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Here’s a twist. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has hauled off and said that Sen. John Kerry’s slight rise in recent polls toward dead-heat status is clearly the work of the Holy Spirit. Well, OK, he didn’t put it that way. He said the president is down and Kerry is up and “That’s how God wants it to be.” There was no immediate response from press officials working for the Rev. Pat Robertson.
It is interesting to have to turn to Baptist Press for coverage of an event in the Roman Catholic community — for the most part — in Miami-Dade County. The Democratic League there has decided not to endorse Sen. John Kerry, primarily because of religious and cultural issues. The Baptists note that it has “more than 1,000 members and a reach that expands to 100,000 pro-life, pro-family Democrats in Miami” and that it is “primarily led by Hispanic-American Democrats.” It’s impossible to read the group’s 10 reasons for rejecting Kerry without hearing the voice of Pope John Paul II. I can’t find national coverage of this story, other than this weak nod in that direction.
Longtime readers of GetReligion may remember the defining image used in the very first post on this blog. It has shown up in headlines several times since then.
Every now and then, a religion story breaks out online that truly defies a quick and easy blog report. This is certainly the case with the slap-fest that is taking place between our friends at the Christianity Today blog and the trailblazing liturgists at the Episcopal Church’s Office of Women’s Ministries.
That sound you hear right now on the Religious Right is stunned silence about the president’s change of heart on same-sex unions.
Rob Moll at the always wide-ranging blog at ChristianityToday.com has a fine piece online addressing some of Nicholas Kristof’s recent efforts to praise, dissect and criticize evangelical Christians and other believers who he sees as irrationally old fashioned. It seems that Christian tradition is a good thing, when he agrees with it, and a very bad thing, when it crimps his cultural style. Kristof wants readers to think he is seriously investigating Christian history and thought, then he throws in cheap shots such as this: “When a Texas governor, Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson, barred the teaching of foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.’”
I was reading my newspaper the other day and hit a story that just made me sick. I don’t watch a lot of commercial television and, somehow, I had missed one of the hot shows in the tornado of “reality TV” programming. I refer to “The Swan,” from those cultural conservatives at Fox.
In the three years I have lived in Palm Beach County, I have met legions of people who have stopped their subscriptions to the Palm Beach Post, in large part because of the newspaper’s relentless attacks on religious believers who take a traditional approach to faith and morality. I started out trying to calm these people down, assuming they were blowing things out of proportion.
Small crosses are OK in France. Large crosses are not. Well, the same principle does not apply to turbans. Young Sikh men are in trouble with authorities in state schools, even after they removed their colorful turbans and wore less prominent under-turbans. Meanwhile, young Muslim women continue to cause trouble, refusing to remove their veils. This is, of course, an ongoing story that still has drawn little attention in the U.S. France is trying to replace tolerance with secularism, creating a glimpse into the next generation of culture wars in Europe.
