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When I saw the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week, I groaned. Beaming out from the pages in ridiculously campy, 1950s-style photos reminiscent of June and Ward Cleaver were two perfectly domestic gay men.
I confess that even my magazines stacked up during the papal visit. Thus, I was a week late getting to the epic Newsweek “Splitsville” cover story by David J. Jefferson on Baby Boomers and divorce in the symbolic Grant High School in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles.
Pope Benedict XVI may be in his 80s, but he keeps a schedule that is tiring just to observe. There have been so many appointments, so many meetings, so many worship services. One of the significant events was a prayer service with representatives from other Christian church bodies. And as dramatic as people may think his Regensburg speech was, his comments at St. Joseph’s in Yorkville gave the gathered much to chew on.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s ace religion reporter Ann Rodgers had an innovative angle on the pope’s address to U.S. bishops. Whereas most people focused on Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks about sexual abuse or immigration, Rodgers focused on his comments about the life of the church:
Major props to Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post for a wonderful story on the front page of yesterday’s Style section analyzing the significance of Pope Benedict XVI’s papal garments.
With Pope Benedict XVI in town, the media are running with every angle imaginable on the Catholic Church.
Associated Press writer Hillary Rhodes filed an interesting piece about how pastors are turning to the Internet to answer theology questions. One of the pastors she spoke with was Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church:
Tense religion writers all across this land are sitting at their desks, waiting for the dreaded moment when an editor walks over and says the words no one wants to hear just before a papal visit: “A friend of mine heard that people are buying those pope-soap-on-a-rope things somewhere in town. Why don’t you look into that and see that other kinds of pope junk are out there?”
Charlton Heston raised the tablets containing the Ten Commandments high over his head decades before he did the same thing with a flintlock rifle and, to their credit, most of the journalists who wrote his obituaries managed to cover both of those symbolic gestures.
