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I have had a number of readers ask me for my reaction to the recent remarks by former President Jimmy Carter in which he addressed both his party’s dogmatic stance in favor of abortion and its growing estrangement from traditional religious believers.
OK, I have held off writing about this for a week because I wanted to see how the daily sports press and the weekly magazines handled a tricky style question at the heart of this story.
As I said not that long ago, we remain at the trial balloon stage in the ongoing drama of the Vatican and gay seminarians. Over and over we have seen MSM reports that Rome was poised to release the long-awaited Congregation for Catholic Education document that is supposed to “ban” — or maybe not, or maybe just a little bit — the admission of homosexuals from seminaries.
Europe’s Sky News is reporting an undercover “investigation” on highly controversial religious leader Fred Phelps. With reporting like this in Europe on religion in America, Europeans will be loving us about as much the Israelis appreciated their Roman rulers. The problem in this case is that you can’t really fault the Sky News report for overly hyping the basic facts in the story.
I am not a frequent reader of the magazine Maxim, but it did carry a rather humorous article on how to “score in church.” While the article is quite crude in its advice and I would not encourage anyone to try “this at home,” or at church for that matter, it is an interesting look at how a different worldview sees Christianity and the American church scene.
I ran into a minister the other day over at the Naval Academy, a man I’ve known for about 10 years. He was leading a really interesting project, one directly linked to a topic that comes up often on this blog — offensive free speech.
Maybe it’s just my church-state studies background, but this case about Wicca and public prayer strikes me as a major story and a sign of things to come. We may have heard the last of a witch named Cynthia Simpson at the U.S. Supreme Court, but the splintering of the old Judeo-Christian (and now Islamic) civil religion will continue. Here’s the lead from the Richmond Times-Dispatch story, the only MSM coverage that really mattered.
This week’s issue of Time features a wide-ranging discussion that links to its cover theme of “What’s Next?” The participants, identified by Time as “some of the smartest people we know,” include author Malcolm Gladwell, techie lecturer Clay Shirky, New York Times columnist David Brooks and author Esther Dyson.
