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Judging from today’s reactions to the election, the deep thinkers at the former paper of record need to get a grip. I’m the lead-off hitter — LeBlanc and Mattingly come by later in the day to bat cleanup — but the shrillarity of Gary Wills’ and Maureen Dowd’s slow curve-ball should be enough for at least a lazy double.
True story: Your humble scribe once got sucked into a conversation with a guy who thought his own taste in music should settle the argument for what is good and hip and cool. A few minutes in, I let slip that I enjoyed the songs of the late lamented crypto-Christian rock group Creed, which launched my friend on a whale of a rant.
That sound you hear right now on the Religious Right is stunned silence about the president’s change of heart on same-sex unions.
Rob Moll at the always wide-ranging blog at ChristianityToday.com has a fine piece online addressing some of Nicholas Kristof’s recent efforts to praise, dissect and criticize evangelical Christians and other believers who he sees as irrationally old fashioned. It seems that Christian tradition is a good thing, when he agrees with it, and a very bad thing, when it crimps his cultural style. Kristof wants readers to think he is seriously investigating Christian history and thought, then he throws in cheap shots such as this: “When a Texas governor, Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson, barred the teaching of foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.’”
Late Great newsFriend of this blog Rod Dreher has a funny, but serious, column out about the “ghost” in the VeriChip story.
Here’s a fun piece in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, by sometime CounterPunch contributor Linda S. Heard, about the upcoming U.S. elections. Not sure the Kingdom of Saud is well served with this one.
So far, the Paul Crouch story has proceeded along the traditional lines of a low-level conservative sex scandal, by which I mean a scandal that is not part of some hypernews event (think Jim Bakker era) or a political crusade (think minister with strong ties to the White House).
As Doug just noted, this whole “Christian comedy” story is really, down at the roots, about the wider issue of Christian and conservative subcultures.
I happened to sit next to a hero, a wise elder of religion writers, as the Anglican Church of Canada selected its new archbishop last week. He observed that few of Canada’s major dailies had sent reporters to cover the meeting, and that this reflected on how Canadian culture sees the church as largely irrelevant. I said a few reporters were present from dailies, but I had dismissed his point too glibly: the National Post depended on Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun; the Globe and Mail relied too much on telephone interviews; the Toronto Star let Canadian Press handle most of the week’s news.
