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For years, our missing co-founder Douglas LeBlanc was the GetReligionista who was officially in charge of posting “hathos” alerts linked to mainstream media coverage of religion news. He’s still out there, lurking, and he sent us an alert this morning for the first hathos alert of 2010 and it is a goodie.
I rarely disagree with the results of the Religion Newswriters Association poll that selects the year’s Top 10 stories on the religion-news beat.
Over the weekend, I discussed a New York Times story about a possible rift between the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Health Association (CHA) — which represents the many Catholic hospitals in the country — over health care reform legislation. The Times reported the following: “In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.”
The Washington Post‘s Rob Stein has an important story looking at how federal funding of abstinence-focused education might be included in the behemoth health care reform legislation pending in the Senate.
The Senate’s passage of health care reform legislation was a major victory, though there’s a big difference between winning a battle and winning the war. There’s no solid evidence as of yet that the House is going to accept the Senate’s legislation as it’s written. The President appears to concede the issue may not be resolved into February.
How do you sum up how billions of Christians across the world observe the birth of Christ? It’s difficult to do. This Associated Press round-up begins with a completely unfazed Pope Benedict being knocked down by a deranged woman and ends with 47,000 Filipinos, displaced by an erupting volcano, eating Christmas dinner at shelters. It includes the sad news that some Christians in Pakistan fear marking the day, still scared by the Muslim riots targeting them from earlier this year.
As the Divine Ms. MZ mentioned the other day in her “Nightmare on Capitol Hill” post, abortion is the issue that simply will not die in the ongoing debates about health-care reform. Right to life issues also hover in the background in those arguments about care of the elderly, too.
David Kirkpatrick had a fascinating profile of Robert P. George in the Sunday New York Times magazine. George is a Catholic public intellectual — a professor at Princeton who writes about policy and politics. The first thing to say about the piece is that it’s a great idea. I’ve been reading George for years but, then again, I’m the type of person who reads First Things and The Public Discourse. The average Sunday New York Times magazine reader probably doesn’t. Considering the influence George has on conservatives, a profile makes perfect sense.
Ah, yes, fewer than two shopping days 48 hours left to fire your salvo in the 2009 Christmas wars! To that end, The New York Times has a colorful little report on an order to remove seasonal religious symbols displayed in a public building and California. Only this time, there was no cross, creche or menorah:
