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That’s a cliche, I know, but that’s how I felt when reader Josh Carlton sent me a link for a Rolling Stone photo essay titled “Young and Pious: A Rock & Roll Story.” Then it offered a read-out that told you what you needed to know: “Photojournalist Stephanie Keith goes inside the Christian rock subculture and finds sexy girls, hardcore bands and the strange marriage of rock and rapture.”
The bad news is that we know almost nothing concrete about what happened during the discussions between Pope Benedict XVI and his former students this past weekend — those talks about evolution and philosophy. We have clips and snips from here and there, with the spin being that Intelligent Design was not on the agenda. What was on the agenda? Well, precisely the kinds of philosophical concerns that are at the heart of the ongoing debates inside the Vatican about clashing evolutionary theories (plural).
Christopher Goffard of the Los Angeles Times has told the pathos-laden story of conflicts between pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa and his namesake son, pastor of Capo Beach Calvary.
Neela Banerjee highlighted a fascinating evangelical phenomenon in a New York Times article. The article shows that Banerjee is really going out of her way to cover a wide variety of folks on her religion beat:
RightWingBob sounds the alarm today about an unsourced and unfounded aside in an otherwise routine profile of Bob Dylan in The Christian Science Monitor:
After looking back over the comments from last week’s post on the disastrous news articles on the firing of a longtime Sunday School teacher in upstate New York, I feel it’s necessary to make a couple of points very clear.
As I noted the other day, the leaders of the First Baptist Church of Palm Beach elected to try to stonewall reporter Jane Musgrave of the Palm Beach Post. Why? She was checking into rumors, reports and documents that suggested that the Rev. Steven Flockhart — the congregation’s new minister and a nationally known pulpit star — had some financial skeletons in his closet. That led to a lengthy report that, to my amazement, did a good job of quoting the young minister’s many admirers, as well as his critics.
I really liked this Peggy Fletcher Stack piece in the Salt Lake Tribune. It’s not groundbreaking, but it nicely surveys a variety of churches in the Salt Lake region about an issue that’s somewhat universal.
Here is a story from last weekend that I have been thinking about most of the week. The story is not new, but there has been a major development.
