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While Washington, D.C., holds its collective breath waiting for the next round of the Supremes game, anyone who really wants to catch up on events in the Darwin Derby need only click over to the blog of the omnipresent Ted Olsen, Rob Moll & Co. at Christianity Today. They have decided to call this the “Unintelligently Designed Edition” and, yes, its 300-plus links sprawl out — but in a way that is not random or impersonal.
The evolution versus God legal wars started anew this week, or at least that is how the media is framing the landmark Pennsylvania trial over whether a school district is legally able to require students to hear about the “intelligent design” theory.
Two articles in The Washington Post this weekend caught my attention (and some of our readers’ attention). Both took on a chunk of the big debate over “where we all came from” and both were displayed prominently in the main section of the paper.
It seems obvious that two of the most controversial subjects in American government (and thus in journalism) are sex and salvation. The question is whether we now have to add a third “s” word to the list — science. Once you have asked that question, you then can ask whether the reason science is so controversial is that, when it evolves into philosophy and theology, it is shaping what journalists, politicos, academics, artists and others think about sex and salvation. So maybe we do not need the third “s” word after all.
My oh my, am I scared to blog about this story from the Telegraph right now. Nevertheless, rest assured that if I were to interview Bobby Henderson about his faith, I would do my best — iTalk is a wonderful thing — to quote him accurately and make sure that people know where he is coming from. That is what journalists do. Luckily, it does appear that he is rather candid about his views (even though his summary of the Intelligent Design mainstream is laugh out loud funny). But, hey, he is trying to be funny.
The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review contains an essay that is must reading for anyone who cares about the future of American newspapers and the classic “American model of the press,” which is (or was) built on the concept that newspapers promised readers fair and accurate coverage of both sides in heated debates.
Anyone who has read GetReligion for a while knows that, as a rule, we are fans of the work of religion-beat star Laurie Goodstein at The New York Times. Click here for a flashback to her fine work on a story that other papers we could mention have been, well, oversimplifying a bit.
