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Here’s an example of a critical story finding its way from the blogosphere into print: In March the Rev. Sun Myung Moon managed to get himself and his wife crowned — in a ceremony inside the Dirksen Senate Office Building — as Ambassadors for Peace.
This week in religion news begins with glad tidings for Anglicans and comedy fans alike: the producers of The Simpsons have invited Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, to consider a guest appearance.
Sharon Tubbs does a great job in today’s St. Petersburg Times of relating the play God’s Man in Texas to church-growth pressures faced by clergy across the nation.
The June 21 issue of Time devotes a 10-page cover story to the volatile questions of faith and politics. Time supplements other recent stories about the religion gap:
On Friday the Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane welcomed retired Senator John Danforth as celebrant and homilist during the national funeral for Ronald Reagan. In this interview with Nan Cobbey of Episcopal Life, Chane discussed the elaborate advance preparations for the funeral. Some of Chane’s fellow bishops, who have shown certain imperious tendencies in recent months, would have behaved more like this.
The indispensable John Allen Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter writes this week about Pope John Paul II’s visit to Switzerland and President Bush’s visit to the Vatican.
Oliver Pritchett of the Telegraph knocks it out of the park in satirizing Christian Aid’s Pocket Prayers for Peace and Justice. The one example Pritchett cites from Pocket Prayers is quite enough: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” becomes “Even if a full-scale violent confrontation breaks out I will not be afraid, Lord.”
The June 14 U.S. News & World Report includes three items that touch on God-beat concerns. Columnist Gloria Borger strives to make sense of the pew gap, but her generalizations get in the way.
As some of GetReligion’s readers have observed in our Comments feature, gay marriage is a frequent topic in this space. It’s a topic I would love to set aside, were it not such an inescapable talking point in religion circles and, by extension, on the Godbeat.
