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I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to report on the relief and recovery efforts in Haiti, much less manage or participate in them. I keep reading the news and feeling sicker and sicker. One of the things that struck me about personal emails or messages out of Haiti is how they all emphasize the religious lives of the survivors. And it’s nice to see that much of the mainstream media coverage is touching on that as well.
You can learn a lot about a family by observing how it handles fights. And Laurie Goodstein’s Sunday New York Times story shows that as the breach between James Dobson and Focus on the Family grows, all parties are keeping quiet and pretending everything is OK.
It seems like over the last 10 years or so, I’ve read roughly eleventy-bajillion trend pieces about the confluence of environmentalism and religion. Most of these pieces have been fairly uncritical about or even cheerleading this commingling. So I wasn’t terribly enthused to see this New York Times story, “Pastors in Northwest Find Focus in ‘Green.’”
In case your memory is as poor as mine, back in November Sarah Pulliam Bailey discussed an Atlantic profile of Dave Ramsey, a Christian financial advisor who abhors the modern-day trend of buying everything on credit. This was the companion piece to the cover story for the magazine’s December issue, and Sarah remarked that a colleague was going to tackle the bigger story. I was that colleague. Whoops.
If disaster strikes, you can pretty much count on religious broadcaster Pat Robertson to say something about it that offends much of the population. It’s not just Robertson, of course. You might recall Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., saying Katrina was about God wanting to smite Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour or something. Anyway, with the horrific news out of Haiti, that the earthquake there led to unbelievable loss of life and property, Robertson came in on cue. And news organizations spread the word immediately. Here’s how CNN reported it:
I was reading Pope Benedict XVI’s recent speech to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps when I came across this quote:
The other day, the divine Ms. MZ wrote an enthusiastically depressing post about some of the bad news that we keep hearing about the state of Godbeat reporting in the mainstream press. Grap a box of tissues and head back over there to read that post, if you dare.
Chemistry was one of my favorite subjects in high school. There’s just something about discussing the periodic table of elements that makes you feel like Bill Nye the Science Guy. Thus, I was delighted to read this Houston Chronicle profile on James Tour, a successful chemist at Rice University. Okay, I’ve lost some of my chemistry enthusiasm because I forgot most of it, but this profile by Eric Berger is compelling. Tour is among the 10 most-cited authors in the world, and the reporter could have easily focused on his scientific achievements alone. But he doesn’t stop there and weaves in details about how Tour’s faith impacts his science.
