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With all the coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States, some of it seems to just blur together. So I had to highlight a completely fresh take on the trip from the Washington Times‘ Julia Duin:
There is a church in my neighborhood that has some bizarre combination of names like Mt. Calvary Holy Trinity Apostolic Church for Believers. My friends and I like to imagine what strange set of events led a church to have that name. Was that its original name? Was it a merger of multiple churches?
On my way to opening night at the new Nationals ball park last night, a man who was walking to a late Mass at a local church told me that he was upset by the report that Muslims had overtaken Roman Catholics as the largest single denomination. The story he read came from Reuters reporter Silvia Aloisi and here’s how it begins:
In recent weeks, I’ve tried to point out some of the better and worse coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit to the United States.
Reader Martha pointed us toward an article by Reuters religion reporter Michael Conlon. The piece takes the increasingly common view that Pope Benedict XVI will focus on education when he visits the United States next month. For a particularly insightful look at the matter, I commend this piece by someone you may be familiar with.
Newsweek ran the oddest article by Christopher Dickey yesterday. It reads like an opinion piece, in that way that so much of what’s in the news magazines do, but it’s not marked as an opinion piece.
Earlier in the month, I directed readers to some of the better media sites previewing Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit to the United States. I have two revisions to that list.
Usually the media only write about religious issues when those issues intersect with politics. So I was pleasantly surprised to read Susan Levine’s fantastic story about the role that faith plays in the lives of an area Christian couple. I was even more surprised that it ran on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post. Here’s how it begins:
I’ve been admiring how much work Gary Stern, the Journal News religion reporter, has put into preparing for the upcoming visit of Pope Benedict XVI. He put up an interactive Web site and publishes regular updates on his religion blog.
