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USA Today‘s “Lives of indelible impact” is one of the stranger lists I’ve seen for some time. The concept is not new, as Beliefnet has published its “Most Inspiring Person of the Year” feature for several years now. Within context, the list makes sense: To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the newspaper is publishing 25 lists of 25 items each.
In the May 28 issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes a brief piece in the spirit of Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,” in which the theme of a social gathering feels at odds with the upscale surroundings. Here the gathering’s theme is spiritual enlightenment, featuring the actress and recently published author Ellen Burstyn (Lessons in Becoming Myself) and Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love).
This one comes to you from deep inside tmatt’s GetReligion guilt file, so please hang in there with me for a moment.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, showed one of his more decisive moments on Tuesday by announcing that he would not invite two bishops — Gene Robinson of the Diocese of New Hampshire and Martyn Minns of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America — to the Lambeth Conference next year in England. The significance of his decision is captured well in reports by Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times, Julia Duin of The Washington Times and Rachel Zoll of The Associated Press.
And then there was the funeral, with flowers, politicos, hymns, memories, televangelists and that final ironic detail — a potential whiff of napalm as a Liberty University student prepared a few makeshift bombs to drive away the right, right, right fundamentalists who planned to protest the work of that infamous liberal and sell-out Jerry Fallwell.
For the past few days I have been on the road and away from a steady Internet link. However, even during a drive from Boston to Baltimore, I was plugged in enough to the mainstream media (and the Drudge Report) to know that GetReligion’s friend Frank “Bible Belt Blogger” Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had an interesting story on his hands.
Both Time and Newsweek have chosen to bid farewell to Jerry Falwell with one-page essays on whether Falwell’s death also means trouble for the political involvement of conservative evangelicals in politics.
Ever since the so-called New Age era, I have been interested in the rise of Wicca and the whole neopagan scene. This trend raises all kinds of interesting issues of coven and state (Do conservative Christians really want equal access laws?), and you really can’t talk about faith in popular culture, especially Hollywood, without dealing with the new consumer-friendly forms of paganism.
Anthony Gottlieb’s New Yorker essay on contemporary atheists came to my attention earlier this week through that magazine’s much-improved website. I did not want to write about Gottlieb’s essay before receiving the issue in the mail, largely because I wanted to be sure of his current connections. Internet searches turned up articles that placed him with The Economist, but those were all a few years old.
