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Alex Johnson of MSNBC writes: “George Bush has not said directly that he was ever born again. He has often said he was pointed on the path to God after a discussion with evangelist Billy Graham in 1985. . . . There is a second story about how Bush started on the road to salvation, one that is more in line with the common narrative.”
Charlie Madigan, senior correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, coins the phrase “Jesus-baiting” to introduce his report from the dreaded Bob Jones University, which he calls “the shiny, big brass buckle on the Bible belt.”
Here are two tidbits — something old, something new — from the weeklies that arrive at my snail-mail address.
Richard Major has filed a report for The Tablet on Archbishop George Carey’s visit to Truro Episcopal Church (beret tip: Simon Sarmiento). It’s a basic but flawed narrative of what has transpired in the broader Anglican Communion since the consecration of Gene Robinson as the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop.
Jimmy Swaggart has apologized, in the classic “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” style, for saying about gay men, “If one ever looks at me like that, I’m going to kill him and tell God he died.”
A friend at the Baton Rouge Advocate once remarked on the cognitive dissonance of singing the folkie Communion song “Sons of God,” which uses a chirpy melody for its chorus of “Eat his body, drink his blood / And we’ll sing a song of love: / Allelu, allelu, allelu, alleluia!”
Word Spy rightly honors journalist Alex Heard as the father of the word hathos, which he defined as “a mixture of hatred, disgust, embarrassment, and pathos” (The New Republic, Feb. 11, 1985).
Stephen Bates of the Guardian reports today on something remarkable: a “senior North American bishop” says the Episcopal Church is willing to punish African dioceses financially if it is disciplined for consecrating Gene Robinson as an openly gay bishop. Patrick Mauney of the Episcopal Church Center has previously said, “The disbursements are offered without strings attached.”
Here’s David Gates, in the Sept. 20 issue of Newsweek, reviewing Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president (as the Republican candidate, naturally) and turns America into a fascist state:
