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The second episode of CNN’s God’s Warriors series aired Wednesday night. I wasn’t able to follow the show as closely as on Tuesday night, so I’ll provide some general comments rather than “live blogging” the show. Please give feedback since commentary on television news programs isn’t something we do that often.
As promised, here is a review of the first installment of CNN’s series God’s Warriors hosted by Christiane Amanpour. The topic for tonight is “God’s Jewish Warriors.” I raised the question Monday of whether the series would engage in moral equivalency by lumping together extremists (or God’s warriors) from Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As one reader asked, where are the Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism?
The email is starting to come in asking when GetReligion is going to have something to say about that New York Times Magazine cover story from this past weekend, the massive piece called “The Politics of God” by Mark Lilla. The sad thing about it is that I am three time zones away from my office and involved in some long, long meetings in which a circle of journalists and academics are, during the break times, talking about this piece.
An Episcopal priest in Louisiana sent along a story that ran on KSLA-TV in Shreveport. The provocative headline — “Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest if Martial Law Ever Declared” — promises a juicy story. Particularly for civil libertarians like myself who fear just such hypotheticals. Here’s the lede:
One of the things we like to do at GetReligion is watch a story develop and jump on it once the momentum has reached a certain level (or that could just be whenever we get around to it). That can work with those multiple-day stories that are likely to make it into the newsweeklies, while other times the stories are built on similar themes over a longer stretch of time.
Eileen Flynn of the Austin American-Statesman had a huge package of stories on the emerging Christian church movement, both in Austin and throughout the country. The four-story series (here, here, here and here), along with solid photos by Laura Skelding, covers the emergent church movement that started in the late 1990s by a group of young Christians who worried about the gap between traditional churches and young people without formal church backgrounds or were frustrated with traditional churches.
James Faust, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1978, died on Friday. He also served in the high-ranking position of second counselor to President Gordon Hinckley since 1995.
Who would have thought that a religion story out of Iraq, or the Middle East for that matter, would have something to do with subjects unrelated to headscarves and terrorism?
