I would like to note that the following post is in no way an endorsement of the decision by a Colorado woman to smash up a piece of alleged modern art.
That one word makes a difference
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Pod people: On converts to atheism
We have another podcast up and running. This one is a follow-up chat, with me this time around, about the new wave of data from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life — the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.”
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Bible-toting bullies with webcams?
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Penitent's precedence over priest's predicament
Earlier this year, we looked at the story of Father Mark Gruber, a popular Benedictine monk who was let go from St. Vincent College after porn was found on his computer. When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story in February, tmatt noted that some of the hardest news stories to cover are personnel disputes inside private colleges and universities, particularly religious ones, due to privacy issues. It turns out he was particularly prescient.
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The naked tea partiers
For reasons known only to New York Times editors, Kate Zernike is continually given free rein to write about the Tea Party. There have been a litany of complaints about her coverage, perhaps most notably when earlier this year she accused Human Events editor Jason Mattera of speaking in a “Chris Rock voice” and using “racial stereotypes” to mock Obama. Mattera was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Zernike didn’t realize that was just how he talks. Not content with the amount of racial phrenology she’d employed to date, she wrote a piece about race and the Tea Party pegged to the Glenn Beck rally that contained this immortal sentence:
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'Journalists can play with quotes'
That’s all I could think of when I read this line in a Fortune magazine article about why we’ve seen no lawsuits from Facebook or its founder Mark Zuckerberg despite all the likelihood that “The Social Network,” compelling as I expect it to be, is based more on fiction than fact:
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That's mighty Native American of you!
Apparently Archbishop Charles Chaput struck a nerve with Mark Silk, professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.
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Moses' mighty wind
Have you heard the old joke about the Sunday School teacher trying to convince her students that it was not the Red Sea but the Sea of Reeds that the Israelites crossed? She explains that Moses hadn’t miraculously parted the water to enable the crossing. Rather, the sea was actually very shallow — only a couple of inches or feet deep, in fact. So while God did rescue his people, he didn’t use supernatural means.
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Failing a religious literacy test
Did you catch Robert Wright’s “religious literacy test” in The New York Times this week? It’s under the opinion section, and I’m all for people having their own opinions. But, as they say, you can’t have your own facts. And that’s why I bring it up here. Wright is very well respected, a journalist and the author of the bestseller The Evolution of God.
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