I continue to be amazed at the degree to which the debates about health-care reform keep cycling back to issues of money and, let’s face it, religion.
Got news? Faith, funds, hard choices
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Red hot Catholic drugs
Typically when a news story about drugs begins with a priest, the focus is going be on how a community deals with the devastation those drugs have caused. And this story from Tuesday’s Washington Post is no different — except when it comes to scale. Here we aren’t talking about a life lost and a city under siege, but about a whole country under the influence.
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Faith findings 101
Two studies about the influence of higher education on faith have been released in the past month. One, presented by two professors at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, looked at attitudes among college-educated evangelicals about gay people and atheists. They argue that the data show that education is linked to higher “tolerance” for both groups.
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Digging into the "morals clause"
Some sex scandals are sad but exciting and some are just unseemly. This Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino one is a doozie. The married father of five had unprotected sex six years ago with a woman he had just met earlier in the evening and when she claimed to have gotten pregnant from the encounter he gave her $3,000. He says the money was for insurance. She says it was for an abortion. And then years later he went to the FBI after, he says, her extortion attempts got out of hand.
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What would Eunice Kennedy Shriver do?
About a year ago, a coalition of pro-life groups began a global effort to lower the percentage of unborn children who are aborted because they have been diagnosed as having Down syndrome. That statistic is believed to be about 90 percent, in large part because of parental fear the burden of raising a flawed or imperfect child.
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Two passengers and a baby
At the beginning of the month we looked at the various and sundry ways the mainstream media reported on the stabbing of an 8-months-pregnant woman and the kidnapping of her baby. Some people called the child, who was taken from the mother’s womb, a “fetus” while others called it a “baby.”
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True love waits but don't get crazy
The August cover story for Christianity Today, a magazine I write a column for (here’s the latest) has been making a bit of a splash. Mark Regnerus’ “The Case for Early Marriage” discusses how the chastity advocates forgot to mention that waiting until you’re old to get married might not be the most effective strategy for abstaining from sex until you’re married.
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Got news? (Criminal) check, please
Although often restrained by their position from writing stories that reveal serious denominational problems, or using quotes that reveal dissenting viewpoints, in-house religious journalists are often a big resource for journalists covering religion stories.
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And now for something completely different
Earlier today we looked at some of the mainstream media reports of the American Psychological Association’s resolution on treatment for those dealing with same-sex attraction. The Wall Street Journal took a completely different approach than almost every other report out there. Religion reporter Stephanie Simon writes on a new therapy for people whose faith and sexual identity are in conflict and how the APA changed its treatment guidelines to allow counselors to help clients reject their same-sex attraction. It was certainly different than the headlines over most of the AP reports. Here’s how she began:
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