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I’ve given up trying to keep track of Entertainment Weekly‘s many annual lists. EW may be the most list-happy publication in pop culture, although it’s not as ambitious as Rolling Stone. For sheer pomposity, it’s hard to beat “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
I have to admit that there is no reason for the following information to be posted here at GetReligion.org, other than my simple amazement that no one — Frank Rich of The New York Times leaps to mind — seems to have written about this product yet in the mainstream press.
The age of the megachurch has not been kind to small congregations. The aging of the declining “seven sisters” of mainline Protestantism has not been kind to small congregations, either.
As I rode home on the MARC train the other night, I saw several people reading the sprawling Washington Post features section piece on the sad lives and early deaths of professional wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit. This led into a series of hard-to-answer questions about why so many wrestlers die young, other than the assumed impact of illegal steroids on their hearts.
As I like to mention from time to time, the professionals over at Religion News Service have a digital newsletter in which they send out a link to a “story of the week” that everyone can read if they wish. The sad truth is, it’s hard to find RNS copy online if a particular story does not run over at Beliefnet.
The New York Times’ Peter Steinfels has done an excellent job of assessing why many culture-loving Christians respected the films of Ingmar Bergman and of Michelangelo Antonioni, his counterpart in lost Christian faith. This segment is especially good at explaining their two very different non-faith journeys:
About a month ago I had lunch with tmatt, who gave me solid arguments for why the Harry Potter series were loaded with Christian themes and messages. I didn’t need much convincing since the arguments that the books were bringing children into the occult sounded a lot like the ones people used against C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and those are some of the best books ever written.
During the Culture Wars era, the U.S. Supreme Court has been forced to wrestle with this question: Can a government-supported advocacy of “secular humanism” (scare quotes were the norm) become a form of religion? I think the more important question is whether government-supported advocacy of Universalism is a form of doctrinal entanglement, but the hot-button phrase “secular humanism” was what grabbed the headlines.
