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The latest issue of The New Republic has E.J. Dionne’s dispatch from Rome on the election of Benedict XVI. Like most TNR dispatches, the piece becomes an argument. In this case, the point is that Catholicism shouldn’t shut itself off from the modern world.
The job of the GetReligion crew is to judge media coverage, for good or for ill. The smaller the story, the easier that is to accomplish. But then you have these massive media events and what do you do with those? Here’s my idea. (And I’m speaking for myself here, not the non-Borg.) I think we could hand out awards for best and worst coverage of big religion media events and invite readers to chirp in with their own nominations. For instance, in the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I would start with the following awards:
Boy, when I wrote a piece for The American Spectator suggesting that the next pope not allow most priests to marry, I had no idea that we’d have a new pope so quickly, or that he would be so very likely to resist most calls to reform. The piece may be the fastest-rotting piece of punditry I have ever produced, though that didn’t stop readers from giving it to me good in Reader Mail.
This week, The Washington Times ran a three-part series (links here, here, and here) by religion reporter Julia Duin. The umbrella title for the series was “Faithless: God under fire in the public square,” and the 7,200-word package serves as an interesting look into the world of the Christian and secular activists who are fighting over how much religion should be allowed to shape public policy and public life.
Everywhere I turn this week, reproduction and contraception are in the news. Maybe it’s the Spring factor (enemy of people with allergies and all haters of public displays of affection) or maybe the death and funeral of the pope have set off a few moral tremors. Who knows? Item: New York senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has promised to block a Senate floor vote in the new nominee for head of the Food and Drug Administration until he agrees to rule on the proposal to make “Plan B,” the “morning after” pill, available over the counter. Item: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick threw a hissy fit over the wave of cases where pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for the pill — either the pre-emptive variety or the morning after edition. Item: Economist Steven D. Levitt’s new book Freakonomics is getting a lot of mileage out of Levitt’s old charge that abortion reduces crime (by eliminating a lot of would-be criminals). “Ahem!” says movie critic/crack statistics guy Steve Sailer.
A good, if slightly confusing, piece in The New York Times about Yale’s decision to kick a church off campus that has been affiliated with the university for well over 200 years.
As the late pope was on his deathbed, the outline of a deal was being hammered out between the Vatican and the Chinese government. Hours after John Paul II quit this vale of tears, the results of those negotiations were made public. The Vatican would be willing to derecognize Taiwan in exchange for the license to operate openly in China.
The Economist holds forth on the “future of the church” in its latest issue and decides that the new pope should be an Anglican.
