At a dinner last night with some journalists and scholars (not in Rome), I wisecracked that we all needed to head down to Jesuit headquarters to watch the conclave on live video.

You can agree or disagree, but conservative religion columnist Michael “Marriage Savers” McManus — a mainstream Protestant — has an interesting point to make about the papal conclave. He asks this question: In the age of imploding ordination statistics, would a Third World pope — especially one from Africa — be more likely to allow priests to get married than a pope from Europe or elsewhere in the First World?

NPR ombudsman — ombudsperson? — Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has posted a very interesting column about listener reactions to the network’s coverage of the life and death of Pope John Paul II. He says that hundreds of NPR regulars have written in to protest, saying that there has been too much coverage and that it has been wildly out of balance — too positive.