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A long, long time ago, I was the religion writer and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. It’s a fascinating city in a beautiful region (heaven, you know) and I envy people who get to work out there.
The age of the megachurch has not been kind to small congregations. The aging of the declining “seven sisters” of mainline Protestantism has not been kind to small congregations, either.
It should be clear to just about anyone who reads major newspapers that we live in an age in which it is is safer to use religious language when describing secular sins than when describing what used to be called religious sins. It’s safer to talk about the sin of burning too much gasoline than the sin of lust. It is acceptable to judge certain secular forms of behavior, but not other forms of behavior that we have said are purely religious and private.
The email is starting to come in asking when GetReligion is going to have something to say about that New York Times Magazine cover story from this past weekend, the massive piece called “The Politics of God” by Mark Lilla. The sad thing about it is that I am three time zones away from my office and involved in some long, long meetings in which a circle of journalists and academics are, during the break times, talking about this piece.
As I rode home on the MARC train the other night, I saw several people reading the sprawling Washington Post features section piece on the sad lives and early deaths of professional wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit. This led into a series of hard-to-answer questions about why so many wrestlers die young, other than the assumed impact of illegal steroids on their hearts.
One of my guilty pleasures is reading the little BeliefWatch column that runs each week near the front of Newsweek.
Have you ever been reading a news story and hit a paraphrased quotation — as opposed to a verbatim direct quote — that made you stop and mutter, “Now wait a minute! Did that person really say that? Does the reporter actually have a recording of that?”
