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To tell you the truth, I have no idea what to say about this open-a-vein news feature from the Dallas Morning News. This really stirs something in me, as a guy who spent a big chunk of his childhood in Wichita Falls, Texas.
The New York Times‘ Gardiner Harris had a story about a controversial Obama administration pick. It seems that Dr. Francis S. Collins, the geneticist who led the effort to sequence the human genome, is facing some opposition on his path to heading the National Institutes of Health. Some are praising the pick, but not everyone:
For generations, presidential inaugurations have served as the high holy days of civil religion for scholars studying the intersection of faith and public life. Want to know about the lowest-common-denominator faith that unites the muddy middle of the American marketplace of ideas? Dissect the religious language that presidents use when standing at that big pulpit on Day One.
When I was an intern at the Ventura County Star, an editor taught me to avoid writing ledes that require weak modifiers like “may.” The same goes for headlines that end with a question mark. It’s a cheap trick designed to imply a big story that really isn’t there — though I will admit I use it often when blogging.
It’s time to take a trip deep, deep into the tmatt folder of GetReligion guilt. You see, with the Iran explosion and a bunch of other major news, I don’t think we made a single reference to coverage of the Southern Baptist Convention meetings in Louisville.
As you would imagine, I have — since my return from Bangalore and New Delhi — been especially sensitive to news reports with India datelines. At the same time, I am always interested in coverage of human rights issues, especially those linked to religious freedom and the rights of minority groups. Call me an old-fashioned liberal.
When I was criticizing that awful Washington Post piece about how morally confounding Mark Sanford’s love life is, it just seemed odd to me that no media outlet has really explained the Christian view of love. For being a country that is majority Christian, it’s shocking how little we read about some of the basic tenets of the theology.
One of the things my pastor told my husband and me in premarital counseling is that we should think of love as a verb, not a noun. The Christian couple, he said, should know that love is what you do, not what you feel. On a somewhat related note, my father told me that he had counseled couples for marriage who wanted their vows to read “as long as we both shall love” instead of “as long as we both shall live.” Dad pointed out that they’d need something to keep them going after their first week of marriage.
As interesting as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s bizarre and tormented press conference was — the one where he announced he had something going on with an Argentinian woman, it was his wife’s statement about the matter that I found the most intriguing. In her statement, she overtly references her Christian faith, even quoting scripture.
