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The powers that be are saying it early and often down in Alabama: The three students held in connection with that wave of fires at rural Baptist churches were just a bunch of wild guys who were having some fun and things got out of control.
How busy have things been around here lately? Earlier this week I was quoted in a mainstream newspaper about GetReligion’s response to recent news coverage (as opposed to old coverage) of Ave Maria University in Southwest Florida. If you don’t recall this blog’s response to that, there’s a good reason — I haven’t had the time to blog on that yet. I think the Oscars thing jumped in there.
The stunning news from the funeral of Los Angeles Times legend Otis Chandler is that the liturgists at the famous All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena were not more creative with the content of the service.
And now it is time for another episode of “As the Notebook Turns,” an ongoing feature in which friends of this blog offers their side of conversations and/or interviews with journalists. In this case, the person on the other side of the reporter’s notebook is, in fact, a journalist herself. This episode is drawn from a post by Dawn “The Thrill of the Chaste” Eden, a fierce blogger who also works on the copy desk at the New York Daily News.
I almost posted a link to this piece last week. However, I thought at the time that it was — for GetReligion — one of those “dogs that didn’t bark” stories. After all, the piece does not mention the red vs. blue zip code divide or the theme, previously seen in Los Angeles Times stories, that some people in Hollywood might be getting sweaty palms, in an era of crashing box office numbers, about holding a Brokeback Mountain wedding shower.
As GetReligion readers know, I am about as pro-free speech as you can get, even pro-offensive speech in the tense world of religion and politics. I even think that the U.S. military doesn’t need to mandate a kind of lowest-common-denominator Unitarianism, funding with tax dollars. I’m a radical.
One or two people have asked me if I would comment on the allegations of financial scandal in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), a branch of Eastern Orthodoxy here in North America with Russian roots.
I realize that I have started seeing the “pew gap” factor all over the place. Nevertheless, that is what I thought of this morning when I read the Wall Street Journal‘s “Black Flight: The exodus to charter schools” piece by Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten.
Late yesterday afternoon, I received a call from Godbeat veteran Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post, who was working on an update about the status of the National Religious Broadcasters and the Rev. Pat Robertson. I don’t think it would hurt to say that he wanted to know if I would talk about some of the things that have been said about the czar of The 700 Club on this website, which I assume means this post, this one and especially this one.
