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Today’s Washington Post is so full of religion stories and religion haunted stories that I hardly know where to begin — from abortion rulings to the latest Koran crime update, from a reporter taking a Bible Belt trip through her past in a vanishing Virginia town to yet another stunning Catholic clergy abuse lawsuit settlement. This does not even include the religion page.
A brief shout out to my friend Prof. S.J. Dahlman, who sits in the desk I occupied at Milligan College and has the wonderful duty of writing about religion in the beautiful mountains of Northeast Tennessee. The last time we checked in with Jim and his “Face to Faith” column in the Johnson City Press was talking about snakes and how they are not typical of faith in the region.
Here is a short update on a religious liberty story that I have been trying to keep my eye on — which is hard since the MSM rarely deals with these issues. I refer to the frightening case of Hamid Pourmand, a lay pastor in Iran. To see the earlier post, click here.
Sorry to have gone all but AWOL in the past few days due to intense teaching and editing duties at our SIJ 2005 journalism boot camp here in Washington, D.C. Let me jump in here for a moment to urge you to check out the lively exchanges on the Rt. Rev. LeBlanc’s post on Mark Felt, ethics, modern journalism and a host of other topics — with guest appearances by whistleblowers, Clinton administration fans, Nixon critics (on the left and right) and folks offering many, many other points of view.
There is an interesting church-state case going on right now in the heart of Indiana, and prog-blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters of Wildhunt wants to know why more religion writers are not interested in it.
That sound you just heard on the other side of the Atlantic was the million or so people who still sit in pews in the postmodern Church of England picking up a copy of the Sunday Times and shouting, in unison, “Say WHAT!?!?!”
There isn’t a strong religion-news hook to this next item from the Chicago Tribune, unless one assumes that any story involving U2 and Bono has a neo-messianic theme in there somewhere between the lines.
How many of you can remember stories about the impact of cable and satellite television on evangelicals and charistmatics? Good.
I have had some readers email me asking if I would post my Scripps Howard News Service column for this week, which can be found here.
