George Conger

What has God got to do with drones?

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,”a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. 


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Occupy Poitres

Le Figaro, Le Monde and Libération are France’s newspapers of record, the Presse de référence. While the national edition of Le Parisien, Aujourd’hui en France, may have a larger circulation, I believe that these three  best represent the voices of the French establishment: Le Figaro, the center right, Le Monde the center left, and Libération the left.


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What's happening in Zanzibar?

It’s been about five years since I was last in Zanzibar. I was part of the press gaggle accompanying the archbishops of the Anglican Communion on a day trip from the mainland to Christ Church Cathedral in Stone Town — the island’s principal town. Built over 125 years ago on the site of the old slave market (the altar was built atop the sight of the market’s whipping post) the picturesque coral stone cathedral is a monument to the British suppression of the slave trade. Zanzibar had been the entrepôt for slaves captured on the mainland before they were shipped north to the Arab world.


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ABC on Jesus the sky pixie

These words close Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1924 poem “Vladimir Ilych Lenin“.”  Written in the months after Lenin’s death, “VI Lenin” is the greatest of Mayakovsky’s works and the apex of the socialist realist style of poetry that flowered in Russia in the decade after the Revolution. “VI Lenin” is also the template through which some in the press construct the person and works of Jesus Christ


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Guardian ends the debate on abortion

There are no valid pro-life arguments. All right thinking people have seen the light, the Guardian reports, with support for legal limitations on abortion  limited to the slack jawed troglodytes of the political right, Conservative Party MPs (possibly the same thing) and religious loonies.


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Jesus Rifles Redux

NBC has resurrected the “Jesus Rifles” story of 2010, reporting that some three years after the Pentagon began removing a “Bible code” stamped on rifle sights manufactured by Michigan company Trijicon, the job of erasing the Scripture references remains unfinished.


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Crazy Charlie: His cartoons are insane

In this week’s podcast Issues Etc. host Todd Wilkin and I discussed two of my recent GetReligion stories: “Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad Cartoon Crassness” and “Foggy Bottom’s ‘pantywaist protocol pussy-footers’.” Starting with the press coverage on the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and consulate in Benghazi, the articles (and our discussion) moved on to the vexed question of how the Western media reports on blasphemy in an Islamic context.


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How Many Gays in Hampstead?

Here is a craft question for you, GetReligion readers. No, I don’t mean freemasonry but journalism. When should a reporter use his editorial voice to correct or challenge an assertion made by the subject of his story? What if the assertion is not central to the story at hand? What if the assertion is in line with convention wisdom, but is not true?


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