To experience today’s Peggy Noonan column, one really needs to call it up on the Web. It is, in effect, the first Noonan blog — only printed in a newspaper. What should we call that? Religion news and trends run all the way through it, right down to the last bite (the pope’s email address). Here she is on the Harvard holy wars about President Larry Summers: “What the Summers story most illustrates is that American universities now seem like Medieval cloisters. They’re like a cloister without the messy God part. Old monks of leftism walk their hallowed halls in hooded robes, chanting to themselves. Young nuns of leftist deconstructionism, pale as orchids, walk along wringing their hands, listening to their gloomy music. They become hysterical at the antichrist of a new idea, the instrusion of the reconsideration of settled matter. Get thee behind me, Summers.”
NASCAR, Cabela's -- and Catholicism?
The 80th anniversary issue of The New Yorker includes a report by Nicholas Lemann on how some editors of the nation’s most prestigious daily newspapers are feeling beleaguered by criticisms by both liberals and conservatives — but especially by conservatives. The essay opens with Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, talking at length about how President Bush’s adviser Karl Rove “pounded on us for two cocktails’ worth of conversation.” (Keller had made the mistake of asking Rove what he thought of the Times‘ political coverage.)
See you later, alligator?
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights issued a press release yesterday denouncing a “vile column” distributed by the Universal Press Syndicate titled “Death for the Pope.”
Dawn of the deed: Was the mistake fatal?
My first full-time job in journalism was on the copy desk at a daily in Champaign, Ill., so I have been on the other side the editing process. I would like to make three comments about the Dawn Eden affair, based on what we know so far. I have never met Dawn (the logo is from her blog) and I hope we can discuss this sooner, rather than later.
Darkness at Dawn
The New York Observer this week ran a major cover story on l’affaire Eden, the firing of headline gal and copyeditor Dawn Eden by the New York Post for her pro-life edits of a piece on in-vitro fertilization.
The Bill O'Reilly of MSNBC
Keith Olbermann has been on a tear about James Dobson and Focus on the Family for several days now, mostly on his MSNBC blog, but Tuesday night he took his grievances into prime time.
The Osteen factor
Louis Romano hits where it hurts in his profile of Joel Osteen in Sunday’s Washington Post by closing on what Osteen would call a negative note:
The "Witness" and purple spirituality
One cannot overstress the following fact: The whole “red” and “blue” typology works at the level of the Electoral College and, much more so, when applied to “progressive” and “traditional” cultures with counties (think college towns vs. rural) and zip codes (think latte artsy urban vs. Home Depot suburban). But it is impossible to divide American culture into two zones at the level of most people’s lives.
Evangelicalism: The tattooed generation
There’s little new about the story that Jamie “Jay” Bakker — the son of PTL Club cohosts Jim and Tammy Faye — survived a hellish journey through teenage alcoholism, reclaimed his Christian faith and has become a pastor in Atlanta. Bakker wrote about it in his autobiography, Son of a Preacher Man (2001).
