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Was I out of the country when the decision was made to turn the presidential debates into the Hour of Power? In round two, Kerry tried to offset some of the damage he was about to incur with his answer on the Silent Scream issue by saying that he was an altar boy back in the day and that that “faith” still leads him today.
If you live in the Seattle area and would like to shake hands with GetReligion contributor Jeremy Lott, here’s your chance. Jeremy will be at Stellar Pizza & Ale this Friday (the 15th) for several hours starting at 7 p.m.
Sorry I missed this year’s New York Film Festival. According to a report, the festival featured a dogfight for top tweaking-tender- religious-sensibilities-if-there-are-any-of-those-people-here honors. But director Pedro AlmÃÆÃÆÃâódovar’s Bad Education, about priestly pedophilia, comes to the issue a bit late to lay a hand on British director Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake.
It’s hard to know what criteria apply to scoring the presidential debates anymore, but it’s a safe bet to say that when pundits are looking at last night’s contest and comparing the president to Aristotle, we can call it a Bush win. Before the debate, I had heard lots of carping by conservatives about the faux town hall format, in which supposedly undecided voters usually pepper candidates with questions about what government can do for them, but that was not the thrust of most of the queries.
The more one looks at the literature put out by Australia’s upstart Family First Party, the less adequate our treatment of the party thus far appears. Go to the website and read the FFP’s positions and the reasoning behind them. The party is having to defend itself against charges that it is the political arm of the Assemblies of God church. A vote for Family First, opponents warn, is a vote for fundamentalist Protestantism.
Here’s a fun fact: Australia is holding a national election Saturday. There isn’t much hand wringing in the nation’s press about low voter turnout because skipping that trip to the polls is against the law, and punishable by a fine. The fire this time is over the relatively new Family First Party, a socially conservative, economically flexible political party that advocates stronger controls on pornography, drugs, gambling, stem cell research, and genetically modified foods — and a general rethink of how the Australian government regards people. According to the FFP’s website:
Here’s a fun piece in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, by sometime CounterPunch contributor Linda S. Heard, about the upcoming U.S. elections. Not sure the Kingdom of Saud is well served with this one.
This has been an unusually fertile week for religion news from the Emerald Isle — including one unexpected ray of hope. Local Catholics celebrated the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to the Republic of Ireland, apparently the first time that any pope had ever set foot on that very Catholic soil. It may be hard to remember now but the pope used to stay in Rome rather than fly all over the globe.
Missed the first bit of MTV’s latest installment of Choose or Lose: “Sex, Votes, & Higher Power” Wednesday night, but I caught most of it. I must admit, the segment dealing with abortion wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared. Host Christina Aguilera, wearing a pink button down sweater over a not-too-short (for her) periwinkle blue dress and less makeup than usual, interviewed two girls who got pregnant out of wedlock.
