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Sally Quinn can be a charming and entertaining writer, especially on the topic of throwing a great party. With her Saturday op-ed for The Washington Post, however, Quinn calls more attention to her poorly informed and utilitarian understanding of why a church exists.
As far as I can tell, there is no faith, no religion, no hope and no positive sense of morality in the following story.
I am so sick of looking at the shoddy coverage of non-Roman Catholic priests who are female. But since it’s our job here to root out shoddy coverage, let’s look at this piece and then pray that the coverage improves. The latest one is from KSDK in St. Louis. The headline is: “St. Louis woman becomes world’s first Catholic priest to give birth.”
The theological term is “theodicy,” and, as I have said before, this concept is woven into many religion-news stories for at least two good reasons.
Earlier this month in the midst of election craziness, The Detroit News took what could have been a simple crime story about a rash of church robberies and interlaced the article with theological themes, historical trends and even sociological explanations.
Criticizing Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, for churning out glurge is now criminally easy, but Paul Cullum betrays an ignorance of flyover country in writing about Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (direct to DVD this week). Working from a 16-point memo of Kinkade’s filmmaking tips, Cullum first tries to classify Kinkade as “a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set.”
A few weeks into Major League Baseball’s off-season, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had a short story on long-time major league pitcher Salomon Torres and his announcement of his second retirement. The article focuses almost 100 percent on baseball but contained one of those classic paragraphs that briefly mentions religion and then runs away from it like it was some sort of third rail.
A few days ago we looked at some decent media coverage of a Roman Catholic Womenpriests story. A few more stories worth looking at have been filed or discovered.
Amy Sullivan of Time has written about six church options for President-elect Barack Obama and his family — and, hold the phone, the list does not include St. John’s, Lafayette Square (“the church of the presidents”) or Washington National Cathedral.
