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Stories about religous and moral controversies are about polity and denominations, protests and politics — but they are also, and mostly, about people. When a writer cares enough to spend time getting to know the people behind the positions, then it is possible (or more possible) for the journalist to let the story unspool invitingly without jumping in there with the exclamation points and scare quotes.
When popular films portray Christians well — not as plaster saints or as hypocrites with bulging eyes — they can achieve a near-transcendence. I think of the late great Horton Foote’s screenplays for Tender Mercies or The Trip to Bountiful, or the the humanity that director Paul Thomas Anderson gave to a Christian police officer in Magnolia.
Wednesday Mollie looked at a story from CNN.com about an odd encounter between a shop-keeper and a would-be robber. It wasn’t clear exactly what, if anything, actually happened during the meeting.
The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an 11-page comic strip by R. Crumb that depicts the accounts of the Creation and the Fall from the first three chapters of Genesis. (The feature is an excerpt from the forthcoming The Book of Genesis: Illustrated by R. Crumb.) The online version requires a subscription, and that’s too bad.
Yesterday morning at Los Angeles International Airport, Brenda Lee presented herself as a journalist, a Catholic priestess, and a California citizen so concerned about gay marriage that she wanted to give a letter to President Obama. In blurring those identities — in behaving as an activist while standing amid journalists — she managed to get herself hauled away in full-throttle civil disobedience mode.
I am not an American Idol fan and have not seen a single minute of this year’s pop-machinery-industrial festival. I love music way too much to watch.
Your friends here at GetReligion are not big on reading the tabloids, but we have received a few notes from people asking what we think of the tabloid-esque coverage of Father Alberto Cutie, the famous “Father Oprah” of television and South Beach.
