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As you might expect, I would like to make a few comments about “The Bishop’s Daughter,” the buzz-provoking piece in The New Yorker by the poet Honor Moore about the double life lived by her father, the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore Jr., the trailblazing liberal leader of the Diocese of New York from 1972-89.
This past summer I was talking with another religion-beat professional and this nationally known journalist put something into words that I had been feeling, but had not yet articulated. This scribe who will not be named said that on many days she or he felt like he or she was turning into a public-relations person for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Last week I wrote about the noticeable lack of coverage of a recent Presbyterian Church (USA) ruling on issues surrounding homosexuality. The denomination has a few hundred thousand more members than The Episcopal Church but gets far less coverage. I asked why. Readers provided a number of interesting answers.
A few days ago, I called on reporters to examine why Catholics in the Wisconsin primary had moved from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. In response to my post, faithful GR reader Dale made a good point: Catholic voters migrated away from Clinton at the same rate as lower-income voters. Take it away Dale:
Last week the highest court of the Presbyterian Church (USA) ruled on a pretty contentious issue. I thought I’d wait a few days until more coverage of the ruling appeared in the mainstream press. But other than a few reports from veteran local religious reporters, I haven’t seen much of anything. Apparently a church ruling on homosexuality is only interesting to the media when it happens in The Episcopal Church.
I have always said that if you want to know what a political leader is really like, pay close attention to the beliefs and values of his or her spouse and children. I have taken flack, among evangelicals friends, for noting that the born-again President George W. Bush certainly seems to have a very upper-crust wife from the oldline Protestant side of Dallas and I have yet to see signs of traditional faith in the lives of his daughters. So be it.
With the recent addition of endowed chairs in Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University and Utah State College, Mormon studies are becoming more popular. Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe wrote about the trend, noting that Harvard is offering a course on “Mormonism and the American Experience” this semester.
Much of the mainstream media coverage of the controversies in the Anglican Communion have focused on The Episcopal Church. Canada’s Globe and Mail looked at how things are playing out in another part of North America. Robert Matas wrote a story on Friday about a parish in Vancouver deciding to align with Anglicans in South America. He took the novel and welcome angle of determining why the parish had made its decision. For his lede, he told readers about the Bible study that parishioners at St. John’s Shaughnessy Church had taken part in prior to voting to request oversight from Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Anglican Province of Southern Cone:
