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You don’t have to look far on the Internet to find discussion of The New York Times as a Jewish paper. I’ve had some fun with these beliefs — often closer to conspiracy theories — but that’s because they’re pretty ridiculous.
Over the past few days, I’ve been wondering about the significance of religious or quasi-religious words in a culture in which a shared understanding of these words appears to be disappearing. My curiosity was first piqued by a column by Gene Lyons in Salon. The critic argues that an interview (not so much the act?) sex offender Roman Polanski (here’s Mollie’s take from last week) gave should get a “special place in hell.” His column is sprinkled with words like “holy writ”, “sins” and the most definitely not complimentary “professional Christian” (applied to Nevada Senator John Ensign.
A reporter friend sent along the following story that appears on BBC. It begins with such a promising headline: “Fighting the ‘contraceptive mentality’.” Unfortunately, the article approaches the topic narrowly.
Anyone out there in GetReligion reader land who wants to read a truly depressing A1 feature story? That’s what the Baltimore Sun gave us the other day and, truth be told, I have a sense that there is much more to this story than made it into the newspaper — but I don’t think there is much that reporter Nick Madigan could have done about that (with one or two exceptions).
This past June, I commented on the popular use of the word “icon” to describe Michael Jackson. In a way, the story below is a fitting follow-up to the summer stories of the deaths of other icons, such as Farrah Fawcett and Ted Kennedy. (Don’t forget this Wall Street Journal piece that made fun of how low the “icon” bar had been set.)
Let me own up to being on the losing side of the great American dialogue about guns. Linked to my pro-life beliefs is a deep skepticism that the answer to violence on American streets is owning guns to use in self-defense. Thus I find it unsettling when pollsters, as Pew did last spring, track a rise in anti-abortion sentiment — and a call for less regulation of guns. Is there a connection?
The New York Times ran a very old story the other day, a story about a topic that has, in fact, been around for several decades.
Anyone who knows anything about the work of the conservative journalist and historian Marvin Olasky knows that he loves the old-fashioned advocacy journalism of America in the early 19th Century.
