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As interesting as celebrity scandals are, celebrity mea culpas are close behind. After Patrick Kennedy, Mel Gibson, Mark Foley and Ted Haggard ran off to rehab as part of their public repentance (and I’m sure at least two of them legitimately needed it), some began to wonder if we’d ever see an apology not tied to a substance abuse claim.
This may be one too many sports-related posts for some of you (and a good start for others), but after reading ESPN The Magazine‘s profile of Detroit Lions quarterback Jon Kitna I couldn’t let it pass. Thank you to all of you who sent us this story, and I agree with the most recent submission that this is one of the most substantive attempts to look at faith and football in a very long time.
There is no religion in it and, again, that is what interests me. There are legal question. There are questions about medicine and even therapy. There are life and death questions. There are even hints that moral questions may be involved. But that’s it.
In the latest Time, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy provide an informative and lively report on the media-averse Council for National Policy and its threat to go all Ross Perot on the Republican Party if it dares to nominate the pro-choice (but also pro-constructionist) Rudy Giuliani.
Evangelicals were on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. The story — about how “hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants” are using the massively popular, hugely entertaining and quite violent video game Halo 3 as a recruiting technique — is well-rounded, gives a paragraph to theological issues and quotes a nice variety of people. But something about this story seemed so unfresh, especially when it compared this trend to bingo games in churches during the 1960s:
Every time President Bush speaks of his Christian faith, the mainstream media get all roiled up. Here’s how a 2003 story in The Christian Science Monitor began:
Paul Elie’s latest essay for The Atlantic, a 6,400-word report on the variety of political thinkers who cite the late Reinhold Niebuhr as their hero, starts off strong but spends too much time waist-deep in the big muddy of debates about the Iraq War.
Remember four years ago when St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke roiled various groups by saying he would deny Democratic Sen. John Kerry communion if he presented himself for it? Four years later the most prominent Roman Catholic running for the highest office in the land is a Republican and, shockingly, Burke has the same position on communion as he did before.
I am, at the moment, reading The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. It’s an amazing book (a Pulitzer Prize winner), especially if you are interested in the foundational beliefs that fuel the fire in the Al-Qaeda faithful.
