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Surely, somewhere in America or the world at large there are a few atheist or agnostic women who are active in the La Leche League network that encourages modern women to breastfeed their babies. There must be a few.
I have a friend who is an Army doctor. Turns out he knew Major Nidal Hasan back when they started school together. I asked him if he was surprised to find his former classmate accused of killing 13 Fort Hood soldiers. He told me that while he was completely shocked — as were all the other colleagues who knew him years ago — the ones who had continued their studies with him or who had worked with him more recently were in no way shocked. Apparently they felt that he’d become completely radicalized.
Years ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about a pagan mother and some of the parenting choices that she was making during an age in which pop-culture was becoming increasingly fascinated with its own glitzy few of witchcraft and wizardry. It was a Mother’s Day column.
According to various journalists who cover the White House, the Dalai Lama told the media who covered his visit there this week not to ask silly questions. That, and the throwing of snow at the gathered press, put a smile on my face.
The big news before I even walked out the door this morning was Tiger Woods’ public apology, in fact the first public appearance he had made since that cataclysmic collapse on Thanksgiving weekend. This was no press conference, and everything Woods said this morning felt painfully processed. It was also already common knowledge thanks to the reporting that took place during his two-and-a-half-month Houdini act.
Pop star Elton John is featured on the cover of Parade magazine this week. So I guess Parade is still around. He’s ostensibly on the cover to talk about how he’s a better person now than he was before. But he makes news for an unconventional religious idea he puts forth.
You can make fun of me, but I do, on occasion, watch Private Practice, where attractive doctors magically fix people and cheesy romance abounds. Compared to its sister show Grey’s Anatomy, it appears to be one of the only prime time television shows that consistently deals with serious medical ethics. In one recent show, for example, a Catholic doctor’s 15-year-old daughter gets pregnant. (Spoiler alert: the doctor wants her to have an abortion, but the girl chooses to keep it). Writers use such ethical scenarios for television drama, but people are faced with these kinds of decisions more often than we might think.
There is no question that Rep. John Murtha was a giant on the Democratic side of the aisle in the House of Representatives. Thus, it was no surprise that his funeral received significant coverage in the publications that specialize in covering life on the Hill.
Just last month I wrote about the “gospel of easy money,” and in that post were a few links to stories of pastors living unusually lavish lifestyles. If you read that post, and easily discerned my contempt for such behavior, you’d expect that similar stories immediately grab my attention. Stories like this one from WFAA News 8 in Dallas/Fort Worth:
