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Life is like a night in a second-class hotel. It contains hints of beauty and glory with little of the reality. This is more than a paraphrase of a quote from St. Teresa of Avila. It serves as an analogy for the coverage of religion in The Washington Post‘s two-part series about propaganda in the U.S. war against Islamic terrorism.
As you may have noticed — if you have taken a turn or two around the WWW in the past 20 hours or so (click here) — those amazingly productive people over at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have rolled out the second half of their lay-of-the-land study of religion in the United States.
I got a confession to make. For years, I avoided reading the religion sections of weekend papers. The stories were uncritical and dull. They were about children lighting candles or people praying for peace and love.
After one brief palate-cleansing look at decent stories on the same-sex marriage issue, we can now return to the mainstream media’s attack on defenders of traditional marriage. At this point, I’m not sure how inadvertent the biased stories are.
If we didn’t require one to get to church, my husband and I might not own a car. And we’ve been really happy about not having to fill up the tank much as gas prices climb higher and higher.
Conflicts between the various streams of American Judaism have always fascinated me, all the way back to my graduate school days at the University of Illinois in Urbana. There are so many parallels with similar conflicts between traditional and liberal Christians, between pre-modern doctrines and the believers who are rooted in the modern and, I guess, the postmodern.
Several years ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about one of the more obscure disputes linked to the death, or death by starvation, of Terri Schiavo — whether or not her body should be cremated, against strong opposition of her devout Roman Catholic family.
The Associated Press wrote an interesting man-bites-dog story about religious conflict in Israel. According to the wire service, Orthodox Jews burned hundreds of copies of the New Testament:
Since I have been following the whole Sen. John McCain media drama with the Rev. John Hagee, I thought I’d try to comment on the latest act.
