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Late last week, I was visiting the Washington Post newsroom with some of my students and the professionals there were — justifiably — buzzing about a news feature that dominated that day’s front page. It was one of those mood-of-the-nation pieces in which one person’s story is used as a metaphor for the lives of many.
Remember a few years ago when lots of reporters were talking about the emerging church as if it was the new trend was sweeping the nation? You know how people are still talking about it now? Yeah, me neither. It was such a nebulous “movement” to begin with, but apparently New York magazine just discovered it.
Last week I mentioned that I’d been the unlucky recipient of an intimate encounter with a TSA agent. As many more Americans have undergone the “how’s your father” with the agents, stories have been getting out about Americans wondering how much of this is security versus security theater. Here’s one mom’s story. Here’s Penn Jillette’s account.
A few years ago, Newsweek‘s Lisa Miller attempted to argue that the Bible didn’t really have much to say on marriage, except that it should include same-sex partnerships. In the first paragraph of the theologically illiterate and snark-infested piece, she asked “Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple–who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love–turn to the Bible as a how-to script?”
As you would expect, I spend a very high percentage of my time surrounded by religious believers of various kinds — especially academic leaders from the middle of the evangelical Protestant world (and Eastern Orthodox folks from my own parish).
Like many Angelenos, I have long since soured on the mayor of our great city. It’s still shocking to me that he basically moonwalked into a second term. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s personal peccadillos and ethical standards aside, his tenure, like his personality, has been more show than biz; all talk, no game.
As I watched CNN’s Election Night coverage last week, my GetReligion antenna immediately shot up when I heard the first part of Florida Sen.-elect Marco Rubio’s victory speech:
With the election finally over, I’m slowly emerging from the bunker at my newspaper in Washington, D.C. I work for an editorial page, and while I don’t strictly cover politics, obviously it has dominated the news for the last few months. I’ve been wanting to discuss something here for a while, but I’m just now getting around to it.
As I mentioned the other day, the Mattinglys of Ferndale, MD, received waves of really strange robo telephone calls before the election — since one adult in the house is a registered Republican and the other is a Democrat. We got ‘em all, folks.
