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You just know that there has to be a religion ghost in there somewhere if the oh-so-cynical folks at the Washington Post Style section are going to get all worked up about a story that pits those strange folks out there in red-zip-code Middle America against the befuddled elites in dark-blue zip codes.
Mainstream editors always want at least one religion story in the newspaper during the days leading up to Easter. It’s a law. That’s one reason you see all of those strange faith-based cover stories on the magazine racks this time of year (and just before Christmas, too).
What are we supposed to think when we read that pastor so-and-so is controversial because he is the leader of such-and-such a church (which may or may not call itself a church), which is part of the emergent stream of the emerging conversation inside the emerging or emergent church?
I am sorry to keep returning to this subject so often, but the reporting coming out of the Zacarias Moussaoui trial is so gripping, unnerving and frustrating that I can’t stop reading it.
It’s time for me to offer an apology to Richard A. Serrano of the Los Angeles Times. The other day I wondered if he had avoided, on purpose, the religious actions and statements in the testimony and evidence at the Alexandria, Va., trial of the smiling terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. I mentioned this while discussing the emotional landmines facing the creators of the new movie United 93.
Happy birthday to me (sort of). This is the week that I get to celebrate the birthday of the weekly “On Religion” column that I write for the Scripps Howard News Service.
At the moment, the basic news story template for the release of the movie United 93 turns on this question: Is the public ready to buy tickets to see a sad movie about 9/11?
Here’s a quick note to the reporters covering the case of Jason Johnson, the student who has been expelled at the University of the Cumberlands after outing himself in his MySpace.com profile. I should, just to be clear, note that Cumberland is a Baptist university, but not part of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the global network in which I teach.
The anonymous scribe “Diogenes” over at Catholic World News’ Off the Record blog doesn’t have much to say that is positive about “The Gospel of Judas” and its pre-Holy Week publicity blast. There is, for example, this link to a dissection of a Dallas Morning News story in the wave of coverage.
