Journalism

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Behind the Music: Handel edition

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It’s that time of year when concerts of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah occur with seemingly ubiquity. The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini reviewed one such performance yesterday, remarking that the bass “sang the repeated ‘the dead shall be raised incorruptible’ and ‘we shall be changed’ with such prophetic vigor that the prospect seemed almost terrifying.” I read a review of a different Messiah concert in the same paper a few weeks ago.


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Discovering a conservative giant

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David Kirkpatrick had a fascinating profile of Robert P. George in the Sunday New York Times magazine. George is a Catholic public intellectual — a professor at Princeton who writes about policy and politics. The first thing to say about the piece is that it’s a great idea. I’ve been reading George for years but, then again, I’m the type of person who reads First Things and The Public Discourse. The average Sunday New York Times magazine reader probably doesn’t. Considering the influence George has on conservatives, a profile makes perfect sense.


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Merry Christmas, Irv Sutley!

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Ah, yes, fewer than two shopping days 48 hours left to fire your salvo in the 2009 Christmas wars! To that end, The New York Times has a colorful little report on an order to remove seasonal religious symbols displayed in a public building and California. Only this time, there was no cross, creche or menorah:


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Nightmare on Capitol Hill

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Despite polls showing a majority of Americans do not support the current legislative proposals being voted on in Congress, the Senate took us one step closer to passage this weekend. One of the interesting subplots to this unfolding national drama is the role that abortion has played in shaping the bills. Over on the House side, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., managed to insert language prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortion under the proposed plan — either directly or through subsidies of the planned exchange.


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NYTimes: 'Oops!' on orphanages?

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After publishing a one-sided A1 attack on African orphanages on December 6, The New York Times has now partly corrected its reporting with a shorter A14 story on December 17 that says orphanages may not be so bad after all.


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'60 Minutes' visits a persecuted patriarch

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There is much to praised in the “60 Minutes” profile of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and his tiny, yet historically significant, flock of persecuted Orthodox Christians in Istanbul. It’s worth watching, if only for the remarkable videos taken at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai in Egypt and the remarkable city of churches and monastic cells carved into the mountain cliffs in Cappadocia (video link here) in Eastern Turkey.


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