Mainline

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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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Spiritual, but generic, Santas at work

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It would be impossible not to be moved by USA Today feature story about the volunteers at Santa-America, who swing into action this time of year in 40 states to minister to children who are living in hospice care or those who face the lose of a parent.


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Oral Roberts: From Pentecostal to Charismatic

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Obviously, one of the major religion stories of the day is the death of the Rev. Oral Roberts at the age of 91. I would imagine that the major newspapers have had obituaries ready for a decade or more.


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The missing motivation

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When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment preventing federal tax dollars from being used to fund or subsidize abortions, it was hard to find a story that didn’t mention the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. That group, and several other organizations that oppose abortion, had worked for months to ensure passage of such an amendment. We’d been encouraging more reportage on abortion funding for months. But when the drama in the House happened, where they only passed the overall legislation because the Stupak amendment passed, I figured we’d see some good coverage of abortion politics as we moved to the Senate.


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Birds of a doctrinal feather

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The church-state junkie in me really does not know where to begin when it comes to evaluating the mainstream media coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case pitting the University of California’s Hastings College of Law in San Francisco against the campus chapter of the Christian Legal Society.


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Black Fridays and purple Sundays

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Every year we read about the War on Christmas. The mainstream media love to cover stories about those Scrooges who ban the use of any specific greetings related to Christmas and the old curmudgeons who complain about the same.


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When Lutherans split

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The Episcopal Church has less than half the membership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But the former gets much more media coverage than the ELCA. But both are experiencing division under similar circumstances. Both churches have lost significant numbers of members in recent years, with congregations occasionally deciding to leave as a unit. And the problems in both churches deal with how the denomination interprets Scripture. The big fissures have been sparked by dramatic changes in church doctrine on sexuality.


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Getting the rite right

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Last Sunday, the Rev. Susan Slaughter was ordained to the priesthood in The Episcopal Church. This is newsworthy because her ordination took place in Ft. Worth. This is where things get a bit tricky. There are two groups purporting to be the Episcopal Diocese of Ft. Worth. That’s because most Episcopalians there left The Episcopal Church just about one year ago. Here’s how the Dallas Morning News put it at the time:


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An embryonic quandary

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Science and faith can come at odds for some couples who consider the implications of in vitro fertilization. The Chicago Tribune recently tackled this struggle with a focus on the Potters, a suburban Chicago couple who must decide the fate of two embryos that were not implanted in the womb.


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