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Let’s read this story together, shall me? The headline on A1 of the Washington Post was blunt, yet with very few specific details, in part because of the presence of that dishwater adjective “moderate.”
The other day my three-year-old daughter told me she missed her cemetery. (Until a few weeks ago, we lived near a beautiful, historic cemetery in Washington, D.C. We’d take walks in it most days and read tombstones as we played and ran around.) I loved hearing her say that because I always loved the cemeteries I grew up around, too. As a pastor’s kid, I wasn’t shielded from death and dying. I love Lutheran funerals so much that I’ve been known to attend ones for members of my congregation I wasn’t close to. And while I never planned out my wedding, I have written down what hymns I want sung at my funeral. And I’ve told my husband I want as simple a box as possible and no embalming. I do want a nice tombstone and I want my family to come visit me often.
The word through the grapevine is that tmatt is wrapping up end-of-the-semester grading this afternoon.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen more coverage of Festivus, which is something of a countercultural tradition in more ironic circles. It was the holiday that became famous after it was written into a Seinfeld episode. Thirteen years ago, believe it or not.
On Saturday night, Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly tried to murder as many Swedes as possible by blowing up his car and himself in crowded areas where people were busy shopping for Christmas gifts. Amazingly, and perhaps due to an inadvertent early detonation, he was the only person killed. Two others were severely injured. All signs point to radical Islam as the motivator for the deadly violence. It’s interesting to see how different media outlets lead their early stories on the terrorist once his identity was established. Here’s the Telegraph:
This week the Colorado Springs Gazette had a report about a trio of churches that have left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over their departure from traditional Lutheran teaching. Here’s the lede:
After writing thousands of news stories, features and personal columns in my 20-year reporting career, I see myself as a veteran journalist and a competent one at that.
This was the year when the media took a keen interest in what they termed “Islamophobia.” This was all the craze for a while, with Time running a cover story headlined “Is America Islamophobic?” The actual text of the story acknowledged no evidence to substantiate the charge, but had paragraphs like this:
