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The same-sex marriage wars have flared up once again in Maryland, which should not come as a surprise. It also seems that religion will play a major role in the discussions of whether the state legislature should back a legal redefinition of marriage or pass some other measure addressing the issue. Duh.
A couple of weeks ago, I highlighted K. Connie Kang’s story in the Los Angeles Times about an interfaith worship service hosted by the Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese. She wrote a detailed report that included the observation that Hindus had been invited to take communion during the service.
The story starts in a church, with a minister trying to figure out how to step into the pulpit and tell his congregation about a great, and seemingly senseless, tragedy in the congregation. Four people were dead and the worshippers were going to ask, “Why?”
Each year, I like to look at what stories the mainstream media publish for Lent. The papers that noted Ash Wednesday, such as the Indianapolis Star, Newsday and the Orange County Register, published brief stories about the imposition of ashes.
You can’t study church-state separation issues without studying civil religion and it is very, very hard to study civil religion without taking a look at the whole issue of how presidents talk about faith and, in particular, God. I was already thinking about this issue when I wrote my Scripps Howard News Service column this week, which was a follow-up, sort of, to the whole Mike Huckabee “vertical” credo flap (with insights from Mike Gerson about the whole issue of “soaring” language in political rhetoric).
Los Angeles Times reporter K. Connie Kang had another interesting story on the Godbeat or, in this case, the gods beat. Yes, the Episcopalians are involved.
I was wondering what it would take to get some more mainstream media coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s United Church of Christ pastor. Wright has been mentioned in quite a few opinion columns and tabloid publications recently for his race-based preaching and teaching. But mainstream media coverage has been lacking. So it was nice to see an article by the Baltimore Sun‘s Michael Hill about Wright and the attention he’s been receiving:
When I was growing up, two of my favorite books were In Cold Blood and Dead Man Walking. Both exposed the desolation, inhumanity, and cruelty of capital punishment — and both were hugely popular. But did either of them make the death penalty less popular? The data is not encouraging.
As likely is the case in most communities around the country, there are abandoned churches in neighborhoods that used to be vibrant and alive. I know this is true in my neighborhood (I can see the abandoned church pictured in this post from my window) and I have seen it in other cities, particularly off the coasts where there is plenty of cheap land and the geographic cores of cities have gone through a several-decades long transformation from life to death.
