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Nothing stirs up as much GetReligion guilt in my heart as the arrival of a new issue of The Atlantic Monthly in my mailbox at work. Month after month, it seems that there is some giant story that I want to write about on the blog — immediately, post haste — yet it is so long and involved that it just keeps slipping and slipping and, well, then that new issue arrives and stirs up my guilt.
I have been haunted by this story every single day since it came out in the Los Angeles Times. Yes, haunted, as in by a ghost.
Last week the Vatican issued a document on bioethics called “The Dignity of a Person” that was covered fairly extensively by the mainstream media. Considering what coverage of Vatican statements and documents is normally like, the coverage was actually not bad. But it wasn’t perfect.
After Michael Crichton’s death last week, a few different obituaries hinted at his iconoclastic questioning of global-warming certainties. What’s striking is that Crichton’s criticisms of global warming attracted more hostility than his attacks on religion — a generic religion that stands as the enemy of all things scientific. New York Times science columnist John Tierney quotes from a speech, “Environmentalism as Religion,” which Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club:
Of the many articles written about the death late Sunday of Barack Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Payne Dunham, nothing expressed Christian hope quite so well as these pithy words from blogger Andrew Sullivan:
Given all the coverage of the New Atheist movement, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more religion beat stories on average atheists. Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote a story about local atheists and freethinkers a few weeks ago that has been getting republished throughout the country. It begins with an anecdote about a woman who experienced a feeling of euphoria when she became an atheist a few years ago:
Let’s just get right to it. This Los Angeles Times piece about the religious views of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is pretty much worthless.
I am a huge fan of the old Sim games. I hardly ever play anymore, but games such as Sim City played a significant role in my upbringing. Since I am GetReligion’s “token normal American young male” according to Terry, I have the honor of writing about the religion ghosts in the Spore story.
