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There are very few news stories that have affected me as deeply as the massacre at Columbine High School. Obviously, Sept. 11 hit the whole country. It still stands as an event that I cannot even comprehend. But for me as someone who lived on that side of Denver for a decade, Columbine remains a kind of small-scale, very personal, horror that stands alone.
The right-of-center Daily Telegraph, Great Britain’s only remaining broadsheet, has published a list of what its editors consider the 100 most influential conservatives and liberals in the United States. The list tells us a lot about how the British see our next presidential election. It’s also a peek into how journalists across the pond understand America’s political power structure. Where do they rank the leaders of our political, business, social and, yes, religious institutions?
There’s no doubt about it. The Rev. Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., is a Baptist — because he says so.
There’s been a surprisingly low level of news coverage on a trial judge’s ruling that “sectarian prayers” on the floor of Indiana’s House (the lower level of its General Assembly) violated the “constitutional separation of church and state.” Most recently, an appeals court tossed the case on procedural grounds, but didn’t look at the merits of the case because the plaintiffs didn’t have standing.
Our friends at Beliefnet.com (we are linked through Blog Heaven) have this strange little blog/graphic device going right now called the “God-o-Meter,” which they are insisting is pronounced “Gah-DOM-meter.”
The other day, I raised a question or two — as I tend to do — about a Los Angeles Times story on an interfaith gathering of scholars to address scriptures that appear to “assert the superiority of one belief system over others.”
OK, we’ve waited long enough. Nearly a week after the news from EthicsDaily.com that Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, described Mormonism as “the fourth Abrahamic faith,” little has been said of this rather significant statement.
I was too slow to express my interest in posting about David Kirkpatrick’s epic New York Times Magazine essay, so Terry beat me to it, and with greater thoroughness. Still, Terry graciously invited me to write an additional post if I had a different perspective on Kirkpatrick’s reporting.
We’ve established that The Washington Post Style section likes to be snarky. In the Post‘s effort to cover substantive news and issues, the snark will often get in the way. It’s almost like they’re trying to entertain us, rather then inform us. Since when does an important, serious, American news organization behave that way? Oh wait, never mind.
