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The Miami Herald has a standard obituary this morning for the Rev. D. James Kennedy of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. I am not sure what page the story is on, but I do know that — in the online edition — there is no mention of the death of this international evangelical leader on either the front page or on the main news page. I had to use a search engine to find it.
The marital troubles between superstar couple Juanita Bynum and Bishop Thomas Weeks III have received little coverage beyond the straight news stories one would expect about people at this level of fame. There have been no New York Times think pieces or Newsweek analyses. This is not an easy story to cover.
“Hitchens Takes on Mother Teresa,” Newsweek‘s website proclaims this week, which is about as fresh a bulletin as Saturday Night Live‘s standing gag of “Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead.” That Newsweek would invite Hitchens to write an online essay is no great surprise. Even when Hitchens’ purpose is to whistle a happy tune over Mother Teresa’s grave, he does it with a certain flair. Here is a crucial point in his argument:
How would you like to try to write a standard, newspaper-length obituary for the Rev. Billy Graham? How would you like to cover his entire life in somewhere between 600 and 2,000 words?
I’ve given up trying to keep track of Entertainment Weekly‘s many annual lists. EW may be the most list-happy publication in pop culture, although it’s not as ambitious as Rolling Stone. For sheer pomposity, it’s hard to beat “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
You knew that the religion ghost in the Michael Vick story would wake up. I mean, last week I put it this way in a post responding to a Michael Wilbon column in The Washington Post that veered into faith language:
“The Iconoclasts,” Jason Zengerle’s New Republic report on evangelicals who have become Eastern Orthodox, is a largely commendable effort to let a few of these converts speak for themselves, but it presents an overly political picture of evangelicalism.
I am tempted to think that the word “evangelical” and several words connected to it have become too vague to be of any use to mainstream reporters. I know that’s impossible. There are simply too many people who use “evangelical” as a noun or an adjective these days.
