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The Wall Street Journal‘s opinion section has a solid review of what appears to be a solid book on the growth of evangelical, seeker-friendly megachurches. The growth of megachurches, along with the decline of the traditional mainline churches, is one of the biggest stories in religion these days, and this reviews highlights some important aspects.
One thing I don’t miss from Washington are the snarky, uninformative feature/news stories in The Washington Post‘s Style section. The latest and greatest from those pages, Sridhar Pappu’s report on the Values Voters Summit, is like a bowl of bad popcorn. Little informed, slightly amused but mostly bemused, I came away from this story learning more about Pappu’s day at the Hilton Washington than the latest plots from the religious right to take over America, or at least install a president to its liking in 2008.
Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball (with Suzanne Smalley, Eve Conant, Babak Dehghanpisheh, Pat Wingert, Dan Ephron, Rod Nordland, John Barry, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, Richard Wolffe and Thijs Niemantsverdriet) profiled Blackwater CEO Erik Prince for Newsweek. It’s the kind of story that offers such balanced and illuminating insight as this:
I hit the wall on something this past weekend. But before I vent a bit, let’s flash back to one of the most candid and insightful statements in the New York Times self-study document (PDF) from a few years ago.
I’m not sure whether to call it a meme, but there’s certainly a monotony to reports about the Religious Right’s indecision on which Republican candidate to support. The same few names keep popping up, primarily James Dobson and Richard Land, and I think the entire country must know by now that both men would refuse to vote for Rudy Giuliani.
Talk about a loaded image. The Column One feature in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times focuses on how the World Wide Web has raised up some new African-American voices, some new points of view on politics, culture and, of course, religion.
As a college teacher, I really care about trends in all of the schools that send me students — schools both public and private.
Most second- and third-tier presidential candidates fuss about a lack of media attention and the mainstream media’s general tendency to treat their campaigns as equaling the significance of a stalk of corn in an Iowa cornfield. The social conservative Sen. Sam Brownback wouldn’t hesitate to blame his lack of political traction on the media’s failures to take his candidacy seriously.
