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Remember when President George Bush nominated Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court? As readers and viewers were told for months, Alito would become the fifth Catholic on the court — the most ever.
It may be time for that old, old Episcopal joke, again. This is the version that I heard in the mid-1990s.
Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon has a really interesting article in this coming Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The article, which has been online for days now, is just an interview — but the subject is Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I forget when and where it was in which, as a reporter, I heard a stunning lecture on the impact of birthrates and basic demographics on the rise and fall of religious institutions in the United States and elsewhere.
In a week in which the homepages of the heavy media hitters have been drenched in Michael Jackson coverage, there has, believe it or not, been other news. President Obama met with Russian leaders Medvedev and Putin and negotiated agreements of import to the United States. U.S. troops died in Afghanistan implementing new U.S. strategy. And oh, by the way, Pope Benedict XVI issued a new 144-page encyclical, “Charity in Truth,” or “Caritas in Veritate.”
Call me a dinosaur. While I don’t blink an eye anymore at sanctuary screens and televisions in the parish house, I’m still not convinced that cell phones and computers in the sanctuary aren’t a huge distraction, another manifestation of our ADHD society gone techno-nuts.
It’s very appropriate that the New York Times highlight one of the developing, perhaps major religious news stories. And it’s even better, most of the time, when that story is told by religion writer Laurie Goodstein, who has a gift for nuance and ability to give her readers revealing details about her subjects in a way that is spare, usually undramatic, but enlightening.
When I was criticizing that awful Washington Post piece about how morally confounding Mark Sanford’s love life is, it just seemed odd to me that no media outlet has really explained the Christian view of love. For being a country that is majority Christian, it’s shocking how little we read about some of the basic tenets of the theology.
The Associated Press report is very, very, very short and raises many more questions than it answers. Here is a typical version (or click here for a longer version in the Los Angeles Times):
