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Maybe the most unnecessarily talked about story of the past few days, particularly in that corner of the world I dwell in known as the Jewish twitterverse, has been Madonna’s first-person piece for Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yediot Achronot. In “I Found an Answer,” the Material Girl offered a testimonial about how she found God, got religion and awakened her spiritual soul through Kabbalah.
Why is it that when it comes to celebrities, journalistic standards seem to fly straight out the window?
Believe it or not, your GetReligionistas are busy people who do have lives and other jobs. You can tell this from time to time when typos slip into print and we are slow to fix them. You can tell when huge stories break and it takes us a day or so to get our act together and wade through oceans of digital ink in search of a ghost or two. Is that a mixed metaphor, or what?
The Los Angeles Times had an interesting feature recently. It’s a look at the 13 of the most “faith-offending films.” Reporters Patrick Kevin Day and Jevon Phillips write:
Because we’re seeing so many stories about bioethics, I’ve been trying to learn a bit more the field of thought. I recently read G.K. Chesterton’s “Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State.” It’s a collection of essays written in the 1920s at the height of the eugenics movement. One of the things I found so interesting about the book is that if it were read in the 1920s, one would think that Chesterton was fighting a lonely and losing battle. But a few more decades of eugenics — punctuated by the Nazi embrace, of course — and people began questioning and rejecting it.
Having spent the past two years almost exclusively reporting on the American Jewish community, it’s easy to forget how foreign some parts of traditional Jewish life are to most Americans. That’s why I could really appreciate this story from the Associated Press that does an excellent job of educating readers while informing them about a development in Big Sky country:
Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon has a really interesting article in this coming Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The article, which has been online for days now, is just an interview — but the subject is Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Here’s a question that we have asked here at GetReligion — more than once, in fact — and, now, it’s being asked at the Wall Street Journal.
