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Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito will most likely be confirmed this week or the next by the Senate and for the first time in United States history, the nation’s highest court will have a majority of Catholics serving on the bench. The Economist, with its European perspective, unsurprisingly sees this event as more significant than do its American counterparts:
When Mother Teresa comes to town for an ecumenical prayer service, all kinds of people are going to show up. That’s what happened in Denver back in 1989, when the tiny nun came to town to pray for peace and for the poor in that city.
This New York Times story does everything possible to fit the facts into the mold of a “Democrats try to get religion in order to appeal to religious people” story. I find this an an example of how many in the Democratic Party and many mainstream reporters do not get religion or religious people.
Back in early December, I pointed out the media silence over a curriculum battle in California. Even though reporters were all over stories about curriculum battles in Kansas and Pennsylvania, no one was paying attention to California, where Hindu nationalists were succeeding in making major changes to sixth-grade textbooks about Hinduism.
A family member who knows a thing or two about culture in Waco, Texas, sent me this interesting ecumenical news story and you have to admit that Fox News put a snazzy lead on it. It’s about the decision of a local Catholic priest to do the official rites of blessing for the new and, in a Southern Baptist mecca, controversial Hooters franchise. And that lead?
The second item in the ombudsman column Monday by the Public Broadcasting System’s Michael Getler deals with complaints from viewers who believe the publicly funded PBS carries too many Christian-oriented programs.
While I was out on the road, our friends at Poynter.org ran the latest of my columns in the “Journalism With a Difference” series on ethics and diversity. This one is entitled “Religion in (or Out) of the News” and focuses on the religion ghosts hidden — or dancing right out in the open — in the Associated Press list of the top 10 stories of 2005. The column flashes back to an interview with the late George Cornell, who, for many decades, was the AP’s only Godbeat specialist for planet earth.
Canada made some news earlier this week by electing a conservative government for the first time in about a dozen years. The conventional wisdom says that it all came down to a well-run campaign and a corrupted liberal party government as the new prime minister Stephen Harper moved to the center by avoiding issues like abortion and gay marriage.
All in all, it appears to have been an exceptionally quiet year on the March for Life coverage front. I, for one, was a bit disappointed that things stayed so low-key, in part because you know that the U.S. Supreme Court hearings have cranked up the work — on both sides — behind the scenes.
