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In March, an article in The New Yorker made some pretty big waves in Episcopal circles. As we discussed at the time, the article was actually a book excerpt from The Bishop’s Daughter by Honor Moore, whose father the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore was the trailblazing Episcopal Bishop of New York from 1972 to 1989.
Since 2004, eight Episcopal congregations have split apart or left the Central Florida Diocese because of the direction of the national church body. Mark Pinsky, the Orlando Sentinel‘s ace religion reporter, wrote that 500 members and the ministerial staff of Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach are leaving their historic church building to form a new congregation separate from the Episcopal Church.
Ever since I saw the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed last month, I’ve been waiting for some mainstream media coverage of the film. Other than surprisingly few reviews — some by reviewers who didn’t bother to actually watch the film — I haven’t really seen anything.
When the Jeremiah Wright scandal first broke, I was one of the voices here calling for more context. Well, I’m done with contextualizing. Sometimes it’s nice to just get a news story that asks hard questions while treating a subject fairly.
It never ceases to amaze me how much media coverage of denominational politics we get for The Episcopal Church vis-a-vis all other denominations. It seems like every time an Episcopal clergyman sneezes, it’s worthy of massive coverage. But a major church body — the United Methodist Church — holds its quadrennial convention in Fort Worth over the last two weeks and we get nothing. Or at least something close to nothing.
For over a year, I’ve been intrigued by Chemistry.com commercials that go on the attack against the internet dating site eHarmony. It’s only mildly surprising for an upstart company to go after a major player in the market by trying to squeeze out some niche audience.
Yesterday, I looked at how media coverage of Jeremiah Wright sourced a proverb from Abraham Lincoln to the Book of Proverbs. The two were similar, but distinct.
I am completely confused by the media coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. I feel as if the media went from providing a bit too much context for his incendiary remarks to completely abandoning the man. Is there any substantial difference between what he said this week at the National Press Club and what we saw in televised snippets from his sermons? Has he said anything different about his famous parishioner Barack Obama than he did in his old interviews with the New York Times or Rolling Stone?
In a story for CNN, reporter Eliott McLaughlin dove head first into a discussion of the religious views of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The hook for the piece is the group’s decision to open up and permit some public scrutiny of its lifestyle. They’ve started a Web site and a handful of polygamous wives have been doing a ton of interviews.
