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The astounding historical and religious significance of last week’s attack is just now being revealed. Some of Tmatt’s questions from yesterday on why these terrorists targeted Jews have been answered, but much remains to be determined and many tough questions must be answered by journalists.
Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. once mentioned how difficult he found it to discuss his Catholic faith in the social circles in which he moved. I had trouble imagining Buckley, who was so clear about his beliefs in God and Man at Yale and in the fortnightly National Review, having difficulty ever expressing his convictions, regardless of his dinner companions.
In a brisk 830 words, Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic explains some of the smoldering tensions that led to this past week’s slaughter in Mumbai.
The coverage of the Jonestown massacre made a strong impression on me, since I was a young journalist who wanted to become a religion-beat reporter.
The cover story on this week’s Washington Post Sunday magazine was a 7,000-word treatise on a medical student deciding whether to become an abortion doctor.
Journalists are often impelled to indulge in navel-gazing at the ping of an incoming email. One topic we tend to chew on, like a cow masticating her cud, is: do we display bias? Our second favorite: are we as bad as those other guys?
Bob Jones University is probably best known at this point for the 2000 presidential campaign controversy involving its ban on interracial dating. After then-candidate George W. Bush spoke there, he was criticized, and the ban was lifted on CNN’s Larry King Live show by the university’s then-president Bob Jones III.
