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If you watched the Allstate Sugar Bowl on New Year’s, you probably noticed two things: that Tim Tebow hardly could have been more brilliant in his final collegiate game and that his iconic biblical eyeblack referred to Ephesians 2:8-10.
It was a busy New Year’s weekend for Mark Barna, religion reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette, who covered the growing split between James Dobson and Focus on the Family, the powerful and prominent evangelical parachurch organization he has led for decades.
The Washington Post‘s Rob Stein has an important story looking at how federal funding of abstinence-focused education might be included in the behemoth health care reform legislation pending in the Senate.
Earlier this year, former President Clinton helped negotiate the release of two American journalists who were held in North Korea for five months after crossing the border illegally.
If there is anything that I truly enjoy, as a reporter, it’s talking with articulate, sharp people who are totally comfortable in their own skins and open about what they think and believe.
So Bob Dylan went and made himself a Christmas album, instead of a holiday album. It ends with him singing “amen” at the end of a non-ironic “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Many will note that the album does not contain a performance, ironic or otherwise, of “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.”
It’s that time of year when concerts of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah occur with seemingly ubiquity. The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini reviewed one such performance yesterday, remarking that the bass “sang the repeated ‘the dead shall be raised incorruptible’ and ‘we shall be changed’ with such prophetic vigor that the prospect seemed almost terrifying.” I read a review of a different Messiah concert in the same paper a few weeks ago.
As the Divine Ms. MZ mentioned the other day in her “Nightmare on Capitol Hill” post, abortion is the issue that simply will not die in the ongoing debates about health-care reform. Right to life issues also hover in the background in those arguments about care of the elderly, too.
David Kirkpatrick had a fascinating profile of Robert P. George in the Sunday New York Times magazine. George is a Catholic public intellectual — a professor at Princeton who writes about policy and politics. The first thing to say about the piece is that it’s a great idea. I’ve been reading George for years but, then again, I’m the type of person who reads First Things and The Public Discourse. The average Sunday New York Times magazine reader probably doesn’t. Considering the influence George has on conservatives, a profile makes perfect sense.
