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The Chicago Tribune had a potentially tremendous story to tell Sunday about a witch school setting up shop in Rossville, Ill., a small, economically struggling town in the heartland. The perspective of the story — about Wiccans trying to fit into a Bible Belt community — is what first jumped out at me.
OK, we’ve waited long enough. Nearly a week after the news from EthicsDaily.com that Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, described Mormonism as “the fourth Abrahamic faith,” little has been said of this rather significant statement.
We’ve established that The Washington Post Style section likes to be snarky. In the Post‘s effort to cover substantive news and issues, the snark will often get in the way. It’s almost like they’re trying to entertain us, rather then inform us. Since when does an important, serious, American news organization behave that way? Oh wait, never mind.
The Wall Street Journal‘s opinion section has a solid review of what appears to be a solid book on the growth of evangelical, seeker-friendly megachurches. The growth of megachurches, along with the decline of the traditional mainline churches, is one of the biggest stories in religion these days, and this reviews highlights some important aspects.
One thing I don’t miss from Washington are the snarky, uninformative feature/news stories in The Washington Post‘s Style section. The latest and greatest from those pages, Sridhar Pappu’s report on the Values Voters Summit, is like a bowl of bad popcorn. Little informed, slightly amused but mostly bemused, I came away from this story learning more about Pappu’s day at the Hilton Washington than the latest plots from the religious right to take over America, or at least install a president to its liking in 2008.
Remember that tragic accident on an Indiana interstate that killed four Christian college students and a university employee? On Sunday, about 20 miles from that spot on that same stretch of interstate, another tragic car accident took the lives of five people traveling in yet another 15-passenger van.
Most second- and third-tier presidential candidates fuss about a lack of media attention and the mainstream media’s general tendency to treat their campaigns as equaling the significance of a stalk of corn in an Iowa cornfield. The social conservative Sen. Sam Brownback wouldn’t hesitate to blame his lack of political traction on the media’s failures to take his candidacy seriously.
Many theories have been tossed around for why Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling avoided discussing religion and her books. One of the more popular theories was that she didn’t want to be typecast or shunned for any personal views that could affect books sales.
