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Let’s start with the classic Martin Marty quote, which is always good when talking about religion and the news. Marty has been known to say that, for many people, the word “ecumenical” seems to boil down to someone saying, “I don’t believe very much and you don’t believe very much, so we must have a lot in common.”
A long, long time ago, I was the religion writer and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. It’s a fascinating city in a beautiful region (heaven, you know) and I envy people who get to work out there.
As I rode home on the MARC train the other night, I saw several people reading the sprawling Washington Post features section piece on the sad lives and early deaths of professional wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit. This led into a series of hard-to-answer questions about why so many wrestlers die young, other than the assumed impact of illegal steroids on their hearts.
James Faust, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1978, died on Friday. He also served in the high-ranking position of second counselor to President Gordon Hinckley since 1995.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has ordained gay clergy for years. Since it formed out of a merger of three Lutheran church bodies in 1988, it has defrocked three clergy for violating the church body’s requirement that gay clergy abstain from sexual relationships. At the group’s national assembly last week in Chicago, a vote to permit homosexual clergy to engage in sexual relationships failed on Friday but another vote requesting that the church body avoid disciplining gay clergy who violate the celibacy policy was passed on Saturday.
Bruce Tomaso at the Dallas Morning News‘ fine religion blog highlights a horrible Reuters story that Christianity Today‘s Ted Olsen found.
Two of the biggest political stories of the year, so far, have been the rise of the Godtalkers — old and new — in the Democratic Party and the ever-larger online power base that most liberal leaders call the Netroots.
Today I was crowned Miss America. Except by “Miss America” I mean my husband said I was “one foxy-looking pregnant lady.” It’s a shame that pageant organizers do not recognize this triumph and bestow on me the crown I so rightfully deserve.
