Douglas LeBlanc

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Mean literalists suck

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Poor besieged Anna Quindlen. She received an indignant letter from a reader, you see, and his tone reminded her of the chill wind that is religious intolerance. “When did it first become gospel that only conservatives knew God?” Quindlen asks. As evidence of this widespread bigotry, Quindlen refers to the notorious Christian apologist Bill O’Reilly — which could leave her more literal-minded readers thinking that God must sometimes refer to himself as The Factor.


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U.S. News skims the surface

The cover copy for this week’s U.S. News & World Report promises more than its reporters deliver, especially in the deck: “Searching for the truth between Mel Gibson and the Gospels.” The deck implies that Gibson and the Gospels represent different extremes, and that U.S. News — still so attached to its News You Can Use formula that it splashes a white-on-red Annual Career Guide banner atop the cover — will sort it all out for us with businesslike efficiency.


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A foolproof template for primatial correspondence

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Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal had great fun last week in exposing the boilerplate style in two letters by Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Many paragraphs that first appeared in a letter Griswold wrote to his fellow primates of the Anglican Communion (Aug. 19, 2003) found a new life in his letter to Alexey II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dec. 19, 2003).


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Creeping Fundamentalism III: Mel Gibson, purveyor of hate

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It’s striking how quickly an accusation becomes presumed guilt and then a cliche detached from any need for proof. Consider the speed with which Karen Russell, a trial attorney appearing on MSNBC’s Abrams Report, mentions Mel Gibson as a hatemonger, as if this is an indisputable fact.


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