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I finally got around to reading Lauren Collins’ profile of Michelle Obama in the March 10 New Yorker. It’s sympathetic but no puff piece — packed full of information that isn’t necessarily flattering. Obama’s stump speech includes the idea that we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents, and so on.
This week I’ve been on a bit of a tear about the shoddy coverage of the Vatican’s supposed reissue of the Seven Deadly Sins. But I absolutely can’t let pass another horrible example of media malfeasance. Reporter Richard Owen, who was responsible for much of the “deadly sin” silliness, filed the following report from Rome:
It’s one thing to rip a routine or bad story. It’s another to criticize an excellent story with one flaw. The exercise can seem, and perhaps often is, pedantic. So if the criticism is to be convincing, it better be valid.
As a rule, your GetReligionistas are fond of the regular Belief Watch column that appears in the crowded front pages of Newsweek. But I have a bone to pick with the recent mini-feature that ran with the headline, “Stop Your Sobbing — Now.”
Stephanie Simon had a fine Column One feature the other day in the Los Angeles Times about a battle that is brewing — avoiding this pun is impossible — down in Alabama between the Southern Baptists and the beer drinkers who view home-based microbrewing as a kind of sacrament. You gotta love the dateline, too — Harvest, Ala. — and the lede that takes us into the catacombs of some true beer believers.
That was one of the hot story angles that the mainstream press pounced on a decade or two ago when reporters discovered the snarky glory of covering the annual meeting of the CBA, which was once known as the Christian Booksellers Association. Among the insiders, this icky side of the Christian gifts industry is referred to with the overarching term “Jesus Junk.”
The news out of England is that the House of Lords has, in a landslide, voted to do away with Britain’s common — but almost completely irrelevant — law making blasphemy a crime.
As you might expect, I would like to make a few comments about “The Bishop’s Daughter,” the buzz-provoking piece in The New Yorker by the poet Honor Moore about the double life lived by her father, the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore Jr., the trailblazing liberal leader of the Diocese of New York from 1972-89.
