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A reader submitted this New York Times profile of a street preacher named Leyland George. He has a boombox ministry. The profile is very brief and totally interesting, but it does raise some questions:
A horrible shooting happened yesterday at a small Christian vocational school in Oakland, California. A former student went on a shooting rampage, killing seven people and injuring three.
Last week I mentioned that I’ve become mildly obsessed with the murder of Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi-American woman who was beaten so brutally at her home in El Cajon, California, that she later died.
One of our most visited pages last month was a post about the lack of coverage of comments made by Saudi Arabia’s top religious official (Got news? Destroy all churches!). As I mentioned in that post, Arabian Business News reported:
There’s a story about a book publisher being asked how to write a best seller. He said the title of it would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” But I can’t help but thinking “The Conspiracy of Jesus’ Dog” would also rank high. (Memo to self: get on it.) Or maybe I could combine Jesus, Lincoln, dogs and conspiracy theories. Lincoln is reported to have said, after all, “I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
We’ve been talking quite a bit about how the public outcry over religious freedom issues has been portrayed in the press. When the Obama administration created a new requirement that religious employers fully fund abortion drugs, contraception and sterilization, many religious employers and their supporters cried foul. The people who support the mandate argue that free contraception is a fundamental right that the government must force employers to provide. Further, failing to force employers to provide these things constitutes a war on women.
I’ve been mildly obsessed with the horrific beating of an Iraqi-American woman in Southern California. Shaima Al Awadhi succumbed to her injuries on Sunday. She was 32 years old and a mother of five children. Her oldest daughter is 17.
In the lead-up to Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Mexico, news reports were oddly obsessed with a sort of popularity contest between the current and preceding pope. We kept joking about the secret “enthusiasm meters” reporters must be consulting to come up with stories such as this one from December:
