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Here is a story with legs, in red pews and zip codes. And, while this little piece ends with the magic words “The Associated Press contributed to this report,” I cannot find any other references to it in Google News. Honestly, I wonder why. Yes, I realize that this is probably written straight off a press released from a U.S. congressman’s office.
This may be one too many sports-related posts for some of you (and a good start for others), but after reading ESPN The Magazine‘s profile of Detroit Lions quarterback Jon Kitna I couldn’t let it pass. Thank you to all of you who sent us this story, and I agree with the most recent submission that this is one of the most substantive attempts to look at faith and football in a very long time.
For those who closely watch the state of religion and American politics, there is going to be a fascinating press briefing this week at (surprise) the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. There has been some early coverage (click here for a Washington Times report), but we will not know the fine details until the end of the week.
In the latest Time, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy provide an informative and lively report on the media-averse Council for National Policy and its threat to go all Ross Perot on the Republican Party if it dares to nominate the pro-choice (but also pro-constructionist) Rudy Giuliani.
Evangelicals were on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. The story — about how “hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants” are using the massively popular, hugely entertaining and quite violent video game Halo 3 as a recruiting technique — is well-rounded, gives a paragraph to theological issues and quotes a nice variety of people. But something about this story seemed so unfresh, especially when it compared this trend to bingo games in churches during the 1960s:
Every time President Bush speaks of his Christian faith, the mainstream media get all roiled up. Here’s how a 2003 story in The Christian Science Monitor began:
Paul Elie’s latest essay for The Atlantic, a 6,400-word report on the variety of political thinkers who cite the late Reinhold Niebuhr as their hero, starts off strong but spends too much time waist-deep in the big muddy of debates about the Iraq War.
I approached Newsweek‘s cover story on Mitt Romney with dread. Would this be still another media demand that Romney deliver a J.F.K. speech that promises to build an unscalable wall between his faith and his public service?
After watching a round of CNN over lunch, I think we can now proclaim this the political story of the day. You know that this development is causing a round of celebrations in the Hillary Clinton headquarters, since third-party bids are what opens the door for candidates with consistent high, high negative numbers in polls.
