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Let me be clear: I am not a hipster. I’ve had black-rim glasses since junior year of high school (12 years) and a beard for almost as long (off and on). But I am a Christian and I have had Christian hipster friends for the past decade, so Brett McCracken’s new book, “Hipster Christianity,” appeals to me.
Peter J. Boyer deserves GetReligion’s “rock star religion reporting of the month” award, an honor that I just made up on the spot. In all seriousness, Boyer has produced yet another thoughtful, thorough, compelling piece for The New Yorker, this time on the Fellowship, a secretive religious group inside the DC Beltway. (Earlier, we looked at his piece on Francis Collins.)
Dr. Francis Collins finds himself in the middle of an ethics-, science-, politics-, money- and religion-filled debate instead of in the chemistry lab lately. Despite Christopher Hitchens’s recent shout-out, you have to wonder if the embryonic stem-cell research debate has left him fairly friendless.
Every now and then, news coverage of a topic or an idea gets into the digital bloodstream and simply, as the popular saying puts it, “goes viral.” It really helps if the story is given a punch headline that causes lots of people to click “comment” or to post notes on Facebook. You know the game.
Thousands of people demonstrated outside California’s state Capitol this past weekend. I assume — and, yes, I know how fraught with potential disaster that course of action can be — that The Associated Press didn’t consider the rally any big deal.
For some reason, it does not surprise me that a Google News search for the phrase “disgusting religious-cultural roots” currently yields little or nothing in terms of information or commentary from reporters in the mainstream press.
There was an interesting Associated Press story out of London the other day about end-of-life issues that has really been making the rounds — for perfectly valid reasons.
Tmatt already looked at some early coverage of the “Restoring Honor” rally held in Washington this weekend. I went down to the Lincoln Memorial to catch part of it but couldn’t even come close to hearing, much less seeing, what was going on. But I did meet a ton of people. It was a completely different event than the tea parties I’ve seen. Last September, there was a huge gathering in D.C. of people upset at the size and scope of the federal governemnt. This was even before health care legislation was signed into law. The protesters carried thousands upon thousands of creative and witty signs and it was really something to see. I was pretty sure I’d never seen a protest with so many employed people, or so many people who had children. And grandchildren.
