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As we all know, and as numerous stacks of research have shown, only really stupid, illogical, fact-challenged people believe that God played some meaningful role in the creation of heaven and earth. Right?
So I finished the 5-part (plus epilogue!) New York Times series about the hostage-taking, captivity and escape of reporter David Rhode. I enjoyed the series, and it reminded me of the one about a similar situation involving the Christian Science Monitor‘s Jill Carroll.
We’ve looked a bit at some of the hyperbolic coverage of the major Vatican news this week. Previously, for instance, the Times (U.K.) ran headlines about Catholic tanks parked on Anglican lawns, then Vatican gambits and Papal poaching.
As you can see from the numerous posts on media coverage of the pope’s outreach to conservative Anglicans this past week, clerical celibacy has been a subplot (not solely fostered, but certainly abbeted by a speculative press). And then there is of course, the shadow side we have seen covered before — the sex abuse scandals of the past 25 years. These involve mostly pederasts — clergy abusing children.
Here’s a question for you, as we move into the follow-up reports on the Vatican’s move to open a door that will allow flocks of Anglo-Catholics to enter the Church of Rome, while retaining many elements of their own rites, music and traditions.
The breaking religion-news story of the day is in Vatican City, with aftershocks in England. As has been rumored, literally, for years, Pope Benedict XVI has reached out to Anglican traditionalists, offering them an Anglican-friendly home in the Church of Rome. His activism in this area dates back to his days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of stories about a study on abortion rates worldwide. Published in the Lancet based on research by the Guttmacher Institute, the stories said that abortion rates were the same throughout the world, regardless of legality.
When my family made the decision to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, we helped start a tiny mission in the Tennessee mountains — in Johnson City, to be precise. In the early days, Holy Resurrection Orthodox Mission included a family in with very recent roots in Egypt and its Coptic Orthodox traditions.
