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The other day I mentioned that reader Jerry submitted a story about Harold Camping repenting of his false predictions of the rapture and end of the world. We wondered how much coverage of the repentance we’d see relative to last year’s significant coverage. While the repentance won’t make it onto a list of top ten news stories for 2012, it actually has received some coverage.
It’s no surprise people seek some sort of higher power when overcoming an addiction, whether it looks like meditation, prayer or other rituals that help the process.
But before we get into that, raise your cyber-hands if you think one of the most important stories in the year — think religious liberty, think higher education, think politics — is the growing evidence of deep, bitter rifts inside American Catholicism linked to (a) basic matters of doctrine and (b) the degree to which people practice the faith (the old reality of the “pew gap” statistics) in sacraments and worship?
One of my friends is an impressive campaign operative. He flies across the country each week advising campaigns, from congressional races to presidential ones. He’s smart and savvy and has energy to burn. And even though he’s much younger than I am, he’s been doing it for more than 15 years. He started as a young homeschooler.
Many weeks ago, we noticed that the discussion over the Obama Administration’s new rule (to force religious groups to fund things to which they’re doctrinally opposed) was being framed in two different ways. One side framed it as a religious liberty issue, since the federal government is telling religious groups to go against their religious teachings. The other side, because the Obama Administration is forcing religious groups to fund sterilization, abortifacients and contraception, framed it as an “access to contraception” issue.
On one level, the error that I am about to spotlight is so silly that it could just be a typo or a stupid (click here for classics) error — like someone calling Sen. Rick Santorum an evangelicalist or reporting that some liturgical committee has decided to modernize the Episcopalian prayerbook, again.
An editor, whose religion I don’t know, sent this Associated Press story along with the note, “Maybe I’m too sensitive to these things, but this strikes me as kind of a vile headline if you think about it–not that some people mistake him for a Protestant, but the implication is that they wouldn’t support him if they knew he was Catholic.”
