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It’s a topic that comes up every now and then when mainstream reporters try to figure out the foreign policy implications of all of those bizarre evangelical beliefs about Israel and the end of the world.
A Jewish candidate and a Catholic candidate square off in a statewide race with national implications. What happened the Sunday before Election Day? They went to church, of course.
The apparent destruction of the presidential ambitions of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., has been interesting to watch. The story goes several layers deep, and I’ll do my best to probe the more interesting, religion-oriented ones in this post. Feel free to post your thoughts on how religion was played in the hundreds of articles written on the politician who has been dubbed the darling of the religious right and a clone of President Bush.
Let me pause to plug an item or two over at Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher’s blog, in large part because he has veered totally into GetReligion territory with repeated appeals for journalists to actually cover the doctrinal contents of the current story about Pope Benedict XVI and Islam.
Godbeat reporter Teresa Watanabe has a report out in the Los Angeles Times about a hot skirmish on the front lines of interfaith life. The issue? Should the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission reaffirm its selection of veteran Muslim leader Maher Hathout to receive a major human-relations award after two weeks of hot debate? Only four of the 14 commission members ended up voting for him, but that was enough — due to those who declined (were afraid?) to cast a vote.
The other day I received a blunt, fiery, angry email. It was from an anti-Semite who was mad at me for writing a Scripps Howard News Service column in which I quoted several Orthodox Jews discussing the meaning of repentance and forgiveness in Judaism and, in particular, why they thought that Mel Gibson — if he is a serious Catholic believer of one form or another — was going to need to do more than seek out a few good photo opportunities on a holy day or two.
RightWingBob sounds the alarm today about an unsourced and unfounded aside in an otherwise routine profile of Bob Dylan in The Christian Science Monitor:
The New York Times Saturday used the New York Mets’ acquisition of Major League Baseball star slugger Shawn Green to write about Jews in sports. To better phrase it, the 1,200-word article was about how Jews are not involved in sports.
I was reading Seymour Hersh’s excellent New Yorker piece on the Bush administration’s interest in the Hezbollah-Israeli war when I stumbled across this paragraph:
