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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.
Hear me, people, I am very familiar with the competing truth claims connected with the great barbeque churches of the American Southeast.
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.
The University of Tennessee’s men’s basketball program now has a couple of religion ghosts following its rather successful hoops program. In addition to the team’s coach Bruce Pearl, who is said to be passionate about his Jewish faith, one of its best players, prolific 3-point shooter Chris Lofton, has suggested that his faith helped him beat a cancer that he has kept silent about until now.
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 the world’s 250 million or so Orthodox Christians, this is Bright Week. And if it is Bright Week, that means that last Sunday was Great and Holy Pascha. Which means that I was so busy this week, as my students wrapped up their work here at the Washington Journalism Center, that I didn’t offer a post on some of the Pascha coverage. I did, however, work in a Pascha column of my own for Scripps Howard.
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.
