Journalism

Shepherds at war

Eve Conant does a great job in the May 7 Newsweek of tracking the spiritual struggles of Army Chaplain Roger Benimoff, who begins a second tour of duty filled with idealism (“My heart is filled with prayer and god is giving me a discerning spirit”) and returns to the United States with his faith in tatters (“We make God into what we need for the moment. I hate God”).


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My truth is that I am a gay Episcopalian

Professional team switcher Jim McGreevey is back in the news. He’s the former New Jersey governor who was forced to resign amid charges of sexual harrassment from a male subordinate. McGreevey was married at the time and had been married previously but somehow managed to turn the bad news into a celebration of his newly revealed homosexuality. Now that’s how you spin, kids. He and his wife are divorcing and he plans to get hitched to his live-in male lover. McGreevey claimed, by the way, that he began an affair with his aide while his wife was recuperating in the hospital from a particularly hard labor and delivery. Classy.


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Deadly social networking in Japan

In his feature article “Let’s Die Together” in the May Atlantic, David Samuels does a heroic task of explaining why anonymous group suicide is becoming popular in Japan. The opening image Samuels uses, of a car in a Tokyo suburb in which five young men and one young woman died together, reminded me of a scene in P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men, in which a group of elderly people on a bus cruise hold hands and jump to their deaths from a cliff.


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On the other side of the notebook

A very strange thing happens when journalists write books — they find themselves (hopefully) being interviewed by other journalists, often before speeches and other (hopefully) book-promoting events. Soon thereafter, they often read articles based on these interviews and find themselves exclaiming, “Wait just a (provide colorful descriptive words here) minute, I didn’t say that!”


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