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When I was growing up, two of my favorite books were In Cold Blood and Dead Man Walking. Both exposed the desolation, inhumanity, and cruelty of capital punishment — and both were hugely popular. But did either of them make the death penalty less popular? The data is not encouraging.
It must be fun, in a twisted sort of way, to be a religion reporter in those regions where the Anglican Wars are raging. The action just never stops.
One of the questions that we hear from time to time is why GetReligion devotes so much attention to abortion since, from the point of view of some readers, the issue is political or scientific, but not “religious.” Meanwhile, there are many supporters of abortion-rights who insist that people who oppose legalized abortion are — pure and simple — guilty of “trying to force their private religious beliefs” on other people.
Apparently I’m not the only American with a new little bundle of joy. Bucking the trend in other industrialized nations, we’re experiencing a little baby boomlet, with the most children born since 1961. Some 4.3 million babies arrived in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gentle GetReligion readers! Please know that this post is not a shameless attempt to shoot the following paragraph from a William Booth feature in the Washington Post out into the search-engine universe at Google and Yahoo. Your GetReligionistas are above that sort of thing, I’ll have you know.
As likely is the case in most communities around the country, there are abandoned churches in neighborhoods that used to be vibrant and alive. I know this is true in my neighborhood (I can see the abandoned church pictured in this post from my window) and I have seen it in other cities, particularly off the coasts where there is plenty of cheap land and the geographic cores of cities have gone through a several-decades long transformation from life to death.
After reading stories about the New Hampshire election results last night, I remembered that 12 years ago Mark Penn and Dick Morris, two all-powerful pollsters for President Clinton, had discovered a remarkably effective polling technique.
The abortion debate in the United States is described as emotional. So what are we reporters doing to make it rational?
That sound you heard the other day in England was nervous coughing. It seems that the leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church, Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, is determined not to let gays, lesbians and bisexuals in England sit on the sidelines while traditionalists in the rest of the world take shots at her troubled flock.
