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For those who closely watch the state of religion and American politics, there is going to be a fascinating press briefing this week at (surprise) the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. There has been some early coverage (click here for a Washington Times report), but we will not know the fine details until the end of the week.
There is no religion in it and, again, that is what interests me. There are legal question. There are questions about medicine and even therapy. There are life and death questions. There are even hints that moral questions may be involved. But that’s it.
In the latest Time, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy provide an informative and lively report on the media-averse Council for National Policy and its threat to go all Ross Perot on the Republican Party if it dares to nominate the pro-choice (but also pro-constructionist) Rudy Giuliani.
Don’t get me started on the state of air travel these days. My wife and I had lots (and lots) of extra time yesterday in Logan International Airport during a trip north for parents day at Gordon College, and I spent much of that time digging really deep into the new issue of The New Republic.
Evangelicals were on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. The story — about how “hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants” are using the massively popular, hugely entertaining and quite violent video game Halo 3 as a recruiting technique — is well-rounded, gives a paragraph to theological issues and quotes a nice variety of people. But something about this story seemed so unfresh, especially when it compared this trend to bingo games in churches during the 1960s:
Remember four years ago when St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke roiled various groups by saying he would deny Democratic Sen. John Kerry communion if he presented himself for it? Four years later the most prominent Roman Catholic running for the highest office in the land is a Republican and, shockingly, Burke has the same position on communion as he did before.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore has a new leader and, as you would expect, the Baltimore Sun put the installation rites on page one. And, as you would expect, the story was a mix of pageantry and pieces of the sermon by Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien that had political implications.
After watching a round of CNN over lunch, I think we can now proclaim this the political story of the day. You know that this development is causing a round of celebrations in the Hillary Clinton headquarters, since third-party bids are what opens the door for candidates with consistent high, high negative numbers in polls.
It’s almost the Gregorian chant of liberal religion, and you don’t need to attend many inquirer’s classes before hearing it: “We take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” Yet it’s usually the same people who talk the most about biblical literalism, as if it were a metastasizing cancer in American culture. By percentage, very few Americans engage in the sort of biblical interpretation that will deprive them of coffee in the morning or a blood transfusion in the emergency room.
