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We all agreed to take a look at Jon Meacham’s lengthy mash note to the sainted Billy Graham. I alternately enjoyed the Newsweek piece and felt it went a bit over the top in luscious praise. But I’m pretty sure I would have hated it if I hadn’t read Meacham’s earlier pieces on the Nativity, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I wanted to like Jon Meacham’s Billy Graham exclusive Newsweek cover story. It contained lots of good information. There were colorful, well-described scenes and a solid understanding of Graham’s mission as an evangelist. It dealt with most of the Graham-related scandals. At about 4,500 words, the piece was thorough and non-repetitive.
While it’s still too early to be talking 2008 presidential politics, we can’t help ourselves here at GetReligion, particularly when one of the country’s major publications puts out a landmark piece on how religion will affect the potential candidacy of not just a particular candidate but of the entire race.
An August 5 article in the Los Angeles Times brought to our attention that Jews and Muslims are not the only ones caught up in Middle East conflict. Christians live there too.
A few years ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is gay. He surprised me by telling me that he opposed gay marriage vehemently. He thought that children should have a mother and a father and that gay marriage would subvert that. He also believed gay culture was all about promiscuity and sexual liberation. Marriage might kill what he loved about being gay.
… or at least conservatism as defined in the current American political landscape. Reporters, take note.
It must be the week for stories about how evangelical Christians are turning their backs on Republican politics. Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece on Gregory Boyd is still rockin’ the charts, even driving Boyd’s book from #32,738 to #54 on Amazon.
Laila Kain’s very long article in the Hartford Courant‘s NE magazine on the departure of longtime television news anchor Steve Bunnell from the news business to the evangelism business is a great example of what can be done when a journalist gets a whole lot of space to fill and a whole lot of time to fill it.
We would have looked at Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece on an evangelical pastor disowning Republican politics even if many of our readers hadn’t asked us to. Apparently a number of you had strong feelings about the piece, some loving it and some not so much. It’s also the second-most-e-mailed story on the Times website right now.
