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Last week I expressed my disappointment in Paul Elie’s essay for The Atlantic on various efforts to claim the mantle of Reinhold Niebuhr. Wilfred McClay — who was one target of Elie’s essay and a friend of this blog before this blog even existed (i.e., a friend of mine through email) — dropped me a note to express his dismay about Elie’s treatment of his remarks.
As part of a Los Angeles Times series on homelessness, faith and values reporter Stephanie Simon spent some time in Denver looking at a government program that involves a Democratic mayor and a challenge to the area’s churches, synagogues and mosques to work with the 600 or so homeless families in the community in a mentorship program begun two years ago.
There’s a big religion story going on in Baltimore right now and it centers on what most evangelical or even fundamentalist Protestants would call a “revival meeting.”
The mainstream press is just getting started when it comes to covering the splinters that are almost certainly going to take place inside American evangelicalism in the months between now and the election. The key to all of this is that some people think it’s really amazing to discover (a) that evangelicalism (whatever that means) is not a monolithic movement and, duh, (b) that Protestants who have every right to decide (thus saith one interpretation of Sola Scriptura) what the Bible means are going to reach different conclusions on some hot doctrinal and social issues.
In the Oct. 8 New Republic, Alan Wolfe of Boston College reviews Head and Heart: American Christianities, the latest book by Garry Wills. The argument of Head and Heart, as condensed by Wolfe, should gladden the heart of anyone who has night sweats because of the Religious Right:
Did you catch this story about abortion rates worldwide? It’s based on a new study done by researchers with the Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) and the World Health Institute that was published in The Lancet.
Molly Moore of The Washington Post Foreign Service had a dramatic and tragic story in Tuesday’s paper that shows the surge of immigration — and racist attitudes — in the suburbs of Zurich, Switzerland.
Boss Mattingly asked me to take a look at the latest Newsweek and write up my thoughts. After I read it all — and I do mean all — I couldn’t figure out why he thought it was GetReligion-worthy.
I think we could use a bit of a flashback to an amazing column that I read this summer in the Turkish Daily News by the Muslim journalist Orhan Kemal Cengiz. This was, you may recall, a column titled “We Cannot Afford to Lose Our Armenians!”
