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Sarah Price Brown of Religion News Service scored a nice scoop in a June 27 report that Rick Warren of The Purpose-Driven Life fame was headed to North Korea to speak in a 15,000-seat stadium.
Sigh. Another late night with rowdy football fans at the pub outside my window here at St. Edmund Hall in downtown Oxford.
Did a Democratic version of Mike Gerson start working for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.? I ask the question because his speech earlier this week at the Call to Renewal conference is about the best attempt to articulate the struggling movement known as the “religious left.” Not that it was that impressive. It’s about time a Democrat came up with something beyond the talking points on religion and its involvement in the public square.
Allow me, in the midst of the Superman and Anglican news, to pop a quick post in here in which I shamelessly promote the work of a friend of mine — William R. Mattox Jr. In addition to being a friend, he is a frequent speaker in the journalism program that I lead here at the Council For Christian Colleges and Universities. What else should I confess? Oh, he already owes me lunch.
We knew Superman Returns contained some pretty heavy religious imagery, the Christian and Jewish type to be specific, but the film is now drawing positive comparisons with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. On top of that, the film contains some un-Christlike imagery — unless you believe the researchers behind Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code — that has drawn some fascinating speculation from movie reviewers.
This is a few days late, but we need to look at that Los Angeles Times “End Times” story. I’m not sure if the problem with the story is that it is disorganized or that the reporter just doesn’t get the topic about which he is writing.
As some of you have noticed, we are currently having some technical difficulties. This has required us to turn off the comments sections of the blog. Our tech friends at Gospelcom.net hope to have matters straightened out by Monday or thereabouts. So we’ll take today off and, maybe, swing back into action late Sunday with comments about religion coverage in the weekend editions.
In the end, it was the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that made the biggest news on the front lines of the liturgical culture wars this week. However, it should be noted that the most important action taken by the oldline Presbyterians was to adopt precisely the option that the Episcopalians have been using for quite some time now.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a little column for Scripps Howard about a little movie called Facing the Giants that seems to have started a little controversy. I have given up trying to predict when people are going to react to a column. You know?
