosopher Antony Flew is, amid painfully documented memory problems, being exploited by a few evangelical authors. Oppenheimer argues that There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, “a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese,” bears far more editorial fingerprints by Varghese than by Flew.
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Mourning Columbine, yet again
There are very few news stories that have affected me as deeply as the massacre at Columbine High School. Obviously, Sept. 11 hit the whole country. It still stands as an event that I cannot even comprehend. But for me as someone who lived on that side of Denver for a decade, Columbine remains a kind of small-scale, very personal, horror that stands alone.
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Those parish school puzzles
Are African Americans converting to Catholicism anymore? As Nicholas Lemann writes in The Promised Land, the old saying in Chicago was that when water was sprinkled on the forehead of a black baby, he or she was baptized essentially into three interlocking institutions: the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and the local buildings-trade union. Now one wonders what a future historian would write about the situation today.
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Parsing pagans properly
Tom Breen is an extraordinarily good newsman in the Associated Press’ Charleston, West Virginia, bureau. He manages to write compelling national stories by focusing on local trends and events. I’ve been reading his coverage of the sad case of a 20-year-old black woman who was raped and tortured. Six white individuals have been charged in the crime. Terry highlighted his story this past summer about small-town churches struggling to keep their doors open. His thoughtful comments have enlightened many discussions here at GetReligion, too.
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Mouw underlines a non-negotiable point
The other day, I raised a question or two — as I tend to do — about a Los Angeles Times story on an interfaith gathering of scholars to address scriptures that appear to “assert the superiority of one belief system over others.”
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Too few words for America's many faiths
In celebrating its 150th anniversary, The Atlantic invited writers and artists to discuss the future of the American idea. The results, while not entirely disheartening, leave the impression of a people largely ill at ease with their nation’s future and, in a few cases, openly contemptuous of the country’s elected leaders (or, in the words of Greil Marcus, “those who presume to rule the nation”).
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Lutherans in our midst
I was quite surprised to see the story Terry sent me from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Written by religion reporter K. Connie Kang, the story is about the holy day being celebrated today by millions of Lutherans, as well as Christians of various Protestant denominations: Reformation Sunday.
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5Q+1 as David Crumm shifts into overdrive
GetReligion’s friend David Crumm sent email this week with the news that he will take a months-long leave of absence from the Detroit Free Press to develop a project called Read the Spirit. To call Read the Spirit a blog focused on religion news would be an understatement.
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